Mike Rowe is a best-selling author, narrator, podcaster, and TV host known for his hit show “Dirty Jobs”. He also started the mikeroweWORKS Foundation which gives out millions in scholarships every year. His new show “People You Should Know” premieres on his YouTube channel May 2nd.
Mike Rowe returns to talk about some of the big issues facing America’s workforce today, if Trump’s tariffs will bring manufacturing back, and why he thinks there’s a war going on against the idea of work itself.
Mike Rowe: https://www.instagram.com/mikerowe/
Mike’s Youtube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/@therealmikerowe
Mike’s foundation: https://mikeroweworks.org/
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I'll be in Chicago, Illinois on April 24th, Miami, Florida on May 10th, Cedar Rapids, Iowa on June 19th, St. Paul, Minnesota on June 20th, Fargo, North Dakota on June 21st, Rapid City, South Dakota on June 22nd, Winnipeg and Calgary in the Canada.
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Please go through those links so you get accurate pricing.
And I appreciate your support for the Return of the Rat tour.
Today's guest is a host.
You know him from Dirty Jobs.
He's also an author and a podcaster.
He has a new show coming out in May called People You Should Know, where he travels the country interviewing regular people who are making a difference in the world around them.
It's always a good time chatting with the one and only Mr. Mike Rose.
Shine on me.
And I will find a song.
I've been singing.
Almost.
I've been singing.
Oh, he's bringing up coffee.
That's how they used to do it.
Like, you really got to work for it.
You want to be in the labor force.
You got to heat it up.
It's awesome.
Yeah, see?
Is there a cream in there?
See, this is the difference between today.
Look, this is the difference between my parents and us today.
This is how you got a cup of coffee with me, like my grandparents.
Yeah, man.
They would serve it like this.
Yep.
And you figure it out.
Good luck.
Figure it out, man.
You're on your own.
And here we are.
Well, remember the last time I was at your place, I had rolled out of the hotel, come to your house.
I wasn't quite sure who you were or where I was or anything.
And all I knew was I needed coffee and you ordered some for me.
And they brought it in.
And it was so freaking hot.
I didn't make a big deal about it, but we were like two minutes into our conversation.
I thought, damn it, man.
I just, I literally cleaved my tongue to the roof of my mouth there for a second.
I wonder if I could still be interesting.
And then I just powered through.
You know what?
It's whatever.
It's just pain.
Well, thanks for doing that, man.
Oh, that's the worst, bro.
When you drink something so hot, but you want to be a man.
That's what I think.
Our grandfathers, no wonder they couldn't express their feelings.
They couldn't talk.
You know how hot the coffee was then?
It was magma.
Yeah.
And how jacked up their teeth were.
They were in constant pain.
Yeah.
People died of their teeth back then.
All the time.
Yeah.
We lost at least a grandfather to his to teeth infection or to gum infection.
At least.
But yeah, people died.
It was crazy.
These bananas.
Yeah.
I bit my lip the other day.
And this is a funny thing for me anyway, but the third, like the first time you do it, it's annoying and it really takes you out of your meal, takes you out of your conversation.
Yeah.
And part of the reason is because you know it's going to happen again.
And then when you do it again, it's a different kind of rage.
Right.
And because it's tinged with the inevitability.
Like it's going to happen.
And then when you bite it the third time, it's just white, hot pain and like an anger at the universe.
And it's irrational.
Yeah.
But it's just one of those things.
And maybe four or five times you're going to bite it.
And it's going to be like that for the next 24 hours until your body finally sends some sort of message and the swelling starts to go down.
But it is a, it's a, it's a horrible moment in your day when you start that crucible.
It's an oral Vietnam, man.
There's nothing like that going down that journey, the D-Day of every bite you take and one of them is going to land, step on that, on that hidden IED of a previously bitten inner lip.
An oral Vietnam.
Can we get them some coffee?
It's going to happen again.
Some cream.
They just bring you more coffee, more coffee.
You know what?
Maybe I should, I used to drink, I used to drink black all the time, and then I went two creams and one cream.
And you know what I find?
It upsets people when you change your coffee order.
Like the people around you, in your circle, like I always thought you were a black coffee guy.
Oh, yeah.
And now what's with the cream?
Or what's with the almond milk?
You don't want to do that.
That sends a whole different message.
Yeah, definitely.
In some communities, that is not good.
Well, there's no, not good.
There's no nipples on the almond.
Yeah.
And if you're looking for them, you are a Randy character.
Well, you can't.
I mean, curiosity would require some kind of cursory inspection from this milk delivery system with no nipples.
Oh, look at you, Zach.
That's amazing.
Thank you very much.
Where'd you get those out of?
Did you go into the cow?
I saw the one we had was expired, so I was.
Did you really?
Oh, my.
You went to the corner to get me some of these little poisonous pods.
These are good.
Oh, yeah.
Why is everything...
I'm like, should coffee creamer have melatonin in it?
I don't know.
Isn't that the stuff that makes you tired?
Yeah.
It's like, what's going on?
That is a mixed message.
I know.
Here's some caffeine with a little sedative for you.
We'll just let your body sort it out.
Yeah, it's where we are.
Next thing you know, you're biting through your lip.
Cursing the universe.
Oral Vietnam.
Dying to your teeth.
Oh, dude.
Dude, do you have any idea how much feedback I got?
I don't know if this happens to you.
Like you see yourself maybe on YouTube and it's clearly you, right?
This is a thing.
You don't dispute it.
It's you.
You did whatever it is, whatever conversation you're having.
But you don't have any real recollection of the conversation.
You're just seeing yourself, right?
Like this happened to me a lot years ago when people started uploading these incidents on QVC, like in the middle of the night where I'd been fired for various inappropriate interactions with product or.
Oh, you were on QVC?
Oh, yeah.
Yeah.
But when I look at those old clips and I can't deny that it's me, but I have absolutely no idea what's going to happen or what I'm going to say next.
It's very unusual.
It's like biting your lip.
Yeah.
Because nothing you do about it.
You just sit there and you watch yourself doing things you don't remember doing and you just hope, you just hope to God you don't blow it.
I didn't know you got involved in this.
I'm seriously involved in this.
This is the dark arts selling jewelry to people that are high on sleeping pills.
Yeah, I mean, their lonely hearts, they're, you know, that look at my nails so nicely manicured and all that.
That was 1989.
Are you selling those?
Or 90. Were you going to a poison concert?
What were you even wearing those for?
You know, I mean, as long as you're going to do it, find the cat sack.
That's when I knew my life had taken a weird turn.
This was 1990.
It was my first job in TV.
Was it really?
That's crazy.
Like, I didn't even know that.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah.
Oh, my gosh.
Look at you.
Look at the hair.
Right.
Where were you from, Transylvania?
So this is a lava lamp, right?
And I'm.
I have no idea how to behave.
I just want to know if it's really hot.
Well, guess what, dude?
It's hot, man.
Put two creamers in it.
It's like that lava.
I mean, obviously, it's not really lava.
It's magma.
No.
It's not lava.
I open this thing up on the air just because it's three in the morning, right?
And you're just trying to make sense out of whatever they bring you next.
It could be the AMCORE negative ion generator.
It could be the health team infrared pain reliever.
It could be a lava lamp.
Oh, yeah.
It could be a child's diaper that sorts coins.
They brought me a cat sack, K-A-T SAKS CAT SAC.
I thought it was a joke.
It's not.
It's like a grocery bag lined with mylar, right?
And your cat crawls in it and it makes a crinkling sound and cats love it.
Oh, that's nice.
So this is the kind of thing, man.
I would sit there for three hours in the middle of the night trying to, there was no training program or anything.
They would just bring you these things that look like you'd get them out of that machine on the carnival midway with the claw.
It was really just stuff that had failed to sell in prime time.
And so if you're new, there's no training program.
They just put you on the middle of the night and they just bring you this stuff, man, one thing after the next, and you talk for eight minutes.
I love that.
We should bring that back.
What if we brought something like that back?
Well, I mean, QVC is still on.
It's just that back in those days, no one really knew about it.
They didn't have any big vendors or anything.
Today, you know, they do six, $7 billion a year.
It's huge.
It's giant.
It's huge.
Home shopping is huge.
I wonder if we should do, what if we did a fun one on like YouTube and we sold American products that were American-made, Mike?
I'm in.
I'm in.
Look, there are no new ideas.
Like, I joked the last time I was at Japad in Nashville.
It was like, I really felt like you had tapped into like a Wayne's world meets Charlie Rose.
Right.
And so all those old ideas will come back.
Telethons will come back.
Oh, I love that.
Home shopping never really went away.
Telethons were great, though.
You'd call up and you'd be like, who's crippled?
Sometimes my stepdad would get drunk or whatever.
And he'd like want to impress on mom.
So we'd ring up one of those telethons that were on just to, he'd be like, oh, hey, it's Randy, who's crippled over there?
And they'd like tell you who's crippled or whatever.
And he'd be like, put $30 on that one.
Well, do you remember Jerry Lewis doing the telethons?
Yep.
Jerry's Kids.
Jerry's Kids.
He was real.
I mean, he raised like a lot of money.
He did a lot of good in that world.
But you got it 36 hours into a telethon, right?
You've been up 36 hours.
Yeah, you're on QVC then.
And I did, there were times on QVC where it snowed and like the next ghost couldn't come in.
So when you've been up for that long and you're on live TV and they bring you like a collectible doll and you're hallucinating and you don't even understand that people collect dolls, but they do, right?
They do.
And so you're just sitting there, like this doll would be next to me and her name would be Rachel and she'd be dressed up like a tramp from Little Women or something.
And you just give them stories.
Pride and prejudice.
Exactly.
I loved him as he loved me.
So Emily Bronte, or was it Charlotte?
I'm not sure.
I think they've dated for a while.
I'm not sure who it was.
They may have, one of them took the other one's name.
Well, this is like what you just did is exactly what I would do every night.
It was free associating over whatever they brought.
I wasn't a very good salesman, but I was good at like starting sentences with no clear end and just keep going.
So the next thing you know, you're giving these dolls like very elaborate backstories, you know, like, you know, she's a doll that gives you just a hint of possibility.
She says no, but there's yes, yes in those eyes.
And then the camera guy pushes in close, really close.
And I'm sitting here like this looking at a monitor, looking at myself, looking at the doll, and a million people are watching.
She's new in town.
She's new in town, and she's keen to make some friends.
And there's really no telling how far she'll go or how far you'll let her.
Because it's really up to you, caller.
For three easy payments of $29.95, young Rachel here will be on her way to you.
And whatever you do with her in the privacy of your own curio is between you and your lord.
I'm just here to tell you that she's on sale and she looks like a sport.
All righty, what's next?
Next up, Mike, we actually have the Princess Diana Beanie babies that are in town.
Hey, that's fantastic.
They're just passing through, actually.
Mike, there's not many of them.
Well, you know, aren't we all just passing through, Theo?
When you really think about it, this whole notion of permanence as it relates to porcelain dolls, I think that's something we can dive into to kill three, four, maybe five minutes.
Oh, I believe that.
And I'll tell you this, that these beanie babies are stuffed with, what's the, it's not cotton, what is it?
It's styrofoam, Theo.
Oh, yeah, styrofoam.
They're stuffed with styrofoam.
