New York (CNN) It's just before 8 a.m., and John Kasich is in a crowded New York City green room.

He's waiting to go on "CBS This Morning," and the room feels especially cramped at the moment because there are two minor entourages here. One is his, and another is for Spencer Rascoff, the CEO of online real estate company Zillow, who will also be a guest on the show. There's a curved teal couch and a coffee table with two Emmy Awards and the day's newspapers on it, all with front-page stories about the terrorist attack at the Ariana Grande concert in Manchester.

Kasich's here to talk about his new book, " Two Paths: America Divided or United ," and the news of the day. There's President Donald Trump's proposed budget (it "isn't going to pass," he says) and the opioid epidemic (Ohio's No. 3 for opioid deaths, according to a graphic on the screen, and drugs are "destroying the culture of our country," he says), but he also wants to talk about Manchester. He has two 17-year-old daughters, twins and music fans, and just this past weekend he was at Rock on the Range, a three-day festival in Columbus, he says.

Kasich's a big concert-goer and he likes talking about music, something that came up every so often during the campaign. He recently went to a Maroon 5 concert with his wife and was surprised to realize just how many hits they have. He'll soon see fellow Ohioans, Twenty One Pilots, who went to Worthington Christian, the same school his daughters now go to, and who he was rooting for a year before they released a No. 1 album. In 2014, speaking about the musicians that the Ohio State Fair books, he said they need acts that are "on the way up," according to the Columbus Dispatch. "We ought to book Twenty One Pilots. My daughters love them; they're from here."

Kasich asks the assembled green room if they've heard of Tricky. Tricky's a British rapper in his late 40s, whose highest-charting song on the UK charts was a reworked version of "Milk" by the band Garbage that he was featured on. It peaked at No. 10 in 1996. Madonna once asked him to produce one of her albums, but he turned her down, he told the Guardian last year.

Tricky did a song with Hawkman, Kasich says, have you heard about Hawkman? What about Live? One of the guys from Live is on Tricky's "Evolution Revolution." Doug, can you pull the song up. Doug, a member of Kasich's entourage, pulls out a phone and plays it.

In addition to music, Kasich also likes talking about jobs, especially whenever he has an audience with a job maker, such as the CEO of an online real estate company, as he does now. Does Zillow employ anyone in Ohio, he asks? "Why not?"

A member of Rascoff's entourage reminds him they do; they bought a Cincinnati start-up back in 2015 called DotLoop that does online real estate document paperwork and had 124 employees. "We need to have more of your people out there," Kasich says. "You want to be in the Midwest."

Kasich pulls out his phone, a flip phone, and calls a guy named Wayne and hands the phone to Rascoff.

"We want to have something like Zillow in Ohio," Kasich says in the car after his CBS hit. "It's consistent with what's happening in the state." If they have a job they need to fill, "I will get it filled."

Speaking of jobs, Kasich has called his current gig -- being the governor of the great state of Ohio -- the second-best in the world, after president of the United States. The job of president, of course, he applied and was one of the finalists for -- the fourth-place Republican primary finisher -- but he ultimately wasn't hired. And the job of governor he won't be able to keep forever, because of term limits. In 20 months, he'll find himself unemployed.

It's an unusual time to be a Republican looking for work. In Washington, the party is in power, but weighed down by dysfunction and controversy. Trump's 2016 victory caught many by surprise, forcing politicians who assumed they'd have the option of running against a President Hillary Clinton in four years to reconsider their options. No one seems sure of what exactly to expect, with each new twist, turn, and congressional testimony bringing greater uncertainty.

The 2016 election caught many off-guard, including Republican politicians who assumed they'd have the option to run for president in four years, against Clinton. Trump's surprise victory complicated those plans,