Best of the Program | Guest: Mike Rowe | 2/22/22

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Hey, great great podcast today for you.

We celebrate Washington's birthday with a little story that I think everybody gets wrong.

We also talk about what's happening in Russia.

I don't know what's happening in Russia.

Don't worry, they're just robbing the front room and the living room, but those are pro-burglar rooms.

So it's going to be fine.

And the one and the only Mike Rowe joins us.

Make sure to subscribe and rate and review the podcast as well as as Studios America, both available right here on your podcast platform.

And don't forget to subscribe to Blaze TV at Blazetv.com slash Glenn.

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Here's the podcast.

You're listening to

the best of the Glenn Beck program.

Can you explain to Americans what exactly will they face if this happens?

Sure.

As the President president talked about in his speech,

we are aware that, again, when America stands for the principles

and all of the things that we hold dear,

it requires sometimes for us to put ourselves out there in a way that maybe we will incur some cost.

And in this situation, that may relate to energy costs for us.

Oh, okay, all right.

But we are taking very specific and appropriate, I believe, steps

to mitigate.

You know, the little people people are going to have to pay the costs of this.

And, you know, if it just, darn it, it happens to be fossil fuels.

Ah, shoot.

But we're, but we're going for our principle.

Shut up.

You don't even know what our principles are.

I'm tired of you talking about our principles because you despise American principles.

Yes, you do.

Yes, you do.

And I am,

Stu just said to me a minute ago, I'm offended by them using the word principles.

They have none.

None.

They have none.

So Pat Gray is joining us here from Pat Gray Unleashed.

Pat, I don't know if you saw not only is energy cost going up now because of what we're doing with Putin, but farmers yesterday.

They came out with the cost of just the increase of cost of running a farm.

And that's bad for farmers, but really, I'm glad it doesn't affect us because it's only the farmers.

You know, I feel bad for the farmers.

Yeah, yeah.

But this will be fine for us.

Yeah, it'd be fine.

Contract labor, up

45.1%.

Fertilizer, this chart says 18.

The fertilizer that most farmers use.

Just this last weekend, it was reported is going up 300%.

Why?

because of the next thing lp gas 226.7 percent increase maintenance is 89 percent increase seeds 30 percent increase insurance 33 percent increase

So what's great that they're going to eat all that cost though for us

they're so rich.

Yeah, they can do anything.

I'm telling you support your local farmers.

Yeah.

Support your local farmers.

Let me show you something I found in Costco.

Going shopping in Costco.

Give me this.

This is, saw this, thought it was a misprint.

Actually, ask the butcher.

That can't be right.

Those two steaks are $99.

What?

This steak is, what does it say there?

$221.

It's not Wagu, is it?

It's Wagu.

It is.

Yeah.

Okay.

But $221

for one steak.

One steak success.

That's a lot.

That's a success.

That's a whole lot a lot.

Not even I mean, that stuff a pound is like $180 a pound or something.

Now, it's $221 a pound.

Oh, okay.

Yeah, okay.

So it's gone up just a little bit.

So you're probably going to be buying not as many of those steaks as I usually do.

I'm telling you, you're going to be eating bugs.

You are.

Have you noticed this push for bug eating?

Bug eating is big.

It is.

For a couple years now, they've been hammering that bugs are a lot of protein.

They're so, you know, if you put them in some olive oil, they're delicious.

Everybody keeps laughing about it.

It's kind of weird for not wanting to eat them.

Is that an attitude?

Yes, it is.

And yes, we are laughing because it's completely ridiculous.

And Americans aren't going to eat bugs.

The Americans will eat bugs if

that's the only thing you have.

Listen to this.

So there is a

transition period that may be brutal to some.

That's why we have to harness the economic

productivity through nature-based solutions.

This is is a quote from a new book out by Charles, not Charles Schwab,

Klaus Schwab.

Klaus Schwab is the leader of the Great Reset.

So he just put this out and he said, you know, we're going to have to have nature-based solutions because things are going to be too expensive.

That's why we'll have alternative food protein sources.

like beans and bugs.

It's terrible.

You eat the damn bugs.

Yeah.

Yeah, be my guest.

People have got to wake up.

They think that this is all a joke.

They think that that's too crazy to happen.

What hasn't been too crazy that has happened recently?

And look at the farm increases you're talking about.