And I'll tell you, it was a bold move on a manufacturer.
It's Russian cotton, as they call it.
That's right, because when you get it wet, it swells up a little bit, like those nesting dolls in reverse.
When you see that little princess dye beanie baby swell up like a tick, your heart's going to beat with anticipation and wonder about what could possibly happen next.
Yep, and we also, she comes, if you buy her now, she comes with these two CIA Dolls.
We're not saying anything.
You say potato, I say masad.
I say cavity search because with the beanie baby, it's really your property.
That's the beauty, especially the princess dye beanie babies, because with a touch of royalty, well, they're dressed in purple too, the color of kings, Theo.
I thought that's worth knowing.
And if you order right now within the next 44 seconds, both of these CIA beanie babies will be stuffed with pure polyester or gay cotton, as they call it in some sort of thing.
That's right.
And for this week, just to mix things up a little bit, each one of these beanie babies, every one out of 100 will be stuffed with cocaine.
So it's really going to shake things up because who knows who's going to get it and who knows what's going to happen next.
Oh, I wouldn't put it in a baby's crib unless you want him to walk this week.
That's what I'd say.
I just bit my lip.
I'm going to put two creamers inside of myself.
Mike, we have you here.
Thank you, dude.
I didn't know you were in those trenches.
Because you know what I've thought about?
It would be neat to do something if we did it with products, only products that are American made, right?
I just got this shirt and a jacket from this company, American Giant, right?
Seriously?
Yeah.
Bring in that jacket if you can.
I know those guys.
Bathrop or what's a Winthrop?
Bayard Winthrop.
Bayard Winthrop.
Is the CEO of American Giant?
Are you messing up?
I swear to God, dude.
Bring it in.
It's a gray one out there.
I'll tell you a true story about this guy, Bayard Winthrop.
16 years ago, he sent me a sweatshirt in the mail because he saw me on dirty jobs getting the absolute crap knocked out of me and he saw my clothes being destroyed right and left.
He goes, this is an indestructible sweatshirt.
It's 100% made in the USA.
And Slate Magazine had just written a story called The World's Greatest Hoodie.
So it wasn't cheap, but it was made from cotton that was literally picked like outside of Gaffney maybe or Middlesex, South Carolina, where their factories were.
He showed me pictures of the employees who stitched it, right?
The yarn, everything.
And I still have it.
Wow.
I wore that thing.
It was completely in it.
There it is, Slayton Magazine.
It's the greatest hoodie ever.
This is December 2012.
So he sent me this sweatshirt, and I wore it, and I gave him some love on dirty jobs because it really is amazing.
You know, it's the kind of sweatshirt.
Do you remember the champion sweatshirts?
Yeah.
With the reverse weave.
Yeah.
Right.
They were like the varsity sweatshirts, the Harvard crew guys.
It's the kind of sweatshirt your girlfriend steals.
It's those.
So anyway, I never knew what happened to the guy, but he reached out a couple years ago and American Giant is still doing it.
Like, I mean.
Yeah, they're making clothes in America, right?
Because this is, yeah, how did I come across this?
Oh, a friend of mine showed this to me.
They sent me a clip about a guy was trying to make a product in America.
Yeah.
And he couldn't do it.
I'll put it on for a few minutes.
This is my AG right here, Daddy.
That's great, man.
Yeah.
Yep, they're doing it.
They're actually doing it.
People don't understand how jacked up this is.
Back in 1988, 80% of all of the clothing we wore was made in America.
Yeah.
And today it's 2%.
It's bananas.
It's unbelievable.
The problem that those guys have is there's a labor challenge because what's happening is they're competing, obviously, with China and with Vietnam and with a lot of other places.
And those places, you know, they don't have the same regulations.
They don't have the same requirements.
They don't have the same conditions and factories, all that stuff.
Right.
You don't have to be fully awake to work.
You don't even have to really be human.
I'm not sure what the laws are.
I just know that when the dust settles, it's a hell of a lot harder to do it here.
So they do it.
They're trying to do it.
They do it elsewhere.
They do it in South Carolina.
They do it in South Carolina.
American Giant.
American Giant does.
But it's crazy to think that when you think about, this is a misconception that I started to realize that I had, that when I travel around the country, because we've probably, and I just said this recently, but we've touring comedy, we've probably done the top 200 cities size-wise, right?
Like some comedians, they go to 50 cities, right?
Sure.
And they go to the, we went as many places as you could go.
And we still have more to go.
But I mean, like, you know, anywhere from like, you know, Lubbock to La Crosse, Wisconsin.
Yeah, I mean, just we, we, to Fargo.
I mean, we're going to medium-sized cities.
And you always think like, oh, well, there's factories everywhere that make things and stuff like that.
There's not.
No.
There's not.
And you think, oh, well, I'm sure there's always, you're flying on an airplane.
You're like, oh, I'm sure we're passing thousands and hundreds of thousands of factories that are making products and sweatshirts.
We're not.
No, it used to be, I mean, the Rust Belt in particular, like that part of the mid-Atlantic, those were factory towns.
The Tetanus Belt, too, they called it.
The Tetanus Belt.
Well, I mean, it was, you know, there's so many rivers up there.
And so the mills were by the rivers.
And so the factories were near the mills and the cotton was spun there.
But this guy, Bayard, he's actually become a friend of mine.
And he's on a mission.
And like flannel, like hand-dyed yarn in flannel was something like those old thick flannel shirts that we grew up with.
You can't get them anymore.
So American Giants started making those.
They started making these hoodies.
And the more I read about him, the more I liked him.
So he's become like he's in my world now because I tried on my podcast.
I'm not there yet, but I'm really trying to make sure all the sponsors have an American-made story just because why not?
See, the thing is, man, if Trump succeeds at the reshoring effort with the tariffs.
Yeah, that's part of it.
But if in general he gets manufacturing reinvigorated in this country, then there's going to be a challenge that a lot of people aren't talking about, which is labor.
Right.
So there's in January, there were 482,000 open positions in manufacturing in this country.
480,000 open positions.
If he gets his way and this all gets reinvigorated, you're talking about two or three million new jobs, but there's no workforce sitting there going, this is what I want to do.
Or prepared to do it?
So there's a skills gap for sure.
Okay.
But there's also a will gap.
Right.
Okay.
So let's talk about a couple of these things, Mike.
So first let's talk about, I'm going to take this off because it is pretty warm in here, but I will say this.
This is great.
It's a little bit falls off in that thing.
They made a t-shirt.
Oh, dude, you will never, this thing will keep your coffee warm for seven eons.
It gets, it's, I mean, not to turn it into a commercial, but I swear it's weird how soft it'll get.
It gets softer and it gets thicker.
It'll smell a little funky.
Oh, God, it's going to turn into a wife.
Spit my lip again.
Hey.
Damn it.
But no, this is really awesome, Mike.
And I know you have a new show that's coming out on your YouTube on May 2nd, where you went and met with a lot of just workers on the ground, right?
We do a lot of that.
But this thing is kind of important.
The tariff stuff?
Yeah.
Okay, let's start there.
So Trump has put in a lot of, he started this kind of tariff war, right?
Yeah.
And you hear people say it's good.
You hear people say that it's bad.
From my perspective, after traveling around the country, I don't know how else you're going to get jobs back here because it just, there's a lot of towns that are boarded up.
There's a lot of small cities that are boarded up.
I mean, a whole city.
You walk through the city of Jackson, Mississippi during the day, it looks like a movie set.
It's very clean.
It's beautiful, but there's nothing.
And that's one of 40 probably cities that we've seen that are like that.
So I'm just thinking, what's going to come and save these cities if something needs to?
And so then you start to see Trump put these tariffs on, and then you start to get the idea, well, it's to bring jobs back so we have jobs here so it keeps cities busy.
Yeah.
So it's two different conversations, I think.
Okay.
And obviously, I'm not an economist.
In fact, I don't know an economist who thinks tariffs are a good idea.
I really don't.
I don't know an economist.
I know a couple, but the ones I'm most interested in are like slightly right of center where they don't agree either.
Right.
So like everybody is either having a conversation about whether or not it's a good idea economically.
I call that like a tier two conversation.
You're having a tier one conversation.
You're saying, well, wait a minute.
What if there's something in the country that's actually more important than the economy long term?
Right.
What if, like, what could that be?
The economy of the human spirit, I think.
It could be that.
And, you know, I get, I get all kinds of grief for this, but I think it's a fair analogy.
I think about, well, hell, I think about slavery in 1870.
Right.
And I think about the conversation that was going on in the country.
And a big part of it was, wait, if we get rid of this, do you have any idea what it's going to do to the economy?
Not just for the South, which would collapse, but for the North.
Who was buying all the products?
Who's all dressed in cotton.
Right.
And of course, there's the triangle trade, molasses, rum, slaves, right?
This is an eternal wheel that had been going on for time immemorial.
Yeah, dark rum.
Where do you think that came from?
You know what I'm saying?
You put a couple, you know?
I think I know what you're saying.
I'm just saying you mix a few items and you got some, that's the best rum they got.
It's good rum.
But if you fundamentally were to make the slavery decision based on nothing but whether or not it was good or bad for the economy, well, we'd still have slavery.
So we got to a point where people said, wait, wait, wait.
This can't keep going.
This isn't human.
That's right.
Right, right.
And so it was bad.
The economy crapped the bed.
We fought a war.
A lot of people died.
And I don't mean to sound glib when I say it.
I don't know what the real ramifications are going to be.
I don't have a crystal ball.
But I do think that the reason people are talking past each other with the tariffs is because some people are saying, look, it's a tax, period.
It's not good for global trade, which is true.
But if there's this other, if you're trying to transform Jackson, Mississippi, then you at least have to elevate the conversation to this other set of consequences that might happen if you shake the whole thing up.
Now, again, I put a big asterisk on that, i.e., I don't really know what I'm talking about, but I do believe that there are unintended consequences and intended consequences.
And the consequences of messing with the tariffs are probably both.
Right.
But do you feel like, do you think Trump, his intentions are good?
Here's what I think.
When I started my little foundation, which by the way, we're still doing it.
We've got 3 million bucks we're giving away this month in these work ethics scholarships.
So we're training people for skilled jobs.
We're training people for manufacturing jobs.
We've been doing it for years.
That's me in a cap and gown sitting there without any pants on, as if to indicate optically that even though I have my degree, I'm not actually trained for any of the opportunities that currently.
Oh, you look like you just graduated from San Francisco.
I'll show that, dude.
Nice legs.
It was an experimental.
My dad used to wear those shoes, dude.
Hey, you can see my shark bite there on my left knee.
There you go.
Looking at that, that hurt.
Yeah, a lot of sharks over there in San Fran, those bays, buddy, you know?
So Trump's intentions, right?
I don't know.
I don't know the man.
I'm rooting for him.
But here's what happened to me.
When I started that foundation.
You started this.
Yep.
Because your foundation gives out work ethic scholarships.
Work ethics scholarships.
And people can apply on the website.
If you click on scholarship right there up at the top, yeah, it'll take you to a, oh, yeah, well, that's me and a bunch of people who got the scholars.
There you go.
Yeah.
That's awesome.
Can we donate to that?
You can donate to it, sure.
Awesome, man.
Yeah.
In fact, we just auctioned Off, these guys up in Ohio made me a truck.
