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TheDocNCarolynPodcast.com (A Fresh look at Dirty Jobs) · TheDocNCarolynPodcast

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_01: The Dr.
• 0:00
  SPEAKER_01: Carolyn Podcast!
• 0:02
  SPEAKER_05: And we're back and we're podcasting.
• 0:05
  SPEAKER_01: We do this every week.
• 0:07
  SPEAKER_05: 135, episode 135 of the Dr.
• 0:09
  SPEAKER_05: Carolyn Podcast.
• 0:10
  SPEAKER_05: Thank you for being aboard.
• 0:11
  SPEAKER_05: Uh we we have a show that I am uh I'm very excited about because I'm wondering how people are gonna make this controversial.
• 0:20
  SPEAKER_05: What what part of it do you think will be what's controversial about jobs, you think?
• 0:24
  SPEAKER_01: Because the push has been so long that everybody needs to go to college.
• 0:28
  SPEAKER_05: Right.
• 0:29
  SPEAKER_05: So what kind of what kind of pressure was there on you to go to college or was it just assumed that you would?
• 0:35
  SPEAKER_01: No, there wasn't any pressure.
• 0:37
  SPEAKER_01: And I really had no desire to go to college.
• 0:39
  SPEAKER_01: I wanted to be a mom, and you know, I wanted to.
• 0:42
  SPEAKER_05: So you didn't you didn't have a career bend necessarily.
• 0:45
  SPEAKER_01: No.
• 0:46
  SPEAKER_01: Um but after my first husband passed away and I was I had two kids.
• 0:51
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, you had better do something here.
• 0:55
  SPEAKER_01: So I think it's great for girls to figure out a career path and have a plan.
• 1:02
  SPEAKER_01: Whether or not, you know, if they get married and want to stay home with their kids, that's awesome.
• 1:07
  SPEAKER_01: But just have a plan just in case something horrible happens, because you never know.
• 1:11
  SPEAKER_05: And don't you think our culture made a shift at some point uh during life in the States, it became unfashionable to be a stay-at-home mom.
• 1:20
  SPEAKER_05: I don't know if you got that messaging.
• 1:21
  SPEAKER_05: It seems like from you know, from my perspective, that was kind of discouraged.
• 1:25
  SPEAKER_01: Yes, and even now, I mean, I follow I I see all the social media things, and there are always people who are uh stay-at-home moms and they're you know showing their baking or whatever they're doing.
• 1:39
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah and people just really are nasty to them.
• 1:43
  SPEAKER_01: Kind of disgusting.
• 1:44
  SPEAKER_05: I don't know if this mic is picking up but our our cat Barney is in the background and he is screaming at the top of the He started the show early.
• 1:51
  SPEAKER_05: Yeah, he usually does this at like midnight.
• 1:54
  SPEAKER_05: We have a midnight uh performance.
• 1:57
  SPEAKER_05: So what was your what was your first job?
• 1:59
  SPEAKER_05: You're the you're by the way, you are highly educated.
• 2:01
  SPEAKER_05: If if you're just punching into the show uh and you just like and it happens, people will land on Apple Podcasts or Spotify or something, hey, they look interesting.
• 2:11
  SPEAKER_05: So who are these people?
• 2:13
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 2:14
  unknown: Right.
• 2:15
  SPEAKER_05: But you are a uh nurse practitioner and you've been in nursing for a long time.
• 2:18
  SPEAKER_05: But but it wasn't your first and you and you have a master's degree in uh in in nursing, and uh you're a nurse practitioner, family nurse practitioner.
• 2:26
  SPEAKER_05: But what was your first job?
• 2:28
  SPEAKER_05: You didn't uh break out, you didn't break into the nursing business.
• 2:31
  SPEAKER_01: I I was trying to to decide between teaching and nursing.
• 2:36
  SPEAKER_01: Teaching.
• 2:37
  SPEAKER_01: Teach I know.
• 2:38
  SPEAKER_01: I don't even like undisciplined kids, so that would not have worked out well.
• 2:42
  SPEAKER_05: But Mike Rowe is talking about uh jobs and what is happening with AI.
• 2:48
  SPEAKER_01: It's it's a little bit disconcerting what's happening with AI.
• 2:53
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, there's lots of good things.
• 2:55
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 2:55
  SPEAKER_01: Like I use it all the time.
