Will Cain Country - Is the American Dream Dead — or Can It Be Rebuilt? (ft. Wade Stotts & Mike Tobin)

Episode Date: January 22, 2026

Does the American dream exist for Gen Z the same way it existed for Boomers? Host of ‘The Wade Show with Wade,’ Wade Stotts joins Will to discuss the collapse of the "American Dream," explaining how a combination of factors such as the decline of college education, an over-reliance on foreign labor, and poor policy decisions have pushed prosperity out of reach for many, even if they do everything right. And why there can still be hope for the future. Plus, FOX News Senior Correspondent Mike Tobin sits down to share the story of his climb to the top of Mt. Everest, as documented in the new FOX Nation special ‘Everest: Journey to the Top of the World.’   Subscribe to ‘Will Cain Country’ on YouTube here: ⁠⁠⁠⁠Watch Will Cain Country!⁠⁠ Follow ‘Will Cain Country’ on X (⁠⁠@willcainshow⁠⁠), Instagram (⁠⁠@willcainshow⁠⁠), TikTok (⁠⁠@willcainshow⁠⁠), and Facebook (⁠⁠@willcainnews⁠⁠) Follow Will on X: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠@WillCain Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Jobs, college, marriage, is the entire system broken and really only ever worked for one generation? Is the system that is America built for the baby boomer with Wade Stutz? Kane Country at the Wilcane Country YouTube channel. The Wilcane Facebook page, the Fox News Facebook page, always available by following us at Spotify and on Apple. Mike Tobin, Fox News Reporter, has just climbed Mount Everest, reaching the summit. Tobin did 22 push-ups to signify the number of veterans who commit suicide every day. We are going to be joined on that trek to hear about that climb. here shortly by Mike Tobin.

But Wade's thoughts, the host of the Wade show with Wade, has recently suggested that the system is broken. This thing that we have built from a college education to homeownership, from social security to immigration, is one big giant scam that really is only ever benefited. one generation, the baby boomers. Here is the case laid out on the Wade Show with Wade by Wade Stutz. Growing up, most Americans were told a story about success. Their lives they were told were laid out before them. Just jump inside the success machine and ride the conveyor belt to riches and comfort. The outline of the story went like this. College, job, married, kids, house retirement. The quintessential American life. Yes, there will be hard work, they said, but you will be rewarded.

The machine always works. Whatever you do, don't doubt the machine. That's what lazy people do, entitled people who spend their days dipping their avocado toast and their $8 latte. But if the machine ever did work, it doesn't now. Joining us now is the host of the Wade show with Wade.

It is Wade Stotz. What's up, Wade? It's great to be here. You know, it's cool that I didn't have to climb out Everest to get on the show, but I do feel sort of like a slub compared to your next guest, but it'll be fun.

Yeah, all I did was make a video, but thank you for inviting me anyway. What is the hardest physical challenge on the resume of Wade Stott's? Oh, my goodness, nothing. I don't do hard physical challenges. I just sit in my bunker all day and sort of eat Doritos. It's great. It's great. From that part you preach about the loss of masculinity in America.

Absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah, those other guys, they don't get it. Well, of all the things that I have aspirations to do, two of the lowest on my list, like my bucket list of things that I would like to accomplish are climbing Mount Everest. I hate the cold. I don't know that the rush at being at the top would, in a satisfactory manner, check the boxes of the suffering that it takes to get to the top and run a marathon.

I just have no interest. There's a lot of things I'd like to do, but I don't see myself running a marathon. Yeah. Well, good for them. You know, I root for them from my bunker again. I'll find a new snack. But yeah, Doritos for now. Me and Kamala with our Doritos. We love it. Well, we'll hear a little bit about the climb up Everest with Mike Tobin. Right now we're hanging out with Wade Stott, who has put this video out about the success machine, the story of America. The story's been told for roughly 80 years that this is the path to success, from college to homeownership, to

child rearing to retirement. I don't know that the point of your video, Wade, I don't know if the point of your analysis and your diagnosis was to point at one generation as really the only generation who this system has actually provided success, but that's one of my takeaways and watching what was the 15-minute video on YouTube is that it did work. It did work for the baby boomers. Yeah, it did. And for a lot of reasons that I get into in the video, but the initial one is the college. So college is seen as the sort of first stepping stone on this on this path. And what happens now is that in the previous generations, college really did set people apart. And the problem now is that it doesn't set people apart in the same way, having a degree.

But also college is not the same thing it was in the 70s and the 80s, even in the 90s. And for for reasons that like DEI coming in, I find I find that there's you can look at these issues as sort of things to get mad about on the internet or on the news or on the radio. But it really does saying taking the next step and saying it really is affecting young people can sometimes be a hurdle because it can be sort of theoretical things to get mad about. And then if somebody says, hey, I'm doing my best and this isn't working for me, then the advice typically is that you're not working hard enough. I had to work hard. Surely you just haven't achieved as much as I have because of your efforts. And I think that that's a mistake.

I think it's a mistake to give any kind of advice. Obviously, I mean, we've all seen the Caleb Hammer videos. We all know that there are people who are wasteful who rack up tons of crazy debt. We know that there are people who have no sense of the future. That's all true. But there are people who are working their best. And that, yes, these DEI things and as well as foreign students, coming in, blocking out spots for other people, for Americans, I should say.

Those things really are affecting at least that first step. And then by the time people get out, everybody knows, again, everybody who watches your show and watches other shows, knows the, at some level, craziness of the college experience. The ways in which the education that they get is not at the caliber that it would have been, even at the time when Alan Bloom wrote the closing of the American mind. Like this, we've gotten so far. away from the intention of this. And I think that, yeah, the college is probably the best illustration for that first step. And the difficulties that show up there are the same difficulties that keep

showing up later. And the goal of my video was to just show that every step along that path, the incentive structure, everything that's supposed to tell you how to act and how not to act is broken and that normal Americans trying to do it right who were told this is the path and believed and believed what they were told. They're the people that get left behind. And I don't want to, I don't want any of this reality of, hey, this is a tough lot. I don't want that reality to make anybody bitter. And I also don't want anybody to be offering advice to those young people out of ignorance of how bad the situation is. What I find fascinating about the success machine and the way it worked for baby boomers is not to malign anyone listening who is in their 60s or 70s, but to show

that the steps along that chain are broken basically for every subsequent generation, not to the same degree. I think you could almost do it from the other chronological order way. You could say Gen Xers, of which I am a Gen X, probably don't have a real good, rational reason to plan on the entitlement state being for them in their retirement. They should not probably bank on Medicare and Social Security because those by every mathematical indication are insolvent and they will not be able to, with the population behind them, be able to support the expectations of Social Security and Medicare. Back it up. The millennials are not reproducing. The number of children in that equation is not there for millennials. Back it up. Gen Z is not getting.