They made a MicroWorks work truck.
Rogan's head exploded when he saw this.
This is a 1964 power wagon, and they built it from scratch.
It was beautiful.
And they took it to the Barrett Jackson auction, and we got one and a half million bucks for it.
So that all went to scholarships.
I remember last time I was going to be.
We're going to donate way less than that.
I was auctioning off all kinds of crap from dirty jobs to raise money.
We've given away about $12 million in these.
That's amazing, man.
But I'm not saying it because I'm awesome.
No, you're just saying this is so this is a way that you're trying to be a part of the things that you've gone through and seen.
You want to put guys back in the workforce and make them be prepared.
Is that right?
That is right.
And the answer to your question regarding Trump actually starts with Obama, because the year we started this in 2008, I don't know if you remember it, but he had a thing called the Highway Infrastructure Act, and it was big news, headlines everywhere.
He was going to create 3 million shovel-ready jobs, right?
And I was rooting for him.
And Dirty Jobs at the time was at its absolute peak.
And what was weird as the country was going into a recession was everybody I was talking to on Dirty Jobs, there are 12 million unemployed people, but they all had like help wanted signs out.
They were really struggling to hire.
And their basic bitch was, we just can't find people who are excited to pick up a shovel.
We can't find people who want to do the work that we have.
So I reached out in an open letter to the president in 2009 and just said, look, man, I am rooting for you.
I think 3 million shovel-ready jobs sounds great.
But part of making that succeed has to include a campaign to help make shovel-ready jobs cool.
Because right now, people aren't buying it.
There it is.
Look at that, man.
You guys are unbelievable.
That's an open letter to the president.
March 11th, 2009.
I am awed by the task at hand and compelled to tell you about MicroWorks, a public awareness campaign designed to reinvigorate the traits.
Yeah, we need, there needs to be.
I'm saying it because it's about to happen again.
Donald Trump is going down a road, and if he succeeds, he's going to create millions of manufacturing jobs in a country that currently has nearly 500,000 manufacturing jobs open because the people who run those factories can't find people who want to do the work.
So it's not enough to create the jobs.
And look, a lot of your listeners are probably thinking, well, make the pay better, make it more interesting, make it more palatable.
And we can have that conversation for sure.
But the bigger issue still is there's no enthusiasm for the work.
We took shop class out of high school.
We robbed kids of the opportunity to even see what that kind of work even looks like.
Meanwhile, we told a whole generation of kids they were screwed if they didn't get a four-year degree, right?
And so people say, Mike, how did college get so expensive?
I know you know this, but nothing has gotten more expensive in the last 40 years than a four-year degree.
Not real estate, not healthcare, not energy, nothing, right?
And so we keep telling kids they're screwed if they don't go in this direction.
We free up endless money to loan them.
So now you got $1.7 trillion in student debt on the books.
You've got 7.6 million open jobs right now, most of which don't require a four-year degree.
And here's the other screwed up part.
You got 6.8 million able-bodied men who are not only not looking for work, I mean, they're out of the workforce and not looking.
So all of that together, we've never seen that before in peacetime anyway.
So something beyond the tariffs, something beyond policy is going to have to happen to make 22-year-olds go, yeah, man, I would consider doing that.
Right.
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Well, I've got some thoughts on that.
So one is, do you think that the college, one of the reasons it went up was because most of that money was loans and then that was almost a scam, not a scam, but a scheme to.
Scam's good.
Yeah.
Wow.
Look, it's a product, man.
What you're selling.
Right, but how does that money?
So just so I know, so I'm clear.
So that money works because then the college loans it to you.
They put interest on it and then you have to pay it back.
Well, the college doesn't loan it.
Sometimes you might get a scholarship from the college.
That's not a loan.
But financial aid packages can involve like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which sounds like your awesome aunt and uncle.
Yeah, it also sounds like you borrowed some money from a guy in Memphis.
Actually, what it is, is some faceless bureaucrat in a tall, soulless building in Kansas City that's just crunching the numbers, right?
So the more people that they can get to go to college, the more interest that they can get off of these big loans, right?
So, sure, the people loaning the money are getting interest on the loans, but it's the colleges themselves that like right now, like literally as we speak, there's a screaming headline.
Trump just put a hold on $2 billion of federal money that was going to go straight to Harvard.
To Harvard.
That's right.
Now, why would he do that?
You know, people are screaming.
Oh, my God, it's something about free speech.
And, you know, $2.2 billion in grants to Harvard has been paused due to activism on campus.
Where in the headline does it tell you that Harvard has a $52 billion endowment?
Nowhere.
But they do.
They've got over $50 billion in an endowment.
Yeah, that might not even have an effect.
Well, I mean, look, colleges, especially the top-tier colleges, have an awful lot of money and they have a steady stream of customers because in our society, we have completely bought into the notion that what you're purchasing in these schools is an education.
What you're actually purchasing is a credential.
Whether or not you're educated or not, your experience may vary.
Look, dude, I'm looking at my iPhone right here.
If you've got an internet connection, you have...
How you process it and how you utilize it, that's up to you.
That's you.
So it's not fair to say that you can get a liberal arts degree on your iPhone, but you can.
It's not fair to really compare, you know, lying in your bed like I did two weeks ago, watching a free lecture at MIT and saying, you know, it would be the same experience if I were there in the classroom.
But it's close enough to say, well, wait a minute, if the first one cost me $0.00 and the second one is going to keep me in debt for over 20 years, what am I doing?
So I don't know, man.
I feel badly about painting with too broad a brush.
My liberal arts degree served me really well.
I graduated four years after you were born, I'm guessing.
1984, I graduated.
Beautiful year.
All right.
It was a great year.
I went to two years in a community college.
A lot of hot chicks then, too, huh?
Couldn't swing a dead cat without hitting a prospect.
God.
You know those collectible dolls on QVC?
It was very, very similar.
Yeah.
It was a good time to be alive.
I was also singing in the opera back then.
Oh, yeah, that's Fred.
I forgot that you were an opera guy.
Yeah, it was a thing I did.
Cat calling.
Dude, if you hear that cat call, you stop.
If it's just some fucking Chicano whistling at you, dude, I'm keeping walking.
But you hit a guy, if I could hit half of an Ave Marie on his lunch break near an open manhole, dude.
You got to stop.
Well, people pay attention, man.
Like in the first season of Dirty Jobs, I sang.
I didn't even know the cameras were rolling.
I was just blown away by the acoustics in a sewer in San Francisco.
Oh, yeah.
So I sang, Vecchiazimara Senti, Irrestuopianto Scende Re Sacriamonteodevi Le Megrazia Recevi.
Right?
Okay, I'll have the anapasta.
Okay.
But it was like the image of a dude wearing a rubber suit, squatting in a sewer, covered with other people's shit, singing Puccini.
To your point.
Literal Puccini.
Pooccini.
That's good.
Yeah, people didn't know what to do with that.
You don't know where to, it's like a lot of cognitive dissonance in your brain.
There's a lot going on at once.
And there's a parallel here.
That's kind of what's going on right now.
That's it.
People, like if you sing opera, you shouldn't be in a sewer.
If you're in a sewer, you should be getting paid crap wages.
But what do you do?
What do you say about a guy in a sewer who's a multimillionaire?
Right?
Like, what do you mean he owns his own septic tank business?
What do you mean he worked his way up to become a successful entrepreneur without a college degree?
How is such a thing possible?
Every day, Theo, we've got 2,200 people have gone through microworks.
I'd say 30% of them are welders.
I'd say half of them are making mid-six figures.
Nobody believes it.
I spend most of my time now in this space sitting down with people who are 25 years old and looking at a camera and saying, hey, I get it.
Don't take it from the opera singing rich dude covered with other people's crap.
Okay.
I get it.
I'm not persuasive.
But listen to her.
Listen to him.
Right.
Right.
And so that's how the needle starts to move.
And that's part of what has to happen.
So you're saying that if the tariffs work, right?
Part of that is going to have to be that we're going to need people who can do the jobs, do the manufacturing jobs here.
We're going to need those skilled labor workers, right?
Yes.
Okay.
So, and we don't have all those right now.
We need them.
We don't have them.
How do you, so we almost need like a, like, remember that Uncle Sam poster, like, I want you, like, we need that PR campaign to get people hype because, yeah, you just need that thing that's going to get people hype a little bit.
It's not just PR.
It's ethos too, you think?
Well, what is ethos?
Bring it up.
Yeah, bring up ethos and tell us and all these Greek words, you know, the Aristotelian definition of a tragedy, anagnoresis and peripatetia, a characteristic of spirit, a culture, era, or community is manifested in its beliefs and aspirations.
That's it.
A challenge to the ethos of the 1960s.
So can I have an ethos on myself, kind of like my own spirit?
Yeah, absolutely.
Okay.
So if it's an individual, it's a worldview.
I think, and an even better way to think about it is a code.
Okay.
Do you have a code?
If you do, what is it?
Like Dexter kind of, but my own thing?
Like a lit, like a code?
Yeah.
Like, look, man, this will sound really outdated and hokey.
Integrity, you mean?
I do mean integrity.
I mean, when I was a kid, like the first time I had to raise my hand, well, the first time I had to take a pledge, it was the pledge to the flag.
Yeah.
I didn't really know what it meant.
I was too young.
I just memorized it.
Right.
But later in the Boy Scouts, you know, I had a scout master who was a retired army colonel.
He was a hard ass and he took this really seriously.
So you like raise your hand and pledge.
You take the scout oath.
No, I'm only like 12 years old at the time, but I remember thinking, this feel like there were candles lit in a darkened room and it was serious.
You know, it was as serious as could be.
It's easy to look back and laugh and poke fun.
No, we did the same thing.
And it mattered, man.
On my honor, I will do my best to do my duty to God and my country.
Like, wait, that's just the first sentence.
Never mind whether you like it or agree or disagree.
Challenging kids to take an oath and to make a pledge.
My foundation has a thing called a sweat pledge.
You have to sign it if you're applying for the particular pile of money that I've accumulated through donations.
And I'm super stingy with that money.
Well, AA has a, they have a pledge in the beginning that you do as a group.
There's something about doing something as a group that makes you feel a part of a group.
That's how a group works.
That's how tradition happens, right?
You can't just have it without actually participating in it and vowing to it.
You must assume individual responsibility, but you must do that in the presence of other like-minded people.
So my sweat pledge, which I ironically wrote after some bourbon, stands for skill and work ethic aren't taboo.
I was just looking for a way to make people make a promise.
And you can find it out here.
It's now a curriculum, actually, in 70 schools, but it's based on the 12-step recovery process and the Boy Scout law.
Combined with these really old school affirmations around things like gratitude and delayed gratification and personal responsibility and work ethic and aversion to debt.
I actually have something on the sweat pledge that says, I would rather live in a tent and eat beans than pay for things I can't afford.
Now, people call me.
They're pissed.
Their parents call, right?
There's a tenant on the pledge that says, I believe that my safety is my responsibility.
I understand that just because I'm in compliance doesn't mean I'm out of danger.
Now, I believe this because I nearly got killed half a dozen times on dirty jobs.
There it is, number six, right?
So this thing makes people crazy.
They resist it.
But this is a code really here.
It's my code.
It's your code.
And it starts right at the top, man.