Their cost of doing business and

growing crops.

Putting them out.

Putting them out.

They'll go out of business if they don't raise their prices.

They will.

They're going to have to raise the prices.

Except for corn in Iowa, which I guess has really fertile land.

They're saying now because of the

price of

fertilizer going up, that we will have a 40% yield of what we normally have.

40% yield.

That's not good.

That's not good.

No.

That's not good.

Suboptimal, you'd call it?

Yeah, I would.

And then you have what's going on.

Did you go that far?

I go to suboptimal.

Oh, really?

I hate to get the emotions going with a phrase like that because it's just, you know.

But it's appropriate in this instance, I think.

I think so.

Then you go to the banks, and I'd just like to, again, remind you what Canada made permanent yesterday.

The government's new directive called Emergency Economic Measures Order.

The order says that the banks and other financial entities like credit unions, co-ops, loan companies, trusts, cryptocurrency.

platforms and insurance companies must stop providing any financial or related services to anyone associated with the protest up in Canada.

that's frozen accounts, stranded money, canceled credit cards.

I'm going to show you some stuff that they're doing up.

They made this permanent yesterday.

They extended the

emergency order yesterday.

But there's a reason why they did it.

And

it's brilliant.

It's evil, but it's brilliant.

I mean,

they are going to impoverish people who stand up against things.

Yeah.

And they're taking away.

They've already confiscated the trucks from the truckers

in Ottawa.

And with glee.

And they're auctioning them off.

Now they're going to auction them off.

It's the same

asset forfeiture thing that's going on here in the United States.

There's no trial.

Not even any trial.

They haven't been charged.

Most of them have not been charged with anything.

Nope.

They haven't been arrested.

They haven't gone to jail for the most part.

There are a few of them did.

But they haven't been convicted of anything.

It's only after you've been convicted of something should your ill-gotten booty be sold off if it was ill-gotten.

But But their trucks aren't ill-gotten even then.

We've left that train in the station long ago.

Long time ago.

Long time ago.

People don't understand.

Asset forfeiture happens a lot here in America.

It does.

And it just happened again.

The FBI seized almost a million dollars from this family.

And this wasn't a case of driving around with cash in their car.

They seized it from their bank accounts and took

to make to $892,000, to be specific.

Wait, why?

They started to investigate them.

The Bureau took funds from every corner of their world,

including Amy's savings that she racked up after decades of practicing as an attorney.

And

agents showed up at their home, informed them that they were under investigation for allegedly depriving

Amazon of their honest services.

Wait, what?

What?

Yeah, in plainer terms, they accused Carl, the husband, of showing favor to certain developers and securing them deals in exchange for illegal kickbacks.

And he says that never happened.

And it's exactly why I fought this as long and as hard as I have.

And they just ceased, because they're investigating him for this.

$892,000 from these people.

They lost their home.

They lost their cars.

They sued, but

they supposedly reached a deal where supposedly they're going to return $525,000.

Oh, that's big of them.

About half of them.

You know, this is actually the most...

That one is the most questionable out of them.

Usually they're just like, hey, what do you have that cash for?

Yeah, they just pull you over for a traffic stop.

Just take the money.

Still,

short of showing us the evidence and convicting me of a crime, you can't take that money.

Nope.

Nope.

It is unconstitutional to do what they're doing over and over and over again.

And people just don't understand.

This is coming for everyone.

Yes.

Nobody's safe on the bus.

If you step out of line, it will, I mean, Mike Lee and Rand Paul

are trying to bring up their

bill that they tried to get passed under Trump.

Limit the emergency powers.

Limit the emergency powers.

Well, they couldn't get it under Trump.

They think maybe they can get it now.

I don't think so.

I don't think you're not going to limit emergency powers on these guys.

But that's what Congress should be doing.

And it's not just emergency powers.

Trudeau invoked the emergency powers because he could.

And so he did.

And he said it's going to be temporary.

Really?

Yesterday, they voted in Parliament to extend it, to give it its stamp of appeal.

First chance they got.

First chance they got.

They extended it.

First chance they got.

Now, they used a trick, and I'll tell you about that trick here in just a minute.

But do you think our government is beyond a trick?

Oh, no.

And all they have to do, they already, he just enacted ESG.

Their finance minister, like our Treasury Department, they are

a member of the Board of counsel or something for ESG.

