Mike Rowe

A tree is all the various hardwoods, oak, beech.

We talked about-.

What was going to happen to film when TV came along? What was going to happen to music and DVDs? I mean, none of it really goes away, but it all shifts. It's all impacted. So I was struck by the fact that all of a sudden, we weren't talking about the impact of robots on blue collar jobs, but the impact of AI on white collar jobs.

Right. That's what interested me.

Now, had I not known, it was not me, I would have thought, well, that's something I narrated, you know, four or five.

And I don't know, because this does feel different.

Yes. It was me, a smart aleck looking under rocks, making poop jokes. That's not supposed to be the number one show. So they're like, can you smarten it up a little bit? And I said, well, I've been looking at some science type jobs and they're like, like what?

I'm like, well, we, I'd like to take a deep dive in AI. And they're like, that's great. That's great. If you can find Dirty Jobs in AI, we were golden. Now, did they think I was talking about artificial insemination?

Probably not. Probably not.

There was insertion into the bull. Light current stimulated the prostate. The white gold flew through the air. I captured as much of it as I could. And I put the whole thing on the air a week later and I got called to the principal's office.

You did? The question was, you promised us a show on artificial intelligence. And I said, did I? Then we had this big conversation about science. And the moral of the story is there's more science and artificial insemination than there is an AI, or at least as much.

And in a much deeper, much more meaningful way, we are so disconnected from our food. We're disconnected from our energy and dirty jobs on the surface was just a romp. It was exploding toilets and misadventures and artificial or animal husbandry, or whatever it was. But in reality, it was a pretty thoughtful look at what keeps us connected and what we've become disconnected from. And so ultimately the show stayed on the air and that episode aired to ridiculous ratings, by the way, which is why I violated every other barnyard creature known to man.

Ratings gold. But the thing is, there's no McDonald's. There's no Carl's Jr. There's no fast food. There's no slow food.

There's no meat industry as we understand it, without the other AI. So that's kind of a long way of saying. I'm most interested to see how artificial.

intelligence and artificial insemination are going to somehow, hopefully, come together.

I commented on your desk right away. It's primal.

It's you know, and, and I don't know, it's to, to reconnect with basic things is, is to be around fundamental things. I like what you've done with the place. Oh, I like to sniff it. You know, if you're going to sell t-shirts, do me a favor and put that on it. The thing I don't like about.

Uh, today, and not to sound too high minded, but it's, it's one of the goals of, of my foundation. And, you know, I don't really have permission to talk about AI. That's not really my lane. I don't, really quite know what I'm doing, but on a personal level, when somebody sends you a link that sounds so much like you, you can't tell the difference. Then, then you, you, you start to connect to it because it gets personal.

So I think what I think what's going to happen is this stuff is going to stop being ephemeral, theoretical, and people are going to find real, real, real personal stuff with regard to AI.

Hey guys, Josh Hammer here, the host of America on trial with Josh Hammer, a podcast for the First Podcast Network. Look, there are a lot of shows out there that are explaining the political news cycle, what's happening on the Hill, to this, to that. There are no other shows that are cutting straight to the point when it comes to the unprecedented lawfare, debilitating and affecting the 2024 presidential election. We do all of that every single day, right here on America on trial with Josh Hammer, subscribe and download your episodes wherever you get your podcasts. It's America on trial with.

When you go on Twitter and there's a video of you praising Hitler, that's not really.

But here we are. You make me very comfortable. I just,

Excuse me. What are you wearing? So it does seem like the net effect of almost all digital or even maybe technological advance is to separate us.

correct. And a relentless self-promoter. Relentless. I think. I had her on about 15.

All right.

Yes. And we're going to burrow into our homes and eventually we're going to be able to see movies on very intelligent TVs and so forth. She kind of predicted all that. Of course it all came true. And then she wrote about something called cocooning.

So after you burrow, you just cocoon. So it's deeper and deeper and our, our homes become smarter and the tech becomes more omnipresent and anything we want can be brought to us by a giant company that owns all of the vans and every, every. So in a way we're more connected vis-a-vis fiber optics and relationships and so forth, than we've ever been. But on the other hand, I think she was right. We are, we are so deeply burrowed into our space that, yeah, AI is going to take us to whatever that next level is.

And, and, and sex is going to be a topic we're probably going to have to talk about, because I, I mean, I've read that, I've read these studies that say young men in particular are not, it's not having sex the way.

He's very, very famous, uh, in South Florida, John D. McDonald. Yes. Wrote the Travis McGee mysteries, best pulp fiction ever written. And that stuff today reads like a prophecy.