I believe I've won the greatest lottery of all time.
I'm alive.
I walk the earth.
I live in America.
Above all things, I'm grateful.
Wow.
Now, you can disagree with that, and we can still be friends.
But when I get calls from parents or teachers or kids who are going through this application process, and they say, look, I'm not really comfortable signing this, then I say, well, then this particular pile of free money might not be for you.
It's okay, man.
I mean, I work really hard and I raise a lot of money and I give a lot of it away.
And I make no apology for wanting to help people who at least see the world.
The same way you do.
Or something adjacent.
Oh, I agree.
I think that that makes perfect sense.
But you can't run a business that way.
No.
Like, you can't hire people based on their worldview regarding gratitude or personal responsibility, at least not in California.
Yeah, probably not in California.
You can't, but I think just, you know, you got to keep it off the documents, but secretly in your head, you can low-key have a lot of stuff.
Nudge, nudge, wink, wink.
Do you think there's something different about the Gen Z workforce?
Or do you think there's just they haven't had the same examples that previous generations had, you know?
Yeah, I do.
I think, well, look, again, painting with too broad a brush sucks.
And, you know, I've not pointing at the Gen Z workforce like, you're bad or anything like that.
Because, you know, it's so funny.
It's like we had a guy on recently, this guy, Alexander Wang, and he's not the fashion guy that got murdered.
He's a Chinese.
He's kind of a semi-Chinese guy, but he founded Scale AI.
It's an AI company.
And he was saying that one way to look at AI is that everyone will kind of level up, right?
It's like suddenly kind of robots or computers will do a lot of the more menial tasks and everyone will kind of be a manager.
And it's interesting because if you say that to me or your generation, our generation kind of that people would be like, well, I don't want to just be, I don't want to be the manager of five robots and I sit in a small dark room all the time and, you know, and that's my life.
And maybe I get four day work week instead of five.
But if you told my nephews that, hey, you get to be the manager of five robots and you just sit in this room and control them all day, they would think that's awesome just because of how they've grown up.
You know, like everything is so gamified.
So it's kind of interesting because you start to get into what the whole like perception of work, of being alive even is to people.
Does that make any sense to you?
It makes, look, it starts.
I mean, there's a lot in there.
There's a lot, but what you're really saying is like, what is a good job?
What is a bad job?
What is a clean job?
What is a dirty job?
And once you start to create some sort of hierarchy, which makes sense, everybody's free to do it.
You ought to do it.
But, you know, if Bayard were here, the American giant guy, he would tell you a story about the individuals who made that sweatshirt, right?
He would show you the factory line.
He would introduce you to the farmers who grew the cotton.
He would show you step by step how his entire supply chain is insulated from these tariffs.
These tariffs hadn't affected him at all because he doesn't rely on any of them.
He's totally independent.
So he's taking kind of a victory lap right now.
But his big point would be you would have to see the enthusiasm among his group of workers when they created a sweatshirt that became the greatest hoodie ever made.
And you can look at that and go, it's a freaking sweatshirt, dude.
But it's not a sweatshirt.
It's not that.
It's not about the sweatshirt.
And this might put it into even better focus, just so your listeners understand how jacked up things are.
I got a call six months ago from a company I bet you've never heard of called Blue Forge Alliance.
All right.
Blue Forge Alliance.
Is it siding or no?
In a matter of speaking.
We went through a siding phase.
We'll come right back to this idea.
I remember we went through a siding phase in our town once.
Somebody came through with a semi-truck full of siding.
It fell over and they said people had a bunch of people stealing siding, you know?
We sold that on QVC.
Y'all sold siding?
No, the same siding.
We had a whole racket.
They would bring us the siding that was stolen from the New France.
And I would sell it in between collectible dolls.
People in our area hadn't seen siding before, so they were putting it on the sides of everything, dude.
You put siding on a house, siding on a floor.
Sure.
Yeah, you'd have siding on the ceiling.
It was like, it is not supposed to go up there.
People had siding.
Bro, they put siding on a damn baby while it was resting, dude.
They would just shoot on the bus.
Siding on a ceiling.
It ain't supposed to go there.
This is basic.
Crazy phase.
Yes, dude.
It was a crazy phase.
But back to Blue Forge.
This is crazy.
This is crazier than that.
Blue Forge Alliance is in charge of the American Maritime Base, and there they are.
The American Maritime Base is in charge of delivering three nuclear-powered submarines every year to the U.S. Navy.
Two Virginia, I think, and one Columbia-class.
These things are longer than the Washington Monument is tall.
Wow.
Okay.
They are the pointy part of our national defense.
Yeah, they'll seed about 40, won't they?
Well, look, if things go sideways with Taiwan or China and get hypersonic, I worry about our aircraft carriers.
They're exposed like they haven't been before.
Yeah.
Oh, shit.
If things go sideways with Baltimore, we'll send one over there, you know?
So it's the subs that matter.
Now, Blue Forge represents 15,000 individual companies, and these companies have to deliver three a year for 10 years.
They called me, right?
And they say, look, we're hiring tradespeople, and we're kind of in a rush.
I'm like, well, what do you mean a rush?
And they said, well, we're desperate.
And can you help us find them?
And I said, I don't know, man.
It's pretty skinny out there right now.
There's a lot of competition.
How many do you need?
The guy says 140,000.
Wow.
I swear to God.
And you can find it on the site there.
They're hiring over the next nine years 140,000 welders, steam fitters, pipe fitters, electricians, all of the construction trades, plus all kind of electronics and technical stuff.
But very, very few of those positions require a four-year degree.
140,000 openings.
And the guy says, Mike, we've looked everywhere.
Do you know where they are?
Can you send me a few phone numbers?
I said, actually, honest, I said, yeah, dude, I know where they are.
They're in the eighth grade.
That's where they are.
And if you want to get them, holy crap, they put my face on an I want you to work in the trades.
Who's doing that back there?
I don't know, dude, but what we need are a robots, R-O-W-E, B-O-T-S.
Would you send me that?
Whoever you are doing this amazing, non-authorized, copywritten stuff, I'm going to use that.
I thought robots was a good pun that deserved a little bit more than that.
It's not bad.
You could have mic robots, little tiny versions of me.
Yeah.
That's a cute idea.
That's adorable.
They would sell on QVC, man.
They would kill.
This is the smallest work.
This is the fire ant of the work community.
Let me land the plane.
Okay.
Here's the point.
That crisis that right now is impacting our submarine base.
I think you can draw a line between the enthusiasm of the workers who build one of these subs.
And believe me, you should meet these guys.
They understand they're moving the needle.
They understand that they're the pointy part of the spear with regard to national defense.
It's a big deal.
You can compare not the work, but the feeling to the satisfaction that comes from making the greatest sweatshirt in the world.
And if you can do that, you can do it for virtually every product in between.
That's what I'm talking about.
There's somehow or another, and I started talking about this early on in Dirty Jobs.
It just became clear that in our society, we had identified work as the enemy.
It's like the proximate cause of all our misery is the fact that our freaking boss is up our ass and every day for eight or 10, 12 hours, I got to go make little rocks out of big rocks and life isn't fair.
And damn it, something ought to be done.
And this whole thing, this whole thing is modeled around the idea that I have to do whatever it is I have to do until I get to the point where I can retire.
Right.
So like I'm retirement age now.
Like the idea of retiring is so insane to me.
So why still work to be done?
There's more than ever.
So look, to answer your question, I'm super sympathetic to Gen Z. I want them to find meaningful work, but the meaning, it's not inherent in the work.
It's in the dude.
It's in you.
And you get to assign whatever level of meaning you want to that sweatshirt or that nuclear sub or this cup of coffee or this poisonous cream that your people brought me that right now is either making me tired or jacked up.
I can't decide yet.
So in 30 seconds, you're going to start telling us all your secrets.
You're going to tell us where you keep your favorite wood whittle.
My greatest fear.
Is a whittle a thing a tool?
A whittler could be a person who whittles.
A whittlet could be a thing that you whittle, but a whittle flunk is the actual tool in question.
And you can Google that.
Now, you won't find anything to confirm any of it.
I just felt like it was my turn to talk again.
Oh, that's very fair.
I'm going to say this.
You know what?
You're right.
And I think that that used to be a part of kind of what you were saying even in school.
It's like, I pledge allegiance to my country.
This country means something to me.
Like my grandfather worked at this factory where they made parts.
It was for FMC, right?
And they made like elevator, parts for elevator shafts and stuff like that.
But he would go to the factory and it was like this thing.
And then when we were in elevators, we would see his little emblem on the thing.
He was like, oh, grandpa made this, you know?
And that kind of stuff was huge.
It was like even like native, like in cultures, there are stories that you tell your grandkids.
It's like the meaning of being human, we passed from each other.
We passed it in like relics and in artifacts.
And, you know, you keep things from people that meant something to you.
So I think to think that that just because that only happens, it doesn't only happen like in your family, like if your grandfather passes away and you keep something that meant something to him, but it happens as a community too.
It's like you have things that mean something to you and that carry on.
What am I?
Does that make any sense?
Am I rambling?
I'm okay.
No, dude, I'm telling you.
Yeah, what the fuck you talking about?
Of course it makes sense, dude.
Yeah, it makes you feel alive, dude.
You know, it makes you feel alive.
And then like you see something across town, you're like, man, I was a part of that.
And you get to drive by and tell your son, I built that house.
And your son's like, no way.
I want to learn how to build something, you know?
Why do you think people lost their shit when Obama said, you didn't build that?
You didn't do that.
We all did that together.
It was an insult to what you're saying.
That part of us.
It doesn't mean that we're not all part of a team, a country, a concerted effort, but it does mean, like, if you rob an individual of that feeling, then you have reduced his work to only the transactional components.
It's just a paycheck now.
But I'm telling you, my life changed.
It was early on in Dirty Jobs, and we weren't even really filming yet.
Or it was after we shot, and I was working with a Mason, and I was in his pickup truck, and he was dropping me back at the hotel.
And as we're driving down, we were in some little Midwest town and we were driving down some easily forgettable street.
But the architecture on either side was super cool, right?
And as we're driving, he was like pointing up to the facade.
He goes, yeah, we did that one.
And then around the corner, he's like, yeah, we did that one too.
And see over here the way this, that one took.
And as he was talking, like his eyes were filling up.
And he was driving past his life's work and it was there on display to be seen.
And I was very happy for him to be able to have that, but also very mindful of the fact that you can see the same wonder in the sewer, right?
Like the architecture down there and the technology.
Except you'll never see it and you'll never see the guys who tend to it because it's all out of sight and it's all out of mind.
And that's part of the point too.
You don't that thing you described, I got a call from a, have you heard of Moog, M-O-O-G?
You'll let us down to your neck of the woods.
Actually, Boaz, Alabama.
Oh, damn.
Okay.
Little, it's not so little.
Moog makes virtually every ball bearing in your car or your truck.
They've been making ball bearings for years, forever and ever.
They turned 100 a couple years ago.
And, you know, the guy called me, they're part of federal mogul motor parts.
And they were like, can you maybe just come down here and look at our factory?
And can we film you looking at it?
And can you just talk to some of our people?
And I said, well, yeah, probably.
Why?
And they're like, well, we just think it would be great if somebody were paying attention to the fact that we've been doing this for 100 years and that there is no automotive industry without us.
