On this episode of What's up, Dirty Jobs' Mike Rowe joins us to talk about the latest in the latest craziness that s going on in the world of politics and politics in general. Plus, a story about a suspected Antifa member being arrested in Florida with a pipe bomb.
00:00:20.000I don't really care that she was partying in Miami.
00:00:22.000In fact, I think it's pretty cool that people got into Miami and party because they want to go somewhere where they can be free.
00:00:27.000What I don't appreciate is her repeated attacks on these states, like Florida, where they allow people to live their lives and take responsibility for themselves.
00:00:36.000She had complained about Texas getting rid of their mask mandates.
00:00:39.000She's championed the governorship and the politicians in New York for their policies
00:00:43.000like mask mandates and vaccine mandates, and then goes down to Florida, flouts everything
00:00:49.000that she claims to support, and then there she is getting sick with COVID.
00:00:54.000So a lot of people are pointing out the hypocrisy, and we'll get into that.
00:00:57.000And we've also got CNN now coming out and saying, and this is surprising because it
00:01:02.000comes from a CDC director, that COVID hospitalizations may be inflated by 40% because they're listing
00:01:10.000people hospitalized with COVID as opposed to from COVID, for which there is a very big
00:02:07.000I think most people know who you are, to be honest.
00:02:10.000Homo sapien, six foot, mostly upright.
00:02:13.000The voice from that TV show people watch sometimes?
00:02:17.000You know, that's really where it started.
00:02:18.000If there's a wildebeest trying to get through the vast reaches of the barren Serengeti, but leaving the herd and getting slowly eaten by the crocodile or the hyena, it's probably me.
00:02:29.000And it never works out for the wildebeest, by the way.
00:02:52.000It's really been the greatest, luckiest privilege that I could do.
00:02:58.000It's a TV show on the one hand, but it launched a foundation that I've been running now for 14 years, and it's given me a weird seat at the grown-up table when it comes to talking about things like the definition of a good job or the value of a college education versus an apprenticeship.
00:03:18.000So I never planned for any of it, but because of that show and other shows like it, I get to run a foundation and mouth off to Congress from time to time, and it's a kick.
00:03:33.000Well, Mike, thanks so much for coming on.
00:03:34.000We definitely don't like Congress, so anytime you can mouth off against them, we definitely approve of that.
00:03:39.000And before we begin, we wanted to remind everyone that when the corporate media in unison tells you that there's no mass formation psychosis, that means that there's no mass formation psychosis.
00:03:51.000And that's why I made this fictional shirt which says, Mass formation psychosis that maybe you could get on thebestpoliticalshirts.com.
00:04:00.000And I just purely from the bottom of my heart wanted to thank all the fact checkers out there.
00:04:05.000I almost thought the government was being tyrannical there for a second.
00:04:08.000Thank you so much for clearing everything up for me.
00:05:28.000And now, for those of you who aren't familiar with the Virtual Private Network service, it's a basic layer of security for you as you browse the internet.
00:05:35.000And I actually, considering what we've been going through in recent times, seriously recommend this as well as any other kind of encryption service you can get.
00:05:43.000A virtual private network service makes sure that your data from point to point is going through an encrypted service or at the very least it's being masked so that governments, hackers, corporations aren't going to be able to steal your data.
00:05:54.000It provides you that level of protection.
00:05:58.000We had a journalist, John Solomon, have his private We'll just say it's phone records released by a member of Congress, a certain member of Congress, and now with the January 6th committee, instead of getting a warrant and going to these individuals, like in the Trump administration, and saying, we would like to, you know, subpoena your records, they're going straight to the phone companies who are saying, no problem, and handing it all right over.
00:06:19.000Now, you can't prevent everything, but with a virtual private network service, you do get some basic layer of security.
00:06:24.000And let me explain one more thing to you as it pertains to some important legal cases.
00:06:28.000When you leave your home, let's say in the real world, people can take a picture of your face and say, well, you're out in public.
00:06:34.000But if you have an expectation of privacy, now there's questions about whether or not they can be filming you or photographing you.
00:06:40.000In public, there's certain questions about this.
00:06:42.000What the government has tried arguing is that if you're not masking your internet traffic, you have no expectation of privacy.
00:06:48.000Using a basic service isn't just To actually protect your data, but there's a good possibility it could provide a legal defense if you're saying, I expect privacy while I browse the web.
00:06:57.000So again, go to surfinginternetsafe.com.
00:07:00.000You can get 50% off for life from Virtual Shield.
00:07:07.000And don't forget, go to TimCast.com, become a member, and you'll get access to exclusive members-only segments of the TimCast IRL podcast.
00:07:14.000We're going to have a bonus segment coming up.
00:07:16.000We do that around 11 p.m., Monday through Thursday.
00:07:18.000You're not going to want to miss that.
00:07:20.000And don't forget to like this video right now, subscribe to this channel, share the show with your friends, and let's get into that first story from the Miami New Times.
00:08:17.000But she's also criticized Ron DeSantis of Florida, which I would just say is wrong, because she's choosing to go party in his state while criticizing him for the policies that allows her to go party in his state, and now she has COVID.
00:08:32.000Well when you try to silence speech when you weaponize ... compliance and you disregard your own decrees that you ... complain about other people not following you're not on the ... side of good it's also important to note here that ... with this particular tweet on March of 21 that she of course ... is asserting that people will get hurt that would there will ... be some devastating consequences.
00:08:54.000Because of Texas moving away from mandates moving ... away from top-down centralization of power of ... force against the people who are living there and the ... numbers don't lie when you look at what happened in Texas ... after this and you compared to what happened in New York ... there's a story there that of course is being hidden away ... from the general public.
00:09:16.000I don't think we should be celebrating anyone be sick.
00:09:20.000But this is the story that's happening right now that is deserved to at least be mentioned, in my opinion.
00:09:25.000I think if I zoom out from my ego, I want her to be healthy.
00:09:28.000I want it to be Easy, like a low symptom or no symptom illness and be done with it and realize, OK, it's not that as bad as I thought it was going to be kind of thing.
00:09:36.000That's what I want for the general system.
00:09:38.000I don't want to play hate and love with this girl, whatever, but it's the policy, man.
00:09:45.000If you're in New York, if you're a congressperson, if you're a governor, and you're defending or refusing to speak up in the face of vaccine mandates and mask mandates, and then you decide, for my vacation, I'm gonna go to one of the places where they don't have these policies so I can go party, I mean, that is, that is everything wrong with politics, in my opinion.
00:10:04.000I see, I see conservatives or Republicans being like, I don't like mask mandates, I won't wear one.
00:10:21.000The single most valuable thing right now is the thing that's most singularly missing, and that's consistency.
00:10:30.000We're desperate for people... I don't even think it matters so much what they say.
00:10:35.000If it lines up with what they do in a fairly consistent way, That person right now is going to be both respected and probably in demand, regardless of what side of the aisle you sit on.
00:10:46.000You know, I live in Northern California and I wrote pretty pointedly when the whole French
00:10:52.000laundry thing happened with Gavin Newsom.
00:10:55.000You know, I just said, look, this is not a small thing.
00:10:58.000You remember he was out there and he's without a mask shortly after telling everybody they
00:11:02.000had to wear a mask and didn't help that it was a super fancy schmancy restaurant and
00:11:26.000Mike, there was medical professionals from the government of California coming forward and saying, along with bureaucrats, every time you have a bite, you need to put on your mask afterwards.
00:11:36.000As they were telling people not to gather in large groups, they were shutting down restaurants all over California as he's going to have a dinner at one of the fanciest restaurants in the world with a huge crowd.
00:11:49.000And then, thankfully, because of citizen journalism, because of people caring about this story, this story was able to get out there to the general public and show the hypocrisy.
00:11:58.000Show just how hypocritical a lot of these people are that will ruin your life while living their best life, which is crazy.
