Pod Insights The Way I Heard It with Mike Rowe 455: Philip Diehl—Flying Over the Hump About this episode Mike chats with Philip Diehl, the 35th Director of the U. S. Mint and the man behind the most successful coin program in American history—the 50 State Quarters. They talk about the surprising history of the U. S. dollar coin, how a coin gets designed and approved, and the unexpected reason why the mikeroweWORKS Trades Coin—a symbol of American skill and pride—wasn't actually made in the America.
Transcript 18,544 words · 5 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:03 Mike Rowe? Hey guys, it's Mike Rowe. This is The Way I Heard It. My guest today is Philip Diehl, the former director of the US Mint. A former director.
0:13 Speaker 01 He was the 35th director in all of history of the US Mint.
0:19 Mike Rowe? This guy is so interesting in so many different ways. You'll hear us mention a meeting in Liechtenstein, and it's the truth. I met Philip Diehl in a bar in Liechtenstein with another former director of the US Mint named Ed Moy. And these guys today both work with US Money Reserve. In fact, Philip Diehl is the current president of US Money Reserve. And full disclosure, I do some work with US Money Reserve. This is not a commercial for them in any way. It wasn't paid for them. I just want to get that out of the way. But my meeting in Liechtenstein with Philip Diehl over a civilized cocktail turned into
1:02 Mike Rowe? one of the most interesting conversations I can remember having by accident. And I've had a few.
1:08 Speaker 01 Yeah, you have.
1:09 Mike Rowe? And so he was just one of those guys. I said, you know, if we ever become friendly enough, I'm going to invite him on here because the thing is Chuck, you really can't talk about currency without talking about history. And you can't talk about history without talking about politics. You can't talk about politics without talking about, in his case, God, everything from social anthropology to some very arcane liberal arts majors that brought him. He's such an interesting cat with such an interesting job at this point in his life. And it's just a ton of experience sitting there, you know?
1:45 Speaker 01 But as the US Mint director, he's responsible for some pretty cool things. The Sacagawea coin, right? Number one. But really, what I, we didn't spend a ton of time on this, but the state quarters. That was his deal.
1:57 Mike Rowe? Yeah.
1:58 Speaker 01 Like, play on his name.
2:00 Mike Rowe? His name is Diehl. His name was Diehl.
2:01 Speaker 01 Yeah.
2:02 Mike Rowe? What's the deal with Diehl?
2:03 Speaker 01 Right?
2:04 Mike Rowe? The deal.
2:05 Speaker 01 That should be the title of the episode.
2:06 Mike Rowe? That's not a bad title. What's the deal with Diehl? Although he spells his last name, I think, D-I-E-H-L?
2:13 Speaker 01 That is correct.
2:14 Mike Rowe? Yeah. It doesn't matter how you spell his name. You're gonna like him. And you're gonna learn a bunch of stuff, including why the actual title of this episode is Flying Over the Hump.
2:25 Speaker 01 Yes.
2:26 Mike Rowe? Look, he talks of his dad a lot. And his dad flew a, flew the route in the Second World War over the Himalayas, Burma into China and back, one of the more hazardous routes to fly. And they called it flying over the hump. And you'll hear Philip talk about, he's a sucker for a good metaphor. And in some way, shape or form, it sure seems like we're all flying over our own metaphorical hump, Chuck, you know what I mean?
2:53 Speaker 01 Yes, I do.
2:54 Mike Rowe? We're all running a little low on gas. We're up there, the air's thin, people are shooting at us.
2:58 Speaker 01 Wait a minute.
2:59 Mike Rowe? I've been meaning to warn you about some things in your future. Yeah, it's gonna get sporty for you.
3:05 Speaker 01 Okay.
3:06 Mike Rowe? What a fun conversation. Careful, you might learn something about diversification and gold and precious metals. And also, full disclosure, I wanted to bring him in here because we just raised a fair amount of money for the foundation with these Trades of America coins that were minted over in Germany and designed in Liechtenstein, where I met the 35th former director.
3:32 Speaker 01 And it's all explained why you had to go to Liechtenstein in order to do that, because a lot of people are.
3:38 Mike Rowe? Yes, yes. I mean, do you guys really think I didn't want to make a coin honoring the American worker in America? Of course I did. But it can't be done. And we'll explain why as we fly over the hump with Philip Diehl, right after this.
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5:37 Mike Rowe? Hey, uh, thank you so much for making the time to do this.
5:41 Speaker 02 It's my pleasure. I've been looking forward to it.
5:43 Mike Rowe? Well, I've been wanting to do this for, hmm, I guess it's 18 months now. I think we met in Liechtenstein.
5:50 Speaker 02 That's right. Yep. Yep. I got to check another box for in countries that I've traveled around the world. I had never been there before.
5:57 Mike Rowe? How many? I mean, are you really keeping track? And how many is it?
6:00 Speaker 02 Yeah, it's 24 now.
6:02 Mike Rowe? That's good.
6:03 Speaker 02 Yeah.
6:04 Mike Rowe? Pretty good. Pretty good. So, um, we were in Liechtenstein. I was invited over there by US Money Reserve, a company that you happen to preside over? Is that the correct way to put it?
6:14 Speaker 02 Yeah, yeah, president.
6:15 Mike Rowe? You're the president.
6:16 Speaker 02 Is presiding, yeah.
6:17 Mike Rowe? Yes. And I was there to investigate the process whereby precious metals can be turned into highly coveted rounds and bars for investments and for 401Ks and for IRAs, but also just for people who, who just love it. There's such an interesting passion.
6:36 Speaker 02 Yep.
6:37 Mike Rowe? That informs your chosen field. You're, for the record, a former director of the US Mint.
6:43 Speaker 02 That's right.
6:44 Mike Rowe? That would have been under Clinton?
6:45 Speaker 02 Clinton, yep.
6:46 Mike Rowe? You guys still in touch?
6:48 Speaker 02 Not much. The big director's several rungs down the ladder. My sons thought that, you know, he was my boss and I'd talk to him every day, but he had better things to do.
7:01 Mike Rowe? What's it like? You're the director of the US Mint. I mean, it's a job I think most people are aware exists.
7:10 Speaker 02 Right.
7:10 Mike Rowe? But I can't imagine that anybody could accurately, like, write down your responsibilities.
7:17 Speaker 02 Yes, that's right. And that's because people don't really understand what the US Mint does. They think it produces the nation's coins, circulating coins, and that's it. That's what they really identify. And that's true. That's a very big part of the US Mint's, you know, writ. And, but also the Mint has several other lines of business. It produces bullion coins that compete in world markets. Gold, platinum, silver, and palladium now. And we do, we sell those all. And I still talk about, as we, being the United States Mint, as though I'm a part of it. Because it's like, I think it's sort of like being a Marine. You're never an ex-Marine.
7:57 Mike Rowe? An Eagle Scout.
7:58 Speaker 02 Yeah, that's right. And so that's one line of business. Collectibles is another. Precious metals and base metal collectibles. A really big market in the United States. But one of the things I did was I took it globally. We ended up having a distribution network for collectible coins for the World Cup 1994 matches here in the US, and 95 and 96 Olympic coin programs. And so that gave me three years to develop an international distribution network. And then the other thing that most people don't know is a line of business at the US Mint is we protect the facilities of the Mint's and Fort Knox.
8:39 Speaker 02 People think that, that the gold is controlled and protected by the Federal Reserve, but it's not. It's our job at the US Mint.
8:49 Mike Rowe? What does it look like protecting gold? Are you talking about human resources deployed with deadly force and guns and such? Or barbed wire, Constantine, buried? Like, how do you protect the gold?
9:03 Speaker 02 It's all that. However, it's not like the atrium that you see in Goldfinger.
9:10 Mike Rowe? Don't wreck it.
9:11 Speaker 02 No, that destroyed all of the, some of the mystique. We got the mystique back though because of all the armaments. And, and the, and the facility was placed right on the edge of an armored division fort. And so that the goal was to hold off any kind of attempt to penetrate the grounds until the armor could arrive.
9:38 Mike Rowe? No, are we talking about Fort Knox?
9:39 Speaker 02 Fort Knox, yeah.
9:40 Mike Rowe? And is that still the primary facility where the chunk, the big bulk of the gold is?
9:45 Speaker 02 Yes, that is, at Fort Knox. And.
9:48 Mike Rowe? And it's really there, the gold?
9:49 Speaker 02 Yes, it's really there. I can attest to it and I have no doubt whatsoever that it remains there even though I haven't been there in a few years.
9:57 Mike Rowe? What does it look like? I mean, I assume we're talking about hundreds, thousands of tons of gold?
10:02 Speaker 02 Yes, thousands of tons.
10:05 Mike Rowe? I mean, I've been in some vaults.
10:08 Speaker 02 Yes.
10:08 Mike Rowe? Before, surrounded by, I think, maybe a billion dollars in gold.
10:13 Speaker 02 Right.
10:14 Mike Rowe? This is more.
10:15 Speaker 02 Yeah, this is more. It's not pretty. I mean, it's, you know, a vault. The whole building is a Works Progress Administration building. So it dates from the mid 1930s. So it's not an architectural gym, you know, certainly not on the inside.
10:32 Mike Rowe? It's got that welcoming Soviet style.
10:34 Speaker 02 Yes, yes, the American style. Yes, the American style, the Soviet style, yeah, the American interpretation. Yeah, it's, it's the force, it's the professionalism of the police force. It's the concertina wire that surrounds the place with a lot of open terrain between it and the building. You know, it's the spotlights that can be turned on at any time. If you ask, you know, whether or not there's ever been a penetration, they'll say no. But that's not exactly true.
11:08 Mike Rowe? Really?
11:09 Speaker 02 Yes, there have been a few occasions where drunk soldiers have climbed the fence trying to avoid being caught, not realizing that they're at the depository and so.
11:23 Mike Rowe? Wait a minute, trying to climb out? Or trying to climb in?
11:26 Speaker 02 Trying to climb in to get back into the base.
11:29 Mike Rowe? Ah.
11:30 Speaker 02 After, you know, returning late.
11:31 Mike Rowe? I see.
11:32 Speaker 02 And so that has happened a few times and they don't get very far.
11:36 Mike Rowe? I'm at.
11:36 Speaker 02 And it's a, it's a tough lesson.
11:40 Mike Rowe? When we met in Liechtenstein, full disclosure, I think it was at a hotel bar. And it was getting late in the evening and I had a series of questions that I was wanting to ask you, kind of on the nose, but we wound up talking instead. And Ed was there too, Ed Moy.
11:58 Speaker 02 Right.
11:59 Mike Rowe? Another Mint Director.
12:00 Speaker 02 My colleague, yes.
12:01 Mike Rowe? Yes. And you two together, it was almost overwhelming. It's very difficult to talk about currency without talking about history. It's very hard to talk about history without talking about geography. Hard to talk about geography without talking about philosophy. And somehow or other, music gets all wrapped into it.
12:19 Speaker 02 Yes.
12:19 Mike Rowe? The two of you together, it was just, it made me wish there were cameras with us that night.
12:25 Speaker 02 Yeah.
12:25 Mike Rowe? And I just, I mean, if this conversation goes as planned, I want people to have a better understanding of what role currency plays in their life.
12:36 Speaker 02 Mm-hmm.
12:37 Mike Rowe? Beyond the business of transactions. There you are. And there's, there's Ed, there's me, and there's a billion dollars of precious metals all around me.
12:47 Speaker 02 Now, that looks nice.
12:49 Mike Rowe? Yeah.
12:49 Speaker 02 That's a good presentation.
12:51 Mike Rowe? It's crazy. Well, that's what I was trying to figure out, honestly, because I've been, I won't say suspicious, but I just didn't understand the difference between things like ETFs and physical gold and how you get physical gold into an IRA. And we can get into all that stuff.
13:06 Speaker 02 Sure.
13:06 Mike Rowe? But to kind of stay on the same, why is Fort Knox still relevant? Why is gold still important when there's no gold standard?
13:16 Speaker 02 Mm-hmm.
13:17 Mike Rowe? And when did that leave and what did that mean?
13:20 Speaker 02 Mm-hmm. Well, you know, that today is a really good example. What's been happening over the last two years in the gold market is a really good example of why gold remains relevant as it has for thousands of years. And the circumstances under which it's clearly relevant.
13:42 Mike Rowe? Mm-hmm.