Wow.
So I did.
I went and I brought a little crew with me and I wound up giving them a 60-second love letter.
I know a place in Boaz, Alabama where people understand, right?
They played that at their annual thing and I got a video of people watching the video I made.
Tears streaming down their face.
So purpose.
Pride.
Code.
Integrity.
All that stuff, man.
Yeah.
Oh, there it is.
30 pounds ago, you fat bastard.
But there I am.
Going the extra mile.
American Pride with Mike Rowe.
Some hotties in the back.
Well, you know.
Going the extra mile right there.
American Pride with Mike Rowe.
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Thank you.
Well, let's talk about like the workforce a little bit.
Then let's talk about some issues that they face for a few minutes and then I want to talk about your new show.
Last time we spoke, we talked about minimum wage, right?
Last time we spoke, I said there was no justice if you didn't put spunk minions on a hat.
I told you a story of artificial insemination.
You coined that term.
At least I'd never heard it before.
The coffee came out of my nose and I said, for God's sakes, man, please.
Hot coffee came out of your nose.
It was still hot.
Hot coffee cooled down with some of this, you know, poison.
But yeah, yeah.
I remember last time.
It was that conversation.
I'm not blowing sunshine, dude.
I got more people, more of the people that my foundation tries to reach reached out to me.
Really?
Yep.
To say, I heard Jan Theo Vaughan and I would like to apply for a scholarship.
What do I do?
Wow.
I mean, that's awesome.
No, you need to understand.
Well, I'm sure you understand, but it was, I do this all the time.
Hundreds of people, hundreds of people.
Because the problem is, man, I preach to the choir a lot.
You know, I talk to people who already, you know, your audience is the future of this country.
A big chunk of them are anyway.
I don't know about the others.
Well, I do believe that one thing I think I have in common with a lot of my audience is that the way that we feel about stuff, right?
We might have different views on things, but I think our feelings are a lot the same.
And we talk a lot about like purpose on here.
Like we had a guy named John Vervecky come on and talk about purpose.
We had Richard Reeves, it's really great.
He talks about how men aren't leaders in their communities anymore.
You know, they're not doing Boy Scout troops.
They're not teaching in classes anymore.
So we're losing this male-to-male connection piece that is part of what keeps our desire to be like performing humans, human males.
So we talk about this kind of stuff a lot.
And maybe there's a way we could figure out something to do where we could, you know, where I can, we would love to donate and then just continue to help send people your direction.
Well, look, man, I'll never say no to a couple bucks, but I don't need it.
What I need is what you're doing, right?
I mean, what I need is for the people listening to, like, if they're serious about what you just framed, the book to read is called Men Without Work.
It's by a guy called Nick Eberstadt.
He is a real economist, and I know him.
And he wrote this thing years ago, but republished it during the lockdowns.
And that's where the real truth of this is, man.
That's the real story, Theo.
At the time he republished this, there were 7.2 million able-bodied men, not only not working, but not looking.
Now the question is, well, what the hell are they doing?
Right.
The research goes deep and wide, and it's horrifying.
By and large, the majority of them are spending 2,000 hours a year on their screens.
And what that means is they're not in the JCs or the Kiwanis Club or the Boy Scouts or the Lions Club or the YMCA, right?
They're not in their local church.
They're not volunteering in their community.
They're not doing anything at all except living some version of what, what was it, Thoreau?
Lives of quiet desperation.
And that's, and I want to tell you one other thing, too, that really blew me away.
I knew of you.
I didn't know you.
And it's cool that you texted me and stayed in touch over the last two years since we talked.
Oh, thanks.
No, no, most people don't do that.
Really?
Yeah, they don't.
And I had so much fun talking to you that I took a deeper dive and one night just was scrolling through and I watched you sit here, or maybe you were in Nashville, I don't know.
But somebody called in and they told you a story.
And it was a common story, but it was a sad story.
And it was a combination of addiction and struggling with that and a kind of hopelessness and this kind of desperation that my friend Nick writes about.
And what you did, you did two things that were really interesting to me.
The first thing is you sat and didn't say a word.
I've never seen anybody do that before.
You just sat and looked at the camera like you're looking at me, like you actually listened.
And then you talked for about three minutes in about the most empathetic way I had ever seen.
I took that clip and I sent it to my little network and I said, look, man, this war is going to be fought on a lot of fronts.
It's a war of public opinion, to your point.
It's persuasion.
It's all these things.
But what this guy is doing right now in this space, in this way, is important.
So, yeah, man.
I don't know how big you're going to get, and I don't know how wide your audience is going to be, but the fact that it's as big as it is, yeah, you're funny.
You're funny as hell.
I was going to crash one of your shows in, I forget what town I was in, but it was like, what is it, The Rat?
The Rat Was Back or something?
Return of the Rat too.
Return of the Rat.
Yeah, man.
That's the thing.
You can't keep a rat down.
You could kill a rat.
Bam.
Another rat, boy.
Pop up, dude.
They keep popping up.
But that's who we are.
You're resilient.
We're resilient.
And that's, you know, I mean, Louisiana doesn't have a lock on that, but I'll tell you what, man, Louisiana was very good to dirty jobs.
I mean, from Baton Rouge to Lafayette to cut off.
I did my time there.
We should have been cut off and we stayed on, dude.
That's Louisiana.
Louisiana purchase, first of all, thank you very fucking much.
You wouldn't even have a third of this country if it wasn't for Louisiana.
Thomas Jefferson, 1803.
Making that deal.
And we kept the receipt, I'll say that.
It's a good one.
And also, we have Nutri rats, rats that live underwater, bro.
I know.
I know.
That is something else.
But thank you, bro.
That's very nice of you, dude.
Yeah.
I think that's the one thing that connects our audience is just there's this way that we feel.
And a lot of it is hopeful, right?
And so that's the side that I choose to err on when it comes to the tariff stuff.
It's like, I have no clue.
Like, if it doesn't work, what the fuck, what do we lose?
We're at a, I believe that we are at a severe crossing point right now where if it gets an, if another generation without like a sense of purpose, it's not going to matter.
Nothing's going to matter anymore.
There won't even be enough of a person inside of our grandchildren for it to matter too.
Like even if you bring the gasoline, there's not going to be enough of an amp inside of them to even spark it up.
It's like, even I think the human spirit is a muscle, right?
That's how I feel about it.
And I feel like it's always there, but it's like the stronger that we work it and the more that we encourage others to work it, you know?
And it's scary, man.
I think people don't realize it's scary, but then I think part of all of us realize it's something scary is going on.
Well, the stakes are big.
Right.
I mean, $37 trillion in national, that's the national debt.
$37 trillion.
Most people, like you really don't have to be an economist.
You don't have to, you don't need a pedigree to understand that that's getting a little wobbly and it's not sustainable.
So something radical has to happen.
Something really unpopular is going to have to happen.
Right.
And it's going to be uncomfortable.
It's going to be uncomfortable.
It's going to be wildly uncomfortable.
But what's going to be way more uncomfortable is whatever's after that.
It doesn't even sound human to me after that.
I go back to the slavery thing.
I mean, the idea of getting rid of that in 1860, right?
It was so many otherwise rational people who were walking around, influencers of the day with columns and people giving oratories and speeches, really smart people were saying, we can't do this.
The country will collapse.
And other people were like, well, then let the heavens fall because that's a hill I'll die on.
Right.
So every now and then, something rises to a place where you just can't talk about it the way you'd been talking about it.
And look, man, I really wonder 150 years from now what our great, great, great, great grandkids will be saying about us.
Like how, right?
What will be the slavery of today?
Will it be the fact that we let our country become completely dependent on other countries who really don't like us much?
I mean, it's insane.
I interviewed a guy yesterday who you would love.
Jan Yakelek, he's called.
He writes for the Epoch Times.
He's a senior editor over there.
And he has been on China hard for 20 years.
And he believes one of the greatest untold stories right now is the fact that 60 to 100,000 human organs are being harvested from prisoners in China every year as we speak.
They're called the Fulong Gong, and they were 70 to 100 million of these people have been persecuted forever.
Fulong Gong.
I'm going to quit ordering it.
Dude, you have to, it is bananas.
Fulong gong.
When you look at the number of prisons in China that have hospitals built right next to them, you have to go, well, what's up with that?
And when you talk to these people, and there are countless examples, who are scheduling open heart surgeries, they're scheduling kidney replacements, right?
You can't schedule those.
You go on a list and then you wait for somebody to become brain dead.
In a motorcycle accident.
That's right.
Because you can't take a heart from a cadaver.
You have to take it from a living but doomed person.
Yeah.
Right.
And so cutting that line is about the rudest thing, right?
I mean, that's the line you don't want to cut.
My sister got a liver transplant and we had to wait and they called us over and we'd get over there and be like, no, the guy's going to stay alive.
And we're like, well, fucking, don't call us then.
We just drove over here.
I can't even imagine what that is like, but I can tell you this.
The organ industry in China is a $9 billion industry and people are scheduled.
They're making appointments for livers.
They're making appointments for hearts.
Based on knowing when the guy's going to die or they're killing him.
They're killing them, dude.
Wow.
It's not based on, yes, it is based on knowing when they're going to die.
Exactly.
Because they kill them.
And, you know, what they tell you is, ah, well, you know, look, he's on death row anyway.
And so like, they tell you a lot of things and you'll go, okay, okay.
And so it's back to slavery.
It's like, well, you know what?
I don't really want to look at the reality of organ harvesting.
If my kid needs a heart, please tell me a happy story About how the inmate is a murderer, right?
And we're going to go, and right before we kill him, we're going to anestheticize him and take his heart.
Tell me that story.
It's not much different than in 1860.
It's like, look, I need clothes, man.
My kids need clothes.
Please don't show me the raping and the whipping of these poor people.
Please don't show me the middle passage and what happened, the unspeakable conditions on those ships.
I don't want to see that.
I just want my clothes.
Now, when I'm talking 150 years from now, maybe I could be talking about 150 days from now.
Please don't show me the abortion.
I don't want to see that.
Please don't show me the diseased lungs in your attempt to get me to stop smoking.
I don't want to see that.
Please don't make me shoot the cow in the head.
I did that on season three of Dirty Jobs.
I slaughtered a cow and butchered it with a mobile butcher just to show viewers where their food comes from and what it takes to make a porterhouse, what it takes to get a sirloin, the difference between all these different things.
People's heads exploded because the truth is, man, they don't want to see where their food comes from.
They prefer to think it's growing on a hamburger tree.
And we really don't want to know the truth about a lot of this.
I mean, look, we're joking about this, but you really want to know what's in this little creamer?
You really want to know why this thing can sit on the shelf for years?
The answer is nothing good.
And a baby won't eat it too.
You see the one where they try to give that to a baby and they won't eat it.
Yeah, because they know.
They know.
So look, we're ostriches and we had our head in the sand on a lot of different things.
And a lot of parents, you know, to bring it back to kind of where we started, they don't want to see that that 200 grand they invested in that college degree can't get their kid a job in his chosen field.
We don't want to look at 37 trillion in debt.
We don't want to look at the fact that our country is making only 2% of the clothing that we wear.
Dude, we have in this country, a third of the United States is covered with timber.
Covered with timber.
Now, our forests are rotting and they're burning because we're not tending to them.