00:12:05.000I wonder if it's, you know, for people who align themselves with, like, the Democratic establishment or who are Democratic activists, they overlook the Newsom stuff, or the Whitmer, or the Pelosi, or the Maxine Waters, or, you know, the list goes on.
00:12:18.000I wonder if they overlook that because their attitude is the messaging is more important.
00:12:22.000It doesn't matter if a handful of people are flouting the rules and ignoring it so long as they're telling everyone to follow the rules to keep us safe.
00:12:29.000And then I wonder if, you know, for post-liberal, libertarian, conservative, whatever, their attitude is, are you being honest?
00:12:40.000If the populace is freaked out to an eight or a nine, they'll Absorb a level of hypocrisy that they won't when they're at a five or a six or a four or five now We're becoming I've just noticed it in the last couple of weeks.
00:12:57.000We're becoming less scared I just had it got through it.
00:13:02.000They've come through it It's not now just a question of how many people do you know who have had it?
00:13:07.000it's we're starting to see and you can chalk it up to Omicron or therapeutics or the Therapeutic nature of the vaccines, whatever it is, people seem to be having a much easier ride than we were.
00:13:20.000And so as the fear level comes down, what happens now when you recall Nancy Pelosi walking into a salon to get her hair done when she had specifically told people That you're not allowed to do that.
00:13:33.000You feel differently now, because you're not as afraid as you were.
00:13:37.000So there's a long tail, I think, on hypocrisy, and it's still spooling out as we speak.
00:13:43.000I bet this is gonna be like, people that are starting to, it's dawning on them now, like, now that they're calming down, they're gonna see this, and it's gonna be like reliving trauma for these people.
00:13:50.000So when we, or when anyone is gonna approach them about like, hey, just so you know, I'm not, don't rub their nose in it when people start coming around.
00:14:02.000I know a lot of people want to say, I told you so, but that's not always the best kind of approach, especially when it comes to someone coming out of a trauma-based fear state that was instituted by a lot of very powerful forces, the corporate media, the politicians, All took this situation and let's be honest here from my ... perspective exploited it to the fullest extension.
00:14:22.000Extended that they could in a way that that ratcheted up the ... numbers of cases ratcheted up number of deaths that are now ... even in question by the government's own answers and ... explanations to what actually was going on here CNN.
00:14:35.000was talking about gangbusters for ratings as they were obsessing about the death counter on their corporate media broadcast that of course was celebrating that they were able to ratchet up those numbers and get more viewership because of that and that is a sick mentality that deserves to be checked and they need to be held responsible for it.
00:14:54.000You know that meme, keep calm and x or whatever?
00:15:47.000You know, you're talking about being graceful, and I think that's great, and you're talking about we should understand, and I think that's great too.
00:15:55.000But look, there are consequences of living at DEFCON 5.
00:16:53.000But we're not going to spend the rest of our lives in that state.
00:16:55.000There's videos out of Syria during the civil war in places like Aleppo where the buildings are completely wiped out.
00:17:00.000There's no sign of civilization but people, except for the people, that are carrying food and working and you're wondering.
00:17:07.000You can hear gunshots go off in the distance but these people say it's either I just wither and die in a hole or I get out to get food and living even amidst this conflict.
00:17:15.000I think they needed the panic and they wouldn't be able to exploit this entire situation if there wasn't a panic.
00:17:21.000And it's important to understand they created it in many important circumstances.
00:17:26.000With that fear comes anxiety, comes depression, comes a lot of psychological disorders.
00:17:30.000If we look at the mental health of America, it has steadily declined over the years.
00:17:35.000And dramatically, when COVID came to the world, because politicians were exploiting that.
00:17:40.000And this kind of sick, deprived behavior, I think, is perfectly represented by this latest LA Times column that literally is titled, Mocking Anti-Vaxxers' Deaths Is Ghoulish, Yes, But Necessary.
00:17:55.000Imagine working at a newspaper saying this out loud and still exploiting it when again the data should be questioned here and the facts still aren't figured out here so the arguments she's making here for it being necessary it's it's such a complex web of of just emotions that they throw at you so you don't look at this calmly rationally because if you did you wouldn't be going along with any of this nonsense think about the fact that that article got passed an editor probably several editors
00:18:24.000And so the thing that scares me is that there's somebody in the newsroom who says, you know, they enjoy mocking, or people should be mocking those who die, and then everyone around them being like, yeah, we agree with this, and so much that we want to publish this.
00:18:37.000That says to me that we're really separated in this country from whatever it is.
00:19:05.000It was good Oh as a journalist, right?
00:19:08.000I mean somewhere along the line with an article like the one you just quoted and with the thing I was just talking about before Shouldn't somebody be asking the question?
00:19:20.000Is it persuasive, for instance, to point to the people who, for whatever reason, haven't been vaccinated and identify them as the proximate cause of all of the problems?
00:19:34.000Now, you can have the conversation about whether they are or whether they're not, but from an advocacy standpoint, from a journalistic standpoint, you know, do those people find it persuasive to be put into a box of deplorables?
00:19:49.000We've had a couple people on the show we've disagreed with, and typically I'll ask them, you know, why don't you, you know, flies with honey, why don't you try and advocate and be nice and empathize?
00:19:58.000It doesn't seem like people want to do it, right?
00:19:59.000So this article saying we should mock those who die from COVID, obviously it's not persuasive.
00:20:27.000These are talking points that are issued not just by LA Times reporters, quote unquote, but these are also similar comments expressed by world leaders like Justin Trudeau that when talking about the unvaccinated said, do we tolerate these people?
00:20:42.000We have Rochelle, the former banker, Emmanuel Macron, who literally came on the world stage and said, these people shouldn't be considered citizens for what they're doing because they're irresponsible for their health.
00:20:56.000These are arguments and talking points that have ratcheted up.
00:20:59.000At this level, that are extremely insane, extremely draconian, from very powerful institutions, very powerful people, that in my understanding are very dangerous, especially when you look at them with these specific comments with a context in history.
00:21:13.000Let me jump to this story right here from Newsbusters.
00:21:21.000My response to this is, conspiracy theorists 49,837, corporate press zero.
00:21:27.000This is something that, you know, independent media has talked about for some time.
00:21:31.000It's something that the quote-unquote conspiracy theorists have been saying for some time, that there is a difference between being hospitalized with COVID, meaning you went there for some reason, turns out you had COVID, and being hospitalized from COVID.
00:21:45.000For nearly two years, and with the midterm election coming up, conservatives and Republicans were vilified as conspiracy theorists for raising questions about COVID hospitalization numbers when it came to who was there because of COVID and who just happened to be infected.
00:21:58.000On Monday, CNN and anchor Jake Tapper finally arrived at the scene to ask the obvious questions after CDC director Dr. Rochelle Walensky admitted to Fox News the numbers inflated by upwards of 40%.
00:22:12.000Tapper prefaced his late revelation by prefacing to CNN's Dr. Sanjay Gupta that, quote, the case numbers aren't really as significant as hospitalizations because what's important is how sick people are getting.
00:22:24.000And since CNN had obfuscated the idea that the CDC was misleading people, Tapper had to spell out what was going on.
00:22:30.000Over the weekend, the CDC director, Dr. Rochelle Walensky, was asked how many people are in the hospital for COVID versus how many people are in the hospital with COVID.
00:22:39.000Meaning they're there for some reason, and it's also true they have COVID.
00:22:45.000After playing the soundbite of Walensky admitting up to 40% of the patients who are coming in with COVID are coming in not because they're sick with COVID, but because they're sick with something else, Tapper seemed a bit surprised and called it misleading, saying, So the hospitals are still stretched thin because of this, so I'm not trying to take away from that, But if 40% in some hospitals, 40% of the people who have COVID don't necessarily have problematic COVID, they're there because they got in a car accident, they're there because, you know, they bumped their head and they're being included as in the hospital with COVID, that number seems kind of misleading.