married, back it up. Gen Alpha has no reasonable expectation that a college education will provide for them a career path that leads to a successful life. And I think on top of that weight is this verge of the AI revolution where I've seen Elon Musk and others say, you're talking about a totally worthless degree with 50% unemployment within five years, meaning those sitting in college today are probably learning something obsolete does not make themselves marketable within five years. Yeah. I think a big part of this problem is that people at some level believed all of the marketing about what college would do. And college itself is a system that is based on getting people to believe that we will change your life. And that as we internalize that marketing and think that

that is the way that actually everything changes, the way I can get success, then yeah, we believe the marketing and we spend our entire lives, we paying back the debt that we incurred for that process. Also, the same thing happened with Social Security. It was, it was a pitch and the marketing angle was we are going to make the lives comfortable of people who cannot work anymore. And the last time that we had any kind of welfare reform when we raised the retirement age, all this sort of stuff, or the Social Security reform, I should say, say was during the Reagan administration. We haven't thought about the realities of what has happened since then. And one of those realities is the people who were having children at that time did not have enough children to keep this system going. Yes, all of these things are problems.

And one of the reasons that they are problems is that we believe the marketing. One thing I don't want to do is therefore continue to maybe believe the AI marketing. I do think at some level that the AI companies have an incentive to say, we are going to change the entire work economy of the United States. I think that there are ways in which it can help. I think that actually the declining of population, if we don't import people to replace those people, right? So if people didn't have enough kids to replace and then we start importing people,

I think it may actually be helpful to have a technological solution to some of the worker shortage. I don't know if that's, it cannot fix everything. But what I don't want to do is then think like either AI is going to, destroy the lives of young people or that it's going to save the lives of young people. What I'm hoping for is, again, a realistic assessment of how did it go? How did college go? How is retirement looking? Are these things that we want to keep doing?

Russ Green in an article in the American mind, it was called Total Boomer Luxury Communism, which is a sort of, you know, it's inciting a little bit of a response. But I mean, the truth is that Medicare, one of the facts he says in there is that Medicare covers country club fees and golf t's. So you can buy golf teas and things like that through Medicare because they have to do with exercise or whatever. And these richer age brackets are the ones that are getting the money that is coming out of the paychecks of the younger generation. Whatever we believed about the marketing in previous generations, I think we can throw out in order to kind of check out how did it work?

Did it happen? And can we still pitch this to the younger generation as being something that can take them, not necessarily out of their own class. I'm not talking about class mobility or get ahead and become president of the United States or CEO of some company, but just the kind of life where I can have kids and have a home and get married with some kind of confidence that there's going to be a life for me. Or if my wife wants to stay home, that I live in a place where I can earn enough money on one income to be able to provide a life for my family. All those things are real.

And one of the points in my video is to show how unreal this, this, this particular straight line path is. So what's fascinating about what you had to say about AI is what it could solve in the current system's broken chain. And I had not thought about that way. So let's start. Let's use Social Security as the illustrative mechanism. Social Security was never a giant pot of money that the government kept to the side and didn't

touch and would pay you back with interest later in life. Social Security was spent by the government. You accurately describe it as a mandatory Ponzi scheme that was paid for by subsequent generations. So literally the money of young workers goes to pay to the retirement of old workers. That is just how it works. Now, when you're not having children, you have a math problem. When your population is not replacing itself at a subsequent level, there's not enough young workers to pay for the retirement of old workers. Thus, you are insolvent.

Add to that the longer lifespans of people without raging the age bracket of social. Social Security. You're not just paying for, you know, a mathematical problem in the number of workers, but how long those workers will be on Social Security and putting that burden on the younger people. So one of the unstated solutions, and I should say I do think it is unstated, but perhaps discussed quietly in the cloak rooms of Washington, D.C., is that immigration is a population import mechanism to pay that entitlement. So you bring in Indian workers, you bring in, uh, even, illegal immigrants who presumably pay some taxes. The argument is always they don't get the benefit of the taxes that they pay, but you bring in taxpayers. That's what you do. You bring in taxpayers where you don't have a native-born population that's big enough to pay for the entitlement state. And that, of course, has its own set of problems. And it's interesting that you say AI might be able to solve the need to import foreign labor, which then has the cascading effect of cultural problems in America. Right. I think that a big kind of underlying point in this is, okay, we've got all of these elements that we kind of see as a fixture of the universe, the sort of college to retirement path, college, job, marriage, kids, house retirement. What of that do we want to save? I think that's the question before the house. Do we want to save the university system? I don't. I'm okay with that going, at least shrinking in a huge way. Do we want to save the retirement state. I'm fine with figuring out a way to phase that out. What we do want to save is that center, the marriage, kids, house. That's the heart, I think, of what we want to be able to give younger generations. And trying to keep these two things alive, college and retirement, is hollowing out the entire center of that. So it's harder to get married because there's just no financial certainty,

kids, house, and not to mention the Black Rock thing, or Blackstone, excuse me, that now is going to be taken care of at a federal level. There's a piece of sort of mythology of the end of history in this whole thing. Okay. So people used to have to struggle and well, now it's sort of seen as nostalgic to think that people had houses or that the vast majority of people had houses. Or right now, the median age of the first time home buyer is 40 years old. The average age of homebuyers in general is 59. This is a reality that young people see themselves in. And solving those kinds of problems is, I think, more important than saving the Social Security system and also saving the university system. Propping these things up, I don't want,

I don't want, like OTP is this program that a bunch of foreign students can come in and then they can stay here for years afterwards. I don't want that to happen because what it does, It may save the college system, but it makes it harder for younger Americans to have the way that people thought of as the American dream. And I don't even really like that term, but just what do people want? People want to get married. They want to be able to have a place where they can kind of live the life that they want to live. They want to go home and move the couch over here just because they want to. And they want to be able to take out a wall just because they want to.

And that's the kind of life that the liberty that people have in their own homes. is different from the liberty that you have renting from Blackstone or renting from some Chinese buyer. That's the center. That's what I want to save and not those sort of bookends of the system. I like the term. I think it's actually where you center this conversation, the preservation of the American dream. And I think that's a very fair thing to keep at the center of this conversation. I think it's interesting to center both words.

The dream. And the dream for much of the past has been to be able to have had a minimum. that life that you described, to get married, to have kids, to own a home. The other part of that equation is the word American, and we can't sacrifice the American to keep the dream. And so you import foreign workers, you import foreign populations who don't share that same definition or aspiration of either the dream or what it is to be American. And that's the real core. How do we preserve the American dream? And I think the challenge, and I think that you address this, is not to become a pessimist, not to get blackpilled, not to become a victim to suggest this entire thing is rigged against you, the system is broken, and then swallow the black pill. Because that is a recipe for not the American dream.