13:42 Speaker 02 It's been relevant for thousands of years because it is the only asset that has been Recognized for thousands of years, worldwide, under all kinds of circumstances and all kinds of cultures, as this reliable store of value. And really what we're talking about, you know, there are terms that we use in this business that I think, you know, sort of fly by people. What do we mean by store of value? What we mean is that it does when other assets are crashing in value, like real estate, or stocks, or bonds, or like treasury bills, which have been the most reliable store of
14:26 Speaker 02 value, along with gold, for decades and decades. When those are crashing, gold typically holds its value, or goes up in value. And sometimes you get a little head fake from gold. For example, and we've seen this multiple times, but in the 2008 financial crisis, gold initially fell in value, along with other asset classes. And the reason why that happens is because of margin calls. Investors buy stocks on margin, and when they get a margin call, they have to sell assets, and sometimes gold is among the assets they have to sell in to cover the margin.
15:09 Mike Rowe? Right.
15:10 Speaker 02 And, but, right after that occurs, you see gold rally. And gold continues to rally as the worst happens in stock markets and real estate.
15:21 Mike Rowe? But long before we had the currency system that we have today, and really long before any organized country, you know, had figured out how to trade in, well, I guess we'd recognize as currency, we were still obsessed with gold.
15:36 Speaker 02 Yes.
15:37 Mike Rowe? It seems to be like there's something weirdly eternal about it. And where did that come from, you reckon?
15:44 Speaker 02 Well, it came from Some unique qualities about gold. One is that it doesn't tarnish, so it retains its beauty. Also, it.
15:55 Mike Rowe? What's the word, luster?
15:56 Speaker 02 It's luster, yeah, exactly. It retains its luster. And so that is part of the magic and has been part of the magic. Also, it's malleable. It doesn't, you know, distort easily, but it can be reshaped into jewelry, for example. And the combination of the ability to easily change it into jewelry and with that luster gives it a special attraction as well. The other thing is that it's rare and it can't be counterfeited.
16:33 Speaker 02 And so you have a situation in which a highly sought after product is rare. In that context, then, you know, it becomes very special. And there's nothing, there's no other metal like that.
16:49 Mike Rowe? I guess, I mean, not to over romanticize it, but if you're looking at a gold chain on somebody's neck or a gold watch or really any number of other things, who knows what that was 100 years ago?
17:02 Speaker 02 That's right. Yes. Yeah, that's right. There is some romance to that. And what we, here in the West, we really think of jewelry as being a high-priced, high-margin product. But gold in East Asia is sold in jewelry form, but at a very small markup above the spot price of gold. And that's usually how gold in a retail market is sold instead of as bullion. It's sold as jewelry and it is weighed before it's sold. And the merchant will actually check on that, the spot price at that time on a handheld
17:45 Speaker 02 device and sell you jewelry at a small margin above spot price.
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19:21 Mike Rowe? Also, people who switch plans after calling Chapter save an average of $1,100 a year. 804-Chapter. That's the number. Call it today. It's free. Whole thing takes about 20 minutes. 804-Chapter. Why do you know as much as you do about this topic? And how much of your experience predated your appointment as a Mint Director? Like, what it... How does a guy like you turn into a guy like you?
19:51 Speaker 02 Well, yeah, good question. My wife asked that.
19:56 Speaker 02 My wife for 52 years. I said, honey, you've been here the whole time.
20:01 Mike Rowe? 52 years of age or 52 years of togetherness?
20:04 Speaker 02 Togetherness.
20:04 Mike Rowe? I don't want to pry.
20:05 Speaker 02 Yeah, I know. I'm sure she feels like it's 100 years of age.
20:10 Speaker 02 Well, I knew nothing about coins. I never collected anything, maybe some baseball cards. I knew nothing about coins and coinage and numismatics. I could pronounce numismatics.
20:21 Mike Rowe? That is hard. Look, that's one of those words I looked at in print for a while.
20:24 Speaker 02 Yeah.
20:24 Mike Rowe? And I just thought, you know what? It's better not to attempt.
20:28 Speaker 02 Yeah, numismatist. That's the really, that's the real tough one. Yeah.
20:32 Speaker 01 What about the definition of that? What is that?
20:35 Mike Rowe? Of a numismatist?
20:36 Speaker 01 Well, the news, whatever the word is that you were trying to say.
20:40 Speaker 02 Yeah, numismatics. Numismatics is is the field of coinage collection and study. And a numismatist is a collector, somebody who collects coins.
20:52 Mike Rowe? Yeah.
20:54 Speaker 02 Yeah, so it's one of those inside terms that, you know, is designed to separate the wheat from the chaff.
21:01 Mike Rowe? Well, I've seen it, like I said, in writing all over the place, but about 10, 12 years ago, I met a numist, whatever it is, numist?
21:09 Speaker 01 Numistist.
21:10 Mike Rowe? Numisticist?
21:11 Speaker 02 Numismatist.
21:12 Mike Rowe? Numismatist.
21:13 Speaker 02 There it is.
21:14 Mike Rowe? Who was involved in a salvage operation on a ship called the Central America.
21:20 Speaker 02 Oh, yeah.
21:21 Mike Rowe? Which went down off the coast of North Carolina back in 1840 something or other.
21:26 Speaker 02 Right.
21:27 Mike Rowe? You know the story?
21:28 Speaker 02 I know a little of the story, yeah.
21:30 Mike Rowe? It's coming back from the goldfields after the gold rush. Ship was full of prospectors, many of whom had their gold sewn into their clothing. Wells Fargo had a, had a safe on the ship.
21:43 Speaker 02 Yeah.
21:44 Mike Rowe? The whole thing went down. They, I mean, it was basically America's Titanic.
21:47 Speaker 02 Yeah.
21:47 Mike Rowe? Before the Titanic, of course. I mean, five-
21:49 Speaker 02 Hard to swim in a suit like that.
21:51 Mike Rowe? Oh, I mean, everything, I mean, 550 men, most of the women got in boats, but-
21:59 Mike Rowe? An absolute sh- ship ton of gold, a shipload, wound up on the bottom. And, uh, boy, when they found that, what a story that is. And, uh, it's gold fever, plus treasure hunting, plus pirates, plus new missmases, running amok
22:19 Speaker 02 Yes.
22:19 Mike Rowe? all over the place.
22:20 Speaker 02 Yeah.
22:21 Mike Rowe? Anyway, yes, the obsession with the coin, that's what I want to.
22:25 Speaker 02 And so I didn't know much about this, uh, business before I came into it. And why did I go to the US Mint? It was a very unusual path for someone like me. I came out of the sixties and the early seventies and I had a passion for making change in the world. And, uh,
22:44 Mike Rowe? You're a hippie?
22:45 Speaker 02 unintended.
22:45 Mike Rowe? Were you a hippie?
22:47 Speaker 02 Come on. I'm not a hippie, but because I grew up in Texas and I went to a small liberal arts college in Texas. So, no, I was not a hippie. You know, I was sort of mobilized by the civil rights movement and of course Vietnam War.
22:59 Mike Rowe? Sure.
22:59 Speaker 02 I was fortunate, uh, my number came up, you know, two hundred and eighty-seven or something like that. And in, uh, the lottery. So I always said, you know, women and children went before me. But, uh, my roommate, he drew thirteen. And that was one of the remarkable things about my generation, those of us who were in college, was we had that experience in which we sat around in the dorm and watched television and watched ourselves be separated from those who were going, those who might go and those who, like me, knew we weren't going to go by draft. And it's one of those indelible moments in my mind
23:40 Speaker 02 that I think has largely been forgotten in the culture of how that really did separate us. So I was mobilized early on and I chose political science as my field. Uh, I stayed in it, do a career that took me to the University of Texas at Austin for a master's degree and Stanford University, where I went to get a PhD degree before I realized that I was, uh, losing income, every lifetime income, every time, every month that I stayed. And I went back to work in practical politics.
24:14 Mike Rowe? What was your major?
24:14 Speaker 02 Texas.
24:15 Mike Rowe? Would you study at Stanford?
24:16 Speaker 02 Uh, political science.
24:18 Mike Rowe? Political science the whole time.
24:19 Speaker 02 Yeah, I took some, I wasn't very popular. I was on a full fellowship. I wasn't very popular because I had my differences with the department.
24:27 Mike Rowe? Mm-hmm.
24:28 Speaker 02 And so I took two classes outside the field. One was in religious existentialism.
24:34 Mike Rowe? Of course.
24:35 Speaker 02 Where I, yes, of course.
24:36 Mike Rowe? I mean, what self-respecting political scientist doesn't want, you know?
24:40 Speaker 02 To read Kierkegaard.
24:41 Mike Rowe? Yeah, The Unexamined Life, etc.
24:43 Speaker 02 And that course really was important for me. In fact, I loaded my son, my first son, firstborn, with the name Soren out of respect for Kierkegaard.
24:55 Mike Rowe? For Kierkegaard.
24:56 Speaker 02 Yeah, and then I took a course in organizational theory that was taught by a Stanford Business School professor and that also really transformed my thinking.
25:08 Mike Rowe? Wait a minute. The course was called Organizational Theory?
25:11 Speaker 02 Organization theory, yeah.
25:13 Mike Rowe? Under the imprimatur of philosophy or like?
25:17 Speaker 02 No, it was, it was actually in the anthropology department.
25:22 Mike Rowe? Uh-huh.
25:23 Speaker 02 He held dual professorships in anthropology and the business school. And he was outstanding. Those two were by far the best professors I had in undergrad, graduate school, either place.
25:37 Mike Rowe? I, this is a question I would ask anybody when they say something like that. Is it, did you know it then? Or did it take some time to look back to realize the impact that a professor like that? You knew it was happening?
25:51 Speaker 02 I knew it was happening. And those two courses were transformational in very different ways. One was highly disruptive, and the existentialism course, as you can imagine. And the organization theory course gave me tools that I've used my whole life, a whole new set of tools.
26:13 Mike Rowe? Like what?
26:15 Speaker 02 Well, systems theory and understanding and I have sort of a I have sort of a natural systems approach in that I'm not real linear in my thinking. I tend to surround a subject in order to grok it. And and so that gave me the tools to use along with what my sort of instinctual approach to learning was.
26:41 Mike Rowe? Did you say grok it?
26:42 Speaker 02 Yeah, grok.
26:43 Mike Rowe? Like, did you you're referring to the AI machine as a verb?
26:48 Speaker 02 Well, actually, the origin of that world, that word is from a book called Strangers in a Strange Land, a piece of science fiction written by.
26:58 Mike Rowe? Not Lazarus Long, but.
27:00 Speaker 02 No.
27:01 Mike Rowe? Heinlein?
27:02 Speaker 02 Heinlein, Robert Heinlein.
27:04 Mike Rowe? Yeah.
27:05 Speaker 02 Yeah, strangers in a strange world. And that's the origin of the word grok. So I've been using that word. I read that book in eighth grade, and I've used that word since then.
27:17 Mike Rowe? Now, wait a minute.
27:18 Speaker 02 Now, it's popular.
27:19 Mike Rowe? Do you think grok means to understand something deeply and intuitively, almost as if you become one with it?
27:26 Speaker 02 Yes.
27:27 Mike Rowe? Heinlein is sixty one science fiction, Strange in a Strange Land. Okay.
27:30 Speaker 02 Yep.
27:31 Mike Rowe? Do you think?
27:32 Speaker 02 That was great. That was confirmed. I love that.
27:34 Mike Rowe? He's getting faster. Chuck is. I mean, he's getting faster and faster with this.
27:38 Speaker 01 Every now and then blind squirrel finds a nut. You know what I'm saying?
27:40 Speaker 02 Yeah, yeah. I'm gonna be real careful, though, with every.
27:43 Mike Rowe? Be careful. There's all sorts of things you can find on there.
27:46 Speaker 02 Yes.
27:47 Mike Rowe? I love that you had an eighth grade teacher in nineteen sixty, whatever it was.
27:53 Speaker 02 Oh, yeah.
27:54 Mike Rowe? Who thought you should read that in the eighth grade?
27:57 Speaker 02 It wasn't a teacher. My older brother, nine, seven year older brother, read it. And it was sitting on his desk. And I picked it up and I became a huge Heinlein fan. And then, you know, Asimov and Clark, Arthur C. Clark.
28:14 Mike Rowe? Sure.
28:15 Speaker 02 Bradbury.
28:16 Mike Rowe? Maybe maybe Clark especially.
28:17 Speaker 02 Yeah, yeah.