00:23:45.000Well, there's a lot of things at play here.
00:23:47.000And I remember early on when everything was happening, there was a case of a man being shot in the head that was listed as an official COVID death.
00:23:58.000This goes along, I believe, to what we were saying before.
00:24:00.000If you inflate the numbers, if you make them higher, you're going to scare a lot more people.
00:24:04.000If you make them believe that you might be a huge victim here, you might be hurt.
00:24:08.000The chances of being hurt are high, high, high.
00:24:10.000And as soon as I heard this story, I'm like, yes, of course, we've been talking about this for months because hospitals also are being paid for every COVID patient that they have, are also being paid for putting patients on ventilators, and are also being paid for COVID patients dying.
00:24:25.000So, you know, I don't think there's, you know, in some instances, a financial incentive, but there is a lot of money changing hands here when the numbers go a specific way here that do allude that there is a possibility that this is true.
00:24:42.000We rate the claim that hospitals get paid more if patients are listed as COVID-19 and on ventilators as true.
00:24:48.000Hospitals and doctors do get paid more for Medicare patients diagnosed with COVID-19, or if it's considered presumed they have COVID-19 absent, a laboratory-confirmed test, and three times more if the patients are placed on a ventilator to cover the cost of care and loss of business resulting from a shift in focus to treat COVID-19 cases.
00:25:08.000This is what people were saying all throughout the last year.
00:25:10.000If you go to the hospital, this is from April 27th, 2020.
00:25:14.000It's almost two years ago USA Today told us this and CNN's only now bringing it up.
00:25:21.000In the long history of bromides, platitudes, and tropes, most have been ultimately debunked over time.
00:25:28.000They become conventional wisdom and they collapse under the weight of their own nonsense.
00:25:33.000Never has follow the money been debunked.
00:25:38.000Never, ever, once has it not proven to lead you to the place where the truth is.
00:25:46.000It might not be totally dispositive, but you can't minimize the importance of people acting in their own financial best interest.
00:26:00.000That's an extraordinary thing to think about.
00:26:03.000The hundreds of thousands, the millions of dollars that are in the wind based on a decision that ultimately is going to be reported as fact.
00:27:22.000I feel that a lot of things that a lot of people I hold in high regard have been saying for 18 months are getting a kind of snowball feel behind it.
00:27:34.000And so yeah, I think, I don't know that it'll get worse before it gets better.
00:27:39.000It might get a little weirder over the next couple of weeks, but look, if I were to guess, I'd say we're much, much, much closer to the end.
00:27:47.000Well this goes along with the theory that I was actually talking about a few weeks ago that goes along with a lot of what medical professionals are saying is that because this Omicron is so transmissive and less lethal that it will run through people, run through countries, and then people will go out the other end with natural immunity and therefore absolutely get rid of this pandemic.
00:28:06.000So this is a train of thinking that's out there right now and I think a lot of people in power might be realizing that and that's why we're having these shock announcements by the CDC, by CNN, Going back on essentially a lot of the falsehoods surrounding this entire story, because the game could be over in just a few weeks from now, and that means a lot of ramifications for a lot of the people that betrayed us.
00:28:28.000It needs to be over, especially politically.
00:28:31.000It's going to be a disaster for those who are advocating for COVID policies come November.
00:28:34.000Well this is what I said after coming from New York City is ... talking to people there they had enough they're sick of ... complying with the whims of this insanity they're sick of ... just just going along being told to obey to to get ... permission to go to the store to go to the theaters it's ... absolutely insane and for Democrats to win politically ... they have to get rid of this idea that they have to be the ... nanny state of the individual controlling every aspect of ... their existence and that's why.
00:29:00.000With the upcoming elections, that was another reason I brought up, I think it was in the sponsor lounge that me and you were talking about this, my kind of overall theory why this is going to be ending very soon, because this is extremely unpopular, this goes against the free spirit, the free human will, and there's no way they could get away with this moving forward from my perspective, from what I see.
00:29:19.000And there's also this feeling, as Mike explained, that it's there.
00:29:23.000And look, I think there's something even bigger under all of it.
00:29:27.000We can talk about the politics and we can talk about the science, but You remember Hans Christian Andersen wrote an amazing story called The Emperor's New Clothes.
00:29:36.000Okay, now if you don't know the story, the bottom line is the emperor was convinced that his new clothes were beautiful and the tailors didn't really make any clothes at all.
00:29:46.000He was naked and he sat naked on his throne as he was paraded down the street and all of the townspeople came out and they all oohed and aahed at how beautiful his clothes were.
00:29:55.000And so it was just this giant, weird, happy fiction unfolding in this little town, until a kid, a kid, pointed at the Emperor and said, he's naked.
00:30:08.000And then, right, there was a hush, comes over the crowd, and then somebody else said, well, you know, he does appear to be conspicuously nude, right?
00:30:15.000And so if you look back at the last 18 months, guys, and ask yourself, OK, who's the kid?
00:30:33.000You right I mean in a very very small way I was saying some things very very early on that got a lot of pushback with regard to wait a second I'm not I'm not trying to be disrespectful, and I'm not a Luddite, but I have some questions Especially when Gavin is dining out Nancy's getting her hair done, and I have some questions right so I think in a lot of ways to your point the The temptation to say, I told you so is something that we ought to resist, but it's also something we ought to acknowledge because if you've spent the last 18 months being that kid in the crowd and now you're finally starting to feel like, oh, wait a minute.
00:31:13.000So I'm not the only one that sees 40% of the people in the hospital are not there because of, but with that, that that's, Language matters.
00:32:59.000That's what we needed to get Robert Malone out there.
00:33:04.000To get the whole getter thing happening.
00:33:07.000People never know how it's going to start and we never know how it's going to splat.
00:33:11.000But it's almost always the result of an unlikely voice.
00:33:15.000But it's amazing how I'm just flabbergasted at the thought that Joe Rogan is our generation's Walter Cronkite.
00:33:24.000Steve Bannon explained it to us, if you remember what he was telling us when he was here as a guest, that during the major Historical events like the Civil War or the Revolutionary War.
00:33:34.000It's never the politicians of the people in prominence that are the significant historical figures.
00:33:40.000It's always the laborers, the farmers, the people who are affected by these changes and decide to stand up and represent bigger ideas themselves because of how affected they are by them.
00:33:52.000I absolutely want to talk about labor and everything.
00:33:55.000I want to talk about this story real quick because it segues into a discussion about jobs and labor.
00:33:59.000We have this from the Post Millennial.
00:34:05.000The poll found that 76.8% of respondents believe American society and culture is in a state of decay.
00:34:11.000A poll from the Trafalgar Group and Convention of States Action published on Thursday revealed basically what I just said.
00:34:18.000Just 9.8% of respondents said the country is in a state of progress.
00:34:22.000So I bring this up in relation to what we're talking about just because I wonder if our journalists can't do the job of criticizing the establishment, the government, the narratives, being objective, or just countering the authority.
00:34:35.000Then it seems to me like what we're actually seeing is tribalism.
00:34:39.000Joe Rogan is smeared and slammed as far-right by many of these outlets when he challenges the establishment in this way, and these quote-unquote news organizations just shill whatever the government or establishment line is.
00:34:51.000That says to me, it's not necessarily representative of decay in this country, although it seems like a lot of people seem to believe this country isn't decay, but that we've fractured to a point where both sides are probably looking at each other as the problem, as the decay in this country, you know what I mean?
00:35:06.000But it's not just, it's not both sides.
00:35:09.000Look how many sides are really involved in the rot.
00:35:12.000Our journalists let us down in ways that we can't even imagine.
00:35:17.000Our politicians, of course, are in it for the next election and they've let us down in, I think, a pretty equal way.