It's a recipe for depression, anxiety, malevolence, cynicism, and the things that you and I both know, want to. an individual and interpersonal level lead up to a very sad life. Absolutely. And knowing that, yes, despair is a sin. And that's a problem that people do have when they see the kind of blackness of what the problem is. Yes, you are done wrong. But it's the same kind of advice that you'd want to give to somebody on the left who is

obsessed with their own grievances, whether real or not. You want to give the kind of advice that says, yes, let's talk about what the problem actually is. And as those things are solved, one of the ways that the black pill does make people not be able to see clearly is that they can't celebrate the victories that we've seen over the course of the last year as of a couple of days ago. Trump's victories on both legal and illegal immigration, those are huge deals for young people. And if people don't say thank you or can't acknowledge that that is a step forward because they're obsessed with sort of gripping the black pills in their white knuckled fist, that's a problem. And what it does is it makes people not be able to see opportunities. If you see an opening, our ancestors have gone through way, extremely hard circumstances.

And they got married. They had more kids than we're having. They did work. They figured things out. Yes, it's black. Yes, it's ugly. It's not a good situation. And I'm not, I wouldn't want, I don't want this for my kids. I have five kids. I'm not rooting for this to continue. But my investment in the future by having kids means that I need to be able to celebrate the victories and say, yes, let's push in that direction. So, yes, it's tempting to think that there's a basically healthy system that may have some bugs in it. That that's kind of what we live in. But what I'm saying is that it's basically rotten and that if we can see it realistically, that shouldn't cause us to despair, but it should say, hey, it's going to take a while. It's going to take hard pushes in the correct direction. And like tinfoil Pat sent me a message yesterday from Trump's acceptance speech of the Republican nomination.

One of the things he said in there was you're not dreaming big enough. There's more that can happen to America. America can be better than you can even think. So expand your imagination to think, how can this be better? Not just taking care of some of these sort of, again, tiny little problems. But what that also means is you have to assess where we are. So count the wins and don't allow your assessment of the problem to cause inaction or despair. Let's take a quick break.

I want to keep exploring the American Dream with the host of the Wade Show with Wade. Wade Stott's here on Will Cain Country. This is Ainsley Earhart. Thank you for joining me for the 52 episode podcast series, The Life of Jesus. A listening experience that will provide hope, comfort, and understanding of the greatest story ever told. and follow now at foxnewspodcasts.com or wherever you listen to podcasts. Welcome back to Will Kane country. We're still hanging out with the host of the Wade show with Wade.

Wade. Wade starts. Yes. And Wade, I can honestly say I think that is how I am built. I am not built to focus on the pessimism of things outside my control. And I would like to think that I'm raising, in my case, men, to think the same way. And that is to see opportunity. And I think that that is at its very core, the American spirit. The American spirit was inherently optimistic, pushing West, searching for a better life.

It was at its very core, built upon optimism. And I do worry, I worry that on the right, there is a pandemic of pessimism. And that is, quintessentially in my mind, un-American. Here's why. Because optimism is enabling. it doesn't guarantee success. In fact, it may very well result in failure, but that failure to me will taste much better

than the safety of status quo. You see, it's interesting you bring up President Trump. Yesterday, he announces that he has the framework for a deal for Greenland. And in some ways, Wade, I am not even interested in conversation over the Golden Dome. I'm not even interested in the thawing shipping lanes of the Northwest Passage. What I'm interested in is an optimistic vision of the future of America, the way that we were built, the way that we once were.

I don't think it's a sin to talk about manifest destiny. And I think that if you don't see a better tomorrow, expansionary, brighter, bigger, better, then what are you here for? You know, and I mean that not just as an individual, but as an American, like as a society. And one of the things I like about this whole Greenland deal, and I don't care if it's superficial or even stylistic is it's like for the first time, the whole project here is not to preserve the status quo. And even though it's make America great again, it's not to take us back to the 1950s, but it's to continue in the spirit of the 1800s of America. Yeah, there's a kind of sort of, sort of,

Francis Fukuyama, end of history thing, that thinks that, okay, once the USSR falls, then the lines on the map never change again. And that we've reached the end of things happening. And I don't think, I think that a lot of the objection to the Greenland deal is thinking nothing else can happen. Like, USSR fell and then nothing ever happens again. I also think that the spirit that you're talking about, the American spirit and people's detachment from that has a lot to do with their detachment.

from history. So we don't know the stories of the American frontier. We don't know the heroes that did this. We don't even know fictional versions of it because we're like, we don't even know the Westerns. Like the fact that Westerns and thinking, okay, there's a bunch of land over there. I have, I've never seen it before in my life. But it's going to be my home and it's going to be where my kids are raised. That's a kind of imagination that we don't have. And we can't have it if we're cut off from those people. So the left in their education, in the takeover of the education, it has actually done damage to young people on the left and the right. So if people,

there are people who assume, okay, everybody who came before me was a bad person. Or we have general, or we go like, well, things used to be better and used to be easier for people. But what the reality is,

if we read these people's stories, these are people who, again, like even coming here in the first place and the expansion west, living here, there are plenty of hardships. these people's faced and they had a positive vision for what America was going to be and they knew that there was some kind of future that they wanted for their descendants and their descendants are

us we are their descendants and so they're they wanted they wanted to leave this to us and if we are taken apart from those people if we're divorced from those people if the left succeeded and taking those people out of our minds and out of our visions then yeah they win we're allowing them to win by not reading about these people by not learning about the history of again, of westward expansion. That's heroic. There are heroic stories of men who sacrificed everything to take a future, to give a future to their families that they didn't have. And don't you, do you not think Wade that is in some ways in tension with the idea of preserving this mid-20th century vision of the American dream? Is that not intention with the idea

that you have some right to expect to go to college, to buy a home, to build a family? family, if you and I interviewed, if we were fortunate enough and what an awesome series it would be, but I love how you describe, we've lost our imagination, we've lost our sense of identity of who were. But if we interviewed any of those people from the 1800s, they would scoff at the idea that you were entitled in any way to one of these lives. They would be like, get your ass out there and scratch it out of the dirt. Yeah. Well, one thing that you're struck by when you read about the history of Western expansion is the... the imagination is the creativity.