In Canada?

In Canada, she is a board member of the World Economic Forum on the Great Reset.

So she's all on board.

All Trudeau had to do was say, Yeah, go ahead and just enact that,

and we're just going to do it through emergency powers.

But this is what it's about.

This is what's coming.

And you can't seem to get anybody to really

care

or act on it.

I think there are.

I think people don't know what to do.

Well, that's true.

That's true.

I mean, look at that is true.

You've been talking about taking your money out of the big banks for a while, but even doing that wouldn't protect you against this type of thing.

No.

And that's why you get to the cryptocurrency world, and then you see what they're trying to do to cryptocurrency in Canada.

They're trying to, I don't know how you freeze a Bitcoin account.

I don't think you can necessarily do that.

They close the off-ramps.

Yeah, right.

You wind up with your money in some exchange, and they go through the exchange to shut it down and deny access to the funds that you have.

I mean, they're doing everything they can to control every little bit of your life.

Meanwhile, look this up.

They're doing the Hamilton project.

The Fed in Boston is in charge of the new digital currency, and it's called the Hamilton Project.

The guy who wanted the first central bank, the first bank of the United States.

And they're working with MIT.

And what's interesting is they said that they didn't want to work through blockchain because they needed more transparency than that.

Sure.

But blockchain is

every transaction is publicly posted.

How much more transparency could you possibly need?

I don't know.

Be able to.

Just more.

Or just more.

Just more.

Just make sure that they can turn it on and off or anybody they want and know exactly what people are doing.

Well, they've shown pretty well that they can get a hold of the blockchain funds, haven't they?

I mean, the FBI has done that already and confiscated.

Confiscated people's money.

Yeah,

that they just had a $3.6 billion.

I mean,

I don't know what people think tyranny looks like more than taking everything you own.

But I mean,

not on that.

I mean, you can't go buy food.

You can't get a job.

I don't know what you're waiting for.

Wait until I'm behind bars or barbed wire.

That's tyranny.

That's tyranny.

Looking at this story, by the way, from Pat, two years.

They haven't charged them in two years.

Right.

Two

almost a million dollars.

Have they gone?

Have they charged anybody in

or everybody in January 6th?

Are all those people?

It's

a lot of them are still waiting.

A year and a half there.

You're listening to the best of the Glenn Beck program.

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Yesterday was President's Day, but today is actually George Washington's birthday.

We were supposed to celebrate all presidents, but when I was growing up, it was Lincoln that we celebrated, and then Washington.

I brought a couple of things in.

This is the key to the box number seven at Ford's Theater, occupied by President Lincoln the night of his assassination, April 14th, 1865.

That's the key that opened that door.

This is the

bloody cuff that was taken from, you can see the, on the other side, actually, you can see the bloodstains on this cuff.

This is what he was wearing that night.

You can see some of the stains through it.

This

is

the door handle of his house.

And everybody who sees this is like, can I just touch the door handle?

Yeah, of course you can.

It'll cost you, but you can do it.

Yeah, it'll cost you.

We tell you the fee after you do it, obviously.

Exactly right.

It's amazing, isn't it?

It's incredible.

Now, I gave back that key already.

Wait a minute.

It's not here, though.

I want to talk to you a little bit about this.

And this is from George Washington.

Today is George Washington's birthday.

And

if we are talking about how do we save our country, because we are a country really of rebels.

We are a country of the Boston Tea Party.

We were founded on questioning government.

We're supposed to.

But in the old days, they used to tar and feather people.

And, you know,

you rarely died from your run-of-the-mill tar and feathering.

Yeah, if they wanted to kill you with tar and feathers, they could,

you know, they could do it,

dipping you in tar.

But that was if they wished you dead.

Usually they just wanted to make an example.

This was the case with a guy that you've probably never heard of, Robert Johnson, and it happened on September 11th,

1791.

So Hamilton had passed his whiskey tax and was taxing all the whiskey.

And I'm like, wait a minute.

Johnson was riding his usual tax collection route when he was surrounded by 11 women, he thought.

But they were actually 11 men in women's clothing.

They stripped him naked, tarred and feathered him, took his horse, and left him in the forest.

But he didn't die, and they didn't want him to die.

They wanted his scars to be a warning to every tax collector in the region.

