Timcast IRL - Timcast IRL #443 - AOC Gets COVID After Partying Maskless In Miami, SLAMMED For Hypocrisy w/Mike Rowe

Episode Date: January 11, 2022

Tim, Ian, Luke, and Lydia join host, author, and recording artist Mike Rowe to discuss Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez' hypocritical Covid behavior, CNN's late discovery of facts that sane people had been discussing for years, a new poll finding that 80% of Americans believe the US is in a state of decay, the shabby state of the American economy as jobs underwhelm again, and how leftists may fare in the coming apocalypse. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has tested positive for COVID. She is recovering at home and this comes very shortly after she was seen partying maskless in Miami. I don't really care that she got COVID. Everybody seems to have gotten it. I don't really care that she was partying in Miami. In 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. What 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. She had complained about Texas getting rid of their mask mandates. She's championed the

governorship and the politicians in New York for their policies like mask mandates and vaccine mandates, and then goes down to Florida, flouts everything that she claims to support. And then there she is getting sick with COVID. So a lot of people are pointing out the hypocrisy and we'll get into that. And we've also got CNN now coming out and saying, and this is surprising because it comes from a CDC director, that COVID hospitalizations may be inflated by 40% because they're listing people hospitalized with COVID as opposed to from COVID, for which there is a very big difference. We'll talk about all that. Plus, we've got a story about a suspected Antifa arrested in Florida with a pipe bomb.

Crazy story. And joining us to talk about this and more is Mike Rowe. That's true. I'm here. Thank you. Thanks for coming, man. I can't decide if I'm in a studio or a boardroom or like backstage at QVC where all the tchotchkes imaginable might be for sale.

It's impressive. Well, you're referring to Ian's rock collection. Oh, is that what it is? Might we get a wide shot here for a moment? Oh, yeah. Let me see it. Ian has a rock collection on the table you can't normally see. Your viewers would definitely want to drink that in.

That's obsidian. We've got some. Of course. This is pyrite. Iron pyrite? Luke's got machetes. Luke's got his blades. You never know.

You never know. Especially, you know, with as crazy as things have been getting, man. How would you describe yourself? I mean, I think most people know who you are, to be honest. You know, homo sapien, six foot, mostly upright. Yeah, look, I think most people know who you are, to be honest. You know, I'm a sapien, six foot, mostly upright. Yeah, look, I force gum. The voice from that TV show people watch sometimes? You know, that's really where it started.

If 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. There you go. And it never works out for the Wildebeest, by the way. And you also do Dirty Jobs. You've got a podcast. You have a foundation.

Yeah, Dirty Jobs has been on the air 20 years. Wow. 20 years straight. We just started a new season last week, actually. I was 15. Good for you. That's terrific. That's terrific.

Thanks, Tim. that's that's terrific that's terrific um thanks tim yeah the uh i mean it's it's really been the the the greatest luckiest privilege that i could do you know it's a it's a tv show on the one hand but it launched a foundation that i've been running now for 14 years um 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. So 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. Sounds great. It's a blast. We'll talk about it. We'll get into all of it.

We've got Luke hanging out. Well, Mike, thanks so much for coming on. We definitely don't like Congress, so anytime you can mouth off against them, we definitely approve of that. And 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. That means that there's no mass formation psychosis. And that's why I made this fictional shirt, which says mass formation psychosis, that maybe you could get on thebestpoliticalshirts.com.

And I just purely from the bottom of my heart wanted to thank all the fact checkers out there. I almost thought the government was being tyrannical there for a second. Thank you so much for clearing everything up for me. This should be a great episode. Thanks for coming. Hey, Ian Crossland, what's up? You can follow me at iancrossland.net. Michael, you ever go by Michael? My brother's name is Michael. It's Mr. Michael. I think I've earned it. I hope that one day you'll do the voice of Planet Earth, the series. I did.

Oh, is that what you were talking about when you said the series? Sigourney Weaver was hired originally, and when they did the reboot, I did it. Beautiful. Cool. Thank you. Here's to many more seasons of that. That would be awesome. Thanks.

One of my favorite planets, actually. That's beautiful. It's a good one. It's a good one. I'm very happy. Big fan. I am also here. I'm delighted to have Mike.

Oh, hey, look. It's the top of my head. Is that Dianne Feinstein? I got this awesome... Okay, I'm showing everyone this awesome picture of Dianne Feinstein. Are you related? Are you related to her? Yeah, she looks just like my grandma, doesn't she?

She's so cute. I love her. Anyway, I'm here. Why did you just switch to a camera shot of Diane Feinstein? Because she's more important than me. No, it's because I had it on the room shot and it doesn't put it right backwards. So let's go. Anyway, I'm here. I'm not Diane Feinstein tonight. I'm very excited to have Mike Rowe tonight. I'm delighted to talk about all this stuff. I did not finish my college education and I think that's great. So I hope, hopefully we get into some of that stuff. I'm very excited to rag on college. We'll get into that. 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. We're going to have a bonus segment coming up. We do that around 11 p.m. Monday

through Thursday. You're not going to want to miss that. And 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, coincidence, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez caught COVID after partying in Miami. I mean, that's the gist of the story. We saw the news over the past couple of weeks that AOC was seen hugging people, getting kissed by people, partying at a drag club, and this is coming from a person who has routinely ragged. Actually, you know what? Let me just pull up the tweet. We got this tweet from AOC herself, where she said 93.2% of Texans aren't fully vaccinated.

Mind you, this is March 2nd. The state just endured one disaster worsened by selfishness and denial of basic science, and now conditions are being set for another. Repealing the mask mandate now endangers so many people, especially essential workers and the vulnerable. So perhaps her concern of the mask mandate was only because of limited vaccinations. And now she's changed her opinion. Sure, that's fine.

But 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 a state and now she has covid so poetic justice or or what hypocrisy well when you 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 there will be some devastating consequences because 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 compare it to what happened in New York, there's a story there that, of course, is being hidden away from the general public. That's how I see it. And I don't wish anyone be sick. I don't think we should be celebrating anyone be sick. But this is the story that's happening right now that is deserved to at least be mentioned, in my opinion. I think if I zoom out from my ego, I want her to be healthy. I want it to be easy, like a low symptom or no symptom illness and be done with it and realize, okay, it's not that as bad as I thought it was going to be kind of thing.

That's what I want for the general system. I don't want to play hate and love with this girl, whatever. It's the policy, man, it's, it's, if you're, if you're in New York, if you're a Congress person, 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 going to go to the one, I'm going to go to one of the places where they don't have these policies. So I can go party. I mean, that is, that, that is everything wrong with politics. In my opinion, I see, I see conservatives or republicans

being like i don't like mask mandates i won't wear one and then they don't i'm like well that's what they said i get it aoc who's like you know the governor here can give ronda santa some pointers and mask mandates are important and then but i'm gonna go party where the governor does the opposite that it's the hypocrisy i can't stand the single most valuable thing right now is the thing that's most singularly missing, and that's consistency. We're desperate for people. I don't even think it matters so much what they say. If 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. You know, I live in Northern California, and I wrote pretty pointedly when the whole French

laundry thing happened with Gavin Newsom. You know, I just said, look, this is not a small thing. You remember he was out there, and he's without a mask shortly after telling everybody they had to wear a mask, and it didn't help that it was a super fancy schmancy restaurant and he was with all his buddies it was just a bad look but i just remember saying listen when it comes to politics speaking only for myself i'll forgive stupidity i'll forgive people being wrong and i'll forgive people changing their minds but it's really hard to forgive a hypocrite. Yeah. Mike, 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. As 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.

Sure. With a huge crowd. And then thankfully, because of citizen journalism, because of people caring about the story, this story was able to get out there to the general public and show the hypocrisy, show just how hypocritical a lot of these people are that will ruin your life while living their best life, which is crazy. I 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. I wonder if they overlook that because their attitude is the messaging is more important.

It 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. And then I wonder if, you know, for post-liberal, libertarian, conservative, whatever, their attitude is, are you being honest? Are you an honest politician? Which is rare, to be honest. It depends how scared you are, right? If 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 a five. Now we're becoming, I've just noticed it in the last couple of weeks, we're becoming less scared. I just had it, got through it. My folks both have it. They've come through it. It's not now just a question of how many people do you know who have had it. It'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. 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 you feel differently now because you're not as afraid as you were so there's a long tail i think on hypocrisy and it's still spooling out i have to speak i bet this is going to be like people that are starting to it's

dawning on them now like now they're calming down they're going to see this and it's still spooling out as we speak. I bet this is going to be like people that are starting to, it's dawning on them now. Now they're calming down. They're going to see this. And it's going to be like reliving trauma for these people. So when we or when anyone is going to approach them about like, hey, just so you know, don't rub their nose in it when people start coming around. Treat it like past trauma. Be kind and understanding. People went through a lot.

I'll ask over here. Yeah, I 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. existential extent 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 was 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. You know that meme, keep calm and X or whatever? Carry on. Keep calm and carry on. Yeah. So I feel like the corporate press and many politicians like AOC were the ones doing the opposite. They were telling you not to keep combing.

They were saying the end is nigh. Panic, panic. Yeah, they still are. There was just an article I read maybe two weeks ago written by a doctor over at Johns Hopkins. I forget her name. It's not important, though. You can look it up. It's very specific, though.