00:35:25.000Our scientists have let us down, not because they're scientists, but because there's no consensus and they all sound so damn certain.
00:35:34.000I don't mind you, again, I don't mind you being wrong.
00:36:58.000The censorship that we deal with on YouTube, the censorship on Twitter, the suppressing of big political stories, it is all of these people standing there watching the Emperor, which I guess just is the narrative.
00:37:11.000Nobody wanted to be the person who would call out and say, hey guys, this doesn't make sense, does it?
00:37:17.000As soon as anybody did, the entire crowd turned and yelled, you're right-wing, evil, evil.
00:37:23.000And so now, Over the past couple of years, we not only had Joe Rogan, we had Ricky Gervais.
00:38:04.000But he's always been an independent voice, standing up for himself and what he believes in.
00:38:08.000And that's kind of a bridge, in my opinion, why he's been so important, is that regular people who don't care for politics, don't care for narrative, listen.
00:38:16.000And then when he speaks out and does challenge the system and does say F you to all the lies, he does point at the emperor and say, you're not wearing any clothes, and I don't care.
00:38:24.000I can make a long list of things that Joe Rogan said that I don't agree with, but I have a really hard time finding an opinion that strikes me as hypocritical.
00:38:35.000He's, back to what we said very, very early on, when you get starved for authenticity, the first thing I start to look for is anybody.
00:38:47.000Anybody whose words match up with what they say, and who if they do overreach, if they do get in their own way, they'll be the first to admit it.
00:38:57.000So he has a measure of the humility that's lacking in science, in my view.
00:39:04.000He certainly has a comedian's sense of the absurd, which he uses, but most importantly, at least from what I've heard, he doesn't lie.
00:39:13.000Well he's willing to be wrong and he admits when he's wrong and he's able to look at an issue without emotionally jumping on it and and deciding what it is immediately and the way he he articulates the way he kind of fact finds this larger question that whatever it's asked to him he goes through these motions the way he describes it is is a way that's completely totally different than the corporate media that has PR corporate talking points that they literally regurgitate and speak in unison as if they were in a religion which they are.
00:39:41.000So I want to ask, looking back at this poll, I'm wondering why people feel that the country is in a state of decay.
00:40:39.000Sooner or later it's coming for all the steel in the world.
00:40:42.000But it's also coming for our best thoughts and our best ideas and the things that we hold most dear.
00:40:48.000That stuff also has a shelf life and it has to be nurtured, it has to be watered, it has to be challenged.
00:40:55.000And when we stop doing that and accept having our belly scratched or letting ourselves be patted on the head, that's a bad substitute for that.
00:41:06.000And that's not how you fight Newton's Second Law.
00:41:09.000Well, I agree with you, but I think we have to have a more direct segue into this idea.
00:41:14.000There is infrastructure decay in this country.
00:41:17.000Our roads are falling apart, our bridges are falling apart.
00:41:20.000We're not interested in these big projects.
00:41:23.000I often talk about how, you know, I'm in New York and I'm crossing the Williamsburg Bridge just looking at this monolith of a structure.
00:41:29.000That's existed since before I was born.
00:41:31.000As far as I know, it's just there, and I get to use it.
00:41:37.000And those are those big projects where, effectively, our society said, we're going to plant a tree whose shade we know we will never sit beneath, and that means the next generations will benefit from it.
00:41:46.000When I look at this country as in a state of decay, it's because it's for this reason.
00:41:51.000I see people self-interested, trying to extract as much as they can.
00:41:55.000They feel like the Titanic is sinking, and they're trying to grab as much fine china and silverware they can before they get on that boat and get out of here, leave us all left, you know, drowning.
00:42:05.000But what I wanted to say was, I don't want to get too negative with it, because I'm wondering if, you know, seeing Joe Rogan speak up, seeing his massive success, is actually an optimistic point.
00:42:13.000The people stealing the China don't want a community and that's why I think there's been such a concerted effort to push a divide and conquer agenda that of course puts people in different political Associations and gangs and affiliations, but we have to also recognize if someone is watching the corporate media non-stop, they are living in a totally different world than someone who doesn't watch the corporate media, who does their own homework, who does their own research and actually gets their information from different sources and is able to actually discern information for themselves.
00:42:51.000Rather than just hear opinions and talking points that is the establishment narrative.
00:42:56.000So these two different worlds are of course going to be clashing with each other because these are different realities that people are living under that are completely playing by different set of rules that the other one is not playing by.
00:43:09.000I think your metaphor is pretty great.
00:43:12.000I mean, if the economy that we're talking about here, or our country, is the Titanic, right?
00:43:18.000And if we're talking a post-iceberg Titanic, right?
00:43:41.000Others are putting on wigs and dressing like women to get on the boats.
00:43:44.000Meanwhile, you got a captain who's got so much nobility baked into him that he's absolutely 100% going down with the ship.
00:43:52.000And then you have four dudes who fascinate me more than anybody else.
00:43:55.000The guys in the string quartet who are playing near my god to thee.
00:43:58.000Providing a soundtrack unlike any other for one of the greatest weirdest disasters of all time and then you have the cook You know true story the last guy in the water was the cook and he was blind drunk And he helped a lot of people into the the lat into the lifeboats his name was Joffin Charles Joffin was the last guy in the water and the only one to go into the water who lived And you can look him up, and you'll love his story Point being, there was a lot going on on the deck of the Titanic post-collision, and there's a lot going on in our country right now that belies that percentage.
00:44:39.000I'm getting the feeling that some people are stealing the fuel out of the boats and taking 20-person lifeboats and getting on them by themselves and trying to have like these rich Not only are they taking the little trinkets, they're taking our fuel.
00:44:57.000They're destroying any hope we have of getting out of here.
00:44:59.000My single biggest regret in this whole thing, in terms of stuff I've said on the public record, late in March, I did one of the first Zoom shows, right?
00:45:10.000It was with the captains of The Deadliest Catch.
00:45:12.000And I said to Cenk Hansen in the middle of the show, you know, for the first time, and these are crab fishermen, by the way, just to stick with the nautical metaphor, I said, for the first time in my life, it really, truly seems like we're all in the same boat, right?
00:45:45.000So we have never been in the same boat, ever once.
00:45:50.000But, for the first time in my life, we really truly were in the same storm.
00:45:55.000Dude, that's amazing, because if you think of every other disaster that you've lived through, right?
00:46:00.000I can think of hurricanes up the Gulf, I can think of the wildfires in Northern California, the Dorico that just knocked Cedar Rapids, the inland hurricane, right?
00:46:11.000We've got plagues of ants, we've got all this other stuff, but they all affect very, very specific parts of our country.
00:46:40.000Hiring falters in December as payrolls rise only 199,000, though the unemployment rate fell to 3.9%.
00:46:47.000I love this because the story was published on a Friday.
00:46:50.000And for those that aren't familiar, Friday is when you announce stories you don't want anyone to hear because they're not paying attention.
00:46:58.000But I think when we're talking about any kind of state of decay, talking about what's going on with the economy, what's going on with money printing and jobs, is a really big part of it.
00:47:07.000And I know, especially you, Mike, have tons of experience with how the jobs market and labor works in this country.
00:47:19.000The existence of opportunity is an inconvenient truth for a lot of people.
00:47:24.000And my foundation, we started 13 years ago just trying to make a more persuasive case for a few million good jobs that existed that nobody wanted, right?
00:47:32.000It was really just better PR for welders, steam fitters, pipe fitters, mechanics, and so forth.
00:47:38.000These 11 million jobs that are currently open right now, the vast majority don't require a four-year degree.
00:47:59.000And whether you were into that or not, you know, the fact that they existed in high schools gave a whole generation a front row seat to the optics of labor.
00:48:09.000You could at least look at a job and understood Understand at a glance that it exists, right?