• 2:57
  SPEAKER_05: Well, the discussion has been for the longest time that AI is going to replace like robots and automation and artificial intelligence would would really impact the laborer.
• 3:08
  SPEAKER_05: That maybe that all the cars would be automated, and and to a large extent, you know, factory floors are.
• 3:14
  SPEAKER_05: But what they're finding is the jobs that are really being impacted by AI are the middle manager jobs, the coding jobs, some of the software and coding jobs are being most impacted.
• 3:27
  SPEAKER_05: So what's left?
• 3:28
  SPEAKER_05: He says, Mike Rowe says that 10 million jobs are unfilled right now.
• 3:34
  SPEAKER_05: In America.
• 3:35
  SPEAKER_05: In America right now, are unfilled because uh the mantra has been for so long, get go to college.
• 3:44
  SPEAKER_05: You're worthless unless you get a four-year degree.
• 3:46
  SPEAKER_05: And I grew up in that kind of house.
• 3:47
  SPEAKER_05: I mean, I I didn't I finally didn't end up going to college until I was an adult.
• 3:52
  SPEAKER_05: But I mean, that feeling that you weren't suc that that you that you didn't succeed, that you didn't fulfill uh really the expectations of your parent of your parents.
• 4:01
  SPEAKER_01: I didn't have that, I think because my dad didn't have a college degree and he was successful.
• 4:08
  SPEAKER_05: And yeah, well that was the messaging for me, even though my parents didn't have a college degree, they kind of was were like, if you don't do it, then you're not you know, you're not I never heard that.
• 4:19
  SPEAKER_05: Yeah.
• 4:19
  SPEAKER_01: It was, I mean, you know, they wanted us to do what we wanted to do.
• 4:23
  SPEAKER_05: And so what would you say now if we had middle schoolers or you know, uh high school was coming up fast?
• 4:31
  SPEAKER_01: Well, first of all, they wouldn't be in public school.
• 4:33
  SPEAKER_05: Yeah.
• 4:34
  SPEAKER_05: That's a that's another big thing that came up in some of the other interviews was homeschooling and how important that is now.
• 4:39
  SPEAKER_01: Yes.
• 4:40
  SPEAKER_01: And second, um, if they wanted a career path that required a degree in order to get, you know, certified or a licensed or whatever, then yeah.
• 4:53
  SPEAKER_01: But if you're just going just to get a degree, that's that's silly.
• 4:58
  SPEAKER_05: Yeah, and and when I was working at the emergency communication center in Cincinnati, there was a uh a call taker there, call taker dispatcher, who was working a lot of overtime.
• 5:09
  SPEAKER_05: And how do I know that?
• 5:11
  SPEAKER_05: Because I was working a lot of overtime, and every time I I was there to work overtime, she was there working overtime.
• 5:18
  SPEAKER_05: So uh we were chatting at some point.
• 5:19
  SPEAKER_05: I said, you know, you're killing this OT.
• 5:22
  SPEAKER_05: Um you know, why are you working so much?
• 5:24
  SPEAKER_05: Are you saving to you know, do something, do a vacation, and you know, buy something special?
• 5:28
  SPEAKER_05: What?
• 5:28
  SPEAKER_05: And she said, No, I'm uh trying to pay off my student loan, and so here I am.
• 5:33
  SPEAKER_05: Those wretched student loans.
• 5:34
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, and trying to pay one off myself.
• 5:36
  SPEAKER_05: And so I told her, so I so I asked her, I said, So what's your degree in?
• 5:40
  SPEAKER_05: And I and I kind of presume it was something related to a little bit of public safety, maybe something criminal justice related.
• 5:47
  SPEAKER_05: And she said, No, uh, it's in in accounting.
• 5:50
  SPEAKER_05: I said, Accounting?
• 5:51
  SPEAKER_05: I said, Really?
• 5:52
  SPEAKER_05: I said, Do you work in accounting?
• 5:55
  SPEAKER_05: And she said, Nope.
• 5:56
  SPEAKER_05: I said, Well, tax season, you must clean up then.
• 5:58
  SPEAKER_05: I mean, if you have an accounting degree, certainly you can make a little extra dough.
• 6:01
  SPEAKER_05: She said, the only thing I hate worse than accounting is taxes.
• 6:05
  SPEAKER_05: I said, remember you you may remember that conversation I told you about it.