She's laying out the hellscape of January and February. And I've never read anything this dire. All right. All the hospitals will be full. All of the pharmacies will be closed. All of the shelves will be empty. Please listen to me. Please listen to this. A doctor at Hopkins right now. We're January 10th today in real time and people are looking around. And so what do we do? You 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. But look, there are consequences of living at DEFCON five. Where's the DEFCON one? What's the bad one? One's the bad one. You can't live at one, right? Maybe for 15 days,

maybe for a while, but it starts to wear down. You don't have to look too far back in the history to see what happens when people get bored with being terrified. It happens. And it's got nothing to do with numbers or statistics. It's got nothing to do with facts or data. It has to do with the way we're wired. Remember in the Battle of Britain, right, during the Blitz, those people were bombed every day, and they went underground, and they lived underground for a week, and then they started to stick their heads out. Bombs still falling. You know, two weeks later, they're opening shops. Three weeks later, they're back in school. Bombs are still falling. The bombs never stopped falling.

But after a month and a half, it was just, look, this is bad. This is very, very, very, very bad. But we're not going to spend the rest of our lives in that state. There's videos out of Syria during the civil war in places like Aleppo, where the buildings are completely wiped out. There's no sign of civilization but people, except for the people, that are carrying food and working. And you're wondering, you 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. I think they needed the panic, and they wouldn't be able to exploit this entire situation if there wasn't a panic. And it's important to understand, they created it in many important circumstances. With that fear comes anxiety, comes depression, comes a lot of psychological disorders. If we look at the mental health of America, it has steadily declined over the years and dramatically when COVID came to the world because politicians were exploiting that. And 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 right that is crazy imagine 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 and 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 so we want to publish this. That says to me that we're really separated in this country from whatever it is.

Celebrating death. It's even being neutral about it because they may not agree, but they're obviously not disagreeing because they put it forward. And being neutral towards evil is just as bad as being evil in mind. Well, there you go, right? Good Germans. Yeah. That's it. Order of followers.

It wasn't the Nazi party. It was all the ones who sat by. But look, beside that, it's just, I forgot what I was going to say. Doggone, it was going to be good, too. Oh, man. It was going to be a good one. It was going to be a good one. It was going to... Oh, too. Oh, man. It was going to be a good one. It was going to be a good one. It was going to...

Oh, as a journalist, right? I 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, what is persuasive? Is 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? Now, you can have the conversation about whether they are or whether they're not, but from an advocacy standpoint, from a journalistic standpoint, do those people find it persuasive to be put into a box of deplorables?

We've had a couple of 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? It doesn't seem like people want to do it, right? So this article saying we should mock those who die from COVID, obviously it's not persuasive. Obviously it's antagonistic. But they're doing it not because they actually want to not persuasive obviously it's antagonistic but they're doing it not because they actually want to be persuasive at least in my view they're doing

because i think it is a tribal rallying cry that will generate traffic among their side make them feel good you know you're right we you know you've got someone who's a really nasty person on facebook they see the article and they go that's right i should be a jerk on facebook but but this feel good but this is another aspect of it. These are talking points that are issued not just by L.A. Times reporters, quote, end quote, 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? We have Rothschild, the former banker, Emmanuel Macron, who literally came on the world stage and said, these people are not these people understanding, are very dangerous, especially when you look at them with these specific comments with a context and history.

Let me jump to this story right here from Newsbusters. CNN, Tapper, finally discover misleading COVID hospitalization numbers. My response to this is conspiracy theorists, 49,837 corporate press zero. This is, this is, this is something that, uh, you know, independent media has talked about for some time. It'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, it turns out you had COVID and being hospitalized from COVID newsbusters reports for 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. On Monday, CNN and anchor CNN and anchor Jake, 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%. Tapper 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. And since CNN had obfuscated the idea that the CDC was misleading people, Tapper had to spell out what was going on. Over 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, meaning they're there for some reason. And it's also true they have COVID. After 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 they bumped their head and they're being included as in the hospital with COVID. That number seems kind of misleading. And there you go. I mean, it's something we've long talked about. And now finally, it's hitting the mainstream. Why is it?

Why do you guys think it is? I think it's because Omicron's not hurting people that bad relative to the old version. That's not what I mean. What I mean is this data's been out there already. I think Tapper got Omicron. I don't know if he did. And he was like, this was so nothing. Why are people

wigging out? And so now he's like, and there's the with and from thing. And so it's all like clicking for him now. That's my personal. There's a lot of things that play here and i remember early on when when everything was happening there was a case of a man being shot in the head that was listed as an official covid death i believe in california and i'm like how how does that make sense this goes along i believe to what we were saying before if you inflate the numbers if you make them higher you're going to scare a lot more people if you make them believe that you might be a huge victim here, you might be hurt. The chances of being

hurt are high, high, high. And 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. So, 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. We got the story from USA Today. Our ruling, true. We rate the claim that hospitals get paid more if patients are listed as COVID-19 and

on ventilators as true. Hospitals 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. This is what people were saying all throughout the last year. If you go to the hospital, this is from April 27th, 2020. It's almost two years ago. USA Today told us this and CNN's only now bringing it up. In the long history of bromides, platitudes,

and tropes, most have been ultimately debunked over time. They become conventional wisdom, and they collapse under the weight of their own nonsense. Never has follow the money been debunked. Never, ever, once has it not proven to lead you to the place where the truth is. It might not be totally dispositive, but you can't minimize the importance of people acting in their own financial best interest. I don't care who they are. I don't care if they're elected. I don't care if they're scientists. It just doesn't happen. That's an extraordinary thing to think about, the 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. That's a heck of a thing. Yep. Q Bono is always the question that a lot of people ask. Who profits? Who benefits? Who gets something from this? And for the government to incentivize and take our money, because people think it's free money. People think that a lot of these procedures, a lot of these products are free. They're not. We're paying for them in one way or another. But for the government to incentivize and pay hospitals to give them more money when they have more COVID cases, more ventilators, more debts, is, again, incentivizing something that is obviously something that clearly shouldn't be incentivized.

And for that to happen, it's absolutely crazy. We've been saying it for years, and now we finally know about it. Is this the breaking point? You mentioned, I think you just mentioned a moment ago, people are starting to get less scared of this. Well, for me, there's always, I call it a POS or a period of splat. All things have to go splat, right, before you punch through. And it's not written in the stars. I don't know when it is exactly. But this will tip, right?

And it'll be a combination of things. And for me, I can feel it. I 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. And so, yeah, I think, I don't know that it'll get worse before it gets better. It 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. Well, 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. So this is a train of thinking that's 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. It needs to be over, especially politically. Absolutely. It's going to be a disaster for those who are advocating for COVID policies come November.

Well, 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 going along 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 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 with 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 over over 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. And there's also this feeling, as Mike explained, that it's there. And look, I think there's something even bigger under all of it. We can talk about the politics and we can talk about the science, but you remember Hans Christian Anderson wrote an amazing story called The Emperor's New Clothes. Oh, yeah. Okay. 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. He 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. And 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. And then, right, there's a hush comes over the crowd, and then somebody else said, well, you know, he does appear to be conspicuously nude, right?

And so if you look back at the last 18 months, guys, and ask yourself, okay, who's the kid? Who's the kid in the crowd? We can all probably think, you know, Joe Rogan was a pretty good kid. We were all thinking it. We are. We are. Joe's a kid in the crowd. Ben Shapiro's a kid in the crowd.

You, 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 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 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. Okay. So 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, even little prepositions, right? That's a big, big, big deal. Yeah, and if you listen to them talk, Tapper at one point says that they're asymptomatic, a bunch of these 40%. They just detected it. And, well, maybe it's because they're getting money. I like what you were saying about the kid in the crowd. That's the story. But I also wonder if there's another trope there in that the king is demanding of the subjects the subjects do as i say or else and then the jester mocks him and everyone laughs and he says

don't laugh at me and the jester mocks him again and that depowers the despot that's right so that that's that's you know possible that's kind of how i see you know joe rogan he's a comedian and when he does his show and he does his comedy when he does entertainment be it serious or otherwise people like being a part of it. It feels good. So it's not necessarily the same thing as the kid saying, you know, you have no clothes and everyone kind of being like, well, he said it. I guess he's right. But also people feeling like now it's okay because everyone's laughing together. The point is it had to be the kid because the adults couldn't do it.

Now, in this corollary, look, it could have been Jake Tapper 18 months ago, but it wasn't. It could have been Anderson Cooper. It could have... Go down the list and look at all of the journalists who could have been that kid, who could have been Rogan. What did it take to really start

the splat series of dominoes to go? It took a comedian who got famous for eating maggots on a reality show. I don't think he ate them. No, no, no. He would eat one to shame the man that did it. Oh, yeah, no. Joe would eat a maggot.

Are you kidding? And a kickboxer and a martial artist. That's what we needed to get Robert Malone out there to get the whole getter thing happening. People never know how it's going to start and we never know how it's going to splat. But it's almost always the result of an unlikely voice. But it's amazing

how I'm just flabbergasted at the thought that Joe Rogan is our generation's Walter Cronkite. Steve 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, it's never the politicians or the people in prominence that are the significant historical figures. It'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. I absolutely want to talk about labor and everything. I want to talk about this story real quick because it segues into a discussion about jobs and labor. We have this from the Post Millennial. Nearly 80% of Americans believe U.S. is in a state of decay. The poll found that 76.8% of respondents believe American society and. is in a state of decay. The poll found that 76.8% of respondents believe American society and culture is in a state of decay. A poll from the Trafalgar Group and Convention of States Action published on Thursday revealed basically what I just said.