If you try to collect this tax on whiskey, we'll make your life a living hell.

So he recovers, and Johnson issues a warrant for the arrest of two of his assailants, who he recognized, you know, even dressed as a woman.

Some guys can't pull it off, I guess.

Unfortunately, the man delivering the warrants was also tarred and feathered and left tied to a tree.

Johnson did exactly what they wanted.

He quit the tax collecting business after that.

The violence just got worse and worse.

And anyone with any connection to tax collection was a target, even the collector's wives and children's.

I mean, it sounds a little like, sounds a little like what Trudeau is doing.

Anyone even associated,

you can lose everything.

Well, the people in Pennsylvania, it was western Pennsylvania, divided under the regime of the rebellion.

It was a revolt that was upending everybody's lives, but

they also didn't like the whiskey tax,

and they looked for leadership.

That's when George Washington wrote this letter.

He tasks General Henry Lee with leading

1,200 men, a militia, to squash the rebellion in western Pennsylvania.

Now, I have heard this story a million times.

I heard it in school, and I hear it all the time.

And I hear one of two things.

I hear George Washington, yeah, tell me George Washington and the whiskey tax.

In fact, I heard that just last week from Michael Malice.

Tell me about a benevolent government with a whiskey tax.

Didn't he just say that last Friday?

I think he did, yeah.

Yeah.

Well, you know, that shows you don't understand the story of Washington and the whiskey tax.

I've also heard, you know, from the others, these are really bad guys.

They were just so violent and horrible, and they all needed to die.

Neither one of those are true.

In this letter in my hand, Washington laid out his expectations for Lee's army.

He said, First, to combat and subdue all those who may be found in arms in opposition to the national will and authority.

Second, to aid and support the civil magistrate in bringing offenders to justice.

The disposition of this justice belongs to the civil magistrate, and let it ever be our pride and our glory to leave the sacred deposit there unviolated.

So he was hoping that rounding these guys up and bringing them to justice would be enough to end the violence.

He was right.

The rebels scattered and the revolt ended without any further violence.

Okay, but what about the whiskey tax?

Well, I'll get there.

150 men were tried for treason.

Only two met the very high standards that is outlined in our Constitution.

Two of them were guilty.

That means that they had to be executed.

Washington pardoned both of them.

The whiskey tax?

President Jefferson repealed it.

Here's the thing.

The mob's cause wasn't bad.

Jefferson, even Washington himself, thought the whiskey tax was unfair.

And Americans had been rebelling against taxes for 30 years, resisting taxation.

It was American.

It used to be.

Why should the people pay the government's debt?

They had a point.

But they didn't understand

who they were rebelling against and they didn't understand

that that's not the way you make friends in America.

They lost their way.

They got violent.

And that's what most people remember about that, the violence.

You don't have to discuss the merits of their argument or the validity of their cause.

That's not what people talk about.

It's either George Washington was the first to put his foot down on the neck of people, or these guys were so violent they all should be destroyed.

Well, that's not right.

The story of the whiskey rebellion and the reason why I'm telling it to you today

is this is another example of Washington's leadership and Washington's credibility.

He understood what was right and wrong, but he trusted the system.

Now I don't trust the system.

But I do trust that the people, when they come to their senses, will change the system.

And violence

delegitimizes good ideas.

Good intentions are forever stained by bad actions.

We constantly walk the line between compliance and anarchy.

The whole American experiment hangs in the balance.

If we slip into mindless submission, or step out into violent rebellion, we lose.

Did you hear me?

If we slip into mindless submission

or step into violent rebellion, we lose.

Washington balanced those two.

It requires immense discipline, discernment, care.

But he knew something that I'm not sure we all know.

It's worth doing it the right way

because this is worth saving.

All that's required is to remember, like he did, who he was, who you are,

who we are as a nation.

We are the Poston Tea Party.

We are not the

whiskey rebellion.

They confused them.

Washington set them straight.

We cannot forget that.

By the way,

I have

I look for the dark things in American history because I think it is really important to know all the bad things in American history.

If we don't know the bad, we'll be surprised.

David Barton collects all the good things in American history.

I have looked for the bad things about George Washington.

I cannot find them.

I can find them with a 20th century scholar who never met them or can't give me a footnote on why they think that.

It's just that scholar's opinion, or an opinion based on an earlier scholar, also from the 20th century, that has no footnotes.