• 6:09
  SPEAKER_01: I do remember because accounting was my the first thing that I started going to college for, and I wanted to jab the pencil in my eye because I was so bored.
• 6:17
  SPEAKER_05: Yeah, so here's the thing.
• 6:18
  SPEAKER_05: So I asked her, I said, um so you have an accounting degree yet, you're working in public safety, and she was great at what she did.
• 6:25
  SPEAKER_05: She was a great, always show up on time, very competent employee.
• 6:29
  SPEAKER_05: But I said, um, I said, so why are you working in in this in this in this thing if you have a degree in accounting?
• 6:36
  SPEAKER_05: She says, Well, my parents didn't give said, I have to go to school.
• 6:40
  SPEAKER_05: I have to go to college.
• 6:41
  SPEAKER_05: No choice.
• 6:42
  SPEAKER_05: And I I have no choice.
• 6:43
  SPEAKER_05: I have to go.
• 6:44
  SPEAKER_05: And the same thing that I was told, you have to go.
• 6:46
  SPEAKER_01: That doesn't make sense to me.
• 6:48
  SPEAKER_05: Well, they I mean well, it does make sense if you want your you want your child to be successful, you want them to be, and and that was the that's the line of thinking, that's the reasoning.
• 6:57
  SPEAKER_05: You have to have a four-year degree to be successful, at least.
• 7:01
  SPEAKER_01: My question is, what do you want to do as a career, and what do you have to do to get there?
• 7:07
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 7:08
  SPEAKER_01: Do you have to go to college to get there?
• 7:10
  SPEAKER_01: Do you have to pay someone$70,000 to stand in front of you and do a PowerPoint and read a book that you can read on your own and get the information?
• 7:20
  SPEAKER_05: So that that's that's the perfect setup for the interview.
• 7:22
  SPEAKER_05: So we're gonna go to Mike Rowe and uh and his interview and his discussion about trades and skill trade and skill trades and how important they are in the emerging AI economy.
• 7:36
  SPEAKER_05: I wanted to ask you about uh you had a at True Healing Healthcare.net, you had a sick visit this week.
• 7:45
  SPEAKER_01: I did.
• 7:46
  SPEAKER_05: And uh a lot of people may not know that you actually do sick visits.
• 7:49
  SPEAKER_05: What is how do you do uh telemedicine and uh sick visits?
• 7:53
  SPEAKER_05: How how does that work?
• 7:54
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, it works the same as everything else.
• 7:57
  SPEAKER_01: You just um make an appointment and we do everything via video.
• 8:02
  SPEAKER_01: Obviously, I can't do everything via telehealth, but a lot of things I can.
• 8:08
  SPEAKER_05: And uh So if I so if I wake up in the morning, I got the um You got the man cold.
• 8:13
  SPEAKER_05: I got the That requires an emergency room, does it doesn't it?
• 8:19
  SPEAKER_05: But if it if it's not quite if if it's not uh, you know, taken hold yet and I'm trying to nip it in the PU, I can I can just dial, I can get online, truehealinghealthcare dot net and uh and uh schedule an appointment and then could I could I get a prescription if you Yes, yeah if you need a prescription I can send a prescription.
• 8:38
  SPEAKER_01: Um I mean obviously I can't do the strep and COVID and all that testing like you would in the urgent care, but you know based on symptoms you can Yeah, I can prescribe based on symptoms and based on what I'm seeing and well I know that's a real bonus for folks if they particularly if they don't feel up to driving into the urgent care or to see their provider.
• 9:00
  SPEAKER_01: I try to keep those visits since I don't take insurance, I keep those visits affordable.
• 9:07
  SPEAKER_01: I'm Carolyn Kilgore, founder and provider at TrueHealing Healthcare.net.
• 9:12
  SPEAKER_05: Why functional medicine?
• 9:13
  SPEAKER_01: Because you're more than just a list of symptoms.
• 9:16
  SPEAKER_01: Traditional care often masks the problem, but functional medicine digs deeper to find the root cause.
• 9:22
  SPEAKER_05: What makes True Healing Healthcare different?
• 9:25
  SPEAKER_01: We move away from the one size fits all approach.
• 9:28
  SPEAKER_01: We look at your environment and your lifestyle to create a roadmap tailored specifically for you.