00:48:24.000So we took the art out of it, called it VoTech, changed VoTech to shop.
00:48:28.000Then we walked it around behind the barn and shot it in the head.
00:48:31.000And when we did that, the unintended consequences, we're still seeing.
00:48:36.000People wonder why college is so expensive?
00:48:38.000Well, hell, we just spent 50 years telling an entire generation that they're completely screwed without a four-year degree.
00:48:44.000So, we free up a bottomless pile of money to borrow in pursuit of that degree.
00:48:50.000Meanwhile, we affirmatively tell that same generation that there's a whole category of jobs that are beneath you Which, surprise, surprise, just happen to be the very jobs that are currently going begging right now.
00:49:02.000So, we're lending money we don't have to kids who can't pay it back to train them for jobs that don't exist anymore.
00:49:07.000And that's what that headline's all about.
00:49:20.000And then you have 11 million job openings.
00:49:23.000And so, People who look at that at a cursory glance, they don't understand somebody who quits their job as an insurance broker or middle manager at a cracker factory can't go become a petroleum engineer or even a plumber.
00:49:36.000So there may be a job opening in certain trades or in certain industries that don't correlate so we have that problem.
00:49:42.000I feel like there's something fascinating in my experience with a lot of people of my generation, millennials, where they don't understand basic economics.
00:49:53.000I mean, quite literally, how to come about resources and food.
00:49:56.000So, you know, I talked to the average person from my hometown or that I know went to college, and their idea is, if I want to pay rent, if I want to eat food, I have to get a job.
00:50:07.000And in order to get a good job, I need a degree.
00:50:09.000Whereas my mentality has always been, I suppose maybe because I rake leaves for money, or mowed lawns, or shoveled snow.
00:50:17.000You know, growing up in Chicago, if I needed money, I'd have to go figure out how I can do it.
00:50:21.000So, I'm a little kid, and so, you know, I asked my dad, like, what do we do?
00:51:34.000You can't say, oh, look, I'm going to be a leaf raker and not be curious about the rest of the world.
00:51:39.000The thing I didn't have when I went to community college in 1980 was this thing, right?
00:51:44.000I didn't have this little handheld device that ties me into 98% of all the known information in the world.
00:51:52.000So if I just have a healthy sense of curiosity and an internet connection, all right, well guess what?
00:51:58.000Two weeks ago I watched a lecture at MIT for free.
00:52:01.000Now that thing would have cost thousands of dollars.
00:52:04.000But it's now it's all available virtually for free to anybody.
00:52:10.000And so if you look at it through that lens, the idea that we're still saying that the most expensive path is the best path for the most people.
00:52:20.000That's a big lie, and that's messing stuff up.
00:52:43.000I definitely don't want to generalize too much, but Mike, I wanted to ask you this.
00:52:48.000With colleges raking in so much money, with them indebting so many children, brainwashing so many of them, a lot of people are arguing that colleges by and large cause more harm than good.
00:52:59.000What's your kind of understanding of that?
00:53:01.000Especially when it comes to the current situation in this country, which I would say is in part responsible because of this indoctrination system, which some people call an education system.
00:53:13.000Just once, I would like to be able to say what I mean and not have somebody hear it and hit it back over the net in terms of Micah's anti-education.
00:53:43.000We've got it baked into our heads that the only place to get a worthwhile education is the most expensive place in the world.
00:53:52.000That's why we have 1.7 trillion dollars in student loans.
00:53:56.000And obscenely, that's why we continue to hear about how those loans ought to be forgiven.
00:54:02.000Now this makes me crazy because in my world, you know, we've trained 1,400 people through my foundation to work in usually the construction fields.
00:54:12.000Those are the most popular, welders in particular.
00:54:15.000I know a lot of people who have done really well, who've gone through the program and they're working now and they've paid $40,000-$50,000 to buy a truck.
00:54:23.000They need their truck for their business.
00:55:21.000I have like $19,000 in student loan debt I've had for 21 years.
00:55:25.000I pay the minimum monthly and I have more debt now at $21,000 than I did 21 years ago because I've just been paying the minimum.
00:55:35.000I've also had it on forbearance at times when I couldn't afford it.
00:55:38.000Which to me is like, if I just got that interest to zero, I'd owe like $12,000.
00:55:41.000Because everything I've paid is just paying back interest.
00:55:44.000This is, I think, similar to what you were saying.
00:55:46.000One of the issues I have is I think the interest rates are predatory and a lot of young people are being effectively ripped off.
00:55:52.000So I think there's a good middle ground and maybe we can suspend interest rates, but you've got to pay back what you spent, something like that.
00:55:58.000But the issue is the way that the narrative is framed.
00:56:01.000Why don't we talk about any other debt?
00:56:02.000Why is it that, you know, college degree holders are some of the highest income earners in the country, so we're effectively giving some of the wealthiest free money or a forgiveness.
00:56:11.000Well, let's talk about other areas where we can, you know, better the country or give people some relief.
00:57:07.000And as far as the interest goes, look, I'm really of two minds, right?
00:57:12.000I really pity, genuinely pity, the pressure that we've put on a whole generation of kids.
00:57:19.000When we lean into them to sign on the dotted line, and when guidance counselors and parents and everybody forms, you know, along with your peers, The pressure to borrow the money you borrowed is really obscene in my world.
00:57:37.000Now, does that mean I think the guy or the woman who didn't take that loan, who went a different way, do I think they should be on the hook to pay off one penny of that?
00:57:48.000But I do think we can do a much, much better job of informing The next generation, and I'm not saying your problem doesn't matter, it's a bad deal.
00:57:59.000I knew I was getting into it when I got into it.
00:58:00.000I didn't understand compound interest to the nth degree, but I knew that there was going to be compound interest.
00:58:04.000And financial literacy is part of this, too.
00:58:07.000Teaching that with HOMEC and some semblance of a skilled trade.
00:58:12.000And, you know, getting a kid through high school, understanding compound interest, understanding basic skills, teaching work ethic, for God's sakes.
00:58:23.000What do you think is a great way for young people to get into some sort of trade right now, or someone that maybe has lost their job over the last two years?
00:58:33.000Well, look, if you're willing to roll up your sleeves, if you're willing to learn a skill that's in demand, I can personally tell you right now, I don't know of a single construction operation, and I know hundreds of them, who aren't hiring like crazy.
00:58:47.000We have been trying to expand and build and we are jammed up because there's a labor shortage, there's a materials shortage.
00:58:55.000So should a young person just cold call construction companies and let them know I'm ready?
00:59:01.000Listen, you'll find I'm very, very careful with cookie cutter advice, but If it were me, yeah.
00:59:30.000I'm telling you, I've never seen this kind of opportunity available.
00:59:34.000And I will get, I'll catch all kinds of hell for saying this, because to your point earlier, when we talk about the existence of opportunity, there's a giant tendency of a lot of people to go, those jobs suck!
01:00:12.000Spoiled might be another word to describe some of these individuals.
01:00:15.000One thing I've often talked about is, when I started doing the work that I did, and Luke as well, because I've been working with Luke for like a decade, we're sleeping on couches.
01:00:26.000When I would travel to other countries for work-related projects, Luke would be like, hey, I'll come down, let me crash on your hotel couch or whatever, because it saves money.
01:00:34.000But when I talked to a lot of these, when I started working for Vice, so many people would say, I want to do what you do, I want to travel around.
01:00:41.000And then I would tell them, did you know that I sleep on a couch right now?
01:00:44.000When I worked for Vice, and they were paying me to fly around and report this news, and people assume it must be this glamorous, glorious job, and I must be getting paid so much money, and I was sleeping on my buddy's couch.
01:00:56.000He'd wake me up at two in the morning, smoking pot, being like, what up?
01:00:58.000And it was funny, but it was stressful at times.