Just 9.8% of respondents said the country is in a state of progress. So 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, then it seems to me like what we're actually seeing is tribalism. Joe 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. That 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? But it's where both sides are probably looking at each other as the problem, as the decay in this country. You know what I mean? But it's not both sides. Look how many sides are really involved in the rot. Our journalists let us down in ways that we can't even imagine. Our politicians, of course, are in it for the next election, and they've let us down in, I think, a pretty equal way. Our scientists have let us down in, I think, a pretty equal way. Our scientists have let us down, not because they're scientists,

but because there's no consensus and they all sound so damn certain. I don't mind you, again, I don't mind you being wrong, but where's the humility? Where did the humility go? Those are three big pillars right there that I think disappointed a lot of people. But here's a fourth and another reason why Rogan matters. Comedians. Our comedians have let us down. The court jester that you referenced in Anderson's tale, where is he, right? Now, Chappelle's doing Yeoman's work, in my view, but I look around, I see a lot of comedians who, well, to be fair, there wasn't much they could do for a year virtually.

It's a different world. You know, they were hunkered down too. But the carefulness, the carefulness with which comedy has unfolded or failed to unfold, and we can blame cancel culture, we can blame speech, you know, there's plenty to talk about why. But they let us down too. Nobody was holding anybody's feet to the fire in a really meaningful way. Some people. And that's why, you know, I like the story of the emperor's clothes, right?

And it does feel to me like it represents a decay. It was scientists in establishment institutions. It was journalists for the corporate press. It was mainstream politicians who are worried about their donors they're all the ones who let us down don't forget social media oligarchs this was their time to shine man shout out to spotify for keeping this knowledge on the radio yeah absolutely i mean which robert malone the censorship that we deal with on on youtube the censorship on twitter the suppressing of of political stories. It is all of these people standing there watching the emperor,

which I guess just is the narrative. Nobody wanted to be the person who would call out and say, hey guys, this doesn't make sense, does it? As soon as anybody did, the entire crowd turned and yelled, you're right wing, evil, evil. And so now, over the past couple of years, we not only had Joe Rogan, we had Ricky Gervais that was at the Oscars or whatever,

when he just roasted all of them. Golden Globes, that's what it was. We've had Ryan Long. I mean, Ryan Long has been putting out videos that have been gaining popularity because he's not a right-wing guy. He's just a comedian who's poking fun. But we've got Dr. Robert Malone.

We've got Brett Weinstein. You do have scientists, researchers, and academics who have been speaking up. But when we look to our institutions, that's what's failed us. Now, Joe Rogan is interesting because he kind of occupies both spaces. He's got his Netflix specials. He's got his mainstream arena tours. He's on Spotify. He's on iTunes.

But he's always been an independent voice standing up for himself and what he believes in and 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 they listen to his show and then when he speaks out and does challenge the system and does say f you to to all the lies he does point at the emperor and say you're not wearing any clothes and i don't care i can make a long list of things 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. He'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, anybody 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. So he has a measure of the humility that's lacking in science, in my view. He 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. Well, 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 deciding what it is immediately. And the way 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

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. So I want to ask, you know, looking back at this poll, I'm wondering why people feel that the country is in a state of decay. Well, it's a materials issue as well. We're on 150-year-old materials when we're working with steel. It's super heavy. It's decaying. Things are rusting.

And, of course, the economy is trying to... Here we go. I want to ask you about graphene. No, no, no. We'll get into that. I think that we're literally decaying materials-wise. And people don't understand that there could be a solution. We're going to talk about graphene in a little bit.

That's a ridiculous segue, Ian. No, I think it's part of the decay that people feel. I do agree, but that's not what people are talking about. They're talking about culture. It's a society and culture. The water we drink. I can help. I can help with this.

I see what he's trying to do, and I see what you're trying to do. And what I might suggest is at the root of this is what I think they call the second law of thermodynamics, right? We're living in a state of entropy. We're in a disintegrating universe. To your point, rust never sleeps. Sooner or later, it's coming for all the steel in the world. But it's also coming for our best thoughts and our best ideas and the things that we hold most dear. That stuff also has a shelf life and it has to be nurtured. It has to be watered. It has to be challenged. And when we stop doing that and except having our belly scratched

or letting ourselves be patted on the head, right? That's a bad substitute for that. And that's not how you fight Newton's second law. Well, I agree with you. But I think we have to have a more direct segue into this idea. There is infrastructure decay in this country. Our roads are falling apart. Our bridges are falling apart. We're not interested in these big projects.

I often talk about how I'm in New York and I'm crossing the Williamsburg Bridge just looking at this monolith of a structure that's existed since before I was born. As far as I know, it's just there and I get to use it. Nobody charges me any money for it. I can walk right across it. And 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. When I look at this country as in a state of decay, it's because it's for this reason.

I see people self-interested, trying to extract as much as they can. They 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 drowning. There's no community anymore. But 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 that we actually

are seeing people come together around certain ideas and that decay is actually being reversed the 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 uh you know 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 does their own research and actually gets their information from different sources and is able to actually discern information for themselves rather than just hear opinions and talking points that is the establishment narrative. So 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.

I think your metaphor is pretty great. I mean, if the economy that we're talking about here or our country is the Titanic, right? And if we're talking a post-iceberg Titanic, right? The damage has been rendered, right? We're on the clock and things are slowly devolving if that's if that's where we are right now what's going on on the deck right some people are taking to china some people are angling for lifeboats some men are doing about the most incredibly selfless thing there is and stepping aside others aren't others are putting on wigs and dressing

like women to get on the boats meanwhile you got a captain who's got so much nobility baked into him that he's absolutely 100% going down with the ship. And then you have four dudes who fascinate me more than anybody else. The guys in the string quartet who are playing Near My God to Thee, providing a soundtrack unlike any other for one of the greatest, weirdest disasters of all time. And then you have the cook. True story. The last guy And then you have the cook. 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 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. I'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 these rich. Not only are they taking the little trinkets, they're taking our fuel. By printing money, they're ruining our economy. They're destroying any hope we have of getting out of here. My 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, after the lockdowns. It was with the captains of The Deadliest Catch. And I said to Sig 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? 15 days to flatten the curve. We're coming together. We're going to do it. We're all in the same boat, right? 15 days to flatten the curve, we're coming together, we're going to do it, we're all in the same boat. Oh, bullcrap. You know what? We're all in the same storm. But to your point, our boats are very different. That guy's in a dinghy. That guy's in a yacht, right? That guy's in a freighter. That guy's hanging on to a piece of driftwood, wondering if anybody's going to pick him up, right? So we have never been in the same boat ever once, but for the first time in my life, we really truly were in the same storm. Now, dude, that's amazing because if you think of every other disaster that you've lived

through, right? I 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? We've got plagues of ants. We've got all this other stuff. But they all affect very, very specific parts of our country. This was different. This turned our whole country into the Titanic. And whether you're rearranging the life, the deck chairs, we're playing near my God today. You know, everybody's got their part. It was the world too.

Like 9-11 brought the US together kind of for a few weeks, but this is the whole world. Let's talk about that decay in a more material sense. We got the story from CNBC. Hiring falters in December as payrolls rise only 199,000,

though the unemployment rate fell to 3.9%. I love this because the story was published on a Friday. And 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. Because this is bad news. But 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. And I know, especially you, Mike, have tons of experience with how the jobs market and labor works in this country. Or doesn't.

Or doesn't. You know, look, it's a funny thing. The existence of opportunity is an inconvenient truth for a lot of people. And 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? It was really just better PR for welders, steamfitters, pipefitters, mechanics, and so forth. These 11 million jobs that are currently open right now, the vast majority don't require a four-year degree.

They require training. So you're probably old enough to remember shop class was a thing once upon a time. Shooting club was too. That's right. And home ec was too. Yes. Like real skills. And whether you were into that or not, the fact that they existed in high schools gave a whole generation a front row seat to the optics of labor.

You could at least look at a job and understood, understand at a glance that it exists, right? That doesn't happen anymore. We took shop class out of high school. And that, by the way, was no mean trick, right? It used to be the vocational arts. So we took the art out of it, called it Votek, changed Votek to shop. Then we walked it around behind the barn and shot it in the head. And when we did that, the unintended consequences, we're still seeing them. People wonder why college is so expensive. Well, hell, we just spent 50 years telling an entire generation that they're

completely screwed without a four-year degree. So we free up a bottomless pile of money to borrow in pursuit of that degree. Meanwhile, 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. So 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. And that's what that headline's all about. Yeah. People don't seem to understand this. When we talk about, they say, you know, 4 million people unemployed, or what is the number? Four and a half million people quit their jobs last month. Last month. They quit their jobs. And then you have 11 million job openings. And 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. So there may be a job opening in certain trades or in certain industries that don't correlate. So we have that problem. I 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. And I don't mean the math. I mean, quite literally, how to come about resources and food. So, you know, I talked to the average person from my hometown or that I've, that I, you know, 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.

And in order to get a good job, I need a degree. Whereas my mentality has always been, I suppose, maybe because I raked leaves for money or mowed lawns or shoveled snow, you know, growing up in Chicago, if I needed money, I'd have to go figure out how I can do it. So I'm a little kid. And so, you know, I asked my dad, like, what do we do? I want to buy a toy he's like well get make money i'm like how and he's like i don't know figure it out so me and my

brother we we make kool-aid we go to the we go to the park and we have a pitcher and we'd sell glasses of kool-aid at the baseball games or we'd we'd get take a rake and go ask people if they want to give you money and i'd knock on doors hey i'm willing to do a job for you in exchange for money i didn't need a degree i didn't need it need to go and ask an employer to employ me or fill out forms. It was literally like I'd ask another person if there was an exchange to be made. I feel like our generation, my generation, doesn't understand that. Well, they're being given a binary choice, and it's a false choice, right? It's not one or the other.