• 9:33
  SPEAKER_05: What if someone really wants to make a change?
• 9:36
  SPEAKER_01: If you're tired of feeling fine and want to start feeling great, it's about proactive wellness, not just reactive treatment.
• 9:43
  SPEAKER_05: What's the deal with telemedicine?
• 9:45
  SPEAKER_01: As long as you're 18 and have an internet connection, you can have a visit in the privacy of your own home or anywhere else in Texas.
• 9:52
  SPEAKER_01: We're able to order labs or prescribe or whatever else you need.
• 9:56
  SPEAKER_05: True Healing Healthcare dot net for the great state of Texas.
• 9:59
  SPEAKER_03: Let's start with talking about what you see as the real problem that's cropped up over the past 40 years or so in America.
• 10:05
  SPEAKER_03: We're doing everything we can to push every kid to go to a four-year college.
• 10:09
  SPEAKER_03: What's wrong with that?
• 10:10
  SPEAKER_04: So it's not working.
• 10:11
  SPEAKER_04: I mean, you got a trillion dollars in debt on the student loan side.
• 10:14
  SPEAKER_03: You have a skills gap, something what do you mean a skills gap?
• 10:18
  SPEAKER_04: Well, you have right now about three million jobs, transportation, commerce, um, trades that can't be filled.
• 10:26
  SPEAKER_03: And this is stuff, anything from carpentry to electric uh being an electrician, plumbers, heating, construction, electric, uh you know, there's there's a whole truck drivers.
• 10:36
  SPEAKER_04: You know, there's there's a long welders is a big one.
• 10:39
  SPEAKER_04: Um jobs that typically parents don't sit down and say to their kids, look, if all goes well, this is this is what you're gonna do.
• 10:47
  SPEAKER_03: But these are actually also jobs.
• 10:49
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, not only are they available, but they are also they pay well.
• 10:52
  SPEAKER_04: Listen, uh yes, is the short answer.
• 10:54
  SPEAKER_04: But of course, you know, pay well, it's it's it's kind of relative.
• 10:58
  SPEAKER_04: Right.
• 10:58
  SPEAKER_04: What they what they are mostly, in my opinion, are opportunities.
• 11:02
  SPEAKER_04: You know, a good welder right now can pretty much write his or her own ticket.
• 11:07
  SPEAKER_04: Uh companies like Caterpillar, Bechtel, you can go down the list.
• 11:11
  SPEAKER_04: They have had open shortages for decades.
• 11:13
  SPEAKER_04: And so, you know, I talked to a kid the other day uh up in Butler, North Dakota.
• 11:18
  SPEAKER_04: So it's Butler, right?
• 11:19
  SPEAKER_04: It's cold, but he works on heavy equipment up there.
• 11:23
  SPEAKER_04: And um over a hundred bucks an hour, work when he wants, paid for his house in cash, raising a family, no debt.
• 11:30
  SPEAKER_04: Um people don't tell his stories.
• 11:33
  SPEAKER_03: So so that's part of the problem, is that instead we're telling everybody, you know, just you gotta get that sheepskin, you gotta get the college BA, otherwise you're not gonna be happy, you're not gonna have any opportunity.
• 11:44
  SPEAKER_04: It feels that way to me.
• 11:44
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah, I mean that's that that was my experience in high school, and I still hear the same platitudes today.
• 11:50
  SPEAKER_03: Talk a bit about that, because you have a great story about how you were in your high school guidance counselor's office and you saw a sign that said, Work smart, not hard.
• 11:58
  SPEAKER_03: Mr.
• 11:59
  SPEAKER_04: Dunbar, yeah.
• 12:00
  SPEAKER_04: Well, he uh he called me down, as I guess you know, millions of kids have been called down to talk about my future.
• 12:07
  SPEAKER_04: And uh he was looking at some test scores and said, Look, you you you're not an idiot, you know.
• 12:12
  SPEAKER_04: You got a shot at James Madison University of Maryland, maybe some other schools.
• 12:16
  SPEAKER_04: Uh here's here's what I would suggest.
• 12:17
  SPEAKER_04: And I said, I you know, I I don't have any money.
• 12:20
  SPEAKER_04: Uh but more importantly, I don't I don't have any idea what I want to do.