28:18 Mike Rowe? Out of that cohort.
28:19 Speaker 02 Child was in. Yeah, absolutely. You know, and the Foundation series. All those I loved. I devoured those.
28:27 Mike Rowe? But in the eighth grade, you know, I mean, I had an eighth grade teacher who assigned us Lord of the Flies.
28:32 Speaker 02 Yeah.
28:33 Mike Rowe? Which, you know, I mean, we read it and then we talked about it, like in the eighth grade.
28:38 Speaker 02 Yeah.
28:39 Mike Rowe? And I don't think you're allowed to read that in the eighth grade.
28:41 Speaker 02 Yeah, probably not, yeah.
28:43 Mike Rowe? I wouldn't think so. And definitely not. I mean, those ideas were so, they were just so big.
28:49 Speaker 02 Yes. Yeah, yeah, exactly. They were huge ideas.
28:52 Mike Rowe? Yes.
28:53 Speaker 02 That caught the imagination of me in eighth grade. And there weren't very many other kids in Lubbock, Texas, in my junior high that were reading those guys. A lot of that had to do with the fact that my, I was reading it because my older brother, who was in college already at that point, and who was a true intellectual, was reading it.
29:14 Mike Rowe? Now, is my timeline totally screwed up, or is Buddy Holly in the mix?
29:17 Speaker 02 Yeah, Buddy Holly's in the mix. He and I share, had the same homeroom in Lubbock High School.
29:23 Mike Rowe? No kidding?
29:23 Speaker 02 Yeah, not at the same time.
29:25 Mike Rowe? Right, well.
29:26 Speaker 02 But, yeah, he was a few years older than me. I was also influenced in my music choices by my seven-year-older brother. So Johnny Mathis, Andy Williams, you know, all that whole cadre.
29:40 Mike Rowe? Right.
29:40 Speaker 02 And so I was, you know, moving to Lubbock, I was like a fish out of water. I didn't know who Buddy Holly was. And, and I liked Ricky Nelson, Elvis Presley, and all that stuff. And so I, I had my head turned around. But, yeah, yeah, Buddy Holly.
29:58 Mike Rowe? So how do Buddy Holly, organization, theory, stranger in a strange land, how do these things conspire to birth a future Director of the US Mint?
30:13 Speaker 02 Well, it is a mixed bag, isn't it?
30:15 Mike Rowe? It's a crooked road, for sure.
30:17 Speaker 02 Yeah, and, you know,
30:20 Speaker 02 I talk about, you know, I laugh and talk about my checkered past. I have done so many different things in my career. And I started working when I was 14 years old. There in Lubbock, Texas, my family owned a small family motel, 22 rooms, had a little restaurant. It was U-shaped, like those are on one of the roadways coming in, going out to Clovis Road. There was nothing between us and the North Pole but barbed wire and tumbleweeds. And when the cold fronts would come through, those tumbleweeds would end up in our pool, in the hotel pool. And so, and as the older son at home, it was my job to pull them out.
31:04 Speaker 02 And tumbleweeds are pretty light until they soak up a bunch of water. And I was a skinny kid, I was a little kid. And I learned the value of work early on and to get over my resentment of having to do it. I found ways to make it, if not fun, at least tolerable.
31:24 Mike Rowe? Sure.
31:25 Speaker 02 And I didn't really have any choice in the matter, but looking back on it, I wouldn't exchange that experience for anything. I worked pipeline construction. My dad was a pilot for a pipeline company. And he got me my first job after my freshman year in college, and I worked three summers and one fall, a total of one year, in pipeline construction. As a swampor on a side boom machine, just a basic laborer, I was promoted to being a bending machine operator, where you bend these huge lengths of pipes. And that was really crucial to me because it allowed me to prove myself among men.
32:06 Mike Rowe? To other men or to you?
32:09 Speaker 02 To myself.
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33:54 Speaker 02 You know, it was ultimately to myself. That's what motivated me. If I had just wanted to prove myself to other men, I wouldn't have put up with it. I was proving it to myself, and I was transforming myself. There were habits in the family that I didn't like, and doing that work gave me the discipline to change myself.
34:19 Speaker 02 And so, you know, I, it was fantastic. And it set me apart in my generation, I think, having done hard, physical labor, where I not only won the admiration of other, of men who worked hard, physical labor, and skilled, I mean, you know, there are a lot of skilled workers there, too. So.
34:42 Mike Rowe? Do you remember a time when that realization really hit home? I'm referring to the moment where, I think so many people are brought up to look at work in silos, you know, manual grunt work, hard work here, intellectual, thoughtful, cerebral work here.
35:00 Speaker 02 Yep.
35:01 Mike Rowe? Right?
35:01 Speaker 02 Yes.
35:02 Mike Rowe? And then, all of a sudden, for me, I remember being up in the Bakken and seeing the first horizontal drilling that I'd seen, where pipes are sent down over a mile.
35:14 Speaker 02 Yep.
35:15 Mike Rowe? And then they bend.
35:16 Speaker 02 Yes.
35:16 Mike Rowe? They bend them underground.
35:18 Speaker 02 Yes, yeah.
35:19 Mike Rowe? And like, the chemistry and the science.
35:21 Speaker 02 Yep.
35:22 Mike Rowe? It's.
35:22 Speaker 02 Fracking. Yeah, you're talking about fracking.
35:24 Mike Rowe? I'm talking about fracking. It is mind-boggling. It, it's a miracle of human thought combined with brute force.
35:33 Speaker 02 Yes.
35:34 Mike Rowe? And I find that kind of intoxicating.
35:37 Speaker 02 Yes, yeah.
35:38 Mike Rowe? Because I, I don't know why we've worked so hard to separate the two.
35:41 Speaker 02 Yeah, that's one of the things that I learned was, and you've put your finger on it, I'm a different animal. And there was a beauty to hard, physical labor that I came to appreciate. And where I really came to appreciate it was when, the way I got to be a bending machine operator was, the crew consists of the guy who drives the side boom, the bending machine operator, and two guys who handle the pipe. Well, and typically, sometimes you'd have somebody who was, who really knew what they were doing in that job, to go along with you. And lots of time, you had the, you know, some kid who was on the basketball team at,
36:26 Speaker 02 at Texas Tech, or the football team. And once I got on the inside, then I enjoyed, like the rest of them did, running those guys off, because they couldn't keep up with us. And so.
36:37 Mike Rowe? What's more dangerous, the guy who doesn't know what he's doing, or the guy who doesn't want to be there?
36:44 Speaker 02 Uh, well, they're usually the same guy. You know, they're usually the same guy. If you have somebody who doesn't know what they're doing, but is paying attention and is wanting to learn, then great, you know, but that's not typically what you have. That was me. That was me when I started out. Although, I have to say that the first job I was on was on a crew like this in which it was a father and two sons and me. And I was like a fish out of water in that crew. I mean, they knew exactly how to do their job. And I was lost. I didn't have the slightest idea. It was the very first job I had on the pipeline. And I thought I was going to be fired and almost was fired.
37:27 Speaker 02 They ended up giving me another job that I could do. And then later on, I proved to myself that I could do this. These are hard jobs in which you're running all day long and you're guiding an 80-foot piece of pipe down as fast as a side boom can go in order to get it to the vending machine and bend it and then running it back into the, onto the right of way. And then at some point, then you pick up the vending machine and move it down the right of way and keep doing it.
38:00 Mike Rowe? The thing that interests me so much about what you're describing is that, like so many dirty jobs, there's a satisfaction, I think, that comes in always knowing how you're doing. And you always know how you're doing because you have eyes and you can see the progress.
38:14 Speaker 02 Yes.
38:14 Mike Rowe? Right in front of you.
38:15 Speaker 02 Yeah.
38:17 Mike Rowe? I want to kind of linger on it for a little bit because I know when we snap forward, we're going to talk about the team you assembled at the US Mint. And that team and that crew would need to function in ways that are probably somewhat comparable to what you're describing now. But for the fact that you probably didn't have the visual reminder of how you're doing at every turn.
38:39 Speaker 02 Yeah, right.
38:39 Mike Rowe? You're in the government, for God's sakes. You're like, you're, you're dealing with more Kierkegaardian ideas and theory, organization theory.
38:47 Speaker 02 Yeah.
38:48 Mike Rowe? This is so different than that.
38:50 Speaker 02 Yes.
38:51 Mike Rowe? This is the brute reality of bending pipe.
38:53 Speaker 02 Yeah.
38:54 Mike Rowe? And connecting civilization.
38:56 Speaker 02 Yeah. Well, and, but, there's the beauty in it. And the beauty in it was crucial to me in the moment. Because, uh...
39:07 Speaker 02 Well, the way I got to be the bending machine operator was, we ran off the other laborer, who's, you know.
39:15 Mike Rowe? Not caring.
39:15 Speaker 02 I always had to watch out for him. I just said, you know, it makes my job easier if I don't have to watch out for him. And then the bender machine operator took off for another job, and the head of the crew was a side boom operator, and he went to the boss and said, you should give this guy the side, the bending machine, and he can do all three jobs, but if he's going to do all three jobs, you gotta pay him the higher salary of the bending machine operator. And so, we went to the union, to the head of the union, this was in Arizona, and he said, okay, I'll look the other way. He doesn't have that card.
39:49 Mike Rowe? Give me a year.
39:50 Speaker 02 This would have been in seventy-one.
39:55 Mike Rowe? God, I'm so tempted to ask you to riff on the way work has changed. That kind of work in particular, the way a corner could be cut, the way compliance maybe was a thing, but maybe it wasn't the biggest thing all of the time.
40:14 Speaker 02 Oh, yeah, right.
40:14 Mike Rowe? How things get done. I'm eternally interested in that, and the way they change in the course of a single lifetime.
40:23 Speaker 02 Yes, yeah. You know, I can really address that more in my experience at the United States Mint, because we took the Mint forty years, in terms of its manufacturing ethos and the technology we used, over the course of five years. We jumped it forty years ahead.
40:44 Mike Rowe? And modesty aside, how much of that was a result of your own force of will?
40:51 Speaker 02 Yeah, that was, I mean, I drove that.
40:53 Mike Rowe? And how much of that driving was presaged by bending pipe?
41:02 Speaker 02 No, the work ethic, very much the work ethic was part of that. As we accomplished, as we hit all of these marks at the transformation of the US Met, people would say, "Well, can't we take a break after celebrating?" And I'd say, "Yeah, come back tomorrow and be ready."
41:23 Mike Rowe? Go home and take a break.
41:24 Speaker 02 Yeah, yeah. And so I was driven to prove some things over the course of my career, and they were things related to values, deeply held values. One of the things that really resonated with me in the Kierkegaard course was I discovered my ethical DNA, my religious DNA in that course. I sort of stood out in that class, and I say that because that's what the professor said. And the reason was because I was discovering my, I was tracing my own DNA, my intellectual and values DNA in that course.
42:08 Speaker 02 So Kierkegaard is really hard to understand, because he seeks to hide the meaning. He makes you work for it. And so there's the work ethic again. But it wasn't that much of a mystery to me. I got it. I understood what he was doing and why he was doing it.
42:24 Mike Rowe? What was the exact quote from Kierkegaard? "The unexamined life is not worth..."
42:28 Speaker 02 Living.
42:29 Mike Rowe? Yeah.
42:29 Speaker 02 Yeah. And, oh, there's a number of them. Of course, he's well-known for Fear and Trembling and also for The Leap of Faith.
42:40 Mike Rowe? That's a good one.
42:42 Speaker 02 Yeah, The Leap of Faith, which is in the vernacular.
42:45 Mike Rowe? I wonder if Hunter Thompson borrowed or took Fear and Loathing from Fear and Trembling?
42:50 Speaker 02 Yeah, I wonder. Yeah. Well, I would bet he did. There's a twist in that that is so Hunter Thompson.
42:58 Mike Rowe? There's a twist in everything Thompson did. Now, did he impact your life? I'm just going back to your 60s roots and this journey from a pipe bender to a sort of an idealist.
43:09 Speaker 02 Yeah.
43:10 Mike Rowe? To somewhat of an intellectual, I suppose, and were you reading Thompson? Did you like him?
43:15 Speaker 02 I came to him late. I came to him late. It was well past his... I had a lot of makeup to do. Because I grew up in Lubbock, Texas. And, you know, and because my... I identified so much with my older brother. He was in a different generation. He grew up in a... My family was in... I was born into a family that lived in Highland Park, a suburb of Dallas.