He may have been the greatest man to ever live in America or lead a nation.

And may his spirit never explode nor be extinguished.

The more we model ourselves after George Washington, the safer we will all be.

The best of the Glenn Bank program.

Mr.

Micro, my friend, how are you, sir?

I'm great.

You look exactly the same.

I I hate you.

You're like Wesley Snipes.

You never age.

I thought you were going to go with like a Dorian Gray.

No, no.

I've used that a couple of times on people and they've been, who?

Who?

Like, no.

Yeah, yeah.

Look, if you have to explain it, right?

If you have to explain an analogy, if you have to explain a joke.

you know, you usually realize halfway through the explanation.

You probably shouldn't have started it.

It's not worth it.

It's not worth it.

Long run for a short slide.

So good to see you.

You too.

We're in quite a different world that we were in when we feels like it

yeah feels like it i wonder sometimes you know i mean it's so easy just to stare at the headlines and look at what's going on right in front of you and conclude or assume that we're truly in unprecedented times and then you know you're a student of history you look back and it doesn't take a lot of imagination to to to think well you know the civil war was a heck of a thing yeah revolution was a big deal that whole world war ii thing right yeah but i think we're past the you know the 60s were kind of tumultuous you You know, 80s kind of sucked a little bit.

70s.

I think we're, I think we're, we're left with the big ones

at this point.

We're all the stars of our own movie, right?

We're all the lead in our own play.

We're all the protagonist in our own tragedies.

And so it's really difficult to look around and not and not cast ourselves at the center of all of this.

We can't help it.

It's the fault in our stars, and it's also the thing, I think, that will inspire good men and women to stand up and be counted.

And they are.

I mean, did you follow what was happening up in Canada?

Oh, sure.

The truckers?

Yeah.

Oh, my gosh.

Yeah.

Those people, I mean, they're selling off their trucks today.

Canadians, the Canadian government is starting to auction off all their trucks.

They haven't been charged with a crime.

They haven't gone to have a court hearing.

Nothing.

You know what strikes me about all of this, and maybe this is somewhat of a silver lining in it.

I kind of feel like we're about to close the loop, right?

When this started, truckers were right on the leading edge of heroes.

Yeah.

They were the very definition of essentiality.

Yeah.

Yeah.

In the course of two weeks, right?

They literally went from hero to villain to goat, you know.

And

we've done that, though, with the nurses.

Everything.

We've done that with police.

Everybody.

Everybody.

Yes.

We are constantly.

changing the definition of words that for a long time we thought we understood.

And those definitions are evolving in real time.

And if we question it, if we ask about it, well, they look at us like a cow looking at a new gate.

Like, what do you mean?

Of course infrastructure involves reparations.

Of course it does.

Of course it does.

Of course it does.

Of course that protest was peaceful.

What do you mean?

You know, it's in so many ways.

We've been asked, I think, to simply ignore what we're looking at and pretend that a new language has come along with lots of words that we used to understand but no longer do it's confounding

so how does this

what happens next where do i i mean with everything that's going on in your opinion because you're connected to to people you're watching things you're an intelligent man well thank you uh what uh

except for the opera thing but we make mistakes we all make mistakes yeah um

where does this go well it's going to go splat now i don't know exactly what splat means, but I do know.

I think, was it Churchill who said, you know,

when you're marching through hell, always remember to keep going, right?

You got to get through it.

And, you know, does splat look like a war in Ukraine?

Does it look like a third wave?

Does it, I don't know.

But, but I do believe.

We're getting close to some kind of tipping point,

some sort of critical thing.

This is such a tiny example.

I hesitate to even use it, but I had a moment last week.

I was in San Francisco of all places meeting a friend in a diner.

And I walked in and there was nobody at the hostess stand and I didn't have my mask on.

And I just walked, I could see him sitting right there 10 feet away in a booth.

And a woman ran to the front screaming, sir, sir, sir, I need to see your vaccination card.

And I said, okay.

And I had it and I showed it to her.

And I started walking over to my friend and she said, and sir, you need to put a mask on.

And I looked at her and she looked at me and she had her mask on.

And I had one in my pocket.

But Glenn,

for the first time during all of this, I smiled and I looked at her and I said, I'm sorry, but I can't do that.