And so and that sort of straight line path, the success machine, whatever you want to call it, that is a one size fits all approach to how to take how to live your life. And it's it's one that depends on a vision of the greatest thing, the greatest good in life is class mobility, is taking yourself from, oh, I'm in this small town, whatever. And I'm going to go up to the, I'm going to go up to the heights. I'm going to live in the big city and I'm going to ascend outside of my. own ranks. All of that stuff is necessarily foreign to class mobility, that's a separate thing. But there's a reality that your life, you have to make creative decisions and making choices

is different from going to college and then picking from the menu of majors. So like, and that's, you know, some people should go to college. Many people should. The issue, though, is that the one size fits all is, yes, in tension with the kind of creativity that says, I'm going down. this path, you're going down that path. I haven't seen this place before, but again, it's going to be my home. And then when you look around at the trees and the mountains for the first time, I live up in Idaho. The first people who got here and tried to figure out what was going on here. Obviously, there were battles with Indians. There were all sorts of things that happened. But what they did was they had imagination for what it could look like. I don't think that they imagined it looking exactly like this,

but they were able to plan at some level in a way that we aren't because we just, again, or sold a one size fits all approach. And I think that the creativity that it takes to do that comes from the past. And we can reawaken it. But we can't do it just by imagining it. We have to know how these people worked. And again, find opportunities, see holes in the enemy's armor. Who?

Like, know where you need to go next. Who is in your mind the 21st century version of that 19th century American? About a week ago, wait, I had a conversation with a guy named Tom Bill Ude. Tom Bill U is a big thinker, big talker about the future. And he founded Quest Nutrition, which is the protein-infused chips and bars and so forth. Now has a show on YouTube. We had a long conversation about AI. And he said to me that he believes AI will actually provide a – he said 900 days until the end of capitalism.

And he said it will produce massive unemployment. But it will also produce a significant reduction. in need. It's going to lower energy prices. It's going to make everything from home building to farming much easier and require much less labor. So his entire conversation is, what do you do with a population of people that don't need to work? What do they do to satisfy their sense of purpose? And he said this, wait, he said, I see four paths for future man. Future man's four paths that he chooses in this environment are, A, choose the hard life. These will be the people that want to go to Mars. These will be the futuristic vision of the pilgrim, of the frontiersmen. And these people you have

to remember, he says, had an 80% death rate. 80% of them died. But there will be people that choose that adventure life. B, hedonism, the people that just live and lean into drugs and lethargy and sex because that will be a path. It's easy for them to choose. Sitting in their bunkers, eating Doritos. Yeah. Perhaps. You're the hedonist. No, you might be the Amish. See the Amish, the people that choose out, opt out of this virtual world, opt out of the AI world, opt to live the quaint life, untethered from technology. And D will be the people who choose to thrive, not hedonism, but thrive in this virtual world, build in the virtual world, but yes, also largely live in this virtual world.

The one I'm most interested in because the one I think I would like to think I would choose is A. I think I would, I hope I would choose A. But we don't have to accept his exact parameters way. But as we talk about this, it does make me think, well, the 21st century's version of the American identity won't be. It could be somebody going to Greenland and surviving the temperatures and digging minerals out of the earth. It could be that guy who was very similar to the guy that went to Idaho and Fautanese purse. But, you know, it could be that. But it's more likely to be somebody's rocketing off into sky.

But I just wonder who that is. I mean, is that Elon? Is Elon the 21st century version of those guys back then? I just don't know what that looks like. If you're raising a son to be in the vein of that 19th century vision of American optimism and grit, what does he look like in the 21st century? I don't know. But what I do know is that we have examples of that from the past. And what we live, the kind of world we live in now, it was easy. So 15 years ago, it was easy to think that the great man theory of history was all bunk. And that yes, it's all just kind of sociological factors. It's technological factors. It's technological factors, all this sort of stuff. We recognize now that we live in a world that is shaped by people and shaped by the character of the leaders. And that, you know, that, Even the vaguest idea of making America great again is something that everyone latched on to because they knew that there was some greatness back there, even if they didn't know the details.

And I think that Trump is an example of, hey, that there can be people who are men of destiny that take on hardship for the sake of others, that take on hardship that they didn't have to take on. I think that maybe Trump can be the first of those figures. My hope is that there will be many more. And not everybody has to be that. But if we're going to be a society, we do have to have heroes. We've lived in a time where everybody has tied to denigrate the heroes of the past. And so as we've forgotten those people, we don't have anybody to emulate. So these people, at some level, will always be exceptions.

There will only be a certain number of statues built in our major cities. But what they can be is we can live in a world that intentionally cultivates greatness. I think J.D. Vance is a great example of a guy who was, like, the fact that Yale took him when it did means that there is a path in America for somebody who does want to get out of an ugly situation and go forward with their life. I think that we have kind of glimmerings of examples. And yeah, I think Donald Trump actually is a great example of a guy who sees himself as a pivotal figure in American history. And seeing and not in a maybe in a prideful all this sort of stuff, but not in a fundamental transformation, but in a restoration and sort of glorification of what came before. My hope is that people also recognize that not everybody has to be that, that other people can have small lives where they have their dominion over their world, that they can have property, they can own things, they can have their family that they raise the way that they want to. Start schools have, again, some amount of, if not autonomy, then like, at least liberty. I think that both of those can coexist, and one leads and the other follows. And I'm

okay with having a world where there are mostly people who are concerned with their plot of land, but also have a strong heroic vision of what we're all doing as a people. Yes, that's great. I love that. I really do. Both the great man theory and a king of his own castle and his own destiny on a smaller level. Hey, what grade would you give Donald Trump for the first year of his second term? Goodness. It's hard to summarize.

I mean, I am a plan truster. You have a plan truster on the show. I'm excited about what's going to happen next. I recognize all the difficulties. And I think that there are places is that, yes, he could push further. I think there are people on his team that he has to argue with that I wish he didn't have to argue with.

But, I mean, I'd say, you know, B plus. I don't I'm not I don't want to be unrealistic in my expectations but I'm happy that he's doing the thing he's doing And that B plus should keep in mind that I would you know whatever negative grade that I would give to a Kamala administration So I'm I'm happy I'm happy with where we are I I am I think that any healthy political movement of the future needs to figure out a way to associate itself and work and channel itself into Maga this thing that is happening right now And so I think that this is, I think he's doing a good job. I think it's only the beginning.

And I think it can only be the beginning. And yeah, so that's, I don't know, B plus with footnotes, I guess I should say. Okay, last question for you, because I don't think it's totally untethered at the conversation that we're having this big, broad conversation about America. But this was an article that really fascinated me this morning, Wade, and it is from foxnews.com. And it's talking about assassination culture, something we've talked about for the past. six months. It's really on the heels of this other study that we explored, wherein young women have moved very, very far to the left. And what's interesting about, there's many, many things that are interesting about that. But one of them is it flies in the face of expectation.

Most people think that young men have gravitated toward the right. And the surveys, at least through 2023, do not suggest that is the case. Perhaps in the last two years, there has been yet more of a shift of young men. But what it does show is that over a two-decade-long arc, young women have lurched, leaped, far to the left. I think what used to be a 12-point gap is now a 23-point gap. Men have remained stagnant. That means women have moved, you know, to minus 40 liberal, I believe it is, something like that. And it's pretty fascinating. Now there's this article from Fox News.com about assassination culture, tolerance, acceptance of the assassination of people that you disagree with or that you dislike. Once again, the author said, flies in the face of expectation.