I remember in the debates, Rubio said something. He said what the country needs are fewer philosophers and more welders. And my social blew up. My foundation blew up. They were like, hey, this guy gets it. He's saying what you've been saying. And I said, well, actually, no. I'm not saying the problem with society is too many philosophers. I'm saying it would be nice if we had more philosophers who could run an even bead. And it'd be nice if we had more philosophers who could run an even bead, and it'd be nice if we had more welders who could talk intelligently about Nietzsche and Descartes, and it's not like one or the other. You can't say, oh, I'm going to be a leaf raker

and not be curious about the rest of the world. The thing I didn't have when I went to community college in 1980 was this thing, right? I didn't have this little handheld device that ties me into 98% of all the known information in the world. So if I just have a healthy sense of curiosity and an Internet connection, all right, well, guess what? Two weeks ago, I watched a lecture at MIT for free. Now, that thing would have cost thousands of dollars. But it's now, it's all available virtually for free to anybody. And 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, that's a big lie. And that's messing stuff up.

There's a great joke real quick. Someone posted on Reddit once, if you could go back in time and say one thing to shock the people of the past, what would you say? And someone commented, I have in my pocket a device which grants me access to the summation of human knowledge. I use it to argue with strangers and look at pictures of cats. That's a great quote.

I definitely don't want to generalize too much but mike i wanted to ask you this with colleges raking in so much money with 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 what's your kind of understanding of that especially 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. Well, there it is. Just 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 Mike is anti-education. I'm not. For the record, I'm going to be as clear as I can on your podcast. If you're not educated, you're screwed. All right? Now, having said that, if you think the only place you can get an education is a university, you're screwed in a different way.

That's the big deception. We've got it baked into our heads that the only place to get a worthwhile education is the most expensive place in the world. That's why we have $1.7 trillion in student loans. And obscenely, that's why we foundation to work in usually the construction fields. Those are the most popular, welders in particular. I 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. They need their truck for their business. Big old diesel truck. These things, they don't grow on trees. Nobody's arguing to pay off the loan on that truck.

These are people who build our homes. These are people who keep the previously aforementioned infrastructure running. These are people who are fighting on the front line against the second law of thermodynamics. Nobody's proposing for a moment that we help subsidize the tool that allows them to do that job. And yet, we will argue from the rooftops about why it's good and fair to pay off a college debt. What do you think about paying off all the interest on all the college loans and then make the loan companies eat the interest? You've got to clarify.

Paying off – Just make it good to zero. All interest is now zero. The government stealing money and using it to pay for other people. No, no, no, no, no, no. Eliminating interest rates is just interest rates. Okay. You don't got to get –

I'll give you specifics. I have like $19,000 in student loan debt I've had for 21 years. I 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. I've also had it on forbearance at times when I couldn't afford it, which to me is like if I just got that interest to zero, I'd owe like $12,000 because everything I've paid is just paying back interest. This is, I think, similar to what you were saying one of the issues i have is i think the interest rates are predatory and a lot of young people are being effectively ripped off so i think there's a good middle ground and maybe we can suspend interest rates but you got to pay back what you spent something like that but the issue is the way that the narrative is framed why don't we talk about any other debt why why is it that we 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? Well, let's talk about other areas where we can better the country or give people some relief. You like UBI? Do I like it? Yeah, what do you think about it? I don't like it. And you know what? I don't have a great reason other than I don't believe the primary purpose of work is transactional.

I don't believe you guys are sitting around this table for the paycheck. I'm sure you enjoy it, but it's a crooked road that we're all on. And if you're only here for the money, my guess is you're not going to have much of an audience. Money is a tool. It's a symptom. And to get these cameras, these microphones, and then the message is limitlessly valuable. It's a symptom of a well-intended and well-executed plan. Unless you're born into it.

Well, look, nobody starts this race at the same line. It's not fair. I get all that. I get all that. I get all that. And as far as the interest goes, look, I'm really of two minds, right? I really pity, genuinely pity the pressure that we've put on a whole generation of kids. When 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.

Now, 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? I don't. But 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 to pay off. I knew I was getting into it when I got into it. I didn't understand compound interest to the nth degree, but I knew that there was going to be compound interest. And financial literacy is part of this too. Teaching that with home ec and some semblance of a skilled trade and getting a kid through high school, understanding compound interest, understanding basic skills, teaching work ethic for God's sakes. There's a way to do it.

What 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? What's a few starting steps? Well, 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. We have been trying to expand and build, and we are jammed up because there's a labor shortage, there's a materials shortage. So should a young person just cold call construction companies and let them know I'm ready? Listen, you'll find I'm very, very careful with cookie cutter advice. But if it were me, yeah, I'd do what he did.

I'd knock on doors and say, I want to make money. And here's what I'll do. I'll show up early. I'll stay late. I'll take a bite of the crap sandwich when it comes along. What do you need? What skill should I dedicate the next six months of my life to learning? If it's welding, so be it.

Who's your best welder? By the way, I'll work for free. I'll start Utah. I'm telling you, I've never seen this kind of opportunity available. And 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.

Those jobs don't pay enough. That's because your capitalist, greedy, rapacious bosses are just simply not offering a fair wage. And that's what my buddies on the left say. My buddies on the right say universally, well, the skills gap, you got 11 million open positions because people are fundamentally lazy and shiftless. And that's the problem. It's a binary lie.

Spoiled might be another word to describe some of these individuals. One 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 a decade, we're sleeping on couches.

When 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. But when I talk 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. And then I would tell them, did you know that I sleep on a couch right now? When 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. He'd wake me up at 2 in the morning smoking pot, being like, what up? And it was funny, but it was stressful at times. And then I talked to these other people that like, I really want to do that job. And I'm like, well, you're making money. Why don't you go buy a plane ticket? And they're like, oh, my rent is $2,000 and I want to have this people that like, I really want to do that job. And I'm like, well, you know, you're making money. Why don't you go buy a plane ticket? And like, oh, my rent is two grand and I want to have this really nice apartment in Williamsburg. And I just be like, I don't even have that.

So what's your priority? Well, comfort. It was comfort, not the mission. So you brought that point that no one here is doing this for the paycheck. And I'll say this too. I mean, just the paycheck. Just the paycheck. You know, as long as I've known Luke, Luke got started with like a handy cam and he was

confronting politicians and powerful elites because he was passionate about it. I got started with a little tiny GoPro. I just put on my computer screen and I would talk about things I saw in the news that I had feelings about from there. You planted a seed and I just wanted to keep doing it. I 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. It 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. Now here we are with a company, we we're building more and i gotta be honest um the money is is is not a factor in what our plans are i i you know i i don't put together say the cast castle vlog where we have you know the chickens and stuff because i was like man we're gonna make so much money money on this i was like i want to do something cultural right we don't make money off of it but we're having these videos we're showing people behind the scenes. We're building

culture. We're trying to inspire young people. That's everything we're doing. We're fortunate enough to be able to expand. Also, 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.

Fighting censorship. With that company, I could take 50 million and hire like 50 developers and start building a factory where we'll mass produce Raspberry Pis or something like it, preloaded with the software, turn it around, keep it...

If they're willing to work. And it's complex to launch that system. You needed like a lot of prep and oversight. Well, I also just want to say... Of course, if they're willing to work as well. Yeah, I also want to say

it's very hard to find a lot of labor. Thank you, Tim, for the couches. I appreciate those very much. They're very important for me. But 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 cookie cutter, perfect vision of their lives when other jobs like manual labor, welders, diesel mechanics, that kind of lifestyle is always looked down on. I think there's a programming of our youth that is absolutely destructive, and it incentivizes the seeking of comfort and ignoring and pushing away any kind of discomfort at all costs and portraying yourself as this perfect, amazing image that has all the filters, that looks perfect, that has all the money, that has all the wealth. And when you glorify and keep repeating that image of what you're expected to be, when you're given an opportunity to work hard, to weld, to be on a farm, psychologically, it's not appealing to a lot of people who just want that perfect Instagram photo, who want that recognition, who want that fame without understanding the hard work that goes behind it.

So I think there's another element, especially with the conditioning that happens with the social media algorithms that needs to be addressed because I think it is absolutely destructive towards the future of this country. Have you over the last, and sorry to interrupt there, I'd be about to launch an idea. Over the last 20 years, have you been at this, 15, 17 years or something? What, social or business? Just the dirty stuff. Dirty jobs started 20 years ago, but I'm 40 years in this business. Have you noticed since the dawning of the YouTuber that people now just want to be a YouTuber?

They don't want to work. I saw a poll and it was like, what does people now just want to be a YouTuber? They don't want to work? I saw a poll and it was like, what does the young kid want to be in America? And China was astronaut and America was YouTuber. Yeah, I've seen some of that. I don't disagree with you. I look at it more like an accelerant than I do like a prime mover.

To me, when American Idol hit, that's when I thought, you know, and that was not a social thing, right? That was a phenomenon. That was a television phenomenon that transparently elevated idolatry. We actually put it in the title, all right? It's not American Icon. It's American Idol. So we're going to make fame the thing, the single-minded proposition.

And then we're going to watch as aspiring dreamers follow their dream. And we're going to see how it shakes out. There can be only one. This is like Highlander. But the other story of American Idol that nobody talks about that I find infinitely more interesting are the number of people who learn for the first time in their short lives that they can't sing for crap, all right? People who have been told their entire life that if you have a dream, you can live it. All you have to do is never, ever quit. Persistence, we're told, is enough to realize your dream. Lady Gaga has said it. I've heard her say it after she won her

Academy Award. I heard Beyonce after Grammys. I'm proof, little girl, that you can just follow your dream and look what can happen. Well, what the hell do they know about who's listening? That's why I told you before, Ian, I'm stingy with advice because I don't know who's listening. The odds are very, very good that there are people in that audience that need to hear the exact opposite. They need to be told it's time to quit. They need to be told staying the course only makes sense if you're going in the right direction. And if you never tell people that, then you get the first four or five episodes of American Idol, which are very instructive, when we see the 21-year-old dreamer learn on national television, usually from Simon Cowell, for the first time in his or her life, that ain't going to happen for them.