McGee talked all of the time about this slow unraveling, and he was so wary of, of so much of what he predicted was coming. And of course it did. He lived off the grid on a houseboat called the Busted Flush that he won in a poker game. He solved crimes, essentially.

That's why we can do this. And that's why our attention spans get smaller and smaller and smaller because we've waged a war against boredom. But it's, it's the process of not doing anything, putting all the devices down and being alone with yourself that lets your brain wander. And pretty soon you'll just forest, gump your way through a bunch of things you didn't even know you were going to think about. And then you arrive at conclusions you, you didn't know you wanted to arrive at, but you're glad you did.

It's where ideas come from. If you're, if you're, if you're never bored, if you're always stimulated, then, then you've made a trade, made a bargain, and it's probably a bad one, brought with unintended.

If you are interested.

gov and see if there are opportunities for you fresh out of school, or you might be an experienced, uh, you know, tech coder, who's, who's, you know, done? fine, you know, bought the house, got everything set up and says, you know what, I want to, uh, do something for, for the common good.

And what are they exactly? Well, speaking broadly, most of them don't require a four year degree. They require training. Most of them require a willingness to roll up your sleeves and sometimes get your hands dirty. Uh, welders, plumbers, steam fitters, pipe fitters, electricians, heating, air conditioning, so forth.

For the last 20 years or so, for every five who retire over the course of a year to replace them. It's troubling math. Terrible arithmetic, is Lincoln would have said. And so the skills gap is a real thing. And that part of our workforce has been woefully, uh, neglected, beginning really around the time we took shop class out of high school.

And we've had our thumb on the scale of education in a very specific way for a long time. We have, uh, we've made a very persuasive case for higher ed, and the former president's making a pretty persuasive case for careers in artificial intelligence. And fine, we can all do two things at the same time, I hope.

Pretty much a lone voice, but I've never heard anybody disagree with you because you like, on what grounds could someone disagree with you? No, but I mean, in a substantive way.

we needed more engineers. We needed more scientists. Don't know about sociologists, but, but the higher education needed a shot in the arm. Unfortunately, we weren't content to simply make the case for higher ed. We had to do it at the expense of everything else.

And so trade schools took it in the neck. Community colleges were relegated to something your kid did if they couldn't. Right. But of course, those forms of education are also attached to a big chunk of our, our workforce. And so we kind of waged a war on alternative education, or call it lower education, if you want, because if it's higher over here, it by definition has to be lower over here.

So we drew a real clear line and we told people that if you don't get the most expensive degree that you can, if you don't take the most expensive path there is, you're going to wind up doing something subordinate. The result is this idea that all these great jobs are essentially vocational consolation prizes. Meanwhile, the opportunities that exist, Tucker, I mean, look, I appreciate the kind words. I have been beating the drum for 15 years. Foundation turned 15 on Labor Day.

We've helped about 2000 people get trained in these areas. And I'm telling you, most of my soapbox stuff in the early days was anecdotal. It was what I thought and it was what I saw on dirty jobs. And it was this feeling that we were affirmatively neglecting a whole lot of opportunity. Now, now the stats have, have bolstered that.

The headlines have caught up to my own smack, but, most importantly, the people we've helped five, six years ago are sitting down with me today and answering questions like, well, how's it going? I'll say, and they'll say, I'll tell you how it's going. You helped me get a welding degree six years ago. Today, I own three vans, a mechanical contracting company. I've got a plumber and I've got an electrician that work with me every day.

We'll, we're all making six figures a year. We work when we want. And I hear these stories day after, day, after, day, after day. And I look around and I, I'm not asking the feds to do anything. I did.

I went to Congress three times over the years. And I said, guys, we need a better PR campaign for this chunk of the workforce. The math is awful. And we're not going to be having a conversation about, oh my gosh, you mean a plumber can really make that much? We're going to be having a conversation about what do you mean?

I have to wait four days for a plumber. And that's what's happening now. So, with great respect to Barack Obama, fine, make the case for opportunities at AI, but who the hell is making the case for the opportunity to make this table? Totally right. Who's, where is the passion or the prosperity that will surely follow if you take the time to learn a skill that's in demand and work your ass off?

That's still for sale. It's still real. And I can't find anybody. I really, and I've looked.

Oh, the working man is always better. Oh, the working man sometimes drunk. Okay. In the morning. I get it.

Yep. But I just think the nature of the work matters. If I'm a pornographer, it's probably not good for me, but if I'm, you know, a really skilled drywall hanger, maybe it is.