43:43 Mike Rowe? Yeah.
43:43 Speaker 02 One of the richest zip codes in the country now, then, probably as well. I don't think they had zip code yet, but they would have. And, uh, and so he went all the way through school into... All the way through his junior and high school. At this fantastic school in this very well-to-do district that was very stabilized. My family went through a progression of downward social mobility. And that... And that's another thing that really transformed me. I think if I had grown up like he did in Highland Park, I know I would have ended up a very different person.
44:22 Mike Rowe? Wait a minute. Thompson grew up in Highland Park?
44:24 Speaker 02 No, no, my brother.
44:25 Mike Rowe? Oh, okay.
44:25 Speaker 02 No, no, I'm sorry, I changed.
44:26 Mike Rowe? Yeah. You are a nonlinear thinker.
44:29 Speaker 02 Yeah, the transition here is that I was... My older brother transformed me. I looked up to him. So I was really outside of the mainstream, even before I got to Buddy Holly.
44:40 Mike Rowe? Right.
44:41 Speaker 02 And, and so, and so Hunter Thompson, uh, you know, I came to later, uh, when I got into the seventies.
44:48 Mike Rowe? This is why Heinlein matters and books matter. I remember... I've known Chuck forty-five years, this guy here.
44:56 Speaker 02 Wow.
44:57 Mike Rowe? And one of the first books...
44:58 Speaker 02 He doesn't look old enough to...
45:00 Mike Rowe? To trust me.
45:00 Speaker 01 Thank you. Thank you, Philip. Thank you.
45:02 Mike Rowe? Go ahead, take the mask off. Show him what's... Show him what's under there. No, in your old apartment, years and years ago. I think that's the first time I saw Hunter Thompson's book. It was Fear and Loathing.
45:12 Speaker 01 Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.
45:13 Mike Rowe? In Las Vegas, yeah. And, um, gonzo journalism, right? And what's the great quote? Somebody's... I think it was the music business, or it might have been the entertainment business, but he called it a... A long, plastic hallway, a cruel money trench where pimps and thieves run free and good men die like dogs.
45:37 Speaker 02 The entertainment industry.
45:40 Mike Rowe? Yeah, yeah, which, you know, it holds up.
45:43 Speaker 02 Yeah.
45:44 Mike Rowe? So, anyway.
45:44 Speaker 02 It sounds like World War I.
45:46 Mike Rowe? Talk about a trench, yeah.
45:48 Speaker 02 Wow.
45:49 Mike Rowe? All right, well, I actually do want to ask you about the First and Second World War and the Peloponnesian Wars, too, and the Trojan War, if we can get to it.
45:57 Speaker 02 Yeah.
45:58 Mike Rowe? And the War of the Roses and the Crusades because money.
46:01 Speaker 02 Yes.
46:01 Mike Rowe? Like, is there ever a war that started that wasn't somehow the result of a financial drama? Couple of weeks ago, on this very podcast, I talked with Brooke Rollins, our Secretary of Agriculture, about the incredibly complicated business of delivering affordable beef to our citizens without disadvantaging American ranchers. We also discussed the very controversial decision to import 300,000 metric tons of ground beef from various foreign countries and the maddening policy that allows meatpackers to label imported meat as a product of the USA.
46:43 Mike Rowe? Well, shortly after that conversation, one of my sponsors, Good Ranchers, reported an unusually high level of interest in their product, and this is not surprising. Given a choice, most people would prefer to buy their meat from American ranchers, and Good Ranchers is the number one company in America that delivers 100% American meat straight to your door. They partner with over 100 local farmers and ranchers to deliver pasture-raised meat with no antibiotics and no added hormones. They've got 25,000 five-star reviews on TrustViolet, 25,000, including my own.
47:23 Mike Rowe? This month, when you visit GoodRanchers.com/row, you'll get a free Angus ground beef bundle with your first order. Again, that's GoodRanchers.com/row for four bonus pounds of ground beef raised right here in these United States, and that's guaranteed. Support your local ranchers by insisting on American meat delivered at GoodRanchers.com/row.
47:50 Mike Rowe? If you could eat a cow, don't take a chance on a foreign ranch. Get good ranchers now. Hey, hall.
47:59 Speaker 02 Oh, money was always involved. I mean, I have, I've really, as I've gotten older and have had the time, I've done much more and deeper reading in history. And going back now three, four thousand years. Whereas before, as I was coming up, I was much more interested in American history and European history. The short answer to your question is no. I mean, every war has involved a significant financial component. But I think it's important not to short shrift other forces that drive war.
48:36 Speaker 02 Religion, I mean, there were hundreds of years in which Europe was racked by wars of religion. Unless we know that history, then we don't understand the ground from which America grew. The separation of church and state that was so fundamental to Jefferson and the other founders wasn't some philosophical point of view they had. It was their knowledge of how many millions upon millions upon millions of Europeans had died in wars of religion.
49:18 Speaker 02 Until finally, the slaughter was such that neither side could prevail and they were forced to reach some kind of an accommodation.
49:29 Mike Rowe? It went splat, essentially.
49:31 Speaker 02 Yep.
49:32 Mike Rowe? Just fought themselves to exhaustion.
49:34 Speaker 02 Yes. And so, out of that experience, and that is one of the things that, you know, so powerful about the American story, is the, our ability to apply the lessons of history and grows a little bit wiser by it.
49:53 Mike Rowe? Yeah.
49:53 Speaker 02 And, you know, the, the people who, the men and women who we're celebrating still today, from the greatest generation, my father was one of them. One distinguished flying cross, flying the hump.
50:08 Mike Rowe? Flying the hump?
50:09 Speaker 02 Yeah, flying the hump.
50:10 Mike Rowe? Explain what that means.
50:10 Speaker 02 Uh, flying Burma china and flying supplies into the allied troops over the Himalayas.
50:18 Speaker 02 I didn't really, I had no interest in my dad's story, you know, when I was growing up. But I, my son went into the Air Force and I got a call from his camp commanding officer offering, asking me if I was willing to provide the keynote address at the ball, the Air Force ball that year. And I said, well, first of all, there's a keynote address at a ball?
50:44 Mike Rowe? Right.
50:44 Speaker 02 What is that?
50:45 Mike Rowe? That sounds exciting.
50:46 Speaker 02 Yeah.
50:46 Mike Rowe? Honey, get in here. It's time for the keynote.
50:49 Speaker 02 Yes. And, and I said, I bet those are short. He said, no, you know, the last one was like 56 minutes. I said, I said, okay, I think I can beat that. And so I went and I did a lot of research on my dad's, what my dad's experience would have been like in flying the, the home. And I learned a lot about the heroism and I also learned how he had applied this natural gift he had at Dead Reckoning. And that I knew from my youth, my incredible how my dad always knew where true north was. And so of course, the Japanese would fly, you know, would use radar beams and such
51:33 Speaker 02 to fly planes into mountains and such. And my dad was never fooled by that.
51:38 Mike Rowe? So he just, what a, what a gift that is. Have you, sidebar, but it's a very short book called Longitude.
51:47 Speaker 02 I'm not familiar with that, no.
51:49 Mike Rowe? You can read it on the flight on the way back. It tells the story of the search for longitude. We always knew latitude.
51:57 Speaker 02 Oh, yes, I've seen this book.
51:58 Mike Rowe? But longitude was tough.
52:00 Speaker 02 Yeah.
52:00 Mike Rowe? Cause to calculate longitude at sea, you needed to know what time it was wherever you were. And there were no time pieces in the day that could accurately keep time at sea because of the motion. So the race to find. A simple calculus for longitude was was global. There was a massive prize put up for it.
52:23 Speaker 02 Yeah.
52:23 Mike Rowe? And the race to get this prize is so epic. But a guy like your dad probably could have figured it out.
52:29 Speaker 02 Yeah.
52:30 Mike Rowe? You always know where true north is.
52:31 Speaker 02 Yes, yeah. I got into my dad's head more. I knew, you know, because I lacked interest, which I regret. You know, I did hear, I didn't quiz him enough for some of his stories. But one of them was, these guys flew around the clock. You know, they'd get out of one plane and they'd unload and fly back and they'd load up. And that's when they'd had their chance to rest and get out of the plane when they're loading back up. Because when they unload it, they just push stuff out of the plane.
53:01 Mike Rowe? Yeah.
53:02 Speaker 02 Because there's gunfire always around around the airfield.
53:05 Mike Rowe? Because things aren't exciting enough flying over the hum.
53:08 Speaker 02 Yes, yes.
53:08 Mike Rowe? It's best to be up for a few days straight with people shooting at you to really get the juices flowing.
53:12 Speaker 02 Yeah, exactly. So he told me this story about how he was captain and and typically the captain would take off and then turn it over to the co-pilot and he'd take a nap during that period of time. The co-pilot would fly for some period of time. And so, and they were flying all the time. And so my dad nodded off and his head was over toward the the side of the window. And in his sleep, he thought he heard a change in the pitch of the engine. And he was so tired that he didn't want to wake himself up, but he did. And he saw the Himalayan plane 100 feet beneath him. And, you know, he turned and looked at the co-pilot. The co-pilot was asleep and he turned and looked at the navigator and navigator was asleep.
53:57 Speaker 02 And so he just took it off autopilot and, you know, raised the altitude and put the autopilot back on and told the co-pilot, hey, it's your turn.
54:09 Mike Rowe? Went back to sleep.
54:10 Speaker 02 And went back to sleep. And I said, Dad, you didn't report him. And he said, oh, heavens, no, it would have destroyed his life. And I didn't understand the context that these guys were pushing the limits of human endurance. You know, they understood each other and they had each other's backs.
54:30 Mike Rowe? This was the point I was trying to make before. There's no model for it. There's no playbook for it. But, you know, the business of turning a blind eye to a An HR issue on a pipe bending crew.
54:44 Speaker 02 Yeah.
54:45 Mike Rowe? Right?
54:45 Speaker 02 Yeah.
54:47 Mike Rowe? It's just a matter of degree we're talking about.
54:49 Speaker 02 Right.
54:49 Mike Rowe? It's not so different than nodding off, you know, on a combat mission and then not reporting, right?
54:56 Speaker 02 Yeah.
54:56 Mike Rowe? It's like this idea that there's, there's compliance, but, you know, there's judgment also.
55:04 Speaker 02 Absolutely.
55:05 Mike Rowe? And there's this giant human condition going on, and I'm sure we'll find a way to apply this to, to life at the Mint as well. But all of these things, this is what happened in Liechtenstein, folks, 18 months ago. It's like, it's very difficult to have a linear conversation with you, but it also wouldn't be very satisfying.
55:26 Mike Rowe? Because it's like, all of this is just so agitating. And right here, look, this is how your company, basically, you know, we wound up getting in business together, not because I thought it was a good idea to diversify my 401k with some precious metals, which full disclosure, I did, and I appreciate that, thanks very much, whatever.
55:46 Speaker 02 Sure.
55:46 Mike Rowe? It's because you said, we've got this valor and victory series of coins that are honoring the greatest generation, and there are only a few thousand guys walking around now who are 100 years old, who fought in the great battles of this war. And Mike, would you be interested in, in presenting these coins to a few of these old men? And it took me, I don't know, maybe a quarter second? Maybe a half second?
56:13 Speaker 02 Yeah, right.
56:14 Mike Rowe? I was like, hell yeah. And so, listening to you talk about your dad, did that somehow inform the company's decision to move forward with a project like this? And talk about how currency can honor courage.
56:32 Speaker 02 Yes.
56:32 Mike Rowe? Because that's such a big part of what you guys did here.
56:36 Speaker 02 Yes. Oh, absolutely.
56:39 Speaker 02 The program was born out of, number one, a commitment inside the company to public service and honoring people with public service. And that is something that is close to my heart because half of my career has been spent in business and half of it has been spent in public service. And I mean service, not simply working for the government. And there are a lot of people like me who worked in the service of the public. So that was really crucial to me.
57:17 Speaker 02 And also what was crucial to me is that there's a legacy that, a really complex and multifaceted legacy, that the greatest generation handed to us. And some of that legacy, we talk about it all the time. I mean, we celebrate it in movies and we romanticize it and we honor men and women who really understand that they don't deserve the honor, or they feel like they don't deserve the honor, but they accept it as representatives of their kind.
58:00 Mike Rowe? I would go so far as to say, the men that I gave these to, including at the Naval Memorial, the top guy there, I think they understand the need for us
58:17 Speaker 02 Yes.