Meanwhile, guess who the leading importer of timber is in the world?
China.
Us.
Oh, we're the leading importer of it, but we have a great need.
We have more than anybody.
And we're the leading import.
California has so much timber and they import 80% of what they need.
How much energy are we sitting on?
Right.
Right.
I just look at all of it, and I don't need to get political.
It's not political.
It's some weird combination of virtue signaling and head in the sand.
Well, and also I think our media is probably a lot of it has been under control of people who don't want to champion America, maybe.
I don't know if that's true or if it's just the fads and the way that things have gone.
But it seemed like things have gotten like anti-American somehow in the past even 10 years.
Like the American flag even became like kind of a right-wing symbol as opposed to the symbol of our country.
And whoever's people think that things just happen.
I believe that there's strategy behind a lot of stuff that's out there.
I want to switch to a topic of, but we talked before about minimum wage.
I don't think people can survive on minimum wages these days.
I just don't think that they can do it.
And Bernie Sanders talked about how, well, if a company makes more money because they start using AI or for whatever reason, that shouldn't that minimum wage go up within that company for the workers, you know?
What do you think?
I think we have to do something.
If somebody makes $8 an hour and they work for eight hours, that's $64.
You can buy food for your family for that day these days with that.
Well, look, I mean, there are a lot of thoughts on that.
And I know there's not one perfect answer.
There's not, but you can learn, I think.
I mean, you have to understand that those jobs, minimum wage jobs, were never designed to be careers.
They're rungs on a ladder.
But for some people, they are careers, though.
But the majority of them.
Have that conversation next.
But the first thing to understand is you don't, like the purpose of work is not to merely make money.
It's probably the biggest reason.
You've got to put food on the table.
I get all of that.
But you don't go from a kid into a fully actualized, mature working person.
You have to go through all kinds of like a crucible of fits and starts and good jobs and jobs that make sense.
And whether it's fast food or whether it's maybe digging a ditch or maybe putting siding on a house one hot summer, right?
It's like these jobs that don't pay very well offer something else that's really, really, really important to a person who is maturing and growing.
I know what it is, I bet.
Say it.
They offer you the time to think and plan and strategize and get excited for something that you want to do.
It's almost like a soil that you get to be in for a little bit.
It's like a buffet.
I remember that now.
It's a buffet, man.
You don't, you're not going to eat all of it.
It's not all going to taste good to you.
You have to experience a whole long list of shit.
And most of it is going to leave a funny taste in your mouth.
Most things aren't for most people.
It's a giant process of figuring it all out and also learning who you are.
Now, I get it.
That doesn't address the fact that somebody busting their ass with inflation being wherever it is and the cost of goods being wherever that is, can't afford to feed their family on that salary.
Now, the other side's going to say, yeah, why'd you have a family?
What are you doing?
Why would you have a family before you have the means to provide for them?
And then we're going to have that whole conversation and it's going to get politicized.
But if the basic argument is, wait a second, the people at the top of this company are being unfairly enriched at the expense of the work.
I totally get that.
I totally get it.
And I'll tell you something that gives me hope.
All right, because I get constantly thank you because we get stuck in the doldrum sometimes.
We get stuck in the ditch and we don't look for the light.
I'm going to give you the light, at least a couple beams of it.
The doldrums and the problem almost always happens because it's door number one or door number two.
Everything is binary.
So in this conversation, it's well, are you union or are you management?
Are you labor or are you management?
And like people have to choose.
And now it's easy to forget that these are two sides of the same coin because we always pit them against one another.
And then people wind up in interviews like this or any one of a thousand other conversations and they're going to get tagged as one or the other.
So my hope is in an organization called Opportunity Works.
And I learned about these guys pretty recently.
Two years ago, a company called Groundworks, who you'll love, hired me to give a speech in Virginia Beach when their CEO turned 5,500 of their frontline workers into owners.
Okay.
So here's what Groundworks does.
Groundworks will fix the foundation on your house.
They will encapsulate a crawl space and they will waterproof your basement.
Oh, I was hoping you'd say hide your stepmother down there.
But that's okay.
Well, that's an upsell.
I mean, look, you got to know who to talk to.
But they, like, if you scroll through that, that's Dirty Jobs 101.
Yeah.
I spent the first, a big chunk of the first season underneath houses doing this kind of work.
Now, a lot of these people, they've got a high school education.
Some went further, but a lot of the 5,500 guys I met on that day, they spend their life doing backbreaking work.
They were made owners.
It's like an ESOP plan, and it goes all the way down, all the way through the company.
Wow.
And it's another one of those moments, Theo.
I'm sitting backstage and I'm watching these guys are there with their families and this is a financial event.
Like it changes their life.
So I said to the owner, hey, man, I like this because now I don't think there's any, frankly, need for, like, how does a union negotiate against a member if they're, they own the company?
Right.
It's like, you just took all the air out of that tire.
And he said, well, if you like this, you got to meet my friend Pete Stavros.
Pete works for KKR.
Now, KKR.
Ooh, that third letter.
I wasn't sure it was going to be.
I was like, whoa.
Whoa, Mike.
I'm not feeling hopeful.
I'm trying to head forward.
KKR.
These were the original barbarians at the gate, you know, the whole Nabisco, like that world of private equity gets a really bad rap.
And in some cases, I think probably deservedly.
I don't know about them.
Well, it's a deep dive.
But it's like when you think of when people talk about roll-ups, what they're talking about.
I don't know about that either.
Okay, let's say you've got a heating and air conditioning company, plumbing company, electric company.
Let's say you've had it for 25 years.
And let's say you'd like to retire, but you really can't.
And you got 30 employees and you love them and it's their job and so forth and so on.
So the industry consolidates when private equity comes in.
It says, wait a second, we'll buy you.
Okay.
We're going to make you more efficient.
We're going to put you under somebody, some other name, okay?
And you'll be able to retire because you've worked hard and your people will, well, you know, we're going to do, in some cases, it's good for the workers.
In other cases, it's not so good because in the name of efficiency, you can gut a company.
So that's the negative wrap on private equity has been that.
But now what's starting to happen, at least in these home services businesses, is that this ownership works element, this guy, Pete Stavros, who works for KKR, has done this groundworks deal.
There's Pete.
He's awesome.
They've done this with like 70 companies where they'll go in and they will work with management to make everybody in the company an owner.
And it's a tough sell for management because they got to let go of some stuff.
But the research is incredible.
Over time, what happens is these companies explode.
They stay alive and people are excited about it and hopeful about it.
Dude, I mean, who do you want to come to your house to fix a plumbing problem?
An employee who, you know, is the epitome of a stereotypical plumber, butt cracked, hanging out, pissed off, overweight, right?
Like everything you've seen plumbers portrayed as.
Yeah, drugs, Coke.
Or would you like the owner of the company to come out and fix your problem?
It changes everything.
And I've seen, like you guys should take a deep dive if you want, but look at some of these videos where, like, I saw one the other day, a company, I think they were outside of Chicago, Nucor, maybe.
They make garage doors.
It's another one of these companies you would never think about.
It's like Moog and their ball bearings.
And what is that?
Well, all of a sudden, like you got truck drivers in these companies who have been there for 12 years.
And when this scheme goes into place, they leave this gathering with a check for $400,000, $500,000, $600,000.
Changes the that's a financial event in their life.
And it changes the way you think about that sweatshirt, right?
That's what I'm talking about.
There is a way forward that doesn't keep us stuck in the binary of labor and management.
And I think we have to, you have to realize, like, I start thinking like the only way to compete with big business is you have to start a new way to do big business that like I wanted to sell like a water, right?
I thought like so many people are in recovery and so many more people are headed into recovery for drug addiction, sex and pornography addiction.
Like That's one of the biggest epidemics that's coming right now is pornography addiction.
Right.
And it's not even here yet.
It's coming.
I see what you did there.
It's coming soon.
I don't know.
Hopefully not super soon.
It's just you and me and stay on that bull for eight seconds and we'll hope for the best.
Oh, yeah.
I'm about to creamer over there.
I feel sleepy.
Can I lie down for you?
That's it.
Okay.
I could keep going on that.
But yeah, it's like you have to fight fire with fire and you have to fight it with more compassionate and empathetic fire.
I was like, well, what if we sold a water where the proceeds of it went to put people in rehab, right?
So then it would be really hard, especially these days where so many people, all they have left is how they feel kind of, because a lot of other things have been taken away from them.
It'd be hard to say, okay, I'm not going to buy this.
I know this is going to help somebody get better, right?
It's like, I think you have to start thinking beyond like this circle that we've been in of just like profiteering and of like combining everything.
Everything's just like these, what are they called when they all get together, but it's one owner or whatever?
Co-op.
A co-op.
Co-op or like, because a lot of the stories that I heard, this is, I just thought about this.
A lot of my friends' stories were that their dads got laid off after working at a place for 20 years and 25 years.
Or their grandfather, that was the story that I heard where I bet a generation earlier was, you know, my grandfather got a big severance thing and he got this and that.
And he was like the pride of the company.
A lot of the other stories became, my dad got laid off after 22 years.
They didn't get, you know, and I think a lot of that happened because, like you're saying, umbrella companies came in, things got consolidated.
I mean, we're meeting with Mark Zuckerberg and they're like up against antitrust stuff right now.
Oh, yeah.
Big time.
Which is pretty crazy and scary.
Oh, dude.
I mean, there's so much to think and say about Facebook.
Mark's coming in here specifically?
We're going to see him in Law South, whatever they live at, Facebook.
Yeah, they're down the peninsula from where I live, north of you.
Amazing campus.
Check out the roof.
Really?
When you go there.
Yeah, I don't know if it's James.
Is it good?
Is it siding?
It's sushi and a lot of siding.
Yeah.
Sushi and siding.
It's pretty amazing.
Oh, a roof is just brave siding.
Let me tell you what Mark did for me, just so you get a sense.
I mean, there's just endless things to say about the guy.
I'm fascinated to get to spend time with him.
Well, you know, I wouldn't be here without Facebook.
I know it's crazy because there's clips of me out there telling Jay Leno I'd rather have hot needles stuck in my eyes than book a face or send a tweet or whatever that was.
Oh, yeah.
But, you know, once I realized that all the shows I work on could be programmed basically by the people who watch them, that was amazing to me.
So I get eight, nine million people out there now, six on Facebook and a couple.
Oh, no.
Look, these are my bosses, you know, and I'm super late to the YouTube party, but I just got a million over there.
You did?
Yeah.
Well, you have shows on there, too.
It comes out May 2nd.
You're right.
And that show wouldn't exist without Zuckerberg.
Okay.
Here's so six years ago, Mark invites me down to Facebook, and he talks about this thing called Watch, Facebook Watch.
And the thought was, who are we going to be, you know, 10 years from now?
And who are we really going to compete with?
And how is that going to work?
And could we be Netflix?
Should we be a kind of Netflix?
So that company basically committed to spending close to a billion dollars to answer that question.
So how do you figure it out?
You greenlight a couple of shows and they did something called Ball in the Family, some famous basketball player.
They did something with Jada Pinkett Smith and they did something with me.
What they did with me was a show called Returning the Favor.
Returning the Favor, I think you would dig.
Basically, I would look for and Facebook would tell me about people in these little towns that you probably couldn't find on a map that were doing something super cool in their neighborhood in a totally selfless way.