We kind of thought this would be callous young men. It's not. It's liberal women who are tolerant of assassination. Yeah. Yeah, my general take on this, I think that it's sort of like the girl that gets her boyfriend in a fight at the bar. So most of the assassinations of these people are done by young men. So the action is happening through young men. There are exceptions in the Nashville shooting and things like that.

However, the majority of these are young men who have been sort of brought into the left and women cheering them on. So I think that that's probably what's going to happen. I think women generally are consensus seeking and consensus enforcing. And I think that they look for the social norms. they try to fit the social norms and then try to enforce those social norms. I think that that's generally what happening is they, they see that this, that Trump is a disruptor and that Charlie Kirk is a disruptor to the consensus that has been built over the course of the last several decades.

And they say, somebody stop this so that we can keep this kind of consensus going, keep this little world that we've built going, which in a healthy society is really helpful. So that if you're in, if you watch a Western, And like there's there is a bad guy who comes into this town that all that was built by a bunch of men who wanted to have a place for their families. And then the women should be cheering that on. They should be excited that this external threat that comes into the consensus is expelled. If if Liberty Valence comes into your town, the women should be happy that Liberty Valence gets eliminated. And I think it's just an inversion to where the the socialization, the consensus that exists,

that the women are latching on to is an unhealthy garbage one. So I think that it's a mechanism that exists in healthy and unhealthy societies. It's just that we've given them a world, a terrible world and consensus for them to enforce and seek. All right. Check them out at the Wade Show with Wade. It is Wade Stott. Always love talking to you, Wade. Thanks for your time. It's a thrill, Will.

Have a great day. Okay. So they used to call me in college. during water polo will the thrill. Mona Perry says on YouTube, I'm a boomer with a brain. It's broken for us also. You are not in senior low-income communities.

All single mothers with children living in poverty. Single mothers with children they're living in poverty that are boomers? Mona, I'm having a little trouble. I'm not being cute or rude. I'm having a little trouble with math. Carmela Conali says, quit blaming boomers for everything. It's like blaming Trump for everything. You don't have to take it personally just because it worked out for your generation on the whole, on the average, on the broad scheme of things.

It really did when you compare it to previous and post generations. I'm not mad about it. I'm ready for everybody to push West to young man or into Greenland. Heavy weapons guy says the segregation of different schools of thought into online echo chambers to blame for the gradual decay of the American dream. everything else is a side effect. While Hashycat says, godlessness will end the American dream. Finally, let's head over to Facebook.

We're Steve Allen. People use their real names on Facebook more often, or at least what sounds like real names. Steve Allen says, The dream died when Trump got into office. Okay, Steve. Articulate. Go ahead and explain to me

beyond the declarative your reasoning. fried your evidence. Tony Bell says, I contest that the American dream is not dead. What is dead is dying is ambition, imagination, and determination, and determination. Add to that self-sufficiency and responsibility. Those are what make the American dream possible. Our education system, parents and schools fail our children. I like that, Tony, I agree. I don't want 1950s social security, 1960s, 1960s, 1970s, social security, college education, America. I want 1870s to 1890s. America. Deborah Barerman says the British dream is dead too. All right, let's take a quick break. So when we come back, talk about sort of pushing West young man doing something big and bold, something dangerous. How about climbing Everest? Well, Fox News reporter Mike Tobin did just that.

So we got to hear the story about climbing Everest when we come back on Wilcane Country. It is Wilcane Country for Wilcane Country YouTube channel. Facebook, Spotify, Apple. You know Mike Tobin. You've seen Mike. You've seen Mike Tobin all over the Fox News channel. He's a longtime American broadcast journalist. He's a senior correspondent here at FNC.

Domestic and international news events. You've seen him from the streets of Minneapolis to Tel Aviv. But you probably don't know this about Mike Tobin. He recently climbed to the summit of Mount Everest, wherein he did 22 push-ups in honor of the first responders and veterans lost to suicide. And all of this has been chronicled. It is part of a new special on Fox Nation, Everest journey to the top of the world. It's up right now at Fox Nation. And up right now on Wilcane Country is Mike Tobin.

What's up, Mike? How you don't, pal? Look at you with your vest on. That's not a very Everest look. I wanted to see the like Canadian goose. What does a guy wear? Actually, I, you know, I hunt a little bit, Mike. Yeah.

And what you wear is a big part of the equation. Like, okay, how cold is it? Wool socks, what kind of boots, how many layers? What are you doing on Everest? You probably change in temperature zones. You do. So, like, how do you pack? That's tough.

You plan for the different layers and elevation. And during the daytime at base camp and even advanced base camp at 21,000 feet, we get warm during the day. So you'd be shorts and T-shirts during the day, and you see the sun going down, and you start scrambling for the puffy gas. gear because it gets real cold real quick when the sun goes down. And, you know, puffy shoes and things. How does that work with base camp?

So kind of like, so I've seen the movies, Mike. I can't remember if I read the crack hour book. I've read several crack hour books. I can't remember if I read Everest. But you trek out from base camp. And then what? You set up subsequent base camps as you gain an elevation. At some point, you're done with base camps.

or I guess Base Camp would be at the bottom and you have other camps along the way. Like, give me the sort of subs. How long does it take? Where do you stay along the way? Well, we stayed first at Base Camp. We climbed from the north side of Everest. Krakow wrote his book from the south side of Everest. He came in from Nepal.

I came in from China, Tibet. And we actually drove to Base Camp. So we got out of the buses at Base Camp, unloaded there. And that's 17,000 feet. To give you an idea, it's about 3,000 feet. higher than the highest Colorado peak. So this is where we start resting and try to acclimatize and get our act together.

And the interim camp was 19,000 feet, and we only have an interim camp because you can't just go from 17,000 feet to 21,000 feet where advanced base camp is. You just get sick. Your head will be splitting with headaches, and then you can risk pulmonary edema, cerebral edema.

So you take it all gradually. And then we got to 21,000 feet. And that's when you make the transition really from approaching the mountain to climbing it. You start getting into the vertical environment after that. But you do a lot of, I'm condensing it all, as I tell you this, because you do a lot of acclimatization hikes. You climb high and sleep low just to get your blood boiling and produce enough red blood cells so you don't just get sick as you go higher.