58:18 Mike Rowe? to thank them.
58:19 Speaker 02 Yeah.
58:20 Mike Rowe? You know, I mean, just a few hours ago, a guy named Johnny Joey Jones was sitting right where you are. He lost his legs in Afghanistan and he's written this great book called Behind the Badge. And it's very difficult for him to talk about
58:36 Mike Rowe? It's hard for him to talk about him.
58:37 Speaker 02 Yeah.
58:39 Mike Rowe? But he understands that people need to come up to him and thank him.
58:43 Speaker 02 Yeah.
58:44 Mike Rowe? And so, there's a real grace, and you find it in guys like that. But I found it in the men that you sent me out to present these to as well. Even at a hundred, hundred-one years old.
58:56 Speaker 02 Yeah.
58:57 Mike Rowe? It's, it never goes away.
58:59 Speaker 02 Yes, yes, yes. And this is a role that coins have played throughout the history of coinage. And it's something that I didn't really appreciate. I was like, when I went to the Mint, I was like most Americans. Coinage are a tool. They're a means of conducting commerce. Symbolism of them, the beauty of them, none of that meant anything to me. It was only after I was educated by my customers, who like you say, have a passion for coins and the artage, the art of coinage, that I began to understand the enormous symbolic value of coinage.
59:39 Mike Rowe? Yeah.
59:39 Speaker 02 And how throughout history, that, humans have understood that symbolic value. That's why the images of kings were on coins. You didn't find everyday people on coins. You had kings, and when the first, next, earlier king was decapitated, one of the first things the new king did was put his head on the coins.
1:00:03 Mike Rowe? Yeah.
1:00:03 Speaker 02 So.
1:00:04 Mike Rowe? So the Mints were busy.
1:00:05 Speaker 02 Yeah, the Mints were busy. Yeah, the Mints were busy. And this is something that Thomas Jefferson understood when he wrote the, when he basically created the United States Mint, one of the first agencies of the federal government after the ratification of the Constitution.
1:00:22 Mike Rowe? That was Jefferson too.
1:00:23 Speaker 02 That was Jefferson and Hamilton. One of the last times they worked on, collaborated on something together.
1:00:29 Mike Rowe? Yeah.
1:00:30 Speaker 02 But Jefferson, at the same time Jefferson was writing in committee the Declaration of Independence, at the same time he was working on his theory of coinage. And the United States Mint is a product of that intellectual endeavor.
1:00:46 Mike Rowe? What was his theory of coinage in a nutshell?
1:00:49 Speaker 02 Well, as you can imagine, it was, he sought to democratize commerce through coinage. And if you ever dealt with currency that is not decimal, where you have to memorize what the, how the units of measure relate to each other, then you get a sense for how complex it was for uneducated people to, you know, basically people who couldn't read or write to conduct business.
1:01:23 Mike Rowe? Yeah.
1:01:24 Speaker 02 And in the United States, it was further complicated because multiple national currencies circulated at the same time. So you might be doing change between one currency and another currency, and they're not in decimals. So what Jefferson sought to do was to create coinage that even people who had never really gone to school could conduct business with by having the decimal system.
1:01:54 Mike Rowe? So a penny, a nickel, a dime, a quarter relates to a dollar in a different way than like a pound or a shilling or a pence?
1:02:01 Speaker 02 Yes, yes, that's exactly right.
1:02:03 Mike Rowe? That was revolutionary.
1:02:05 Speaker 02 Yes, it was. And you can't help but wonder if that level of complication was a feature, not a bug, of currency systems.
1:02:15 Mike Rowe? Keep the people stupid.
1:02:16 Speaker 02 Yep, yeah, exactly. And, and so Jefferson would have none of that. And so the coinage system that he was designing at that time was based on, you know, his insights into the democratization that he sought. And one of the things that he also, and Washington got into this.
1:02:40 Mike Rowe? Mm-hmm.
1:02:40 Speaker 02 Washington, and Jefferson, of course, was Washington's first Secretary of State. And Washington had a role in selection of his first Mint Director, who was the greatest Mint Director in the country's history. Sacrificed his life, basically.
1:02:57 Mike Rowe? Who was that?
1:02:57 Speaker 02 His name's Rittenhouse. And...
1:03:01 Mike Rowe? Is Rittenhouse Square named for him in Philadelphia?
1:03:03 Speaker 02 Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
1:03:05 Mike Rowe? I lived there.
1:03:05 Speaker 02 Yes, yep.
1:03:06 Mike Rowe? For a summer.
1:03:07 Speaker 02 Yep, and so, and Washington refused to have his visage put on the nation's first coins. He said, "No, that's where kings go, and I'm no king." And as a result, there's never been a living president placed on an American coin. And it wasn't until early in the 20th century, when, before any president was depicted on a coin.
1:03:35 Mike Rowe? Wait, so Jefferson's theory of coinage and his theory of governance, basically, are hand and glove.
1:03:48 Speaker 02 Yeah, they grew out of the same ground. Yeah, that's exactly right.
1:03:51 Mike Rowe? Like the wine he grew, as well.
1:03:53 Speaker 02 Yeah, that's right.
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1:05:21 Speaker 02 He was.
1:05:22 Mike Rowe? He really just, he just couldn't stop.
1:05:25 Speaker 02 Kennedy said that, he was at a dinner in which there were many, many, you know this line? Kennedy was at a dinner in which he was speaking at the White House, in which there were all these eminent figures, and which he said, "There has never been a time at the White House in which there had been such great intellect at the table since Jefferson dined alone."
1:05:54 Speaker 02 And so, he put a lot of thought into it, and Americans really, and he also understood that a nation's coinage is an expression of its sovereignty. And if other nations' coinage was circulating in the nation, there's questions about the nation's sovereignty. And so, there were all these sort of practical, pragmatic reasons for the foundation of the US Mint, and then all these powerful symbolic reasons as well, that all came into play.
1:06:30 Mike Rowe? In the spirit of the hopscotch that we've clearly engaged. Back to the Mint. You said that you, you basically did 40 years of work in five.
1:06:40 Speaker 02 Yes.
1:06:41 Mike Rowe? So, in what condition was the Mint when you inherited it? What was broken? And, under your tutelage, what was fixed?
1:06:53 Speaker 02 So, everything was broken. There's, really, I'd have to really work to figure out something that wasn't broken.
1:07:03 Mike Rowe? Jeez.
1:07:05 Speaker 02 Well, it was like, I, I
1:07:07 Mike Rowe? I don't want you to throw anybody under the bus, but who's responsible for that?
1:07:09 Speaker 02 Yeah.
1:07:10 Mike Rowe? I mean, was that just a drip, drip, drip of like just casual chronic indifference? Or did one guy just go in and just screw the pooch?
1:07:17 Speaker 02 Well, let me, let me say this. My predecessor, David Ryder, uh, only had the position for a short period of time because, uh, George, he was a appointee of George, uh, H W Bush. I came in as a Clinton appointee and so he had to make room for me. So he was only in that position for a couple of years. I came over to take a look at the job before I decided to take it. And he gave me a fantastic introduction to the challenges of the place. He's still a good friend.
1:07:53 Mike Rowe? Yeah.
1:07:53 Speaker 02 You know, Republican, Democrat, they disagree, disagree on a lot of things. Ed Moy is a Republican, a Democrat.
1:08:00 Mike Rowe? And to be clear, this is, not to make this a commercial, but U S Money Reserve is a commercial enterprise and at the top of the food chain are two former directors of the U S Mint from different sides of the aisle.
1:08:12 Speaker 02 Yes, yeah.
1:08:13 Mike Rowe? I like that. I like these. I like you guys, you know, but I, I just think, that's another reason I wanted to have you on, full disclosure. I just don't, I, I don't know many Republicans and Democrats who genuinely seem to not only respect and like each other, but like hang out often.
1:08:31 Speaker 02 Yeah, we, we really do. I did not know Ed before he came into the company. I might have met him before, but I'd never spent any time with him. So, and I'd been at the company for several years. And so I didn't know what the situation was going to be like, what it was going to feel like, and was this going to be a point, counterpoint sort of relationship? But Ed and I have become really good friends. He and I, and we are constantly discovering how much we agree in certain areas. Certainly around, I'm kind of a fiscal conservative for being a liberal Democrat.
1:09:09 Mike Rowe? Yeah.
1:09:10 Speaker 02 But, but I believe in responsibility. I believe in, you know, we should be responsible with our budgets.
1:09:17 Mike Rowe? Well, you certainly believe in consequences.
1:09:19 Speaker 02 Yeah, I believe in consequences.
1:09:21 Mike Rowe? I mean, you're, you're consequential man and this is a consequential commodity.
1:09:26 Speaker 02 Yeah.
1:09:26 Mike Rowe? This is a product and it has Massive implications.
1:09:32 Speaker 02 We know and we understand that's something that Ed and I share and that is we understand the significance of those consequences, not just for the nation. I mean, you know, that's kind of where we come from, from the big picture financial world, but also for individuals. We can look ahead. We both have this ability because we've been at the high levels of the government. We've been around these issues for a long time. And now, because we are so immersed in what the implications are for individuals, we can look down the road a little bit. And I think we have more credibility in talking about why precious
1:10:14 Speaker 02 metals make sense to people, many more people than, you know, than who have considered precious metals being important.
1:10:22 Mike Rowe? See, I don't think, I'm just gonna move this real quick. I don't think, let me say it like this. I think there's a big difference between buying something and being sold something. And, you know, the investment world is complicated and consequential, and obviously precious metals play a big role in it. But the thing that attracted me to your company, it was this idea that, you know, gold still feels kind of nonpartisan. It feels kind of agnostic.
1:10:56 Speaker 02 Agnostic, yeah, it's a good word.
1:10:57 Mike Rowe? It just is what it is. And everybody kind of agrees, more or less, on its significance. Maybe there's some disagreement over the degree to which it should be held, or how it should be deployed. I can't speak to that, but I do know, and this is really a confession, and not to make this about me or hijack it, but when we were in Liechtenstein 18 months ago, and when we first, when you guys told me about this Valorant Victory series, that's when I was like, wait a minute. What else is egalitarian and agnostic? What else?
1:11:32 Mike Rowe? Do my friends on both sides of the aisle agree with like work ethic is a thing?
1:11:37 Speaker 02 Yup.
1:11:37 Mike Rowe? The trades, the importance of the trades. So you guys let me run with this. You you minted this trade of America coin. And I don't know how up to speed you are, but we these things sold out to raise money for my work ethic scholarship foundation.
1:11:55 Speaker 02 I know.
1:11:56 Mike Rowe? In like hours.
1:11:57 Speaker 02 Yes.
1:11:58 Mike Rowe? It went fast. So shameless pluggery aside, I kind of feel like underneath all of this are some big themes that can unite the country.
1:12:10 Speaker 02 Yes.
1:12:11 Mike Rowe? At least for a little while.
1:12:12 Speaker 02 Yes.
1:12:13 Mike Rowe? In polite conversation.
1:12:14 Speaker 02 Yes.
1:12:15 Mike Rowe? You know, a shared history, a shared coinage, a shared respect for pipe bending and hard work and Buddy Holly and all these things. So am I like, am I just reading way too much into all of it?
1:12:26 Speaker 02 No, I no, I think you're absolutely right. The trades, we have a growing appreciation, especially those of us who aren't very good with our hands. I'm not really good with my hands. And I have a great appreciation for people who are and being able to find them in a work environment in which we are way short on the number of tradespeople that the country needs. And one of the good things that comes out of that is that wages are going up because of that. They need to go up more and we need to do a better job at encouraging young people to go into the trades, to understand what the advantages are, the economic and lifestyle
1:13:11 Speaker 02 advantages are of going into the trades. I was listening to a program this morning about how frustrated so many young men are about their inability to start families. Because and they're living at home or they're bunking up with two other guys. And the trades represent this opportunity to create that, the life that they want. There's been way too much emphasis placed on.
1:13:42 Speaker 02 Going to college and getting a college degree and going to become a lawyer. Lawyers have, what, the highest suicide rate of any profession?
1:13:52 Mike Rowe? It's right up there with dentists.
1:13:54 Speaker 02 Yeah, and so there's been all this misdirection for American youth. And part of that has to do with just the fact that the culture has looked down on or hasn't appreciated the role of the tradesman.