01:01:01.000And then I talked to these other people that were like, I really want to do that job.
01:01:22.000I mean, just the paycheck, just the paycheck.
01:01:25.000You know, as long as I've known Luke, Luke got started with like a Handycam and he was confronting politicians and powerful elites because he was passionate about it.
01:01:33.000I got started with a little tiny GoPro I just put on my computer screen and I would talk about things I saw on the news that I had feelings about.
01:01:39.000From there, you planted a seed and I just wanted to keep doing it.
01:01:43.000I wanted to keep going, I wanted to keep traveling, I wanted to keep talking about stuff and somehow, me in my living room with a GoPro turned into, we got all these cameras everywhere and these lights, And the money was secondary to all of it.
01:01:55.000It was having a camera turned on, talking about what I think, what I feel, what I've researched, proving the liars wrong, fact-checking, that's what I cared about.
01:02:04.000Now here we are with a company, we're building more, and I gotta be honest, money is not a factor in what our plans are.
01:02:13.000I don't put together, say, the CastleVlog, where we have the chickens and stuff, because I was like, man, we're gonna make so much money off this.
01:02:20.000I was like, I wanna do something cultural.
01:02:22.000We don't make money off of it, but we're having these videos.
01:02:25.000We're showing people behind the scenes.
01:02:31.000We're fortunate enough to be able to expand.
01:02:33.000Also, we just launched a charity that basically we're building decentralized software, social networking software, so people can host their own content and have subscriptions directly without any kind of middleman.
01:02:44.000With that company, I could take 50 million and hire, like, 50 developers and start building a factory where we'll mass-produce raspberry pies or something like it, pre-loaded with the software, turn it around, keep it pro- If they're willing to work.
01:02:55.000And it's complex to launch that system.
01:02:57.000You need, like, a lot of prep and oversight.
01:03:01.000Well, I also just want to say, yeah, I also want to say it's very hard to find a lot of labor.
01:03:11.000But I think there's also an aspect here that we should talk about, and that is the impact of social media that glorifies the super rich and the excess that a lot of people strive to, of course, have this kind of cooking.
01:03:25.000You said earlier, it's different for everybody.
01:03:26.000I'd have to know who I was talking to, but I can tell you in general a lot of people I know who start welding wind up with a plumbing certification, and many of them wind up with an electric certification, and many of them wind up buying a couple of vans and hiring three or four people, and now they have a mechanical contracting business.
01:03:45.000Nobody talks about the incredible number of small businesses that begin with the mastery of a skill, not with the acquisition of a diploma.
01:04:16.000And the PR push that came with it was also real.
01:04:19.000The problem is, like all PR, the push for college was terrible because it came at the expense of all other forms of education.
01:04:28.000Regarding medicine and like doctorship and stuff, I've thought that maybe 12 years is insane and that if someone can take the test and pass the test in real time, they can do the work, then they're qualified to be the doctor.
01:06:28.000Whether it's on the foundational side, the missionary side, or the mercenary side.
01:06:32.000It would be awesome to have a show where they're on stage building the piping system and then they rush the water through at the end and see who did it right.
01:06:54.000I moved out to New Hampshire and I met an amazing welder and diesel mechanic named Jay Noon.
01:06:59.000He also does man camp up in New Hampshire with the Free State Project, where he goes out.
01:07:04.000And he literally has all the children from the community come in from the whole Free State Project and says, okay, we're going to be building stuff.
01:07:11.000We're going to be breaking stuff down.
01:07:13.000We're going to be building stuff back up.
01:07:14.000And it's a way to allow children to look at what they're passionate about, to explore it in real life, and provide them with an avenue and a pathway that isn't, I'm going to be a YouTuber.
01:07:26.000And let's be honest here when when ish hits the fan when the financial system is already crumbling and teetering on disaster those people are going to be the latest superheroes in a few years from now when we're dealing with some serious financial ramifications because those are the people that are going to be able to do something in our society compared to of course the latte Starbucks flip-flop wearing yuppies who are going to be wandering around like a horde of zombies asking for handouts.
01:07:54.000Before I do, real quick, just to address everybody, we had all of our internet backups just drop at the exact same time, which is particularly strange.
01:08:12.000The reason, so I don't want to, you know, I want to take digital security as well as physical security seriously, but this may have been an intentional takedown of some sort.
01:08:24.000We've got three, we actually have four backup lines and they all dropped at the same time.
01:09:19.000Well, if you had to choose a side, you know, I mean, it's walking dead time, okay?
01:09:25.000Like, you're gonna have to hunker down in a place that is primarily populated with well-educated, thoughtful writers and thinkers, or hunters and gatherers and builders.
01:09:42.000What team do you go on when things get sporty?
01:09:45.000That's why I'd say I'd go out to the countryside and find some more conservative teams.
01:10:31.000My point is, you know, when we lost power for four days in Northern California at the height of the lockdowns, I never felt more helpless.
01:10:43.000There's nothing I could do except watch my meat in the refrigerator slowly rot and watch as the temperature of the house slowly rose and the thick arid smoke of the wildfires just drifted down and a plague of ants somehow on top of all of this is in the house.
01:11:01.000Everything was just crapping the bed contemporaneously.
01:11:04.000It was who have the know-how to fix them when they go down.
01:11:08.000Whatever little hiccup you just had here, I had a similar one during that time and we lost a primetime TV show.
01:11:14.000We were 50 minutes through and we lost the whole thing.
01:11:46.000The funnier answer is, I played Tim Allen's younger brother on Last Man Standing.
01:11:52.000And the first episode I did with him, we were standing backstage waiting for our entrance.
01:11:58.000And we were talking about this exact topic came up and Tim like lost his mind telling me a story about how a blender broke and how he wanted to fix it with his grandson to show him how a thing can be salvaged and repaired.
01:12:14.000But of course it can't because the whole thing's like two pieces of extruded plastic and it wasn't designed to be fixed.
01:12:42.000It's amazing to me that the technology we have in the civilization is dependent upon hyper-specific specialties.
01:12:50.000A computer is not just made by one person who knows how to make a computer, it's made by probably, what, several dozen specialists in all these different areas, and more than dozens, because if you really want to get down to it, you have this factory that can make the chips, that runs the machines, that talks about the coolant fluid and all that stuff, but then you've got the people who are going to source the chemicals for it, you've got the people who are going to source the metals for it, refine the metals.
01:13:10.000It probably takes How many, I bet somebody in the audience might actually know this, how many specialties does it take to make one modern computer?
01:14:13.000And when you see people work so hard to associate themselves so specifically with something like innovation, it's almost always at the expense of imitation.
01:14:25.000Because imitation gets a bad rap, but these computers and all the specialities that you're talking about, that's all based on Henry Ford's vision.
01:15:09.000But you could say that an original is a bunch of replications pushed together into one new Uber-rep-replication that people consider original.
01:15:20.000Like, when I write music, I take notes from songs that I heard in the past and create a new song.
01:15:24.000We're all standing on the shoulders of giants.
01:15:31.000I can't imagine you would've, but... I've actually not watched a whole lot of it.
01:15:34.000But it's... The premise is... I'm gonna get this wrong.
01:15:37.000For fans of Dr. Stone, they'll get mad at me.
01:15:40.000This genius kid and his friend... I guess everybody turns to Stone in the world for some reason.
01:15:45.000And then thousands of years later, for some reason, this ultra genius and his, you know, friend or whatever, or he, he, he de-stones them or whatever.
01:15:54.000Basically the premise is he's this really smart kid in a prehistoric time or an underdeveloped time, and he's developing technology.
01:16:00.000So I've only seen a couple episodes, but he's like, I'm going to make a cell phone.
01:16:03.000And the episode is actually him directing people to find the metals and explaining how vacuum tubes work.
01:16:09.000And I'm like, it's like Magic School Bus, but for anime fans.