Now, what does that mean for social? When social comes along, it just throws gas on a flame. Well, Mike, everyone needs a trophy. If they don't get a trophy, we're not all the same. We're not all equal, just like our communist kind of philosophy overlords who want to push this doctrine on us that's absolutely insane and calls for more centralization want us to believe in. So I kind of wanted to kind of

ask you, you know, what do you think is leading to this kind of degradation of being a blue-collar worker? What do you think is some of the leading causes of people not wanting to do these hard jobs and then wanting to be the celebrity, be always famous? So the most charitable answer, and probably the truest, is just a straight-up, honest-to-God misunderstanding. There are stigmas and stereotypes and myths and misperceptions that are keeping millions of people from looking at these trades. Of the 1,400 people that have gone through my foundation, hundreds are welding,

and many, many of them are making north of six figures. This is so common and yet so shocking to so many people because they've been told their whole life that that welding certification or that plumbing certification or that heating, air conditioning, HVAC, whatever it is, these things have been relegated to consolation prizes. Vocational consolation prizes. This is what you do if you didn't get the degree. This is what you do if you're not the American Idol. You get in line, you pick up a welding torch, or you pick up the mallet,

and you start making little rocks out of big rocks. And that's the narrative. Well, all of that's wrong. You can make a wonderful living and you can grow a meaningful career by learning a skill and applying it. What would be the first skill you would suggest? Or maybe like you said earlier, it's different for everybody. I'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. Nobody talks about the incredible number of small businesses that begin with the mastery of a skill, not with the acquisition of a diploma, right? I'm not saying that it doesn't happen that way. I'm just saying that we got really, really good at telling one narrative. When college got the PR campaign it needed back in the late 70s, we needed more people going to big schools. We needed more doctors. We needed

more scientists. That was real. And the PR push that came with it was also real. The problem is, like all PR, the push for college was terrible because it came at the expense of all other forms of education. Regarding 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. I would love to see that evolution. Is that something you ever think about? Not much because the medical field has a set of challenges that are outside of my lane. But I will tell you, just by way of example, I took a young woman named Chloe Hudson

on Fox & Friends about a month ago. She came through our foundation, and she wanted to be a doctor. Specifically, she wanted to be a plastic surgeon. Super, super short version of the story, but she was ready to sign on the dotted line, and she was looking at roughly $400,000 in medical debt over the course of whatever it was, six years. And she just freaked.

She just said, I'm not going to do it. So she applies for a work ethic scholarship from my foundation. We give her $6,000, $7,000 maybe. Maybe. We didn't even pay for the whole thing. We just helped. She got what she needed though. Today, four and a half years later, she's making 130 grand a year at Joe Gibbs Aerospace. She's one of their lead welders. This is a woman who's 28 years old,

beautiful, defies every preexisting concept you have of what a welder is supposed to look like, and she's killing it. She's killing it. So part of my job today is to talk about all the stuff we're talking about now, but it's also to get Chloe Hudson on a billboard, to get her on the TV, to suggest to the producers of American Idol that we could have another show called American Icon, and we could start treating people like Chloe Hudson the way the producers of Idol treated Adam Lambert. And guess what? That's what Dirty Jobs is.

For the last 20 years, I treat a sewer inspector the way Access Hollywood treats Brad Pitt. That's my whole deal, whether it's on the foundational side, the missionary side, or the mercenary side. It would be awesome to have a show where they're on stage building the foundational side, the missionary side, or the mercenary side. It would be awesome to have a show where they're on stage building the piping system, and then they've rushed the water through at the end and see who did it right. See whose pipes hold water. Yeah. Yeah.

That's a great show. Well, usually the blue-collar workers are a lot nicer and a lot cooler than, of course, even all the top-list celebrities. When COVID hit, I was in the middle of New York City. I was like, I was done with this. I moved out to New Hampshire and I met an amazing welder and diesel mechanic named Jay Noon. He also does man camp up in New Hampshire with the Free State Project where he goes out. And he literally has all the children from the community come in from the whole Free State Project and says, OK, we're going to be building stuff.

We're going to be welding stuff. We're going to be breaking stuff down. we're going to be building stuff. We're going to be welding stuff. We're going to be breaking stuff down. We're going to be building stuff back up. And 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. And let's be honest here, 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.

Let me ask you this, Mike. Before 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. I'll just leave it at that. And then we got our CTO on it, so everything should be back. Sorry about the interruption. Are we going to get swatted?

I hope not. Is this just a precursor to another stop in prison? I think we have go past that. That's the end of that. The 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. D-Douse. We've got three, we actually have four backup lines, and they all dropped at the same time. Weird. Yeah. Did you get the part where Mike was dancing?

I should have warned you guys. I have a lot of powerful enemies. Yes. Was the micro jumping up on the table? That wasn't on the screen? You didn't get me and Mike dancing on the table. Let me ask you a question in line with what Luke was just asking about. So there's this trope, I guess, this – I guess you can call it a trope, that liberals

won't survive the apocalypse, that people in cities, they don't know how to survive, they don't know how to hunt. And there's a lot of people who are more rural who believe they'll probably fare better. I think it's a bit of a fair assessment. You know, Luke was saying these Starbucks hippies aren't going to do so well when the ish hits the fan. And maybe these guys who got farms or at least know how to deal with chickens might do better. But, you know, you've traveled around. You've met people of all different backgrounds and all the different dirty jobs. How do you feel about that?

Do you think that's just a myth? Well, if you had to choose a side, I mean, it's walking dead time, okay? Like you're going to have to hunker down in a place that is primarily populated with well-educated, thoughtful writers and thinkers or hunters and gatherers and builders? What team do you go on when things get sporty? Well, that's why I'd say I'd go out to the countryside and find some more conservative people. Look around.

I mean, look, you've answered your own question. I can see where you're coming from, and from where I've been, I know what I would choose. Look, it's weird for me after 20 years at Dirty Jobs because people see that show and they figure that I'm that guy. I mean, they figure that I can fix or build or replicate anything. And I don't know why because I never do it on the show. I simply bear witness and work as an apprentice to people who can actually do it. I actually can't. I mean, that gene is recessive.

My granddad had it, but I didn't, you know. Dirty Jobs was a love letter to him. That's another story. My point is, you know, when we lost power for four days in Northern California at the height of the lockdowns, I'd never felt more helpless. There'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.

Everything was just crapping the bed contemporaneously. It was a remarkably grim time. And then our TV, you know, there's no TV. There's no, and it's like my whole life is held together with pipes and cables and wires and the men and women who have the know-how to fix them when they go down. Whatever little hiccup you just had here, I had a similar one during that time, and we lost a primetime TV show. We were 50 minutes through, and we lost the whole thing.

Had to start from scratch. But that's nothing when you think about real power outages. Look, the heroes of our workforce, and I use that word very, very, very rarely, but I use it now because we're in short supply. It's the linemen. It's the people that are, anybody who shares my addiction to smooth roads and runways and affordable electricity and indoor plumbing, we're the people who need to be most involved in this conversation. Do you run afoul of people that maybe promote or just stand by and watch planned obsolescence? Does that come up constantly? Are you like, we've got to fix this thing because it's broken because it was built to break so that they can sell us another one later?

I mean, yes is the short answer. The funnier answer is I played Tim Allen's younger brother on Last Man Standing. And the first episode I did with him, we were standing backstage waiting for our entrance. And we were talking about it. 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. But, of course, it can't because the whole thing is like two pieces of extruded plastic. And it wasn't designed to be fixed.

It was designed to fail. And yeah, we missed our cue because Tim Allen was screaming about planned obsolescence. Have you ever seen the TED talk from the guy who tried to make a toaster from scratch? Yeah. It's amazing, isn't it? He couldn't do it.

Can't do it. Can't be done. So it could be done in the sense that maybe if he tried making a steel toaster, but the plastic he could not do. Right. It's amazing to me that the technology we have in the civilization is dependent upon hyper-specific specialties. A computer is not just made by one person who's going 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. It 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, 300, 400, more? Probably more. The guy who mines the copper? Yeah. Isn't it funny though about how when you

talk about what it takes to make this thing, right? Or the computer, right? Whatever little piece of tech you're most currently enamored of. All of the companies responsible want to position themselves as innovators because there's great sexiness that comes with being an innovator. I don't care whether you're Apple or Google or Intel. You go down the list and they all talk about their incredible ability to think ahead and innovate when in reality, their real talent, the dirty jobs talent, is their ability to replicate. It's not enough to make one of these things. You guys all want one.

In fact, if you can't make a billion of them these days, you don't really have a business. So language matters. And 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 because 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.

It's similar with art too. If you can repeat yourself, if you're a master of repetition, you can be a master artist because you just keep doing it. And then it's going to come around when that thing is when it's needed and you've got to – as opposed to innovating. That's the scarcity model, right? If you're making art for the masses or technology for the masses, then you better have the duplication gene down.

But if you're looking for, what, NFTs, if you're looking for what nfts if you're looking for uh originals you know there's only there's only one whistler's mother there's only one mona lisa but you could you could say that an original is a bunch of replications mixed pushed together into one new uber rep replication that people consider original like when i write music i take notes from songs that i heard in the past and create a new song. Yeah, we're all standing on the shoulders of giants. Sure. There's a great anime.

It's called Dr. Stone. Have you ever heard of it? No. I can't imagine you would have, but I've actually not watched a whole lot of it. But the premise is, I'm going to get this wrong for fans of Dr. Stone, they'll get mad at me.