1:14:11 Mike Rowe? Why do you suppose that's happened? And I ask because I'm asked twice a week by people writing articles about why we waged a kind of war on the part of the workforce that we rely upon. Why do we grow to resent the thing we rely upon?
1:14:35 Speaker 02 Yeah.
1:14:36 Mike Rowe? Tell us a matter with this.
1:14:37 Speaker 02 Yes. Well, I think our parents and grandparents deserve some of the credit for that because they tell the story of how hard they work in the trades so you don't have to. That was a very consistent message to my generation.
1:14:55 Mike Rowe? Want something better for my kids.
1:14:56 Speaker 02 I want something better for my kids. And the fact of the matter is that the trades are not the trades that my grandparents worked in. I mean, there's a skill level, a technology level that goes way beyond that. But there's this tarnish that has remained on the skills trade that I think has been really hard to knock off.
1:15:25 Mike Rowe? Chuck, find, I take it back, I am going to make it a shameless plug. Find the obverse of this Trades of America coin. It's on usmr.com/mike.
1:15:38 Speaker 02 Okay.
1:15:38 Mike Rowe? I just want people to see it up close because it's such a great bookend. You just used the word tarnish and we started with the word luster.
1:15:47 Speaker 02 Yeah, right.
1:15:48 Mike Rowe? I think they're opposites, you know? So a lot of what we have to do reputational wise is shine them up, you know? But not in a sales job. It's an honest, I think, that the myths and misperceptions and stigmas and stereotypes that surround certain types of investments.
1:16:10 Mike Rowe? Also surround certain types of jobs.
1:16:12 Speaker 02 Yep.
1:16:12 Mike Rowe? And they surround certain types of education.
1:16:14 Speaker 02 Yep.
1:16:15 Mike Rowe? And we are in a constant war for PR mind share.
1:16:22 Speaker 02 Yeah.
1:16:22 Mike Rowe? In virtually everything.
1:16:24 Speaker 02 Yeah.
1:16:24 Mike Rowe? So what I loved about that, and you can find the opposite one if you wouldn't mind too, the guy.
1:16:29 Speaker 02 Oh, I thought you, this was the one that you.
1:16:31 Mike Rowe? Obverse and reverse are complicated. It's heads and tails typically.
1:16:34 Speaker 02 Obverse is heads?
1:16:35 Mike Rowe? Obverse is heads.
1:16:37 Speaker 02 My bad.
1:16:37 Mike Rowe? Reverse is tails, but typically, that might be the obverse because it, for reasons I don't understand. But the front of the coin is the one I want to see.
1:16:45 Speaker 02 Okay, here it comes.
1:16:46 Mike Rowe? The man and the woman standing next to it because there you've got no tarnish. That's lustrous.
1:16:52 Speaker 02 Yes.
1:16:52 Mike Rowe? That's five ounces of silver.
1:16:54 Speaker 02 Yep.
1:16:54 Mike Rowe? We tried to capture with a visage and with a posture and with an attitude. You know, I didn't want to go full works project on it, but.
1:17:04 Speaker 02 Right.
1:17:04 Mike Rowe? How in a coin, and how close do you think we came with this to kind of checking the aspirational box while paying some sort of tribute to all of it?
1:17:16 Speaker 02 Oh, I think it's great in representing the dignity of work and the product of that work. That's the thing I, that for me, the dignity of work was crucial. That showing, you know, proving to myself that I earned a place among men.
1:17:33 Mike Rowe? To be weighed and measured.
1:17:35 Speaker 02 To be weighed and measured, yes. Yeah, yeah, like, like precious metals, exactly. And so I think it does a beautiful job of representing that. This is something that's going to be an enormous challenge that's coming around the corner. It's happening already and that is, how are we going to maintain people's dignity in the face of AI? What work are people going to have for, that allow them to earn that self-respect?
1:18:05 Mike Rowe? Yeah.
1:18:05 Speaker 02 And for me, that has been crucial. And it's one of the things that I tried to teach my sons and they are successful and, and making their career. You're, you know, that's one of the proudest thing any parent has is that their children can go and be successful in the world. You know, and they're old enough, they're in their late 30s and 40s where they'll probably be chased by the AI bug as they go up in their lives, but they're not younger where they're already in the battlefield.
1:18:37 Mike Rowe? Well, no crystal balls and I won't hold you to it, but. You know, how do you handicap this? What do you think the answer is? Where are we going to find dignity? What will work look like? And is there going to be some sort of counterbalance? If so much of what's coming has the word "artificial" in front of it, what's the corollary? Authenticity? And how are we going to find that? And how valuable is that going to be? Wow, I just brought it back to gold accidentally. But like, what is the real and the eternal and the unchanging thing in a future that seems to be defined by artificiality?
1:19:14 Speaker 02 Yeah, well, it's all about purpose. And finding means by which people find their purpose. And work is one of those ways in which we've found purpose. I certainly did. And it's one of the ways that I transformed the US Mint, me and others who shared those values.
1:19:32 Mike Rowe? Way to bring that back, because last we left that, old Rittenhouse had just brought you up to speed. Everything had crapped the bed. Nothing was working the way it was supposed to work.
1:19:41 Speaker 02 Yes.
1:19:41 Mike Rowe? Would you change and how'd you fix it?
1:19:43 Speaker 02 Well, when I went over to the Mint, I was handed a remit, and that was to fix the financial management mess at the Mint. And I'm good with numbers. You know, I know how to balance a budget. But our situation was enormously complex. And the reason was because Congress, in its wisdom, had written into law this spaghetti mess of financial relationships and fund relationships that made it impossible for the US Mint to survive an independent audit. US Mint was one of the first federal government agencies
1:20:25 Speaker 02 back in the 90s to be subjected to a financial audit, independent audit. Now, all government agencies are. And we failed it. Not because there was money leaking all over the place. It's just that they couldn't even pressure test it to see if it was.
1:20:41 Mike Rowe? I mean, we all understand the irony of a Mint failing an audit, right?
1:20:44 Speaker 02 Yes, right. And there was no way of fixing that without passing law through Congress. Good luck with that. Even then, it was so difficult. And those were the beginning days. It was right at the time of the Gingrich Revolution, in which Republicans and Democrats started going their own way.
1:21:03 Mike Rowe? Yeah.
1:21:03 Speaker 02 And, you know, to a degree, it hadn't been in the past. So that was the first thing that was handed to me. The second thing that I adopted was a major customer service initiative. And the reason why I chose customer service is that my philosophy, as I walked in the door, was that you have to strip the insulation off of an organization and shove them in front of their customers.
1:21:30 Mike Rowe? Right.
1:21:31 Speaker 02 So that the customers can tell them what they think.
1:21:33 Mike Rowe? Right.
1:21:34 Speaker 02 And there's no place to hide. They have to respond to that.
1:21:38 Mike Rowe? Radical transparency.
1:21:39 Speaker 02 Yes, exactly.
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1:23:07 Speaker 02 And so, and we had, I mean, people, customers would order a collectible coin and wait nine months to receive it. And so we set out, you know, the standard of, you know, I guess the first one was six weeks. Go from nine months to six weeks, which was an embarrassment, but it's a start.
1:23:30 Mike Rowe? Sure.
1:23:30 Speaker 02 And there's a whole pneumatic press that covers the mint and they all laughed at that possibility. And my team didn't think it was possible. And when they achieved it, we all celebrated and I said, great, okay, four weeks.
1:23:44 Mike Rowe? I'm sorry, Phil, just a quick sidebar. What percentage of the mint's purpose slash business is selling coins to customers? I don't think most people have a concept of this.
1:23:54 Speaker 02 Yeah, I mean, depends on how you measure it. If you measure it in terms of units produced, tiny fraction. If you measure it in terms of the value of the coins, then a much larger percentage. Because of course, we're using multi precious metal coins. As opposed to just, you know, circulating base metal coins. If you talk about the amount of time required of staff and staff resources, then getting close probably to 50% of the energy that is consumed by the agency.
1:24:35 Speaker 02 And especially in those early days when things were so chaotic. A lot of the reason why it took so much time was because nobody could get a straight answer to any question. And it was because none of the information systems were reliable. People had tried in good faith to deliver information to management and got burned as a result of it being wrong. And under that kind of environment, people learned, you know, there are a lot of hammers around and the nail that sticks its head up is going to get pounded. And so the biggest challenge I faced, and I didn't realize this at first. This was a piece of wisdom that came to me later.
1:25:20 Speaker 02 The biggest challenge in the transformation of any organization is culture.
1:25:26 Speaker 02 Changing the culture of an organization is the hard work of leadership. And the only way you do that is by example. My philosophy was, I don't mind you making a mistake. If we're doing something new, you make a mistake. Don't make that mistake a second time.
1:25:42 Mike Rowe? Right.
1:25:43 Speaker 02 No, raise the level of mistakes we make. And the other thing was, don't hide anything from me. If something goes wrong, I want to be the first one to know about it. And sure as hell, if I ask you about it, I need to know the truth.
1:25:56 Mike Rowe? How big was your department in personnel-wise?
1:25:58 Speaker 02 Well, the Mint was about 2,100 people with facilities in Philadelphia, Denver, West Point, New York, San Francisco, and then in Fort Knox. And the headquarters in Washington, DC.
1:26:14 Mike Rowe? It's a big job.
1:26:15 Speaker 02 Yeah, it's a big job. And when I went in, we had big labor problems. The Denver Mint, where the national president of the AFGE worked, they had demonstrators outside the Denver Mint. Of course, government, federal government employees cannot strike. So that was as close as they could come to a strike.
1:26:39 Mike Rowe? I think Reagan explained that in fairly stark terms.
1:26:41 Speaker 02 Yeah, he did, yeah.
1:26:42 Mike Rowe? Sent a message.
1:26:43 Speaker 02 Yeah, he did. He sure as hell did. And that got through. So they weren't striking, but they were disruptive. And they were disruptive in Philadelphia, too. And so I talked to my management team to try to get a handle on what it was. I mean, when I worked pipeline construction, I was a member of a union. I've got a story that I can tell you about how I was recruited. I was a member of a union. And so, as a Democrat, you know, I didn't want to have trouble with my union. I just want principle.
1:27:15 Mike Rowe? Sure.
1:27:16 Speaker 02 So I went out to Denver to meet with this guy, and he looked like this mountain man. Came out, you know, from the woods. And I discovered, talking to him, that, oh, yeah, he's better than most labor attorneys. He knows his business. And so finally, at the end of this long conversation, I said, well, what do you guys want? And he laid out four things, and they all seemed so small to me, that this is what we've been fighting about, these four things? And I said, you got them. Okay. And when I went back and told my team, my management team, they were appalled. What did you get in exchange? I didn't ask for anything. These all seemed reasonable. And they just thought I was so naive.
1:28:00 Speaker 02 And I told my deputy, who I handpicked, and we were a fantastic team. Longtime Treasury civil servant, of course, I was a political appointee. And I told him that what they don't understand is that I've bought trust with this guy. And we're not going to have problems there anymore. And he's going to be able to call me and talk to me. And the other thing that we learned was that, you know, sometimes political executives find their career civil servant managers not very cooperative in, you know, in getting the vision.
1:28:41 Speaker 02 And so when you have facilities spread over the country, it's hard to know what is actually happening. And the union could tell me what was actually happening. So they were sort of my fifth columnists among management. And so, you know, and we ended up winning all kinds of awards for labor management.
1:29:01 Mike Rowe? You changed the culture.
1:29:02 Speaker 02 So we changed the culture and we started with labor. And we started with customer service representatives, the people who actually faced our customers. Initially, the coin collecting and bullion customers. Later on, the numismatic, I mean, the circulating coinage customers, which is the Federal Reserve Bank, they were our customers, but also the American public indirectly through our distribution channels. That was a crucial transformative program because it led to the Sacagawea Golden Dollar, which was a huge success when we launched it.
1:29:42 Mike Rowe? What's a huge success mean?
1:29:43 Speaker 02 It means we distributed it through, well, the banks, because they had had this nasty experience with the Susan B. Anthony, it was this huge failure, they were stuck with it on their hands. They were unwilling to launch this new Sacagawea Golden Dollar.
1:30:01 Speaker 02 So I called up the Walmart lobbyist in Washington and invited him to come over. And he and I agreed, he was new, so he didn't know what couldn't be done. So he and I struck up a deal where we would launch the golden dollar in every Walmart and Sam's store across the country at the end of January in 2000. Is that it that we're talking about? No, that's the 50 state quarters. Oh, okay. Yeah, and so. That was yours too? Was that yours? Yeah, that was mine too. I almost got fired by Treasury for that program. That's a different story. Oh, my God. But, and hugely successful, raised 2.6 billion dollars for the American people.