And how long do you stay at each camp and acclimatize? It's kind of a tough thing to say, but I think we were a little shy of two weeks in base camp before we made the move for interim camp, and then we went up to advance base camp. And then the highest we pushed before the summit attempt was 23,000 feet without oxygen. We went to the North call, and if you've read a lot about George Mallory and the historic British team that perished up there, that for a long time was their highest point. and we went up to 23,000 feet overnight and without oxygen, really just to shock the system. And then we came all the way off the mountain and went all the way back to 17,000 feet. In fact, we went into a little town at about 14,000 feet, got a decent shower and some rest. And then we came back into base camp, and then we went for advanced base camp and then started charging for the summit.

I didn't know that there's so much up and down, Mike. Yeah, there's a lot of up and down. It's not, yeah, so working on your body, right? Getting your body capable, essentially, of reaching what is the peak? Yeah, most of what you're doing. 23? No, the summit is 29,000, 32 feet. That's as high as jetliner scale.

29,000. It's as close you can get to outer space on foot. And so most of what you're doing is trying to get your body capable of functioning at that altitude. Correct. That's a really good way to put it. Interesting. When you're at, so let me just, let's kind of go to the end of the story. When you make your final ascent, you're doing that from advanced base camp.

Right. So what you said is 21, right? So in that, so when you finally, it sounds like maybe are you a month in at this point to this entire thing? Or three weeks to a month in? Where are you at this point? It's about a month in at that point, yeah. All right. And then you're at that day.

And you're going from advanced. base camp, which is 21,000, and you're going to do the summit that day. And I'm sure there's a lot of adrenaline. This is the day we're going to do it. Or this is the final climb to 29. How long does that take? Four days. The salt on the summit ultimately boils down to four days. And we had back timed it. There was a lot of bad weather this year. And the teams from the south side all summited in bad weather. There was one team on the north side that went before us. And they had a lot of frostbite injuries. They got up there and got brutalized. And we saw them coming down.

One of the things I noticed is they were wearing the big emergency mittens down low where you didn't need the super warm gloves. And I was watching, it dawned on me that they were covering up bandages and frostbite injuries. And frostbite injury, that's a life-changing injury. If you lose toes, lose fingers, your life is different. Right. Yeah. Right. What do you sleep on that four-day ascent?

What do you sleep now? You're not at a camp, so what are you doing? Well, you have camps. Yeah, you have smaller camps as you go up the mountain. Camp one is kind of level. You go up to the north call, and coal is kind of, you know, climber speak, for saddle on the ridge line. So we go to the saddle and the ridge line, and we had pretty flat camp at Camp 1. And then we started charging up the north call, and that brings you to the side of Mount Everest. And then Camp 2 and Camp 3 are on the sides. of kind of coming off the northeast ridge of Everest. And Camp 2 and Camp 3 were horrible.

They were all pitched to one side. The only thing you could do was try to put your feet downhill. Because there was no way to sleep if you were laying sideways to it. So you try to put your feet downhill, but you still, you slept terribly at Camp 2 and Camp 3. When you need more rest than any other time in your life, you can't get to sleep. Interesting. What are you eating at that point? At that point, you're just eating dehydrated meals.

And frankly, you don't eat a lot. Your body's interesting. It knows what it needs to operate. And your legs in particular are sucking a tremendous amount of oxygen out here. And, you know, you need your brain. You need some other thing. You need a heart to work. And so your body will stop working the digestion.

So when you get up high in the mountain, you really don't feel like eating. A lot of people throw up. Frankly, when we're at advanced base camp, 21,000 feet, I throw up every. day. I'd start every day by throwing up. Really? Yeah. Yeah. That's kind of what I know. What is that about? You're throwing up something. Is that, are you throwing up your breakfast? Or you just ate? No, just, nothing. I usually didn't have anything. So I just kind of heave away for a little

while. And nothing would come out. But that's how I started. What is that about? What's your body saying? I don't want to spend any energy. Yeah, the body just saying, my stomach's not good. And I don't feel good. And that's one more, one more thing that kind of tax you when when when you're up that high. How cold are we at this point? Again, it warms up during the day. The second time we went up the North call, everybody complained about how hot it was.

We were just, you know, I had long sleeves. My base layers were all black, and the sun just brutalized us that day. And then when we got up to the tents and got in, the sun went down and got very cold. But the puffy gear was up there, so we were able to get in the puffy gear, get in a sleeping bag, it wasn't that bad.

And then... But I'm worried about when you have to go to the bathroom. That is an issue. And most people, just frankly, you don't. The amount of food that you have in your system, you're burning it all off. But in Camp 3, everybody had to go at Camp 3, and it's the riskiest you've ever done that.

It was, you kind of knew the whole time, you were you were midway through the act that it could end tragically. Because of the temperatures or a big gust of wind? No, because you're hanging off the side of Mount Everest. And it would, camp three. If you were to slip, yeah, it would, you'd be going for a long time. It just wouldn't be a glorious way to end your life. When you're up there, Mike, what do you feel?

A lot of people still die. And what is the biggest fear that you are facing, like, for your life? Is it your body shutting down because of the physical exertion, the altitude, and the cold? Is it slipping? And are you constantly hyper-focused on your footstep, footfall so that you don't slip? Is it wind? I saw the movie, you know, like big gust of wind come along or something like that. Like, what is your, what is the fear, the biggest fear?

Mostly that your body would shut down. that you'd have some kind of physical complication. The hypochondria comes at you like a freight train. You cough a little bit. That's it, I'm going to die. You just go right to the conclusion that death is coming. But there are many risks up there. Particularly before you get to Camp 1, avalanche is a big risk.

That's what killed off in the 1922 expedition, if I'm getting the date right. George Mallory lost 16 climbers, I think, on his team. due to an avalanche at the North Cole. But once you get up on top of the North call, you're on the ridge line. So all the avalanches fall away from you. And so that risk gets minimized pretty quickly. Then when you're up there, yeah, you can fall. There could be rock fall.

But the biggest thing would be, I think, physically. The altitude is just beating you up at that point. And the wind, by the way, I've covered a lot of hurricanes. And particularly going from Camp 1 to Camp 2, that they wouldn't even call it a storm by Everest standards. That was easily equivalent to a Cat 1 hurricane. Let's take a quick break, but I want to keep hearing about the climb to the summit of Everest with Fox News Senior Correspondent, Mike Tobin.

Welcome back to Will Kane Country. We're still hanging out with Fox News Senior Correspondent, Mike Tobin, who has summited Everest. Mike, are you afraid of heights at all? Do you have any fear of heights? Well, I think everybody does. I went up there. I'm very alert and aware that I could fall. But do I, you know, do I get knock-kneed or anything like that? No, I think I just kind of get focused. See, I'm perfectly willing to admit and face my fears. I do know I have a fear of heights. It doesn't debilitate me.