I can't put a mask on to walk five feet to sit down and have lunch with my friend without a mask on.

And the good part of the story is that there was a pause and she looked at me and she said,

I understand.

and went about her business.

And I thought, wait a second, that's so there's you know, that's a tiny, tiny, tiny, tiny little thing, but I feel a crumbling.

I do too.

I can feel it.

I do too.

And people, I don't know what it's, I don't know, I wouldn't want to bet on what an airport's going to look like in a month or a plane or a restaurant.

I really don't know.

What does that mean?

Well, I think it just means that in that tiny little moment where the people who have to enforce the rules come face to face with the undeniable truth that the rules they've been forced to enforce are not rooted or are no longer rooted in anything that is logical.

And at some point, good cops aren't going to arrest protesters.

At some point.

At some point, look at how many cops in

Canada just became

cops I don't recognize.

I know, but

your question is, how long does that that go on?

My answer is, it's never gone on forever.

True.

It's never gone on forever.

Yes.

Let's talk about the bullcrap that is the unemployment rate.

I keep hearing from the Federal Reserve, you know, our unemployment rate is only 4.5%.

I'm like, that's because you're no longer counting the people who are staying home because you're paying them.

Right.

I mean, we can't have a 4.5 unemployment rate when everywhere you go, you see help wanted.

Everywhere.

Talk about a jobs program.

Oh, my gosh.

Yes, that was one of the very first conversations you and I had when you invited me here years ago, which, by the way, it wouldn't be the same if I didn't thank you for doing that because it did jumpstart my foundation.

We're going to give away another million dollars next month in work ethics scholarships, and we're doing it precisely to answer the question you just posed, which is if we focus only on unemployment, you take your eye off the opportunities that exist.

And the opportunities that exist right now are a little more

than 11.1 million, right?

There are so many open positions right now.

And Glenn, not a week goes by where my foundation doesn't get a call from some large company or more often than not, some association who is desperate, desperate to get out of their own way to hire more people.

And they just don't quite know how.

I mean, and if you think about it, it's not a great mystery.

Companies are often their own worst enemy when it comes to making a persuasive case for why you should work there.

Because it all looks like advertising.

It all looks like marketing.

And kids today, they've got such a bullcrap meter.

They can smell it.

They know when they're being marketed to.

So what we've been doing for the last 14 years and more pointedly for the last five or six is award these work ethics scholarships and try and make a more persuasive case for the opportunities that do exist by confronting the stigmas and the stereotypes and the myths and the misperceptions that keep millions of people from even looking at a career in the trades where there is so much prosperity going on right now, your head will spin.

That is, I mean, I'm not sending my kids to college.

I won't.

They can go, unless you want to go to Hillsdale.

You're not going, I'm not paying for it because it's just an indoctrination program.

And there's, they, there are trade colleges and, and, uh, uh,

trades that you can apprentice in even

that are really good.

You can make a lot of money and have a, a pretty nice life.

And those skills are going away, going away.

Every five tradesmen that retire today are replaced by two.

Now that, I think it was Lincoln who he was talking about something else altogether, but he referred to a terrible arithmetic, a terrible arithmetic.

He was talking about the death, of course,

in the Civil War.

This is just bad math in terms of anybody can look at this and say, you take five and put two back, do it every year for the next 10 years, and there's not much there.

And that's what's been happening.

Our trade force right now is so far north of 50 years of age, and nobody is making a compelling case for tens of thousands of open positions.

And the mistake, Glenn, is people think constantly, this is a problem between employers and people who either are untrained or unwilling to work.

And that's certainly true, but it's also a problem for anybody who shares my addiction to affordable electricity and indoor plumbing and smooth roads, right?

Our real infrastructure is hanging in the balance.

One of the jobs, you know, I'm not sure if you're familiar with all of of the numbers that are coming about AI, but a lot of jobs are going to be just destroyed.

One of the jobs that won't be destroyed, plumbers.

AI can do new construction, but it can't do it inside the house.

It won't be able to.

That's right.

I mean, those guys are going, they already, believe me, I redid my house.

They already make a lot of money.

You know what I mean?

And they don't have both plumbers, two different plumbers,

both of them said, I have tried to get people to apprentice with me.

I want to pass this on to somebody else.

I can't get anybody to work.

They'll work two days and they'll go, what?