1:30:46 Speaker 02 There you go. Went straight into the general fund of the Treasury. Okay, now what's that? So that's the Sacagawea Golden Dollar. And we launched that in January of 2000. Everybody thought it was going to be this huge failure. People lined up before the stores opened and around the block at Walmarts and Sam's Clubs all over the country. Why? Because they loved the image and the, we captured the moment with this coin. Undaunted Courage, the book by Stephen Ambrose. Yeah. Was very popular at the time. And of course, he told the story of Sacagawea.
1:31:25 Speaker 02 And there was a gifted artist engraver who ended up, I did not know this at the time, I had nothing to do with this, also from Lubbock. And she, yeah, talk about Small World, she did the Vietnam War Memorial on the Mall. Right. Glenn Goodacre. Mm-hmm. And she did this design and everybody agreed, this was the great design. We loved it. But I ran into trouble at Treasury because, I know this how silly stuff is, because, oh, Sacagawea was an unwed mother, we're going to celebrate her on a coin. Can you believe that? Actually, yeah, I can believe it. You know, that was on the left and then, you know, there were complaints on the
1:32:10 Speaker 02 right and, so it was all these stupid issues. But the thing is that. I could get support from both Republicans and Democrats because there were powerful Republicans who were from the West who had connections to her tribe.
1:32:28 Mike Rowe? Which tribe was Sachin Shri from?
1:32:29 Speaker 02 She was, you know what, this is going back 25 years in my memory.
1:32:33 Mike Rowe? Chuck, go back, I got a question about the reverse too. Go back your way.
1:32:37 Speaker 02 So, so it ended up that I was able to get the support of a crucial Republican Senator who did not like me for a prior opposition to something that he wanted to do. But I went in and I made the pitch to him. I think he probably was admired the fact that I came in to talk to him about it. He had members of her tribe in Minnesota and he said, "Well, if you put that design on the coin, I'll support you." And so when I went to the Treasury Department to sell it to the Secretary of Treasury, Secretary
1:33:16 Speaker 02 Rubin, I kind of went over and, not in a whisper, but in a very low voice, so that all the staff members who were whispering why they, we shouldn't do this, I told him that Senator Grams said that he would support it if, if you chose that one. Now, Grams was important because he sat on the Finance Committee, the Banking Committee that had jurisdiction over all of Treasury's business.
1:33:43 Mike Rowe? Yeah.
1:33:44 Speaker 02 And so Secretary Rubin looked up and he said, "Thank you."
1:33:49 Mike Rowe? So the stakes, again, the consequences of that are billions of dollars to the American people.
1:33:53 Speaker 02 Yes.
1:33:54 Mike Rowe? I need to understand the reverse. You got yourself a turtle there with a wolf howling at the moon and it appears to be a turkey. These were all consequential for reasons, I assume you can explain?
1:34:05 Speaker 02 I had no idea. This is after my time. They changed the reverse. In fact, I think they passed a law that provided for an annual change to the reverse.
1:34:16 Mike Rowe? Oh, okay. Just to mix it up a little bit?
1:34:18 Speaker 02 Yeah, to mix it up, yeah.
1:34:20 Mike Rowe? So, I don't know Chuck, you'll hate this, but I'd like to see the Susan B. Anthony failure for a moment.
1:34:25 Speaker 01 Why wouldn't you want to see that?
1:34:28 Mike Rowe? Well, I'm, because we're talking about PR, we're talking about, we're talking about marketing, we're talking about selling and buying, you know, through the lens in this case of a Mint Director. I'm just, I'm so interested to know. Why Susan B. Anthony failed?
1:34:45 Speaker 02 Yeah.
1:34:46 Mike Rowe? What did they get wrong?
1:34:47 Speaker 02 Yeah, oh, show the image and it'll jump right out at you.
1:34:50 Mike Rowe? I can't wait to see it.
1:34:52 Speaker 01 Here it comes.
1:34:53 Speaker 02 Okay.
1:34:54 Mike Rowe? Oh, that's too bad.
1:34:56 Speaker 01 What? Oh, it's too bad that I got it quickly enough?
1:35:00 Speaker 02 The design. Oh. So, multiple failures here.
1:35:08 Speaker 01 Multiple failures.
1:35:10 Speaker 02 Yeah. So, uh, the coin looks like it's not round, but it is round.
1:35:16 Speaker 01 Uh huh.
1:35:17 Speaker 02 And it is round, which means that if you have sight problem and you reach in your pocket, feels like a quarter. It's about the same size as a quarter, a little bit different, but it...
1:35:28 Mike Rowe? Yeah, but close enough.
1:35:29 Speaker 02 Same color.
1:35:30 Mike Rowe? Yeah.
1:35:30 Speaker 02 Same color as a quarter.
1:35:31 Mike Rowe? Yep.
1:35:31 Speaker 02 So, and in fact, this came out in 1980 and became part of the Reagan-Carter political campaign. It was called the Carter Quarter, because of course, that was a period, the previous period of high inflation.
1:35:49 Mike Rowe? Mm hmm.
1:35:49 Speaker 02 And so, the implication being that it's really only worth a quarter.
1:35:53 Mike Rowe? You need a dollar to get a quarter, yeah.
1:35:54 Speaker 02 Yeah. And so, it became politicized.
1:35:57 Mike Rowe? Yeah.
1:35:58 Speaker 02 Um, also, it's not the most attractive... Can I say this?
1:36:05 Mike Rowe? I can't stop you, man. I can't stop you. You don't work for the government anymore, you say whatever you want.
1:36:09 Speaker 02 But let me, here's the...
1:36:12 Speaker 02 Here's the thing, is that they set up, the engraver sent up a picture, yes, she is rather mannish, isn't she?
1:36:20 Mike Rowe? God.
1:36:20 Speaker 02 Isn't that that line?
1:36:23 Speaker 01 I've said it.
1:36:25 Speaker 02 But, so, the engraver sent up a realistic image of, of Susan B. Anthony, and the secretary at the time said, "Let's make this a little more attractive." So, they did, and then they ran it back...
1:36:39 Speaker 01 Did they?
1:36:39 Mike Rowe? Did they?
1:36:40 Speaker 02 Yeah. And then, they ran it back by Susan B. Anthony's family.
1:36:44 Mike Rowe? Chuck, find the original.
1:36:45 Speaker 02 Yeah. They ran it back by Susan B. Anthony's family, and they said, "No, we want something that really depicts her as she is."
1:36:54 Speaker 01 Okay.
1:36:54 Speaker 02 As she was. And so, you know, it wasn't a popular design, and it was so easily confused with a quarter.
1:37:02 Mike Rowe? That's such a, uh... Form, function, one follows the other depending, but a quarter in your pocket that feels like a dollar is a mistake.
1:37:12 Speaker 02 Yes, yeah.
1:37:13 Mike Rowe? So, somebody, somewhere, I'm not looking to throw anybody under the bus, but you know, that...
1:37:18 Speaker 02 Multiple design failures. Part of it is the result of Congress's involvement. Being a mid-director is like having a board with 536 members of them, and half of them want to tear each other's throats out. You know, I report to the Secretary of the Treasury, but I had these 536 people who, many of them have a lot more interest in American coinage than the Secretary of the Treasury does. He's running the world economy. So, that, you know, and the reason why Senator Graham was not happy with me before I walked in the door to convince him that this was the right program was because he had attempted
1:37:59 Speaker 02 to pass through committee a dollar coin bill that would have recreated all of the previous failures of the Susan B. Anthony. There was no learning whatsoever, and my attitude was, not on my watch, I'm not going to repeat this failure on my watch.
1:38:19 Mike Rowe? Look at, I mean, there it is.
1:38:20 Speaker 02 Yeah.
1:38:21 Mike Rowe? The quarter versus the dollar.
1:38:22 Speaker 02 Yep, yes.
1:38:24 Mike Rowe? Yeah, what in the world were they thinking? And by the way, what...
1:38:28 Speaker 01 She kinda looks like Washington backwards, doesn't she?
1:38:31 Mike Rowe? You know what?
1:38:35 Speaker 01 It's like they could be, the same model sat for both the coins.
1:38:39 Mike Rowe? Washington looked in a mirror and said, "Oh, no."
1:38:42 Speaker 02 His hair is better, though.
1:38:44 Speaker 01 That is true.
1:38:46 Mike Rowe? So, why is our money, at a glance, so doggone boring compared to, say, so many failed banana republics?
1:38:58 Mike Rowe? You know, bright, festive, dollars of different sizes. I mean, how come all our papers the same size?
1:39:04 Speaker 02 I got a story on that.
1:39:05 Mike Rowe? All right, good.
1:39:06 Speaker 02 So, before I was met director, I was, I went in-
1:39:10 Mike Rowe? Excuse me, I want to be respectful of your time. I could talk to you for hours, but you-
1:39:13 Speaker 02 I'm, I'm good, I'm having fun.
1:39:15 Mike Rowe? All right, great.
1:39:16 Speaker 02 So, I go in, the first day of the Clinton administration as chief of staff of the US Treasury Department to Secretary Lloyd Benson. And, one of the first briefings I get is from the Secret Service, which at the time was part of the Treasury Department. And, they wanted to give me a briefing on the super bill, which was the counterfeited $100 bill that was virtually indistinguishable from the real thing. So, this is back in 1993, Jan-, like, February, probably, in 93. And, if I were telling this to you two years later, I'd have to kill you. But, it's not a secret now.
1:40:00 Speaker 02 But, so, they were, they were telling me this story, God, I'd look so young.
1:40:05 Mike Rowe? Look at you.
1:40:05 Speaker 02 I'd look so young.
1:40:06 Mike Rowe? Who's that guy?
1:40:07 Speaker 02 Really. So-
1:40:10 Speaker 01 They're looking at a picture of Philip and President Clinton. For those just listening.
1:40:16 Mike Rowe? Yeah, I was just saying. If you're just listening, you should get over to YouTube, man. This is some video that's gonna change your life. Go.
1:40:24 Speaker 02 So-
1:40:29 Mike Rowe? Here's a crazy idea. What if there was an academy out there that paid students to learn, instead of the other way around? Specifically, men and women who want to work in the skilled trades. And what if this academy not only paid for your training, but also covered all the expenses associated with your training? Like, travel, and food, and lodging? And finally, what if this academy guaranteed you a job at the end of the training period? Well, that's exactly what's happening at America's Workforce Academy by Meta. This is a five-week, highly immersive, pre-apprenticeship program that gets you all the necessary certifications-
1:41:07 Mike Rowe? You'll need to start a career in the skilled trades immediately. I'm talking about AI-proof, six-figure jobs, helping to build out the new infrastructure that our economy is depending on. Electricians, plumbers, HVAC techs, welders, fiber optic technicians, these jobs, they are all in demand like never before. And again, every graduate of America's Workforce Academy is guaranteed a job on a Meta website. I first announced this program a few months ago, and I have been watching the response ever since. It's extraordinary. This is a nationwide, unprecedented fast track to a long-term career in a skilled trade.
1:41:50 Mike Rowe? If you, or your spouse, or your kid, or your grandkid are looking for a straight path into a career with no cost at all, check out the opportunities for yourself at meta.com/america'sworkforceacademy. That's meta.com/america'sworkforceacademy.
1:42:07 Speaker 02 They asked to come in, gave me a briefing, the very senior people at Secret Service, so I thought this was going to be interesting. And they explained to me, I'd never heard, that there was this super bill that they thought at the time was coming out of Iran that was virtually identical to the American $100 bill, and that they were all over Europe, and there was this huge problem. And I said, "Well, how did they get the equipment to, you know, basically replicate the US's $100 bill?" And they said, "Oh, we sent it over to the Shah. We supplied the Shah with all the equipments of the Bureau of Engraving and Printing," basically. And so, that didn't go well.
1:42:51 Speaker 02 And so, this would have been in 93, so what, 10 years after the revolution in Iran? And I said, "Why haven't we done anything about this in a decade? I mean, how long have we known about this?" And he said, "Oh, we've known for five or six years." And yet, no change was underway to American currency, and American currency was generations behind other countries' currency, incorporating anti-counterfeiting technology. And... The reason was that I came to figure out was that nobody championed it in the government. And without a champion, nothing happens.