Do you remember, I guess it was 2016 Republican debates, all 17 are up there, right? They're all doing their thing. 27,, something like that. Amazing. I forget the exact question, but Marco Rubio's answer was, let me tell you what we need in this country are fewer philosophers and more welders.

So the crowd claps, big applause line. There was a lot of truth. A lot of your comment about sociologists earlier. It's fine. I get it.

But what was interesting was like my social channels blew up, with people going, Hey, this guy's, this guy's really singing your song. I said, actually, no, no, that's not my point. My point would be what our country needs are more welders who can talk intelligently about Nietzsche or Kierkegaard. And we need more philosophers who can run an even bead. Okay.

Yes. It's this idea that a welder is somehow consigned. But look, I don't know where my cell phone is. now. There's yours.

We, you and I. with this internet connection, we've got access to something we didn't when we were in school, which is 98% of the known information on the land. So, in my foundation, I try and make the point to the people who apply for our, for our work scholarships. I say, look, this is learn the skill, be great at it, but for God's sakes, go get your liberal arts education, not at Brown. You don't have to borrow all that money to do that.

Just be interested. Be curious. I watched a lecture nights ago from MIT on my phone, for free, for free. Now I'm not saying it's the same experience, but it's the same information. It's all available.

And if that doesn't like fire you up as a curious person to not be completely engaged by the undeniable fact that most of the known information on the planet is in your pocket and accessible, right? That's a very liberal arts kind of thing to say, but I'm not saying it. You're basic liberal arts student. I'm saying it to the welders and the steam fitters and the pipe fitters and the mechanics that have come through our foundation, because the most interesting people on the planet, and I know I'm preaching to the choir,

you know, do you know the person who made this desk? I don't wish I did. I do too, because I guarantee you, they got a story.

In fact, I had him on my podcast not long ago and they do really, really important research that has to do primarily with collective illusions. In fact, he has a book called Collective Illusion. And one of the things that personally really struck me was that 80% of the information on, on Twitter is created by 10%. The people on Twitter. it's really easy to look at that platform, and many others too, and assume a consensus.

And so once we, as humans realize that there is a consensus or a majority who believe a certain thing, then we'll, by and large, fall in line. Many times supporting things that we personally don't really support. Like, for instance, right now there is a...

Well, it used to be three, right? But in the course of the last five or six years, like a lot of people, it made me wonder as something shifted it in that generation that I just haven't seen. And I'm hopeful that it has, people are starting to get the message that just because you've got $200,000 in debt and a nice diploma doesn't mean the world's going to be the pathway to your door. It doesn't mean you're going to get hired in your chosen field. It doesn't mean you're well-educated.

It doesn't mean anything at all, except for the fact that you owe $200,000.

. That's what it means. That diploma is a receipt, as surely as it is anything else, right? And, and the information you got in exchange for it, well, that that's a tool and how you use it is none of my business. And people are starting, I think, I think, to realize at least this research indicates that our fascination with the golden ticket that's always been a college diploma is starting to.

How is, what's the state of our vocational education in the United States? Like, is, I think our engineering programs are still really good, but like welding, plumbing, electrical, and then some of the higher, you know, electrical engineering, et cetera. Are we still leading the world in that stuff?

Yeah. You know, it starts with interest. It starts with like, if you're a, if you're a 14 year old kid with no real clear idea of what you want to do, and you're walking down the corridor of your high school and you stick your head in the wood shop, and you stick your head in the metal shop, and you stick your head in any number of vocational shops, you can at least optically see what the work looks like or might look like. And for a lot of people who got into the trades, that's where it began. They saw something that resonated with them in a switchblade.

You don't see it. I mean, what more persuasive thing could you say to a kid regarding the skill trades than, don't even look at them. We're just going to remove all proof of their existence from sight. That's what we did when we took shop class out of high school. And it's not a coincidence that, I mean, I think I can draw a pretty straight line that that event and $1.7 trillion of outstanding student loans, 10.8 million open jobs, and maybe even 7.2 million able-bodied men in the prime of their life, according to Nicholas Eberstadt and a book called Men Without Work, great book, who are sitting home, not only not working, but affirmatively not looking for work, spending in excess of 2,000 hours a year, wiping and looking at screens.

That's never happened before, not in peacetime. Anyway, in fact, we are in peacetime.

All of that stuff together, I can walk back and I'll be at a fairly circuitous route, but we took shop class out of high schools and we didn't think anything was going to happen as a.

So you, I got to ask you, you were an opera singer. Well, I sang in the opera.