01:16:11.000I thought it was actually really fascinating to have this, um, Action-oriented show for kids explain how a vacuum tube works and he as he's putting it together and making the glass So it's it's fascinating.
01:16:25.000We need to make glass Here's we need to find to make the glass.
01:16:28.000Here's what we need to make to blow the glass Here's the metal we need and then he tries to find the proper filaments, but he can't find the right You know that can withstand the right temperatures.
01:16:35.000I think it was brilliant Because watching that, I think it would give a lot of people, especially millennials, you know, I shouldn't pick on millennials, everybody needs to understand this, that when it goes into the basics of what's in your TV, you have no idea the precision and the hard work and the trial and error that went into inventing all of these things and how we're very lucky that we've written things down and passed them on, right?
01:17:00.000You made my own point better than I did.
01:17:03.000When you're sitting there in the dark and you can't get your own power back on, you realize just how decoupled you've come from the chain of knowledge that allows you to be your own solution.
01:18:42.000So, watching his face, listening to Chris Cornell sing, and through those headphones, it was just like, I knew in a second, this was my gift.
01:19:16.000There's this fascinating quote I heard that you could give Christopher Columbus unlimited resources and he would never build you a nuclear submarine.
01:19:25.000Because the understanding of nuclear energy, it's beyond anything they could put together.
01:20:05.000Well, you've got a turbine, primarily.
01:20:09.000First you've got to go into the earth, you've got to get it out.
01:20:11.000We live not far, we're sitting not far from where that happens.
01:20:14.000And then you've got bituminous and you've got anthracite, and the approaches are slightly different, but in the end the coal's got to wind up inside a turbine.
01:20:21.000You're getting way more specific than I normally get.
01:20:24.000Well, I... Go ahead with your explanation, because I have a slightly different... Well, we just boil water.
01:20:57.000How do we, you know, a lot of people think it's all photovoltaic, but actually many of them just direct, someone corrected me, someone did correct me on this once, we direct all these mirrors towards a vat of salt water, I believe it's salt water.
01:21:25.000So it's like even, even understanding something as basic as steam pressure can spin something, you know, it's, it's not particularly complicated.
01:21:39.000I just finished a show called Six Degrees, which sounds a little bit like Dr. Stone.
01:21:44.000It's kind of a magic school bus sort of thing.
01:21:47.000Surprising connections that take you down this serendipitous line of invention.
01:21:54.000But part of the thing that I really wanted to do with that show was...
01:22:00.000There were a few things that really just chat my ass and and one is electric cars and just the idea that we're so in love with them because electricity is so much better than fossil fuels and you know if you if you just follow the electricity back from the plug You know, you're going to get to a spinning turbine.
01:22:23.000And the odds are very, very, very high that turbine is being powered by gas or oil.
01:22:30.000And you just can't, you can't separate the two.
01:22:34.000For all the virtue in the world, you just can't do it.
01:23:01.000We can't predict voltage, amperage, the bolts are seemingly random to us.
01:23:07.000Yeah, you'd have to stick something way up in the sky, like a tether, maybe the space elevator to use as like a lightning rod, and then the elevator itself, the tether could be the superconductor.
01:23:15.000The issue is we can't properly measure the output.
01:23:19.000So, while it seems to a lot of people like, oh, you should be able to, no, we can't, because all of our electro systems have to be, they're specific.
01:23:51.000And the fact that most of us have become disconnected from those jobs and the people who do them That's how we land the plane on the skills gap.
01:24:01.000It's not just a skill gap, it's a will gap.
01:24:04.000It's a lack of will on the part of many, many, many millions of people who rely on the people with the skill.
01:24:56.000Well, I mean, if you want to get back to the fundamentals, I mean, that's how Dirty Jobs started with the sewer inspector in San Francisco in 2002.
01:27:48.000The Mackinac Bridge is, I think it's the longest suspension bridge in the country and it connects the upper and lower peninsulas of Michigan, right?
01:27:58.000So it's a giant green suspension bridge and they've been painting it constantly ever since its construction.
01:28:07.000Once you finish painting it, you just start painting it again.
01:28:09.000I went there one day to paint the bridge and to go down into some of the, oh, the towers and to see what the inside looked like and how that maintenance was done.
01:28:20.000And the reason he's asking that question is because at the end of the day, I did something that I do from time to time on the show, usually just as kind of a gag, but I asked permission to do something I knew they would say no to, right?
01:28:33.000As a joke on camera, I said to the supervisor, hey, you know what would be fun before we go?
01:28:39.000And we got a great segment, so no pressure, but it'd really be fun if I could walk across that girder off the deck and then go over that stanchion and then walk up the cable and change a few light bulbs, you know, five, six hundred feet above the water.
01:28:55.000And this guy looks at me and says, okay.
01:29:00.000And literally my sphincter slammed shut.
01:29:18.000But the business of walking up that cable and changing those light bulbs, like when you look down, when you're 600 feet up and you look down at the water, You know, you've got big freighters coming and going underneath you.
01:29:31.000They look like the ships in Battleship.
01:29:34.000These tiny little things, you know, and it's just, uh, it was just one of those shows that took place way up in the air and people looked.
01:29:41.000600 feet above the bridge and then below the bridge it goes more?
01:30:01.000But your sweat pledge you were mentioning before the show was just... Yeah.
01:30:06.000Yeah, well, look, sometimes, you know, if you're trying to figure out the degree to which somebody likes a thing, you have to look at the degree to which other people hate it.
01:33:00.000I think, you know, for me especially, I was told when I was a teenager, you have to go to college.
01:33:06.000And I was thinking about it and I was like, okay, you know, that's what I'm told to do.
01:33:11.000And then I started, I mentioned this before the show, I read an article from an economist who said it was the stupidest investment you could make.
01:33:17.000$40,000 now in four years, you owe 40 grand plus interest and you have no job prospects.
01:33:20.000It doesn't seem to make sense for an investor.
01:33:23.000After Occupy Wall Street, I still had people saying, are you gonna go to school now?
01:33:27.000And the craziest thing to me, I was like, they're asking me to speak at their schools about the streaming and stuff that I'm doing.
01:33:33.000There's something strange, I think, about this generation, and even the boomers telling them, you know, millennials go to college, where they think college is a requirement to success.
01:33:43.000You know, I'll try and make this point quick, but you know what I think happened is, I was told this by my family in the previous generation, my elders, that when they didn't go to college, they ended up working as managers at grocery stores or department stores and they made okay money.
01:34:01.000But their friends and family members who went to college ended up making six figures and they're rich.
01:34:05.000That's why you have to go to college to get a good job.
01:34:08.000But back then, the boomers, you know, the kids coming out of World War II, you could have a high school diploma and raise a family on that.
01:34:16.000So there was no one telling you you had to go to college, which means the people in the boomer generation who went to college chose to because they were chasing a passion.
01:36:29.000I never met anybody on Dirty Jobs who was unhappy in their work, but nor did I meet anybody who set out to do the very thing they were doing when I met them.
01:36:42.000Which means they didn't sit down at 17, identify the thing they wanted to be, and then embark on some great grand quest to borrow whatever it took in order to maybe get the magical piece of paper that would give them a shot at possibly attaining the thing that would give them permission to feel that which your father described as happiness.
01:38:11.000And so, you know, when I look back at all of it now, yeah, sure, there's feces from every species and misadventures and animal husbandry, but it's the people, mostly, that I stay in touch with.
01:38:22.000Although there was that time we masturbated the turkey.
01:38:25.000Yeah, that was an epic story, by the way.
01:38:28.000Well, maybe we'll have you tell that story in the members only.
01:39:33.000Yeah, no, it's it's it's it's still up there.
01:39:35.000That's funny Well, I'm in the booth every day reading something and so usually I get done whatever I get paid to do and then um I do something random and weird and one day it would just seem like It was just time to read the phone book guys, you know, that's great.