This genius kid and his friend, I guess everybody turns to stone in the world for some reason. And then thousands of years later, for some reason, this ultra genius and his friend or whatever, or he de-stones them or whatever. Basically the premise is he's this really smart kid in a prehistoric time or an underdeveloped time, and he's developing technology. So I've only seen a couple episodes, but he's like, I'm going to make a cell phone. And the episode is actually him directing people to find the metals and explaining how vacuum tubes work.

And I'm like, it's like Magic School Bus, but for anime fans. I thought it was actually really fascinating to have this action-oriented show for kids explain how a vacuum tube works as he's putting it together and making the glass.

So it's fascinating. He's like, okay, to make the tube, we need to make glass. Here's what we need to find to make the glass. Here'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. I think it was brilliant. Because when you're 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 people, especially millennials, you know, I should 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. You made my own point better than I did. That's what I was trying to say when 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, right? I remember, do you ever watch Star Trek? Oh, absolutely. Don't get me started on Star Trek. What's the prime directive? The prime directive in Star Trek. Well, you can't interfere with another culture unless they've reached warp capabilities. Correct.

All right, good for you. And it's only because once they reach warp, they're inevitably going to encounter other civilizations. They have to. Right. So I'm hiking through Peru 15, 20 years ago, Cusco to Machu Picchu. I'm with some buddies, and we hired some Sherpas to help us because we had a lot of gear, and we didn't want to carry it all. And these guys were unbelievable.

They're giant lungs, giant heart. They would start walking around 11 in the afternoon. We'd start walking around, sorry, 11 in the morning. We'd start walking around 6. They'd pass us by 4, running in bare feet, right? Con permiso, con permiso. Anyway, I love these guys. And I had a Walkman.

I had a Sony Walkman at the time, and I was listening to Soundgarden, Super Unknown had just come out. And I am just walking through the clouds listening to this. And it's so great. And on the last day, I thought, you know what? These guys were so awesome. I put the headphones on one of the guys who had never been below 12,000 feet in his whole life, by the way, never heard an electric guitar. And I put on Sp spoon man. Okay. So watching his face, listening to Chris Cornell sing and through those headphones, it was just like, I knew in a second, this was,

this was my gift. And I, and I've been tortured ever since because a, like somewhere in the Andes is probably a stone-built thing that looks like a Walkman. But then, like, what happened when the batteries went out and now the magic sounds are gone forever? What's that going to do? There's this fascinating quote I heard that you could give Christopher Columbus unlimited resources and he would never build you a nuclear submarine. Because the understanding of nuclear energy, it's beyond anything they could put together. It's like a kid. It's like adults aren't capable of doing the thought processes, and that's part of why we have young minds to do that.

And why are they still in office politically? There's something that I always something that I perhaps mistakenly believe is fascinating. Probably a lot of people think I'm an idiot. But I love asking people this question. Fine line, man. Fine line between fascination and idiocy. But I've realized something when I would ask people this question. How do

coal power plants work? How do they create electricity? You know, I'd imagine, right? So what do they do? How do we turn coal into electricity? Well, you got a turbine primarily. And I mean, first you got to go into the earth, you got to get it out. We live not far, we're sitting not far from where that happens. And then you got bituminous and you got anthracite and the approaches are slightly different. But in the end, the coal's got to wind up inside a turbine. You're getting way more specific than I normally get. Well, go ahead with your explanation because I have a slightly different, but in the end, the coal's got to wind up inside a turbine. You're getting way more specific than I normally get.

Well, go ahead with your explanation because I have a slightly different... Well, we just boil water. Oh, okay. Right. Great. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You're like, here's the chemical breakdown. We burn stuff.

We boil water. Yeah. Steam pressure spins a turbine. That's it. Rotating magnets generates an electrical current and vice versa. How does nuclear energy? How do we take nuclear radioactive uranium and turn it into electricity? We boil it even hotter.

We boil water. Yeah. Steam pressure spins a turbine. And then there's the solar fields. How do we, you know, a lot of people think it's all photovoltaic, but actually many of them just direct uh uh someone corrected me someone did correct me on this once we we direct all these mirrors towards a vat of salt water i believe it's salt molten salt molten salt it's even more because it holds the heat for

longer and then creates steam pressure spins a turbine boiling water yeah boiling water so you're talking about uh what do you do when your power is out and you can't you know get back going well the problem is getting a turbine yeah there's your problem so it's like even even understanding something as basic as steam pressure can spin something you know it's not particularly complicated how do you build a turbine you're gonna need some copper you have to get a lot of copper and coil it do it properly it's it's crazy i just finished a show called uh six degrees which sounds a little bit like Dr. Stone. It's kind of a magic school bus sort of thing,

surprising connections that take you down this serendipitous line of invention. But part of the thing that I really wanted to do with that show was, like, there were a few things that really just chapped my ass, 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 just follow the electricity back from the plug, you know, you're going to get to a spinning turbine. And the odds are very, very, very high

that turbine is being powered by gas or oil. And you just can't separate the two. For all the virtue in the world, you just can't do it. We got storage issues with power. If we want to use wind, what happens when wind is low, solar doesn't work at night. Geothermal's fantastic, but you've got to be in the right positioning, the right place for it. And so for the time being, we are heavily dependent on fossil fuels,

which means burning them and creating a lot of carbon. Lightning's going to change. When we can start harnessing lightning, we're going to boil a lot of water. Nail a battery, yeah. And you know why we can't, though? We can't predict everything we can. Well, it's just we can't predict voltage amperage the bolts are seemingly random to us yeah you 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 the issue is

we can't we can't properly measure the output so while it seems to a lot of people like oh you should be able to no we can't because what all of our electrical systems have to be they're specific can can the the the can we handle the load typically you're right the load is way beyond anything we normally deal with but we also just don't know what it is yeah slightly and it's like yeah well i think the big point is the fundamentals boiling water is fundamental Building a turbine is more sophisticated. The jobs that are going wanting right now are fundamental. They're fundamental jobs. And 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. It's not just a skill gap. It's a will gap.

It's a lack of will on the part of many, many, many millions of people who rely on the people with the skill. We're just not properly gobsmacked. I'm going to tell you a little personal story here. My sink just broke a couple days ago, and now it's been leaking underneath. I was like, well, I've got to hire a guy to fix it. I think I'm going to fix it. Everybody's got that story.

I want to get down there and fix it. I think I'm going to fix that, too. Everybody's got that story. I want to get down there and fix it. I'll tell you this, man. When it hits the fan, very few people are going to be crying for academics. BuzzFeed reporters. But they're going to be begging for a plumber. They're going to say, please make my poop go away. What do I do with it? That's my whole life now.

I ask that question every day. How long do you want to wait for the refrigerator repairman, for the plumber? And speaking of, you said you were in the sewer. What was life like in the sewers? I've never been in one before. It's pretty great, man. Tell me more. I've been in one before.

Well, I mean, if you want to get back to the fundamentals, I mean, that's how Dirty Jobs started with a sewer inspector in San Francisco in 2002. And it's another world. It's the classic out-of-sight, out-of-mind thing. But this is a 120-year-old system, millions of bricks down there, many, many, many millions of roaches the size of your thumb, countless rats, you're knee-deep, truly, in a river of crap. Good.

How much did they get paid? Oh, that sewer inspector did about, well, it was a city job. So he said, I think it was $82,500. Oh! Wow. Private. We got it. I volunteer to pay more taxes to make sure those people get more money, man.

Look, he loved his job. I mean, $82,000 a year. How many years ago was this? This was close to 20. Yeah, that's a lot more compared to what it's worth now. Yeah, that makes sense. But only what? Like equivalent of like 120?

So he's got like a chill job down there? He has no supervision. Yes. He has nobody monitoring him. His job was he hammered out the bricks that were starting to rot and replaced them. So all he did, he'd go down there, he'd mix his mortar,

he'd hammer out the bricks that had succumbed to the second law of thermodynamics, and he hammered in a new one. Wearing like a full suit though, right? No. No Tyvek. Like a rubber. rubber now he had a heavy duty rubber suit but this that what people don't understand about sewage is that it's got chemicals and stuff it's corrosive right everything people think their toilet is like different from

their sink like different drains go to different pipes that go to no it all goes to the same basic place so when it rains being in a sewer during a rainstorm is a whole different deal. But also, being in a sewer, it's not just a river of urine and crap coming at you. It's all the stuff that goes down the toilet. It's like a medicine cabinet. It's Q-tips. It's Kotex. Is it just black, though?

No, it's more brown. Really? Some of it is not as thick as you think. Some of it sometimes gets pretty thick. It depends how the fixed film reactors and the lift pumps are functioning. We should do a field trip and investigate further. I mean, we're doing the show live, right? We could be live from the sewers of West Virginia or wherever we are.

Let's go to Super Chats because we got a lot of questions. And don't forget to smash that like button. Subscribe to this channel. Go to TimCast.com. Become a member. And we're going to have a members only segment up around 11 or so p.m. where we're going to, we call it the uncensored segment. And

make sure to help support our work over at TimCast.com. Let's read some of what we got here. Gino Fast says, Mike, would you ever climb Mackinac Bridge again? No. What was that about? The 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? So it's a giant green suspension bridge,

and they've been painting it constantly ever since its construction. It never stops. Once you finish painting it, you just start painting it again. I went there one day to paint the bridge and to go down into some of the towers and to see what the inside looked like and how that maintenance was done. And 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? As a joke on camera, I said to the supervisor, hey, you know what would be fun before we go? And 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, 500, 600 feet above the water. And this guy looks at me and says, okay. And literally my sphincter slams shut. I'm like, oh God. So, so 10 minutes later, I'm walking across the girder and going up the cable and we got a helicopter with a West cam rig on it.