• 12:23
  SPEAKER_04: So while I figure that out, you know, I thought I'd go to a community college, at which point he says, Well, that's way below your potential, and pointed to the poster that said, Work smart, not hard.
• 12:32
  SPEAKER_04: The thing about the poster wasn't just the bromide at the bottom, it was the image.
• 12:36
  SPEAKER_04: On the left-hand side, you've got a college graduate recently matriculated, cap and gown, sun setting behind him, looking like he owns the world in the future.
• 12:45
  SPEAKER_04: And next to him is a mechanic holding a wrench, covered in grease or something worse, looking down at the ground like he won the vocational consolation prize of all time.
• 12:55
  SPEAKER_04: And, you know, that was a very specific PR campaign for college, for higher education.
• 13:00
  SPEAKER_04: And we're talking this is what, late, late 70s, early.
• 13:03
  SPEAKER_04: 79s, yeah.
• 13:04
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
• 13:04
  SPEAKER_04: But like all PR campaigns, and most everything I'm doing right now really is through the lens of a kind of marketing proposition.
• 13:12
  SPEAKER_04: But all PR campaigns always go too far.
• 13:16
  SPEAKER_04: And they always, it seems, promote the thing they want to focus on at the expense of something else.
• 13:23
  SPEAKER_04: Now, it's kind of egregious in education, in my opinion, but it shouldn't be shocking because look, the best way to sell a truck is to talk about how lousy the competitor is.
• 13:32
  SPEAKER_04: The best way to get elected is to talk about how creepy your opponent is.
• 13:36
  SPEAKER_04: And the best way to really promote college hard is to talk about how subordinate all the other opportunities are.
• 13:42
  SPEAKER_03: Trevor Burrus, Jr.
• 13:42
  SPEAKER_03: And and you've replaced work smart not hard with work smart and hard.
• 13:46
  SPEAKER_03: What what are the goals of the work smart and hard campaign?
• 13:53
  SPEAKER_04: Well, in in a really general way, uh a conversation exactly like the one we're having, and a question precisely like the one you just posed.
• 14:00
  SPEAKER_04: Because if you don't talk about it, the whole thing is forget it.
• 14:04
  SPEAKER_04: You know, we we have to change the conversation and we have to challenge the uh the existing protocol, if you will.
• 14:11
  SPEAKER_04: So the first thing is this general PR campaign around the trades.
• 14:16
  SPEAKER_04: Um the second thing, there is a financial component to it.
• 14:19
  SPEAKER_04: I mean the posters are only 10 bucks, but if I can get 20 or 30,000 of them hanging in guidance counselors' office around the around the country right now, well that's fun.
• 14:29
  SPEAKER_04: And we take the money we raise, of course, and it goes into a uh into a foundation to keep the conversation going and to award what we call work ethic scholarships.
• 14:39
  SPEAKER_03: What is a work ethic uh scholarship?
• 14:41
  SPEAKER_05: We'll take a break and visit with Kimberly Blakes, and when we come back, we'll answer the question with Mike Rowe: what is a work ethic scholarship?
• 14:49
  SPEAKER_00: Welcome to this Kingdom Minute with your host, Kimberly Blakes on the Doc and Carolyn podcast.
• 14:54
  SPEAKER_00: If I was a Christian, now I am a Christian, I am an authentic Christian, but if I was someone out here in the world and I was a Christian, I would have to say, okay, I don't understand what this says in the Bible, but I'm gonna agree with it because I know that God is wiser than me and He is my father.
• 15:10
  SPEAKER_00: So because of that, I cannot align myself with a political party that diametrically opposes the father, that diametrically opposes everything that I stand for, that stands for killing babies, that stands for every evil and sinful thing.
• 15:26
  SPEAKER_00: It is not even hard now.
• 15:28
  SPEAKER_00: It is not even, it's not even deep now.
• 15:30
  SPEAKER_00: You can just look and see.
• 15:32
  SPEAKER_00: But instead of doing that, they have decided that they're gonna take scripture and they're gonna twist it so hard to where you don't even recognize it anymore, and they're gonna make an excuse for continuing to thumb their noses at God.
• 15:45
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you for tuning in to this Kingdom Minute with your host, Kimberly Blakes, on the Doc and Carolyn podcast.
• 15:50
  SPEAKER_00: You can find me on Facebook at Kimberly Blakes, and I also have a podcast called The Faith Frame Perspective.