So it's like bloody do-gooders running amok, right?
And so we would go in there and we'd meet these people and we would tell them, like I'm not there at this point, I would send the crew in and they'd say, hey, we're working on a documentary about your town.
We understand you're doing some good work, maybe with foster care, maybe with PTSD, right?
And we would love to talk to you about that.
So meanwhile, they're filming that and I come in later and parades are arranged and we free up a big chunk of money, sometimes 100 grand, to maybe build something that allows them to do more of what they're already doing.
Some kind of gift.
So the show, it was a feel-good show, but it was also the making of a feel-good show.
Now, here's where it gets crazy.
We do 100 episodes, which is a lot.
The show's a hit.
It's downloaded 450 million times.
No way.
Okay.
Congratulations, bro.
You're an infection and it's a good one.
It gets crazier.
I win an Emmy.
Okay.
Like, I never won an Emmy.
I hope it was Emmy Rawson, huh?
Oh, man.
Is she cute or not?
Sorry, those bad jokes.
No, no, she's something.
She is.
I don't even know who she is.
I was just thinking of the only Emmy I know.
She's a good one.
Yeah, there you go.
Yeah, she's talented.
Rawsom damn near killed him, huh?
That's an old Emmy Rawsom joke.
So what you got to know is this never happened.
Hits are hard.
Emmys are hard.
Of all the things that I've worked on to be recognized this way, right?
So we got to 100 episodes.
I went to Miami and we're canceled two weeks later.
Yeah.
Now, that's impossible.
But what happened at Facebook was they decided after four seasons that this whole watch platform, they're just not going to compete with Netflix.
So no harm, no foul.
But it was stunned.
We had 2 million people on a Facebook page who would watch that show like on the edge of their seat.
And it was a giant community of people who really gave a shit.
And they were super interested.
Because remember, not so long ago, in fact, today, the country is so divided, and there's so few things everybody can agree on.
You know, this show was, I think, one of them.
It was just a celebration of the neighbors you wish you had.
I don't own returning the favor, but we're relaunching it next week, May 2nd, under a new title called People You Should Know.
And dude, I'm not overly earnest.
I get all my sentimentalities taken care of in my foundation.
But this thing, I mean, whether it's addiction or you're going to meet a guy on this show called Steve Hotz.
He runs something called the Black Horse Forge down in Fredericksburg.
The PTSD thing, you're up to speed with how bad that is?
Not how bad.
I mean, I know that it's a, you hear about it so much and it's used so much, I think it's hard to know what's really going on with it.
Well, last year, 6,407 service people killed themselves, and divided by 365, it's like 17.5 a day.
But that doesn't count overdoses.
That doesn't count, you know, death by misadventure, addiction.
You like add up all of the deaths, the preventable deaths of despair, and the numbers way beyond that.
So on Returning the Favor, we profiled like we, the number of things people are doing to combat this, you would love.
We hunted pythons in the Everglades with these guys.
They're annoying.
They're big and they're, you know, they're very snaky.
Putting motorcycles together in Indiana, you got to get these guys out of their head if you want to help them.
This guy, Steve, the Black Horse Forge, has had 22,000 vets come through.
Wow.
Zero suicides.
He's batting a thousand.
Steve Hots?
Yeah.
H-O-T-S.
He's been here.
Dude, you would.
So this guy was like a dress designer, an interior designer.
All right.
He goes sideways with his boss.
He decides to enlist, 82nd airborne, has hundreds of jumps.
Yeah.
Compresses his back.
Damn near breaks it.
Loses an eye.
Comes home.
Absolute rock bottom.
He's just, it's everything he loved is upside down.
And he starts making knives in a forge and realizes that when you're forging, the only thing you can think about is really what you're doing and don't burn yourself.
And it so completely took him out of his, out of his head.
I could have gone either way.
You see a depressed dude making a knife.
You're like, how's this going?
He's made hundreds.
Wow.
He's got a whole line called the Jackalopes named after crypto-zoological creatures, right?
Like the beast of Bladenborough and all these things.
So he's one of the guys we'll be featuring on this thing.
That's him.
There he is, right?
That's him, man.
One-eyed Steve.
Fucking tough son of a guy.
One-eyed Steve.
Yeah, he threw me out the door.
You'll listen to Widespread Panic?
Yeah.
I like that.
Oh, wait a minute, wait a minute.
Am I conflating Panic at the Disco?
Yeah, you might be.
They should combine.
You'd have widespread Panic at the disco.
At least for one small tool.
One massive stadium extravaganza.
Yeah.
That'd be something to do.
I like that.
Or Deaf Leopard and Glorilla, maybe like Deaf Glorilla.
Deaf Glorilla, yeah.
Dude, they should have cool bands that merge.
Taco Bell and Pizza did it.
How about Queen and Kings of the Stone Age?
Yeah.
Kings and Queen of the Stone Age.
Like have a little family.
That'd be amazing.
Yeah.
Or just like, yeah, or trans of the Stone Age, you know?
Yeah.
Buy it.
I was going to say Kansas and Boston.
Get all this.
Kansas, Boston, and Chicago.
That'd be amazing.
God, that's a great idea.
I'll tell you what else they want to do.
This whole QVC thing dragged forward with a guy like you.
If you'd have me, I'd do it too.
But a celebration of American-made products done with this level of production.
What you really need is a back office to help you with the stuff.
Do you know Josh Smith, Montana Knife Company?
Get his back.
Didn't we see each other at Dave Ramsey's thing?
Were you there?
No.
I've done Dave Ramsey's thing.
Were you there?
I think, I don't know if we might have been there at the same time or something.
Or Tucker Carlson, were you at that Zen thing he had?
Yeah.
This guy makes some of the most, he's a master bladesmith.
He was on, what is it, Forged and Fire.
And I met him about a year ago.
This guy, I mean, talk about a quest.
He makes all, everything is in America, just like Bayard over at American Giant.
I love that.
Only he's up in Montana.
These knives are amazing.
He comes on my podcast and full disclosure, he's not a sponsor, but he said, you know what you're doing with Microworks?
Anything I can do to help?
And people offer, they say nice things, whatever.
So I said, well, I tell you what you can do.
If you want to make a Microworks blade, you know, my real limited, you know, I can, I promise you, my people will buy them like that because your knives are amazing.
And, you know, when they go to your site, maybe they'll get a sense of who you are and what you've done and how many jobs you've created and so forth and so on.
And he makes 300 of these things.
They're unbelievable.
They're not cheap.
We sold them for $350,000.
Let me keep every, we raised like $70,000 immediately.
Immediately.
Now they're doing a knife and my foundation participates.
And I'm going to talk to Bayard about doing something similar because to your point, you got to fight fire with fire.
Right.
That's the thing.
You can't just keep yelling at it.
You can't just be like, no, this is what they're doing.
This is what people, you have to start to be like, well, how do we be in?
How do you ingenuity it or whatever it's called?
Engineize.
Engineer.
Engineer.
Well, look, but that's how you win.
It's like, but just pointing the finger at a time that you're not doing anything.
Here's something.
You have to win the game up here first.
You got to, it's, you know what it is?
It's asymmetrical warfare.
You have to think like in this conversation, typically Walmart is the devil Because, you know, the rap is, oh, well, they're buying stuff super cheap because people need it super cheap and that's what Walmart is and whatever.
The thing people don't know, and I don't work for Walmart, but I'm just telling you, I know them pretty well, and they have spent nearly $700 billion on U.S. supply chain.
So what happens is, God, I hope I'm not talking out of turn.
They made a deal with American Giant too, didn't they?
Yes.
That's what I'm going to tell you.
And this is what your audience needs to understand.
And this is why it's really hard to get good guys and bad guys with black hats and white hats.
It's not that simple.
So you got a company like American Giant who makes a great t-shirt and it says like, you know, American made on the front.
It's thick.
It's indestructible.
I got one.
Bad news, $75.
Now, most people can't pay $75 for a t-shirt, no matter how red, right?
You just can't, it's just, it's not in the wood.
But what happens if a company like Walmart, the biggest retailer in the world, sets aside a real chunk of money and calls a company like American Giant and says, I tell you what, we love that shirt.
If we order a million of them or even half a million as opposed to the normal 5,000 or 10,000 IPO you might get, if we blow this thing up, what kind of price could we actually get at that level?
And then the price starts to come down 15, 20 bucks.
You know, under $20, you can get an American-made t-shirt.
That's what you're talking about.
It's not going to happen with the current way of thinking.
The problem is, if I go out in the world and tell that story, there's a whole long list of union people who are going to say, Mike, you don't understand.
Walmart's the devil because this, this, this, this, and this.
And I say, look, I get it.
That's your fight.
And I don't particularly have skin in that game.
I'm sympathetic to your cause.
But it's back to that tier two, tier one conversation.
You don't talk about tariffs like it's only an economic thing or you want to talk about it up here.
If you're going to talk about it up there, you can't just look at Walmart as the devil because you've been told they're the devil.
And you can't look at American Giant as a small, scrappy U.S. company that makes things that are too expensive because they're doing the best they can with the way the table's been set.
But if you get these two guys together and all of a sudden you get a different kind of investment in a supply chain in our country in a different way, and that's how a t-shirt can be made in this country for a price most people can't afford.
And that's a story that, look, that can happen with knives.
That can happen with anything.
Anything.
Imagine like a QVC type of thing, right?
Where it's like, this is American made and it's awesome, right?
You would like make sure that the products were good and that they had enough of a supply chain where they could sell, or maybe they could only make 50 this month, but that's what they are.
And then they're limited.
And then you have like something that's a real person made it.
And then when you're walking around with something on your back, this is like you're not just carrying, you don't just have a shirt on your back that makes you look cool.
You have somebody's well-being and their purpose on your back, you know?
And so now you're carrying something together.
You don't want you're both carrying purpose.
It takes a lot of, it's pressure if it's just you, but if you put the same weight on two people, that's purpose, man.
Well, look, man, that's rod busting 101.
Look what you just did.
That's like dentist.
Metaphor there.
Like that's, I did a job a couple years ago with these rod busters.
They're ironworkers, right?
And they, and they carry the rebar, right?
So you got a chunk of rebar, say it's like, I don't know, whatever the gauge is, it's thick.
These things weigh a couple hundred pounds.
And you get like eight of them.
So you got 800 pounds on eight guys' shoulders.
And that's the only way you can move them.
You know, you have to put the weight on your shoulder.
Where it gets crazy is, well, that guy's short and that guy's 6'3.
Now, if you're 6'3, you're screwed.
Yeah, you're doing a lot of, right?
So it's like the whole, it's really a great metaphor because when you're humping the iron up to the top of the skyscraper, you're stepping through a grid of rebar that's already been laid.
And if you trip and you go down, you take everybody with you.
So it's an incredible metaphor for teamwork, consequences, stakes, working together, right?
And to your point, there are other ways to get the rebar to where you need to set it, but this is the best way.
And it really does take a different way to think.
And then, ironically, of course, have you ever seen a bridge before they pour the concrete where the whole thing is just like a skeleton of steel?
Sounds very nice.
Well, it's beautiful and it's artistic.
And it's like what you were talking about before.
There it is.
That's like a whole panel of rebar there, right?