And so, and so we got the best, that segment actually won an Emmy. Wow. Um, but the, the, the business of walking up that cable and changing those,

uh, light bulbs. Like when you look down, when you're 600 feet up and you look down at the water, you've got big freighters coming and going underneath you. They look like the ships in Battleship. Oh, my God. These tiny little things, you know. And it was just one of those shows that took place way up in the air and people loved it. Is it 600 feet above the bridge and then below the bridge it goes more

no it's 600 feet to the water probably to 300 feet above the deck all right we got some we got some big fans invisible dud says Mike Rowe is the equivalent of a modern founding father who else would be on that list great question

I don't know but your sweat pledge you were mentioning before the show was just, yeah. Yeah. 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, right? And the sweat pledge breaks a lot of eggs every year. It's a simple 12-step or 12-tenant pledge that everybody has to sign who applies for a work ethic scholarship.

And there's nothing founding fatherish about it, although the ideas are timeless. You know, it's a shameless love letter to work ethic, delayed gratification, a positive attitude, and a measure of personal responsibility. And I know all those things have become dog whistles and problematic terms for a lot of people, but I'm earnest about that, and I mean it. That combination of qualities is still, I think, your best hope of success. I agree. I think it's meth. I think anybody who wants to insult those ideas,

they can say whatever they want because in 20 years, you'll be successful and they'll be begging for change. I thought you said it's meth, which is so different than meth. And BMA. I got one here from Common Sense Fishing. He says,

I'm an HVAC C20 contractor. Started my business January 1st, 2020. Dirty hands equals clean money. Some HVAC salesmen make 200200,000 to $400,000. Got into the trades after my son passed away in 2006. They can never take a skilled trade away. That dude needs to be on a billboard.

And I mean that. Look, this is my life's work. I'm just an entertainer who hit a show, but the legacy of Dirty Jobs, it was an honest show, and I guarantee this guy would agree, but we profiled a dozen HVAC guys on that show. They all are crushing it, but never mind the money. They love what they do. They're superheroes without capes. They show up to people's homes in Phoenix when

it's 110 outside and they fix the air conditioning. Those people weep. They show up to similar homes in Boston in February where it's 20 degrees inside and they fix the heat. That guy has a measure of job satisfaction that most people are simply not going to experience. And good on him. I think this next comment exemplifies why you've got so many fans, especially. Joshua LeBlanc says, Mike Rowe and Dirty Jobs inspired me to find a great job in the trades. Decided college wasn't for me, and now I make more than I would have if I stayed.

I think... Dude, it's a freaking honor and a privilege to work on a cable TV show and have a guy like you read a tweet like that. Sitting here surrounded by guitars, swords, rocks, and guns. Yes. I think, you know, for me especially, I was told when I was a teenager, you have to go to college. And I was thinking about it and I was like, okay, that's what I'm told to do. And 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, $40,000 now.

In four years, you owe $40,000 plus interest and you have no job prospects. It doesn't seem to make sense for an investor. And so I decided against it. After Occupy Wall Street, I still had people saying, are you going to go to school now? And the craziest thing to me was, I was like, they're asking me to speak at their schools about the streaming and stuff that I'm doing. There'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. I thought that. I'll try and make this point quick, but 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.

But their friends and family members who went to college ended up making six figures and they're rich. That's why you have to go to college to get a good job. But back then the boomers, the, you know, the kids coming out of the, of world war two, you could have a high school diploma and raise a family on that. So you didn't, there was no one telling 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. So in my opinion, the reason they think their success in college was because passionate people went to college,

not because college made people successful. No, look, it tracks. I mean, when my grandfather, to whom Dirty Jobs was dedicated, by the way, went to work, he was 14. He only went to the seventh grade. He wanted something better for his kids than he had. He wanted them to have more choices, better opportunity. It's not because he didn't love what he did. He just wanted more for them. And his kids wanted more for me. And

look, it's part of the fault in our stars because while it's normal to want something better for our kids than we had to your point it's math exponentially it doesn't play out what at what point is better pretty good i mean how are my kids going to have it better than me? Good grief, right? So that thing, there is a thing in all well-intended parents that want to push their kids into something better. We just don't know what better is. It's not more money, that's for sure. Well, you know what my dad would say to me when I was little? What do you want to be when you grow up? And no matter what I'd say, it's a wrong answer.

You know what the right answer is? Happy. So I think that's the mentality he had is, you know, to have a life better than me, I just want to make sure you are happy with your life. Look, and so going back to platitudes, bromides, and so forth, and tropes, here's one that chaps my ass like none of the other ones. It's follow your passion. I hear that.

I hear well-intended people telling kids that every day. So now when I rant on this, people push back and say, well, what good is life without passion? And I say, I'm not saying life without passion is the point. The better platitude is never follow your passion, but always bring it with you. And that's the dirty jobs lesson. I 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, which 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, right? We're still telling kids that's how to do it. The dirty jobs corollary was no, follow opportunity. Go look at where everybody else is going. Go the other direction. When you get there, figure out how to be good at whatever it is. Then, then figure out a way to love it. Yeah.

All right. Eek the Cat says, Mike, what was your favorite episode or job when you were doing Dirty Jobs? Well, there was a time when we ate the cat. What kind of cat? You actually ate a cat? No, I was riffing on the...

I think the handle of this person is eat the cat. Eek. Oh, eek. See, that's again, that's totally different. Meth to math, eek to eat. Very similar. Did Eek use the word favorite? I believe he did.

Is that the question? What's my favorite? Your favorite episode or job when you were doing Dirty Jobs. Well, Eek, the cat. Here's the thing, man. Dirty Jobs really wasn't about the dirt or the job. It was about the people. The dirty little secret of that show

was that it's a talk show in a sewer or on top of a bridge or in an air duct somewhere. And 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. Although there was that time we masturbated the turkey. Yeah, that was an epic story, by the way. Well, maybe we'll have you tell that story in the members only. It's probably best there. Then you can tell like it was over a beer. Yeah, because I don't want to pull

any punches when it comes to the cloaca. Let me read you this one. I saw this one early in the show, and I have to read it. Wimplo says, Mike Rowe, I would listen to you read from the yellow pages. All right. Who's in charge of the screen up there? That's me. Well, I mean, technically, we can both control it.

So type Mike Rowe reads phone book and see what comes up. Oh, you read it, didn't you? Yeah, of course. Of course I read the phone book. No, it's on YouTube somewhere. That's amazing. People told me, for years, people were like, I'd listen to you read the phone book. So one day I did. I just read the phone book. No, it's on YouTube somewhere. That's amazing. People told me, for years, people were like, I'd listen to you read the phone book. So one day I did.

I just read the phone book. There it is. There it is. I read the freaking phone book. And people still play it today for their kids, for whatever reason. How many views does it have? Six. No, I don't know.

I mean, it's up there in a lot of different pieces. It's, I don't know, probably a thousand. Genius. At least a thousand, I'm sure. Do you ever do any book readings? Well, there's a lot of different pieces. It's, I don't know, probably thousands. Genius. At least a thousand, I'm sure. Do you ever do any book readings? Well, this one, there's a bunch of different versions. Yeah. 70,000 views on this.

70,000 views on this one. There was a bunch of them. There's a bunch of them, though. No, it's still up there. That's funny. That's great. Well, I'm in the booth every day reading something. And so usually I get done whatever I get paid to do.

And then I do something random and weird. And one day it just seemed like it was just time to read the phone book, guys, you know? That's great. It's time. All right.

Falcon Laser says, Mike, I loved your narration of how the universe works. What do you think the Hubble Deep Field will look like when taken by the James Webb Telescope?

Man. Okay, so the Deep Field is my favorite photograph ever taken. For 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. And this guy, I forget his name, he wanted to point it at nothing.

Hubble time was very rare, so he pointed it at the blackest hunk of nothing there was and started taking pictures. And 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, right? And 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 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. Except the stars are colorful. And the reason they're colorful is because they're actually galaxies. Whoa. And the sky is full of billions of galaxies. And so it's the closest thing we have to what the beginning of the universe looked like.

What the web is going to do with that photo, my guess is I think we're going to see more galaxies and more color. Wow. It's the – Are you ready? His name is Bob Williams that decided to point it at nothing. Bob Williams is the guy? Yeah. 1995.

Did you just Google that or did you know that? Yeah, I just looked it up on DuckDuckGo. Because if you knew that, that was... Not that great. I'm so happy you didn't say the G word. You ready for a spicy one? Bring it. Buddy says, what's worse, micro-neutering sheep with his teeth or CNN eating human brains?

I mean, in my opinion, eating human brains is much, much worse than a dirty job. It depends on the situation. Well, it depends what you're doing it for, right? Why was the CNN guy eating live human brains, right? Thank you. Why were you doing what you were doing as described by that commenter, right? It wasn't live. I don't think it was live brains.

It wasn't live. No one was harmed in the eating of the brains, right? In the eating of those brains. Well, 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. We were up in Craig, Colorado, and for years that's what the ranchers did. They literally bit the testicles off the creature, and they did it for a lot of reasons. This is another story.

If you want, I'll walk you through it in the members thing. Because, I mean, it involves words like vas deferens, scrotum, knife, regret, and blood. I have to say that Reza Aslan of CNN has a job, net job, while he was

at CNN, involved eating brains, and it sounds dirty. It does sound pretty dirty. Not a dirty job I'd recommend, though. That's another level than dirty, in my opinion. Well, has anybody eaten brains? I've never had. No. I've eaten brains, yeah.