Can't get an agent unless you have a SAG card and you can't get a set. Anyhow, if you got in the opera, that you become a member of the American Guild of Musical Artists. And as such, you can buy a SAG card. You pay your dues because they're all sister unions. Of course, DuPont.

So anyway, I'm 22 years old. I can't get in this great actor's guild. When I had a buddy, told me about this loophole, sang in the opera. And the opera had these open auditions every Thursday, last Thursday of the month. So I went to the library and I asked the librarian for the shortest Italian aria ever written.

She knows such a thing. And she said, oh, I want the coat, aria, Cuccini's La Boheme. All right. So I took home, there's a record, and I recorded it on a tape. And I walked around with these things called, Walkman.

This is 1982, I guess. And so I listened to Sam Raimi sing the coat aria for like a month in Baltimore. Didn't know what the words meant. Wanted to get the sounds in my head and memorize the tune. But I did.

And so I went to the Lyric Opera House on a Thursday and I sang it for the chorus master at a couple of swells. Do you still remember it?

It goes on. Basically, I think it's Rodolfo saying goodbye to his coat. Very cold. And Mimi, of course, is dying of tuberculosis.

I stayed in for eight years. I got my union card. They let me in.

And the music was amazing.

I'd never heard a world-class orchestra play. And I couldn't believe I was given access just to be around this level of talent. Mind boggling. And the girls.

. I'm dressed as a Viking. Pirate. I'm singing real loud in languages I don't really understand. There are 80 people in the rep company.

45 of them are women. 35 are men.

30 of the men have zero interest in 100% of the women.

I'm 22,, dressed as a pirate. And the girls are all dressed up like French courtesans, plunging necklines. And oh, it's for eight years. That's unbelievable.

No, because dirty jobs had been a thing. And the list of people who sang opera and crawled through a sewer, apparently, is pretty short.

The opera house stood on stage for about two hours in my hometown, telling stories about dirty jobs and answering questions and telling the story I just told you. And it was one of those moments where I was like, you know what? I don't know if it's full circle, but man, it was super strange and fun and gratifying to go back and do that. Because for me, and this is just the cognitive dissonance and one of the things that people always ask me, they're always surprised by the opera. Because they saw 20 years of dirty jobs and violating barnyard animals and crawling through sewers.

And those two things aren't supposed to exist in the same person. No, they're not. Except they are. The guy who made this table is supposed to be able to quote Robert Frost. And the guy who writes poetry is supposed to be able to, right?

And so I didn't really give it much thought until later in life. But my time in the opera, my time on the QVC Cable shopping channel in the middle of the night, trying to figure out how to talk about product that I couldn't either explain or justify for eight minutes on live TV. Those are the best times of my life. And the training. Now, I mean, I didn't realize I was getting the second best education of my life.

The best education started with episode one of Dirty Jobs and went on for 20 years. And the third best was the community college that I attended out of high school, which changed everything. So today, yeah, if I mouth off a lot about this, it's because I really do believe that when I get criticized for being anti-college or being anti-education, I really only think it's because people, people, must think. if I'm going to try and make a persuasive case for this kind of work, I must be against this kind of work. I'm not.

All right. I like the opera. I like to sing. I crawl through sewers for a living. I run a foundation that is completely committed to making a more persuasive case for the opportunities that exist in this country and to aggressively, but good humorally, hopefully, debunk the stigmas, stereotypes, myths, and misperceptions that are keeping millions of kids from exploring real opportunities that are just sitting right in front of us.

I wish the former president all the luck in the world in his pitch to bring more people into the fascinating future of artificial intelligence. I really do.

. Now that we've... You've done a deep dive, haven't you? We've done a very deep dive. We do.

So. sheep castration, yeah, that was a biggie.

Everything's out of control. This is in virtually every species, the males.

need to be controlled in this way. Like I was at a hatchery one time, Murray McMurray, up in... I think it was Iowa. They ship like 100,000 little chicks out every day in the US mail.

People get.

. You can order chickens through the mail. They do this all the time. If it's a girl chick, if it's a boy chicken, well,

that's called fertilizer. They're ground up. Really? Oh yeah. Yeah.

I mean, that's why.

. How many roosters do you see in the barnyard? There's usually like one or two. Yeah. And there's like a bunch of hens.

Of course. So for that reason, if you're not castrating them, you're getting rid of them somehow or another. What happened in 2008 actually turned into a TED talk, but it didn't start that way. It started with me trying very hard not to run afoul of the network, because after the first few seasons of the show, something really crazy happened. It became a phenomenon and the network had no choice really, but to enthusiastically get behind it, because it was launching all kinds of other shows as well.