Oh, yeah.
And that's just on the floor.
But when you see like an overpass being built, it's like some kind of a dinosaur and it's all done with hundreds of tons of iron.
And like the guys who do this work, there you go.
That kind of thing.
It's just mind-boggling.
And then when they come, like the concrete guys come and they bury it, man, forever.
No one ever sees the artistry.
No one ever sees the work of the iron worker.
You know, for 100 years, it'll live in the concrete.
Well, that's like so much of that is happening to people today.
They feel like their good work has been covered in concrete.
They feel like it's invisible.
They don't feel appreciated.
They don't feel like they're moving the needle.
They don't feel like they're part of a team.
And we have to do it.
The toughest part then is I've found in my own life when it is if I can't, and it's not like you're playing the victim, but sometimes you're the person that gets affected by something, but you also have to be the person to be a part of fixing it.
And that's the toughest thing because there's a part of me that always wants to be like, this isn't fair.
And I'm not saying for me, I've been fortunate in my life.
I can afford to pay my rent.
I can afford to buy my groceries.
But there's certainly been times where I've, in the past, where I've been like, you know, this is unfortunate.
You know, it's there.
It's the society.
It's this fault.
But still, it put me in a certain position.
I still have to be the one to correct my position.
Dude, it's you.
Look, whatever it is, it starts with you.
That's why the first tenant on my stupid sweatpledge is about that gratitude.
I don't think you can feel sorry for yourself if your default position is grateful.
Yeah.
Oh, but that's the truth, man.
Just self-pity can be a drug.
I was addicted to self-pity for a long time.
I didn't even realize it.
I was addicted to self-pity.
I was like, oh, that's a, and I would get addicted to it.
Feels good to feel bad.
It does, especially when that's the thing you're most used to feeling.
It feels impossible to even attempt to feel good.
I was afraid to feel good because I was afraid I would leave my bad feelings behind.
And they were the only feelings I'd ever even known.
Oh, my God.
You would betray your negativity.
Yes.
And thereby let yourself down again.
Yeah.
Yeah.
That's crazy.
And I never even knew that could happen, man.
That took a ton of work to get to do that.
Yeah, I would love to think of something.
It's so funny because I've been trying to think of that.
How do we fight fire with like a fire that has a feeling in it, right?
And then, yeah, what about unions, though?
We had Sean O'Brien come in about unions.
Unions helps a lot of people.
Do you feel like unions are bad or do you feel like unions are good?
Or it's just too broad.
Too broad.
Never mind.
No, no, no.
It's a great question, but it's like, okay, so the ironworkers we were just talking about.
Yeah, that was a cheap question to me to just fling at the end.
Well, look, my own problem, first of all, 2,200 people through Microworks, I'd say maybe 20, 25% of them are working through a union shop.
Most of them are electricians, some plumbers.
But by and large, the percentage in my cohort of scholarship recipients and workers is it's actually bigger than the national.
I think the national right now, 8% of workers are in a union or something like that.
Maybe a little less.
You can check it.
I'm not sure, but it's close to that.
So, yeah, I don't want to paint with too broad a brush, but the thing, it's like tier two and tier one with tariffs.
If you're going to have a conversation about how best to negotiate between labor and management, there you go, 10% in 23, 11.2 in 23, 6.7 private sector.
That's really what you're asking.
Look at that.
6.7% in 2024 in the private sector, like iron workers or plumbers.
35.7% in the public sector.
That could be the post office.
That could be teachers.
That could be the SEIU.
That could be all sorts of different things.
If businesses start to become more like groundworks, you wouldn't even need a union.
Thank you.
So really.
That's the future.
Fire for fire.
How do you, yeah, it's reconceptualizing things.
I call it door number three, right?
You can't just give me one or two, left or right, blue collar or white collar.
Republican or Democrat.
No.
It's all a shell game.
You have to realize this whole thing has been a shell game.
It's a sucker's bet.
Yes.
It's like the color of collars is no longer for sale.
Don't talk to me about blue or white collars.
That's the point of the groundwork story.
You got a guy covered with mud under your house, your greatest investment, okay?
Doing something to save the foundation.
Now, are you going to call that guy a blue collar worker?
You're going to call that guy just a grunt?
That guy is a fucking surgeon at that moment.
That's right.
For your family to sleep safe at night.
That guy is your surgeon.
That's right.
And he's also an owner of the company.
So now all of that other pride of ownership, all of that other code-driven integrity thing, right?
You can start to see how you might be able to build a cohesive unit around something other than a paycheck.
And that's not an excuse to say the paychecks couldn't be better.
I'm just saying that if you only look at the economic ramifications of a tariff, that's not much different than only looking at whether or not you like your job based on what your paycheck says.
And if you take the bait on that, the next thing you know, you're going to be having an argument about UBI, universal basic income, and you're going to get sucked into this whole conversation about, well, what are people going to do if there is no work?
And we ought to just pay them not to do anything.
And then you've got all kinds of moral and ethical questions.
It never stops.
If at a certain point, you have to invest in your own country and your own people, the spirit of your own people.
And I can't understand how that's not extremely evident right now.
And if UBI, if universal basic income helps people to get by for a couple years or five years while things adjust from going from, let's try to build stuff here in our own country and make people feel empowered as if they're part of an assembly line of humanity and of purpose of a nation and of a groupthink of a moral code, then I think that that's totally fine.
Let's stop giving money to other places who have enough money right now and help our own people out for a little while.
And I know I'm opening up bigger cans of worms, but it's just, I fuck, I am all in, because if you don't do it now, to me, it appears like it's kind of going to be a wrap.
But I still believe that there's that human spirit, that there's that, there's that team spirit, there's that, like, that whatever made those people, whatever that thing is to be an American, even if it's not even real, but we believe in it, there's still that inside of us that makes me believe that we could turn it around.
That guy, Bayard, who you, who you brought up, he's a Wall Street guy.
And 16 years ago, he said, no, I've just his family came over on the freaking Mayflower, just so you know.
That's who this guy is.
And he said, nope, redo.
I'm going to build a company called American Giant, and I'm going to prove that this country can still make quality clothing.
Now, that's a very personal mission that could only be embarked Upon by a genuinely hard-headed dude.
Okay.
But 16 years later, they're still standing and they're doing it.
They're proving it.
Right.
Now, can you do it to scale?
This is a whole nother conversation.
Right.
We'll talk about it another time.
We can.
But yeah, can you do it to scale?
What pieces have to start?
But you have to start somewhere.
It's like the crazy person, the leader was at first the crazy person.
The revolutionaries were first viewed as insane.
Always.
It's not just that.
It's every great accepted truth today began as madness.
It was dismissed and then it was grudgingly considered and then it was slowly accepted as fringe and then it was more widely believed as possible and then it got a consensus and then it became the truth and then it became the self-evident truth.
That's how it always, always happens.
It's going to happen with every with every single thing right now, from tariffs to climate change to meat eating to addiction.
All the things we think we know about all of these different things are in a state of evolution.
I agree.
And I don't know where or how it ends, but I'll tell you this, man.
It's exciting.
We are long in certainty today, and we're very short in understanding.
And it's just going to take time.
It's just going to take time to be as certain about these other things as we are about slavery.
It takes time for people.
I don't know how it ends, but look, again, you're engaged.
What you're doing, I can see that you love it.
You love it on stage.
You love talking to people and you love helping your audience.
My hope for everybody who is listening is that they can find a pursuit that gives them a measure of that.
And I've seen it in welders.
I've seen it in plumbers.
I've seen it in entrepreneurs.
I've seen it in writers.
My mom just wrote her fourth book.
She's 87. This woman wrote every day for 60 years, Theo.
Cleaning up after my dirty son?
Well, that was kind of her second one.
But no, for 60 years, her dream was to be a best-selling author.
She never got published until she was 80. And then she went to number four.
And now she's had four books.
I only mention it because I talk about work ethic all the time.
I talk about my pop.
I talk about dirty jobbers and everything else.
My mom right in front of me is a four-time New York Times best-selling author.
And she's 87. And that's a second act.
It didn't really happen for her until she was 80. Yeah.
So whatever level of hope or hopelessness or despair people are in, man, there's...
I mean, I feel inspired.
I feel like we can do things.
I just, I just, I feel like things are so possible, right?
And yeah, I just appreciate that there's an audience that tunes in and I hope they just stay patient, you know, and we'll keep thinking together and we'll find ways to do things new.
I just, I don't think it's that far off to change things, you know?
You're a hillbilly from Louisiana who just interviewed the president of the United States.
Oh, yeah.
Are you kidding me?
Yeah, that's a great point.
Are you kidding me?
That is a great point.
When people tell me.
Dude, I remember when I couldn't find my shirt for almost one month.
By the way.
Three and a half weekends, dude.
You talk about shirts.
I can't believe you got a wardrobe rack here.
Oh, yeah.
And the whole smiley face on the thing and the, that's exactly what you were talking about.
That's your, it's like your credo.
It's your code.
It's such a simple thing.
You know, what's it say on the back?
It just says, be good to yourself on the back.
Well, here you go.
Because, yeah, we're a lot of late bloomers here, but we're fucking hopeful.
And yeah, I think we can do something cool.
Like we just have to make sure we get it right, you know?
You got to try, man.
Right.
You have to try.
That's the thing.
That's about terrorists.
Like, fucking try.
I don't give a shit.
There's nothing to lose.
I've been to every place.
Everybody I know is in addiction.
What are we waiting for to happen?
Tell me how it's working with 37 trillion in the hole.
Tell me what's working.
Okay.
This whole thing is cobbled together with Kleenex and Spit.
And we've confused the fact that we're still living in a workable situation with a situation that truly works.
It's very wobbly.
Kleenex and Spit, I agree, man.
It's time to clear our own throat and make our own fucking glue, too, I think.
I thought you were going to go with Phlegm.
Oh, it was Phlegm, but it was.
Well, if you're clearing your throat, you're cutting up the phlegm.
You can put the phlegm in the glue.
And then the next thing you know, it's all in one of these little sunny delight things.
And I'm feeling weirdly caffeinated and subdued.
Micro, your new show is out May 2nd.
We'll make sure to share some clips of it on our Instagram page as well and on our Facebook.
Thanks, pal.
Yeah, and it's a rehash of, it's not a rehash, it is a continuation of.
It's a celebration of the neighbors you wish you had.
Returning the favor, thanks to Mark Zuckerberg, set the standard, people you should know is what I'm going to do.
Look, I don't know what else to do except point the camera at people who are actually making a difference, whether they're making a sweatshirt or a submarine or saving lives by making knives in a forge, man.
These stories, Theo, that's where we land the plane with your permission.
If you're looking for hope, it's in the forge.
It's in the sewing machines.
It's with a welding torch.
It's with an attitude that says, I'm going to cheerfully take hold of that son of a bitch and I'm going to lift it up and I'm going to do my part to get the rebar to where it needs to go.
I'm going to do my best.
I'm going to try.
And if I fall, I'm going to stand back up because life is a journey, brother.
And it's a job.
I'm not going to say a dirty one, just a job.
Mike Rhode, thanks so much, brother.
Anytime.
Now I'm just floating on the breeze and I feel I'm falling like these leaves.
I must be cornerstone.
Oh, but when I reach that ground, I'll share this peace of mind I found.