Monkey? Human brain? Human brain? No, dude. That's so illegal. Oh, that's getting some guy. Human brain. CNN did that.

It's on YouTube, and they're in the partner program. They're still uplifted in the algorithm. They ate human brains on national television. And that's how CNN gets ratings. Yeah, exactly. Oh, man. I think the dude lost it after that, man. Alright, Anomaly. Oh, hey, I saw Anomaly and

Bryson Gray superchatted. Anomaly says, Thank you, Tim, for the shout-out on my song with Bryson Gray. You and your beanie are going to hit the billboard charts with us. Let's go, King. There's a line, Anomaly raps, I ain't going nowhere like Tim Pool your beanie are going to hit the billboard charts with us. Let's go, King. There's a line, Anomaly Raps, I ain't going nowhere like Tim Pool's beanie. Oh, my. Oh, yeah, yeah.

So I got sent that, and I was like, this is officially the greatest song of any generation. Of course. And I had to tweet it out. So shout out, guys. That was great. It's pretty cool to hear your name in a song. It's a good song, actually.

Well, that's even better. Well, yeah. I mean, they shouted me out, so I shot them out back. Yeah, it's only polite. It was a good song actually well that's even better well yeah i mean you know they they shouted me out so i shot him out back you know like yeah it's only polite i thought it was a good song too it's good it's it's called controlled i believe and it's about it's about manipulation it's a good song you guys check it out bryson gray anomaly controlled done all right let's see what we got let's grab some super chats stealer country says just earned my amp license my options are endless now trade skills are needed now more than ever if you care for your children's future

advocate for more trade activities in your community keep it up micro god bless thank you i will i gotta say you know i 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. That's so cool. Look, there's so many people saying, go to college, go to college, go to college. There are memes where it's like a guy, he's got a big beard and he's making coffee for $12 an hour complaining about his college debt. And then there's a guy with a hard hat working on power lines making $100K a year, no debt. Look, I had a front row seat to it.

Like I said, Dirty Jobs started as a TV show and a tribute to my pop. And then it just got out of control. And then the viewers stepped up and started suggesting all the ideas. And 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? Why are they having such a good time? And what can we maybe learn collectively from it?

And that's, you know. Well, it appears flattery has no limits. Sean Burns says, this man was the dad I never had. I got a sense of hard work from your shows. Is that Sean with an H or E-I-N? With an H-A-W. That's weird because I have a sense of hard work from your shows. Is that Sean with an H or E-A-N? With an H-A-W. That's weird because I have a son named Sean, and I haven't seen him in a long time. Oh, there you go. Sean, is it you, man?

Is it you? Sup, homie? You're familiar with Jordan Peterson. I am. Jordan Peterson has a similar and sort of different message, though. I think what really resonated with a lot of young men was the hard work, personal responsibility. And I think you both have a similar, you know, a target in a different way. Dirty jobs.

Not 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? I hope so. The big difference, Jordan has an enormous brain, and he came out of academia. And so he really came in hot with his worldview, and there was nothing for him to hide behind but for his opinions. I had a show. I'm crawling through rivers of crap i'm making dick jokes i'm just having a time right you know and that got people's attention and then i was able only then was i able to start asking questions like you know maybe maybe these careers sure they're dirty but let's look a little closer.

And by then, I had permission. I had permission to weigh in. So Jordan never had permission. He just did it. And that took a whole different level of moxie. Well, Ehef says, how did Dirty Jobs show shape your perspective? Well, it didn't shape it it it i grew up keenly aware of where my food came from where my energy came from how things got built i i worked on a you know i grew up on a small farm and i had i was surrounded by by that. And when I got into entertainment, I left all that behind.

Not intentionally, but, you know, way leads on to way. And after 20 years of freelancing in entertainment and singing in the opera and selling crap in the middle of the night on QVC and having 150 different jobs, I had become really disconnected from a lot of those things that Dirty Jobs celebrates. And 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. And that footage turned into Dirty Jobs. And to answer his question, what Dirty Jobs did was become my actual education.

I 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. What did your grandfather think of the show he saw one episode he looked at it and he laughed and he and he and he and he gave me the slow clap all right yeah all right jamis 714 says does mike think unions are a good place to start well that would require a broad-based platitudinous cookie cutter answer. So here's the thing with unions. I have absolute great respect for their existence. I belong to one and I have for a long time, but I'm very hesitant to say a way is the right way. My 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.

We'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. I honestly don't think there's a simple answer. It depends on the industry. It depends on the local. It depends on the shop steward. Look, not to turn this whole thing into a polemic, but when I tried to get dirty jobs on the air,

I called the union, and they said, don't do it. Discovery is not a signatory, and you would be running afoul of what's called global rule one, and that could result in fines and possible, right? Same thing happened years before that at QVC. My first job in TV, they were like, they're not a signatory. You can't do it. I heard that a lot from my union. And I had to decide.

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 I'd be having a very different conversation with somebody else. 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 that's crazy sometimes the conventional methods the institutions aren't the way to go

and sometimes they are you really do man if 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. So we got silently in Atlanta. He says, wow, Mike Rowe. That was the first Super Chat asking you to bring him on. You really started an opera singer. I did. Yeah. 1984.

It was a very strange time because that union I just mentioned, I was desperate to get into. I was desperate to be a member of the Screen Actors Guild because I couldn't find an agent who would represent a non-union guy. But I couldn't get in the union unless I had a union job. So that's the catch. The loophole was joining something called AGMA, which was the American Guild of Musical Artists, and then buying your card in the sister union. The challenge, of course, was to get into the opera in order to be a member of AGMA. So yeah, I learned the shortest aria I could find. It was from a Puccini opera called La Boheme. It was called the Cote Aria. I walked around with the

Walkman listening to Samuel Ramey sing Vecchia si marra senti irrestual pianto scenderi sacriamontio devi lemme grazia ricevi

on and on. That's great because by singing that, we own the rights to that recording. We can sample it. Sample the hell out of it. I love it. We make music. We've got a studio here.

I love it. Look, I just recorded a song with John Rich before Christmas called Santa's Got a Dirty Job, and we raised a lot of money for our foundation. So yeah. So cool. So music has always been a thing in my life. The opera was a very, very weird turn, but I got in it.

My plan worked. What happened that I didn't anticipate was I stayed for eight years. In the opera? Yeah. Wow. Yeah. I freaking loved it. Wow.

Marcel Lecrem says, late to the start of the cast, please ask Mr. Mike when he is running for president. Friday, 4-ish. Oh, perfect. They might take that seriously and say that was a declaration, you know. It's actually super flattering, but I think more than anything, it just, 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.

It's weird. People started asking me to get into politics shortly after I crawled through the sewer. And 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. And really, why would he lie to you? I mean, you literally, I had condoms stuck to my rubber hip boots.

I mean, that guy, whatever else you say about him, he's not going to lie to you. Well, they call Washington, D.C. a swamp, so I could see the comparison as well. This is under the swamp. He's a part of the swamp. He has to be elected. We had a few comments.

Some said, have you ever been hired to clean the swamp? Or you should do a show in politics because that's the dirtiest job there is and things like that my my favorite question that i saw in the comment section and i kind of wanted to ask you is um the question if cleaning the gulags is going to be on a future episode of dirty jobs cleaning the gulag as in like gulag archipelago no no like the political gulags that we're all going to be interned into uh you know oh god, God, that's so depressing. So, I mean, see, 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,

it's a cautionary tale and it's a big hunk of history. And who was it? Santa Ana, right? We don't learn from the past we repeat it that would be a great comedy sketch actually Jerry Topps Goulag edition political prisoners the Goulag edition yeah alright I'll run it up the flagpole

thanks for that ladies and gentlemen I am very eager and excited to get to this member segment so I'm going to say go to timcast.com subscribe on the top right you can sign up and around 11 or so p member segment. So I'm going to say go to TimCast.com, subscribe. On the top right, you can sign up. And 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.

It's going to be weird, guys. I don't want to oversell it, but you might want to wake up Grandma. She's going to want to hear this. I love it. And smash the Like button. Subscribe to the channel. You's going to want to hear this one. I love it. Smash the like button. Subscribe to the channel. You can follow the show, TimCastIRL, everywhere. Follow us on Instagram. We post clips. You can follow me at TimCast. Do you want to shout anything out?

Your foundation? Anything like that? Dirty Jobs is back. Sunday's at 8. MicroWorks is going to give away another million bucks in a month or two on work ethics scholarships. You can apply at microworks.org. Other than that, there's books and stuff and wildebeest traveling the vast reaches of the barren Serengeti and so forth.

Mike, you were great. Thank you for everything you're doing. Thank you for coming on the show. I thought it was great. And 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.

So thanks so much for having that. I also have my own media organization on YouTube.com forward slash WeAreChange. I just did a very interesting video on the Novak Djokovic situation. And I did a pretty crazy video on LukeUncensored.com. Hope to see some of you guys there. Thanks for having me. And today was really a great episode. That was fantastic, Luke. Mike, thanks, dude. You're welcome. Thank you. Ian Crossland. having me. And today was really a great episode. That was fantastic, Luke.

Mike, thanks. You're welcome. Thank you. Ian Crossland, check me out at iancrossland.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. Jordan Peterson said,

to notice that opportunity lurks where responsibility has been abdicated. I think that's a perfect summary of what Mike Rowe stands for. And I wanted to say, too, that the whole sweat pledge is 100 percent something that I intend to teach my kids when I eventually have them. You guys. Yeah, it's like the perfect encapsulation of everything I want them to understand about work. You guys may follow me on Twitter at Sarah Patch Lids. We will see you all over at Timcast dot com. So check it out. We'll see you then. Thanks for hanging out. Bye, guys.