• 15:57
  SPEAKER_00: I'll see you guys there.
• 15:58
  SPEAKER_04: The scholarship program and the scholarship business, as I understand it right now, rewards four basic things.
• 16:04
  SPEAKER_04: Intelligence, so you have academic scholarships, um, athleticism, if you can hit a three-pointer, we got money for you for days.
• 16:12
  SPEAKER_04: Talent, right?
• 16:13
  SPEAKER_04: I mean, we we we reward talent, we reward athleticism, we reward intelligence, and of course, need, you know, need-based scholarships.
• 16:20
  SPEAKER_04: Those are the categories that most scholarships address to some degree or another.
• 16:25
  SPEAKER_04: Who's addressing work ethic?
• 16:27
  SPEAKER_04: Who's affirmatively trying to reward the behavior we want to encourage?
• 16:32
  SPEAKER_04: The behavior that the Microworks wants to at least talk about really redounds to two things: the willingness to learn a useful skill and the willingness to work your ass off.
• 16:44
  SPEAKER_04: Combined, we think that is something that ought to be affirmatively rewarded.
• 16:49
  SPEAKER_03: Where did that go wrong?
• 16:50
  SPEAKER_03: Uh or when did that disappear?
• 16:52
  SPEAKER_03: The idea that you know you should learn a skill that is actually useful or in need, uh uh and uh that you should work hard.
• 17:00
  SPEAKER_03: I don't know.
• 17:01
  SPEAKER_04: You know, I I think that's a that's a good question for a real social anthropologist.
• 17:07
  SPEAKER_04: My own opinion is just that there there's a kind of inertia that the most parents would agree exists, and it's the desire to see something better for your kids than you had.
• 17:17
  SPEAKER_04: The question, of course, is what is better?
• 17:20
  SPEAKER_04: You know, is it better right now today to have 140,000 in debt but a degree from Georgetown in law?
• 17:27
  SPEAKER_04: Or is it better to be that kid I described up in Butler with parents?
• 17:30
  SPEAKER_04: I don't know, right?
• 17:32
  SPEAKER_04: But there is an inertia that says the first one is is the better thing.
• 17:38
  SPEAKER_03: Trevor Burrus, Jr.
• 17:38
  SPEAKER_03: And let's talk a little bit about the the college loan scam.
• 17:41
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, because partly, I mean, you talk about okay, there's a trillion dollars in debt.
• 17:45
  SPEAKER_03: Most of that will be I mean it's subsidized by taxpayers, but most of the principal will be paid off by the people who take the loans.
• 17:51
  SPEAKER_03: But you're against the idea of taxpayer-supported loans going to college, right?
• 17:56
  SPEAKER_04: Well, look, it's uh it's we hold the note, right?
• 17:59
  SPEAKER_04: So it's whether I'm against it or not, I I get I get a little curious about it when it gets to a trillion dollars.
• 18:05
  SPEAKER_04: So if if we're lending money that ostensibly we don't have to kids who really have no hope of paying it back in order to train them for jobs that clearly don't exist, I might suggest that you know we've gone around the bend a little bit in our in our clearly pumping that extra money into the system allows colleges to raise their prices.
• 18:25
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, of course.
• 18:27
  SPEAKER_04: The cost of a degree, and this I do know because I've read it in several reputable sources, uh, has increased at over 500 times the rate of inflation since the mid-80s.
• 18:38
  SPEAKER_04: 500 times the rate of inflation.
• 18:40
  SPEAKER_04: Nothing else comes close, not even health care.
• 18:42
  SPEAKER_04: Healthcare is like 250, 260.
• 18:44
  SPEAKER_04: So this this thing is an outlier.
• 18:47
  SPEAKER_04: This thing, the the cost of this thing has increased so exponentially, I can't believe it's not daily headline news.
• 18:56
  SPEAKER_04: Imagine any other commodity increasing at that rate.
• 19:01
  SPEAKER_04: And think for a minute, too.
• 19:03
  SPEAKER_04: You know, I get it, education is hugely important.
• 19:07
  SPEAKER_04: If there's if there's only one thing that's more important than education, maybe, maybe health and fitness, right?
• 19:12
  SPEAKER_04: Because what's the point if you're not functioning?
• 19:15
  SPEAKER_04: But imagine the conversation we have about colleges today applied to gyms.