In fact, it challenges me sometimes. I'm like, I like to do things, therefore. I like to jump off a cliff into the ocean. I've done skydiving and these things because I want to confront that fear. But I'm not going to sit here and tell you that I'm not feeling it. And I think my biggest fears, Mike, that I've probably ever felt like taking my kids to Grand Canyon or any kind of hiking. We've done a lot of hiking with our boys. And it's not for me to fall. I am terrified of them falling. And I just wonder how much I would be focused constantly on slipfall, slipfall height.

Well, you know, you have the crampons on your feet. Once you get up high, I always like it. When you're down low in the Himalayas, most of the terrain is what they call glacial moraine. It's all the gunk that the glaciers drop off. So it's gravel and big rocks and like you're turning your ankles the whole time. But once you get up high, there's ice. And then you put the spiky things we put on our feet are called crampons. So you put on the crampons.

And then you have pretty good footing. So I'm always pretty confident in my footing once we get up high and get on the ice. Okay. Okay. All right. Then let's go back. Well, first of all, a couple more questions before I get to the climax here. Do you know how many people die still every year climbing Everest?

I think the year we were up there, I challenged me on this, but I think it was six. Nobody died on the north side. Six. Yeah, when I was there, but people died on the south side of the mountain. And some years, a lot of people die. And we passed by dead climbers en route to the summit. That's what I was going to say. I've read that.

You die on Everest, you stay on Everest. Yeah, and then you become a root marker, frankly. You know, they turn right at green boots. Really? Yeah, yeah. Really? They are getting some of the bodies are being removed now with drones. Someone will go up there and chop the body out of the ice and they're lifting them off, some of them.

But they're, I believe there are 400 bodies up there now. So you can't get them all. Oh, my gosh. And so, like, when you're climbing, how many, how many do you see? You know, I didn't notice them until the way. down and I believe on the on the northeast ridge you'll pass by four dead climbers but I was really hyper focused that the Sherpa that I climbed with I've climbed with him before and he and I were a really good team and I was just kind of focused on staying in sync with him and I was watching his heels

the whole time as we went up and that's kind of where my my my my tunnel vision was is it crowded Mike I've read that it's become such a thing and so many people do it that there's actually traffic at Mount Everest? On the south side, but we didn't have any crowds. When we got to the summit, we were the only team on the summit. In fact, nobody came up from the south side when we were there. Why is the south side so much more, I guess, popular? Primarily because of the Edmund Hillary-Tensig-Norgette route. They were the first guys to get to the summit of Everest, and they went from that side, and the guiding company started setting up that side. And I got it with, the one thing, and you probably read about this with Crack-Hour's book, there's the

Kumbu icefall as you come in from the south side. And the icefall, you think of a glacier like it's a river, but it's moving slowly. So the icefall is like a waterfall. It's always moving, and those big blocks of ice come down. And the way you minimize your risk is to move quickly through the icefall. You don't eliminate your risk. You just minimize it. But they do that by Sherpa's going into the icefall and establishing the ladders and the fixed lines.

You've probably seen pictures of that. But that means that someone has to spend time in the ice fall. fall to establish those ladders and the ropes. And I'm not without guilt in this department because we did have Sherpas help us out and establish our fixed lines. But to have them hanging out in the ice fall, to me it's just, I don't want to condemn it because a lot of Sherpas make good money in the ice fall. But I just choose not to do it. I don't want to be part of that. Have you done it more than once? No. I've done a lot of mountains, but Everest just the one time. and I was lucky enough to get up in the first try.

Take me to now the final ascent, Mike. So four days, the final and fourth day, you're going to get to the summit. How much of that final ascent, which isn't necessarily just the last day, is vertical? How much of this is you hang off the side of a wall or a rock? Well, you start out of Camp 3, and so when you step out of the tent, you're in a pitched environment. It's not vertical, not pure vertical. And you start up, the first obstacle is the exit cracks. And I guess I call that class four climbing because you're vertical, then not vertical.

The vertical than not vertical. You're going up and over obstacles the whole time. And you gain probably 500 feet of altitude going through what they call the exit cracks. And then you gain the northeast ridge of Everest, which is a spectacular moment. You just think, wow, I'm here. This is it. And then there are three obstacles on the northeast ridge of Everest, called the first, second, and third step. So you get to each one of those, and then you're, again, in a vertical environment.

But you have the fixed lines that you're climbing with. At the second step, there are ladders. Green Boots, the deceased climber is there at the second step. And once I cleared the second step, I've been reading about, I was reading about ever since before I was a reporter. and so I knew that the second step was the most difficult of the obstacles on Summit Day. So once I cleared the second step, that's when I was, it felt to me like I was going to make it. That's where the victory was. Okay.

Yeah. Well, I'm curious how much doubt you had on the entire enterprise. The whole time. Like, that you said you knew you really. So you didn't have any kind of certainty that this was going to happen on this trip or even on this day when it's finally time to ascend. You didn't know until you cleared the second step. Dep, okay, I'm going to make it to the summit. Yeah, yeah.

Tremendous self-doubt, and it comes at you like a freight train, especially because in this line of work, we don't have a lot of free time. There's not all the time to spend with your thoughts. You get to the base camp of Everest, you got a lot of time with your thoughts. And then you think, this is stupid, why am I do this? I'm probably going to die. Why did I spend this money? Why I'm away from work?

I'm away from my wife. Dummy. Yeah, that comes at you again and again. What did it feel like? in. Okay, what did you get to the summit? I mean, was it anticlimactic in that you cleared the second step? And that was more of the moment of accomplishment? Or what was it like when you get to the summit? It's the, you know, it's the summit of Everest. And of course, if you've ever climbed any kind of, I say you do a lot of hiking, you look at the hilltop and you think, okay, it's right there.

It's always further away than you think it is. So, but it's still a high pressure moment. I wanted to do the thing with the flag, and I was hoping I'd have enough time to get the push-ups. in and then I wanted to celebrate with the other climbers. I waited for a little while. Piso Sherpa and I, we just climb really well together. We made good time getting up there, and I was about probably 20 minutes, a half hour ahead of the rest of the team. So I waited at the summit for those guys.

And we did our pictures. We did our thing. And then you know you've got a long day for the rest of the day. You've got to get all the way down. We went 2,000 feet up with the plan of descending 8,000 feet. all the way to advanced base camp. And so there's a lot of work, and 90% of the accidents happen on the way down. So it's kind of hard.

I didn't even think about that. I didn't even think about that. The danger's not over, and the physical exertion is not over. Now you've got to go home. Right. And people are tired, and they've already kind of invested their head. And people tend to cut corners on the way down. And some of them paid with their lives.

And bad weather can roll in the longer you're on the mountain. and if you haven't managed your oxygen, you're going to run out of oxygen. And so you're thinking about all that while you're in the summit. So it definitely was a moment for celebration, but you can't let your guard down. With all that, I guess I would take it for granted, but now my curiosity drives me, with the 22 push-ups, hard at the summit. And by the way, is there ground? Is there enough ground to get out there and do push-ups?