01:39:51.000I All right, Falcon Laser says, Mike, I loved your narration of how the universe works.
01:39:56.000What do you think the Hubble Deep Field will look like when taken by the James Webb Telescope?
01:40:01.000Man, okay, so the Deep Field is my favorite photograph ever taken.
01:40:08.000For those of you who don't know what we're talking about, it was basically After they fixed the botched lens on the Hubble and got it out there where it's supposed to be, they pointed it at this very controversial moment in the Hubble history, because there's a long line of people who wanted to point the Hubble at very specific things to get all kinds of research done.
01:40:31.000And this guy, I forget his name, he wanted to point it at nothing.
01:40:36.000Hubble time was very rare, so he pointed it at the blackest hunk of nothing there was and started taking pictures.
01:40:44.000And what came back basically was what the universe looked like about 400,000 years after the Big Bang, which in real time or practical time is like a second.
01:40:57.000And what we see in the Hubble Deep Field is, at a glance, it just looks like a big, giant sky full of stars that you would see out in the desert.
01:42:15.000No one was harmed in the eating of the brains.
01:42:18.000Well, look, I mean, weirdly, the story he's talking about was called lamb docking, and part of it was castration of sheep the old-fashioned way.
01:42:30.000We were up in Craig, Colorado, and for years that's what the ranchers did.
01:42:35.000They literally bit the testicles off the the creature and they did it for a lot of reason. This is
01:42:41.000another story if you want I'll walk you through it in the members thing because
01:42:44.000I mean it involves you know words like you know vas deferens, scrotum,
01:44:37.000I gotta say, you know, a lot of the Super Chats are people pointing out how you've rescued them by, you know, informing them and inspiring them on trade jobs.
01:44:45.000Look, there's so many people saying, go to college, go to college, go to college.
01:44:49.000There are memes where it's like, you know, a guy's got like a big beard and he's making coffee for 12 bucks an hour complaining about his college debt.
01:44:56.000And then there's a guy with a hard hat working on power lines making 100K a year.
01:45:12.000And then the viewers stepped up and started suggesting all the ideas.
01:45:16.000And then, you know, after you do 50, 60, 80 of them, you can't help but look around and ask yourself, what does this group of people know that I don't?
01:45:26.000You know, why are they having such a good time?
01:45:29.000And what can we maybe learn collectively from it?
01:45:31.000And that's, you know... Well, it appears flattery has no limits.
01:45:35.000Sean Byrne says, this man was the dad I never had.
01:45:38.000I got a sense of hard work from your shows.
01:46:11.000Not only does it give respect to the people who make the system work and highlight jobs that most people take for granted, But it also inspires people to work hard and get active and find a way through it without going to college?
01:46:24.000You know, the big difference, you know, Jordan has an enormous brain and he came out of academia and so he really, he came in hot, right, with his worldview and there was nothing for him to hide behind.
01:47:43.000And when I got into entertainment, I left all that behind.
01:47:46.000Not intentionally, but you know, way leads on to way.
01:47:50.000And after 20 years of freelancing in entertainment and singing in the opera and selling crap
01:47:55.000in the middle of the night on QVC and having 150 different jobs, um, I had become really
01:48:01.000disconnected from a lot of those things that Dirty Jobs celebrates.
01:48:05.000And so when my mom called me to tell me my grandfather wouldn't be around forever, and that maybe he'd like to see something on TV that looked like work before he died, that drove me into the sewer.
01:48:17.000And that footage turned into Dirty Jobs.
01:48:20.000And, you know, to answer his question, what Dirty Jobs did was become my actual education.
01:48:30.000I went to a community college for two years and then later I went to a university but my education didn't start until I was 42 in the sewers of San Francisco followed by Dirty Parts Unknown.
01:48:42.000What did your grandfather think of the show?
01:48:44.000He saw one episode, he looked at it and he laughed.
01:49:08.000I have absolute great respect for their existence.
01:49:13.000I belong to one, and I have for a long time.
01:49:17.000But I'm very hesitant to say a way is the right way.
01:49:23.000My foundation has hooked a lot of people up with a lot of unions and a lot of different vocations and many of them are happy.
01:49:31.000We've also given away a lot of money over the years in right-to-work states and helped a lot of people who are very satisfied today outside of the union.
01:49:42.000I honestly don't think, I don't think there's a simple answer.
01:50:02.000I called the union and they said don't do it.
01:50:05.000Discovery is not a signatory and you would be running a foul of what's called global rule one and that could result in fines and possible, right?
01:50:16.000Same thing happened years before that at QVC.
01:50:23.000I heard that a lot from my union and I had to decide you know it wasn't quite like the scab question because there were no strikes going on but the decision to work outside of the Screen Actors Guild was very difficult for me to make but had I not made it we wouldn't be talking today and you know I'd be having a very different conversation with somebody else.
01:50:54.000If people forget everything I've said, but just remember the one thing, it's be wary of all earnestness and look askance at cookie cutter advice.
01:51:38.000The loophole was joining something called AGMA, which was the American Guild of Musical Artists, and then buying your card in the sister union.
01:51:46.000The challenge, of course, was to get into the opera in order to be a member of AGMA.
01:51:52.000So yeah, I learned the shortest aria I could find.
01:51:54.000It was from a Puccini opera called La Boheme.
01:53:09.000They might take that seriously and say that was a declaration, you know?
01:53:12.000It's actually super flattering, but I think more than anything, to the very early things we were talking, and we weren't having a big political conversation, but we were talking about Authenticity and the reasons that so many journalists and politicians and even scientists have lost their credibility.
01:53:35.000People started asking me to get into politics shortly after I crawled through the sewer.
01:53:39.000And I think part of the reason was you see a guy covered with somebody else's crap and you know he's probably not going to try and sell you something or I mean and really why would he lie to you you know I mean you literally I had condoms stuck To my rubber hip boots.
01:53:57.000I mean, that guy, whatever else you say about him, he's not going to lie to you.
01:54:14.000Some said, have you ever been hired to clean the swamp?
01:54:17.000Or you should do a show in politics because that's the dirtiest job there is and things like that.
01:54:22.000My favorite question that I saw in the comment section, and I kind of wanted to ask you, is the question, if cleaning the gulags is going to be on a future episode of Dirty Jobs?
01:54:33.000Cleaning the gulag, as in like gulag archipelago?
01:54:36.000No, no, like the political gulags that we're all going to be interned into, you know.
01:54:45.000See I'm thinking of Alexander Solzhenitsyn who wrote Gulag Archipelago and of course Cancer Ward which ought to be required reading today because I mean look you it's a cautionary tale and it's a big hunk of history and who was it?
01:55:25.000And around 11 or so p.m., we will have that exclusive members-only podcast at TimCast.com with Mike Rowe telling a story about how he once two-binned a turkey, among other stories.
01:56:16.000And, you know, a lot of people need to hear, instead of those platitudes and mass generalizations, some kind of real honest advice and not just talking points.
01:56:26.000I also have my own media organization on youtube.com forward slash we are change I just did a very interesting video on the Novak Yokovitch Situation and I did a pretty crazy video on Luke uncensored calm.
01:56:38.000Hope to see some of you guys there Thanks for having me and today was really a great episode was fantastic Mike.
01:56:45.000Thank you Ian Crosland Check me out at Ian Crosland net and I will see you guys next time And I wanted to leave you guys with this quote from Jordan Peterson because we mentioned him earlier.
01:56:53.000Jordan Peterson said, to notice that opportunity lurks where responsibility has been abdicated.
01:56:58.000I think that's a perfect summary of what Mike Rowe stands for.
01:57:02.000And I wanted to say too that the whole sweat pledge is 100% something that I intend to teach my kids when I eventually have them.