1:43:35 Speaker 02 And with a champion, nothing happens.
1:43:38 Mike Rowe? In the government, right?
1:43:39 Speaker 02 Yeah, in the federal government. It's become more and more that way. But as we all know, on coinage and currency, everyone is nervous about something going wrong. And the Susan B. Anthony was part of that lesson, was there were people at the Mint who wanted nothing to do with any change in coinage because people were savaged in the Mint for the failures, many of which were not their doing.
1:44:08 Mike Rowe? Yeah.
1:44:09 Speaker 02 And they had been giving, you know, bad marching orders.
1:44:13 Mike Rowe? So first, do no harm when it comes to coinage.
1:44:16 Speaker 02 Well, do no harm to myself.
1:44:18 Mike Rowe? Well, that's true.
1:44:19 Speaker 02 That's really what it was is, and it was as though, when I started talking to people about changing, you know, doing a dollar coin, it was as though this disaster of the Susan B. Anthony had happened the day before yesterday.
1:44:32 Mike Rowe? Yeah.
1:44:33 Speaker 02 And this is one of the things that I learned, that my job as a Mint Director was to protect my people from the ambitions that we had that would inevitably lead to failures. I said that in a committee hearing in Congress. I said, there's one thing that I can promise you will happen if you give us this authority, which was unprecedented, and that is, we will make mistakes. And, you know, faces just sort of froze. What did he say?
1:45:05 Mike Rowe? Well, what you were saying is, we're going to take risks.
1:45:08 Speaker 02 Yeah, yes.
1:45:09 Mike Rowe? And Sacagawea was a risk.
1:45:11 Speaker 02 Yep.
1:45:12 Mike Rowe? And you hit it out of the park.
1:45:13 Speaker 02 Yep.
1:45:14 Mike Rowe? And, you know, all of this is worth it to me, simply to imagine people lined up at a Walmart. To buy your product.
1:45:24 Speaker 02 Yeah.
1:45:24 Mike Rowe? That's really what you did.
1:45:26 Speaker 02 Yes, that's right.
1:45:27 Mike Rowe? You know, under the auspices of the US Mint.
1:45:29 Speaker 02 Yes.
1:45:30 Mike Rowe? That's amazing. Chuck, we're gonna go a little long. Don't panic.
1:45:33 Speaker 01 I think we've already gone a little long.
1:45:35 Mike Rowe? He's okay, and I'm fascinated. Really, just two topics left. You said the word, and it was up there in big letters. It's trust.
1:45:44 Speaker 02 Right.
1:45:45 Mike Rowe? I just want to talk quickly about trust. How you, well, what your opinion is in terms of, like, if trust is the Christmas spirit in Elf, right?
1:45:56 Speaker 02 Right.
1:45:56 Mike Rowe? And there's a thing that says how much, like, where's our trust level right now?
1:46:00 Speaker 02 Yeah, right.
1:46:01 Mike Rowe? It feels like it's pretty low to me.
1:46:02 Speaker 02 Sure is.
1:46:03 Mike Rowe? And so, your thoughts on trust in our institutions, and what that means in the world of currency, investments, satisfied customers, and so forth.
1:46:12 Speaker 02 Yeah. Okay.
1:46:16 Speaker 02 Trust, I felt like my part at the US Mint was really centered on trust building. Trust building among employees, trust building with our stakeholders on Capitol Hill, with our customers. It was all about building trust. And that's sort of old fashioned this way. A lot of people would disagree with this. But I think in the end, trust in institutions comes down to trust in people. That it's built on trust in people. And I believe that trust is built on two things. One is talking candidly to people.
1:47:00 Speaker 02 That doesn't mean undiplomatically, and doesn't mean you have to yell the truth at them.
1:47:06 Mike Rowe? Friendly bluntness.
1:47:07 Speaker 02 Yeah, and people can appreciate that. And especially when you choose teachable moments in which to interact with people like that. So, one of the trust breakers, I believe, is talking off of talking points. All of us can smell talking points coming out of somebody's mouth. And so I try to avoid that. Doesn't mean I don't have them, but typically the, you know, I've, I've written down points that I would have said, I just need to be able to remember them. But as you can tell, I can talk a blue streak without any talking points.
1:47:42 Mike Rowe? Uncomfortable, yeah.
1:47:44 Speaker 02 The second thing is making and keeping promises. That is the key to trust building. And that's the last thing people expect. That was my magic formula on Capitol Hills, is I'd walk in without a hidden agenda. I'd tell them what my agenda was. I'd tell them what I intended to do, and then I'd go do it. And sometimes I'd fail. And I'd come back and I said, we gave it our best shot, but we're going at it again.
1:48:14 Mike Rowe? Swing and a miss, but we're still up.
1:48:16 Speaker 02 And so, you know, I think if I had to boil it down to two points, those would be the two points.
1:48:23 Mike Rowe? There's a line buried in a terrific poem, I'm sure you know, by Robert Service, called "The Cremation of San McGee," which says, "A promise made is a debt unpaid."
1:48:36 Mike Rowe? I think, speaking on behalf of a lot of my fellow Americans, we understand the importance and the value of a second opinion, but we have been thrust into a world where our experts always seem to disagree. Our medical experts disagree. Our political, our elected officials disagree. Our best investment advisors, they disagree. They disagree about everything. And it's not just that they disagree, they disagree with so much certainty.
1:49:06 Speaker 02 Yeah.
1:49:07 Mike Rowe? They just seem so damn sure, Phil. Everybody seems so damn sure about everything.
1:49:12 Speaker 02 Yes.
1:49:12 Mike Rowe? So, I mean, in a world where, and I couldn't agree more, those are the building blocks of trust, but those blocks have been taken out of the bottom of the Jenga tower. And so, how can the average person, what advice might you have for somebody who just doesn't have the time to do the homework, to figure out how to remove their own kidney? It's gonna have to decide on the right doctor, or the right investment advisor, et cetera.
1:49:41 Speaker 02 Right.
1:49:41 Mike Rowe? Say something to, that the average person can hang on to and feel smart about.
1:49:46 Speaker 02 Okay. Number one for me is anybody who tells me something's a sure thing.
1:49:54 Speaker 02 Can't be trusted. Anybody who acts like they know everything, nobody does. So they shoot their credibility with me. The more people that I'm consulting with, you know, live up to their limitations and draw lines and say, this is what I know, this is what I don't know. Here's where they come together. Those people have credibility from me. So I'm not looking necessarily for someone I can trust. That has to be proven. But somebody with credibility, I'm looking for somebody with credibility. And that's a little easier to determine.
1:50:37 Speaker 02 And, and of course, part of credibility is, you know, having references. Being able to talk to people who have done business with that person.
1:50:46 Mike Rowe? Yep.
1:50:47 Speaker 02 So that's crucial.
1:50:48 Mike Rowe? Vulnerability, humility, all the illnesses that seems are in short supply. All right. My last question is kind of a personal one. When I wrote about this Trades of America coin and told the USMR story and how we'd worked together, everybody loved every single thing. But what just chapped people's ass, and this is probably my fault, because on this podcast, we try and find sponsors who make their things in this country. And I talk very favorably about the willingness to try and do that. We had to make a Trades for America coin in Germany.
1:51:27 Speaker 02 Yep.
1:51:28 Mike Rowe? And I did the best I could to explain to people the relationship between legal tender and a company like US Money Reserve and the restrictions of the US Mint and so forth.
1:51:41 Speaker 02 Yes.
1:51:42 Mike Rowe? But in the end, I realized it's like, am I being persuasive? Am I being an apologist? I think I understand why we couldn't do it here, but just in simple terms.
1:51:51 Speaker 02 Okay. So as a former director of the United States Mint, I would have wanted this coin produced in the United States.
1:52:00 Mike Rowe? Yes, please.
1:52:01 Speaker 02 You know, just if it had been possible at all.
1:52:04 Mike Rowe? Yeah.
1:52:04 Speaker 02 But there are a couple of problems. First of all, there's a matter of definition. Legal tender indicates it's a coin. And a coin, in order to be a coin, it must be legal tender, or have been at some time in history, of a sovereign government.
1:52:22 Speaker 02 And if it's not a coin, and legal tender of a government, sovereign government, it is a medal. And so when you see these things being tossed at the 50-yard line in football games being called coins, you know, those aren't coins. Those are medals or medallions.
1:52:40 Mike Rowe? Medallions, right.
1:52:41 Speaker 02 So, number one, we won the coin, not a medal. Number two, the designs on this coin are spectacular.
1:52:51 Mike Rowe? God, they are.
1:52:52 Speaker 02 And there is no minting facility in the United States that could approach the quality of these coins.
1:53:01 Mike Rowe? Which brings us back to Liechtenstein.
1:53:02 Speaker 02 Yes.
1:53:03 Mike Rowe? CIT.
1:53:04 Speaker 02 Yes, to CIT. And they could, they're one of the very few in the world that could do it. And then the third thing is the United States Mint doesn't produce coins for any nation or any entity other than the United States government.
1:53:18 Mike Rowe? Unless you have an act of Congress, basically.
1:53:20 Speaker 02 I mean, it'd be virtually impossible to get it through Congress.
1:53:24 Mike Rowe? I'm busy, Phil. I got a lot going on, you know. I mean, I guess I could have called you guys and, you know, I guess I could have got to the President somehow and said, please, I really need this coin data here, but no, it just seemed easier not to not do that.
1:53:38 Speaker 02 Yes. And these guys are, as you know, are real professionals. I mean, they are masters at their work. And I had never, until you and I went there 18 months ago, I'd never had a chance to tour their facilities. I had never seen minting facilities and engraving facilities like CIT has.
1:54:01 Mike Rowe? Mind-boggling.
1:54:02 Speaker 02 So, I was very impressed. And I can just tell you, no one here in the US, and certainly not the United States Mint, could approach this work.
1:54:09 Mike Rowe? I'll land the plane here because, really, watching those, the excitement of the people, both at BH Meyer and at CIT, is the same kind of excitement you would see
1:54:26 Mike Rowe? In a tradesman who had figured out how to bend a pipe a mile down. That technology, when I pitched this, like, I kind of soft pitched the idea because I really wasn't there to do that, but I couldn't help myself when I was there. They were so excited and listening to Germans or Lichtensteinians or whoever they are, you know, talking to me in broken English about their enthusiasm for the work. It is infectious. And their enthusiasm for the trade and their own trade. Yes. I even said to one of the guys over there, totally tongue in cheek, but I'm like, look, on my show, like, I did a lot of artificial insemination on farms and things, and would it be possible to mint a coin, me with my arm all the way in a cow?
1:55:11 Mike Rowe? He's like, is this possible? Yes. Yeah, we could do that. I don't know if we should. And so, like, that's my life. I can do that. I don't know if I should. Yes. But I was certain that we should do this. And I just want to close by thanking you. We raised well over $100,000 for work ethic scholarships with this coin. And if you guys are game, like, the idea of doing versions of these for plumbers and pipe benders. Yes, yeah. And electricians and getting it down to a price where people could buy a handful and give them to the tradesperson in their life. How great would that be? That would be great.
1:55:54 Mike Rowe? So just tell me who to call a congress and I'm going to get on this now. Call me, I'll get it done. All right. Philip Diehl, you've been very generous with your time. Thank you for making the trip and I'm such a fan of what you're doing. Again, not to make it a shameless plug, but if, if people want to see you really doing what you do today in the way of getting the advice and the history.
1:56:19 Mike Rowe? And explaining this whole world, the best place to go to see you in action is?
1:56:26 Speaker 02 USMoneyReserve.com. And we have tons of educational material. And if you get tired of me, then there's a lot of other expertise. There's a lot of expertise, not just about coinage, but how to invest in precious metals, in IRAs. That is really straightforward. Not very many people know about it. There are, of course, federal government rules, but it's really straightforward. And all of that is available, you know, at the click of a mouse.
1:56:57 Mike Rowe? Yeah. Well, look, it's a free education. It's been a real privilege for me to help just deliver some of those materials on your behalf. It's terrific company. Please give Angela my regards.
1:57:12 Speaker 02 I will.
1:57:12 Mike Rowe? When you see her. And thank you again for making the time. I learned so much. You're welcome back anytime.
1:57:17 Speaker 02 It's always fun. Thank you very much, Mike.
1:57:19 Mike Rowe? You bet. If you're done, please subscribe, leave some stars, ideally five. Five lousy little stars.
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