Well, my feet were higher than my hands were. So it was like those, you know, the push-ups you do on the bench. Once I started, the altitude kind of feels like the worst hangover you've ever had. And I know you don't know what a hangover's life because you just go to church. But it feels like a tremendous hangover. So when I started the push-ups, I realized I'd kind of overcommitted. But it was a, you know, once you start, you've got to finish it. So I was able to knock out the whole 22.

But they weren't, they're not, if you look at the video. 22 and one stretch. 22 and one stretch. No rest in the middle, but they're not really the tidiest push-ups you've ever seen. You'll be forgiven. Your football coach might have criticized you. Okay.

I have two, no, I have three questions left, Mike. Okay. Are you going to, do you have a desire to do it again? No, I don't think I'm interested in doing Everest again, mostly because you put your whole family through it. and put my wife through that. And I don't need to do that to her again. And, you know, we'll see.

I'll climb other stuff. I've never done a big wall. I'm interested in doing that. So that might be the next athletic thing. But one of the things I promised my wife when I was traveling back from China is that, you know, we're going to be a normal couple now. We're going to do normal things. And then I went right to Israel, so I'm falling a little short on normal. Okay.

That's a perfect segue into this. Yeah. You have been on with me. You have been on my show, both the Will Kane Show and Fox and Friends, from some pretty objectively dangerous situations throughout your career. You've been in a lot of dangerous situations throughout your career. Where would you put this? You know, you've been in Israel as rockets fly over. You've been in war zones, multiple. How does this sort of like, we talked about fear earlier, right, and, you know, how it hung over you. Compare or contrast that. from the fear that you have to face with your assignments at Fox? It's kind of hard to say. They almost don't compare. And I'll tell you, the last time I was in Israel, and they had the strikes on around, and the ballistic missiles came into Israel.

And I've got to be honest with you. Most of the time, when the rockets are coming into Israel, they're kinetic. The Katusha rockets that fly to Lebanon or the Gaza Strip. They'll run out of fuel, really, before they enter into Israel. So you never see the incoming rocket. You only see the interceptors that go up after them. But with the Iranian missiles, they're ballistic.

So they would reenter the atmosphere. And you would have this amazing light show as the missiles were coming down. Now, I should have been concerned for my safety. I should have been concerned for the safety of the people on the ground. But there was a big part of my head that thought that is the most amazing thing I've ever seen. Because you see the light show coming in from outer space. and then you see the interceptors go up after them. And the technology that was there, I was always fascinated with it.

But with those ones, those warheads from the Iranian rockets, they were taken out two and a half city blocks and sent in shrapnel a half mile. So security was pulling us most of the time and putting us in the bomb shelter when the rockets were incoming. And I listened to those guys. That's the real deal. Beyond that, you know, I've...

And it's just too, go ahead. It's too incomparable to what you would have felt at Everest? Yeah, I just, I don't know that I can compare the two. Everest was serious. Everest, I put myself there. You know, and the combat coverage and that stuff, it's the biggest thing happened in the world. I'm always trying to get to the big story.

People give me credit for that kind of thing, but that's when I'm happiest in this job. That's why I got in this business. I didn't get in this business to cover holiday trains. travel, even though I do it sometimes still. Oh, I guess it turns out that I have two instead of one last question because our boy, our mutual friend, Ed, is signaling to me. Ed is, by the way, one of the guys that told me about your story and said, you ought to talk

the Tobin about this. Ed has worked in the field, I think, with you behind the camera a couple of times. You may know him as Edgar. I call him Ed. he uh he uh by the way that the knee mike but let me interrupt the camera guys speak well of you and that tells me a lot about a guy do they yeah yeah yeah they do so well that's good to hear yeah i feel like i have more in common with most camera guys and most on-air talent there you promise you that he said what are you saying ed what's what oh did you get an injury what happened

to your leg i broke my leg climbed Everest broke my leg walking the dog uh Oh, not on Everest. No, no, no, I broke my leg walking the dog. In fact, when I was with Ed in Minneapolis, and we were on those icy streets and everything, I was hobbling around on crutches. It's one of the reasons I left Minneapolis. I mean, count your blessings, right?

Because I can be here promoting this Everest documentary with you instead of being, otherwise I'd be in Minneapolis right now. Walking the dog? Just walking the dog? Yeah, I slipped on the ice. It wasn't dramatic at all. Yeah, Ed's reiterated. that you were on crutches on the icy streets of Minneapolis, and I'm sure unruly crowds

had you on the other day when the crowds were unruly maps. Okay, final question. It's sort of the big one, though, Mike. Why? You know, why? You know, when George Mallory. I do the seal swim. I do the seal swim.

I think about the why. You know, why do this, why this? I said before you came on, there are two things that I don't think I ever, I'm into the physical challenge thing. Jobs make it really hard to do that. Yeah. Anything it takes time? or the training involved in it.

I don't think I ever want to run a marathon, just not my thing. I've done it. And climbing mountains, maybe it's the heights thing. I don't know. So I'm curious as you're why. Well, you know, when George Mallory said, climb Everest, because it's there, that was a kind of hostile retort to a pushy reporter.

So I always feel connected to that one. But why? You know, my dad was a World War II vet, made it to 92 years old, smoking unfiltered cigarettes and drinking scotch. But one of the things he told me after serving in World War II, raising seven kids,

succeeding in business, failed in business, is it happens fast. And, you know, I'm getting up there in years and I had a chance to do it. So I took it. And you do kind of, there's a degree to which, is it a life changer?

I don't know. It's Thursday. Let's go promote the show. Let's see, you know, there's work to be done. but also I know for the rest of my life I'm a guy who climbed Everest I'm pretty proud of that that's right that's right as well as well you should be

and to some extent you can go along with Mike it's on Fox Nation adventure of a lifetime in Everest journey to the top of the world again up at Fox Nation Mike's been great to spending this time with you thanks for sharing that story thanks pal I appreciate it all right there you goes Mike Tobin with us here today on Wilking Country. I don't know. I think it's a combination of a lot of things I don't like.

I don't like being cold. I don't like heights. I don't even. And that's not even the hard parts according to him. The hard parts are your body shutting down, which I never even considered. I have to go check it out at Fox Nation. All right. That's going to do it for us today here on Wilcane Country. We will uh, it's a Thursday. So go to Spotify Apple where you can hang with this. We'll call, we'll call, comments, emails, questions. It's your show I'll answer tomorrow on Wilcane Country. Listen to ad-free with a Fox News podcast plus subscription on Apple Podcasts. And Amazon Prime members, you can listen to this show, ad-free on the Amazon Music app.