I got to do all of this?

This is a communications problem and it's a PR problem.

And in my view, one of the most important things you can do, and anybody who has

some influence, is

tell your plumber's story because he can't, right?

He doesn't,

All he can do is preach to the choir and commiserate with other plumbers.

And they shake their heads and they say, yeah, we can't find anybody.

Meanwhile, the question we ought to be asking, the rest, you know, the fat part of the bat, the 300 million people in the country ought to be saying, well, how long do we want to wait for a plumber to come to fix the toilet?

Right.

You know,

obviously, we also want to know how much we need to pay, but how long do you want to wait?

for the lineman to get up the pole.

How long do you want to wait for the heating and air conditioning guy to come out here during the next big freeze, right?

These questions impact everybody.

And

the best way to address it, in my view, I love to talk about it, and I'll find a bully pulpit and I'll pound my shoe on the table forever.

But we have to hear from the people who have prospered directly from mastering a skill that's in demand and gone to work.

And until we do, our kids are just not going to buy it.

So, so, Mike,

can we continue the conversation about jobs that are going to last

through AI?

Are you up on that at all?

Are you looking into this stuff?

Yeah,

I mean, I think so.

And by AI, you mean artificial intelligence.

Intelligence and the

semination, which I'm also prepared to speak of at great length, if you'd like.

No, no, that's good.

You know, early on in Dirty Jobs, there was a delightful bit of confusion when I told the network, yes, I've got a handle on a great AI job.

And they were delighted.

They thought we were going to come back with

a big piece on robots.

And I had my armed to my shoulder in a cow.

And they got everybody phone.

That is the first time I did that.

It's a...

Yeah, yeah, it's a heck of a thing.

It's a heck of a thing.

And you learn why that guy doesn't have one sleeve.

That's right.

That's right.

And why that cow backs up every time he won't be sleeping?

Oh, no.

Not this again.

Not this.

No.

It's bizarre.

It goes to language, though, again, right?

I mean,

so much is swirling around.

You say AI, I hear one thing, somebody else hears something else.

What I'm wondering is

we are going to, we're going to live in a world where you have to be retrained for something new all the time.

That's coming.

And we don't seem to have that work ethic anymore.

It feels like it's being beaten out of us.

Well, we've wrung it out of ourselves.

Look, it's very, very tempting to,

if the guys at Car Shield can come out and take care of a problem that your dad would have taken care of himself once upon a time,

that's a slow creep.

It's not a bad thing.

It's the very existence of companies like that that I think is telling because more and more of us are

increasingly disconnected from the business of work.

I can't change my oil.

I can't even find it anymore.

No, you can't.

You can't go in and change it.

It's all chips.

You can't even run a diagnostic.

I mean, we've placed a lot of mechanics through our foundation.

And I'm telling you, these guys,

it's not quite rocket science, but when you open the hood and look down at that thing, it's pretty close.

Oh, yeah.

You need to be a software engineer.

No, it's completely different.

So look, AI is...

Let me tell you a story.

I have an old car that has a carburetor.

I drove it across the country last, and I got up into the Rocky Mountains.

That thing was dying on me.

It's like, I need air, I need air.

I couldn't find anyone who knew how to adjust a car.

I don't know how.

No one.

And they were, this is the honest to God truth.

One guy in that town said, You know, there is an old guy that used to fix his old tractors.

I might be able to get a hold of him.

And I'm like, holy cow, this is a lost art.

Yeah.

I mean, it's a carburetor.

Right.

Our dads used to do that.

Look, I think it was Huxley.

I think it was Huxley who said

the greatest enemy of freedom is anarchy, but the second greatest enemy is efficiency.

And not effectiveness, efficiency.

So when you talk about AI,

to me, I immediately think of, uh-oh,

we've fallen in love with efficiency as opposed to effectiveness.

Effectiveness still has, in my mind anyway, a human component.

Humans are effective.

Machines are efficient, right?

And somewhere in all that is a lesson and something to be wary of.

I have a feeling we'll learn it after.

We'll learn it the hard way.

We'll learn it the hard way.

Mike Rowe, thank you so much.

Mike is going to be on the podcast that you will hear on Thursday if you are a member of the Blaze and Saturday, wherever you get your podcast.

Mike Rowe from Micro Works Foundation.

You can follow him at micro.com.