But dirty jobs broke a lot of eggs. There was what we called an army of angry acronyms, because everybody watches TV. And if you're an expert in a chosen field and you see me doing something wrong, whether it's OSHA or the EPA, or the ASPCA or the Humane Society, you write a letter, right?

And they said, oh, absolutely. And they described the rubber band, a thick rubber band is placed over the scrotum of the animal. The flow of blood is slowly retarded. And eventually the business just falls off a couple of days later. Right.

It's going to be amazing. TV. Sounds. good. We get there, Craig, Colorado.

Oh, I'm on horses riding through the mountains. It's beautiful. We get all the sheep gathered up. We separate. it, got the lambs there.

I got the rancher, I got his wife. And, uh, the first lamb is put up on the fence and the legs are spread and the rancher reaches into his pocket to pull out one of the rubber bands to put around the scrotum, except it's not a rubber band. It's a knife. And the knife flicks open and you can see the sun glinting off the steel blade. And very quickly he, he leans down and he pulls the scrotum towards him and he cuts off the tip, drops the tip in a bucket.

Then he cuts off the lamb's tail, called docking. Yeah. That goes in the bucket. Then he pushes the scrotum back, revealing two testicles, this, and then he leans down and he bites him. He yanks his head back and testicles come out of the scrotum and he spits them into the barrel.

This all happens very quickly. Funny. Remarkable. I said something I've never said on dirty jobs before, because we never do second takes or anything, but I said, but stop, stop. I said, what are you doing?

And he explained what he was doing and that that's how it had been done for many years. And, um, and that's just kind of the way it was. And I said, you don't understand, because what I think is going on is what happens in reality TV. The guy had seen the show and he wanted to do something spectacular. Of course.

I'm like, we can't be biting people. It's a family show. Okay. Well, I don't care what you think. We, we can't do this.

And he says, well, what do you want to do? I'm like, I want to do it the proper way. I want to put the rubber band on and so forth. The Sony is like, well, we could do that. You know, it's not very nice for the, the lamb.

I'm like, not very nice for the lamb, all this whole thing. What are we talking about? So the cameras fire back up. He goes over to this tackle box and he comes out with the rubber band and he gives it to me and I put it over the scrotum of the next lamb. And we put the little lamb down on the, on the ground and it's trembling on account of the rubber band around the scrotum.

Yeah. And it kind of walks over into the corner and kind of turns around and lies down and is in, is in clear distress. I'm looking at the lamb. I said to him, you know, how, um, how long is he going to be like this? He said two, three days.

Meanwhile, the lamb that he had just at home, this thing's walking around, not a care in the world, already had forgotten. I mean, I'm going to just put his balls on. Gone. Yeah. He's just getting on with his life now.

Now the balls are gone, but you know, it's okay. There's no blood. He's just all pursuing a life of, you know, whatever religious fulfillment a lamb would do without his testicles at that point. And this poor thing is curled up in the, in the corner. So we kept filming and I castrated probably 30 lambs that day.

Did you feel any guilt at all? No, no, it was actually very quick. It was, it's, it's a way more efficient way to do it.

prior to the show. I'd been given bad information by experts. I had called the expert authority. I had called PETA. I called the humane society as well.

The best minds in the business, the people who live to write disappointing emails to my boss, instructed me on the proper way to remove the testicles from a creature. And they were wrong. Now, optically, it might've looked a little better in their minds. I think they liked the idea of a rubber band instead of a knife and teeth, but they were wrong. That lamb castrated the proper way was the very embodiment of abject misery.

And I saw 30 or 40 more of that thing.

I think.

well, sometimes it makes you foolish. Sometimes it makes you brave. Sometimes it's really hard to know what the difference is, but I've done a lot of things on that show because I was aware that we were making a show and it, and it's my job. My job on Dirty Jobs is to try. And it's, it's, it's maybe the greatest scam of all time that I've pulled off.

Not even knowing I was trying to pull it off, but I'm, I'm not judged on that show by my ability to successfully do it. No, of course not. I'm judged by my willingness to try. Your willingness to do it. And of course you're going to bite the ball.

You're going to try, you know, but really how are you going to be? I mean, I got the guy right there. Albert was his name. I can still see his mustache, little traces of vas deferens. So yeah, I mean, it's a heck of a thing.

So I know, I know I'm making an extraordinary moment in television. I know at a glance it looks salacious and probably unjustifiable, but I also know, vis-a-vis the trembling creature in the corner of the pen. I also know that there's some weird, greater truth like throbbing under all this.

That was Dirty Jobs, 2008.

. Nominated for an Emmy.