• 19:20
  SPEAKER_04: Right?
• 19:21
  SPEAKER_04: Imagine saying, okay, it's important to be healthy and fit.
• 19:24
  SPEAKER_04: So what you need to do is spend a thousand dollars a month at the most expensive club in town.
• 19:32
  SPEAKER_04: Otherwise, your heart might explode, you'll crap your pants, you'll get fat, and nobody will love you.
• 19:37
  SPEAKER_04: Okay.
• 19:37
  SPEAKER_04: Meanwhile, there's a YMCA.
• 19:39
  SPEAKER_04: Obviously, you've done some background research on me.
• 19:41
  SPEAKER_04: So I didn't want to say anything, but there's a there's an odor, Nick.
• 19:45
  SPEAKER_03: There is no but you're not anti-college.
• 19:48
  SPEAKER_03: Not at all.
• 19:49
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
• 19:49
  SPEAKER_03: So explain that.
• 19:50
  SPEAKER_04: Okay.
• 19:52
  SPEAKER_04: In the same way I'm not anti-gym membership.
• 19:55
  SPEAKER_04: Look, if you if you got a thousand bucks a month and you can go to the place with the shiny equipment and the the cadre of personal trainers and the and the and the private jacuzzi, do it.
• 20:05
  SPEAKER_04: And and and enjoy your protein shake and the privacy of your own largesse.
• 20:09
  SPEAKER_04: Right.
• 20:10
  SPEAKER_04: Not your largess, your largesse, right?
• 20:12
  SPEAKER_04: But if you can accomplish the same thing for 12 bucks a month, you know, then I think it would be prudent to at least put them on the table.
• 20:20
  SPEAKER_04: And if I have to pay for part of your membership in either facility, then I might get a little exercised about your ultimate choice if you can't pay it back.
• 20:31
  SPEAKER_03: Well, what are the roots of the kind of uh demon demonization or deprioritization of blue-collar work or of dirty jobs?
• 20:39
  SPEAKER_03: I think it's fear, you know.
• 20:40
  SPEAKER_04: I mean, you've got kids, right?
• 20:42
  SPEAKER_04: Yep.
• 20:42
  SPEAKER_04: So it's gotta be very scary to not have a really specific answer to questions like, what's the best path?
• 20:51
  SPEAKER_04: That, you know, and and to have somebody tell you in a fairly convincing way that there is an answer to that question, that must be very comforting.
• 21:01
  SPEAKER_04: And it must be very comforting to pass that certainty on to your onto your kid, too.
• 21:05
  SPEAKER_04: Here's here's what you need to do.
• 21:07
  SPEAKER_04: You need to work hard in school, you need to study.
• 21:11
  SPEAKER_04: It's not bad advice.
• 21:13
  SPEAKER_04: It's just that, like I said before, it always goes too far.
• 21:16
  SPEAKER_04: Because rather than put a period after work hard and study hard, we put an ellipses.
• 21:21
  SPEAKER_04: And that's followed by, or else you're gonna wind up working down at the construction thing in a greenway.
• 21:28
  SPEAKER_03: Well, now you you come from a background of uh your grandfather was a a laborer.
• 21:33
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, he worked with his hands, he built things.
• 21:36
  SPEAKER_03: Did he say to you, you know, I want you to do exactly what I did, or does he want you, you know, I want you to have a job?
• 21:41
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, you hear this all the time, where you don't have to wash your hands for 45 minutes when you come home before you can have dinner.
• 21:48
  SPEAKER_04: He was he was fairly agnostic about my hopes and dreams.
• 21:52
  SPEAKER_04: I wasn't.
• 21:53
  SPEAKER_04: I very specifically wanted to follow in his footsteps.
• 21:55
  SPEAKER_04: The guy could build a house without a blueprint.
• 21:58
  SPEAKER_04: He only went to the eighth grade, but by the time He was in his thirties.
• 22:01
  SPEAKER_04: He was a master electrician, carpenter, steam fitter, pipe.
• 22:04
  SPEAKER_03: And you talk you've talked about how one of your the best days you've ever had was kind of where you first learned the pleasures of dirty work.
• 22:11
  SPEAKER_03: Why don't you tell us about that?
• 22:12
  SPEAKER_04: I was I was maybe ten or eleven.
• 22:14
  SPEAKER_04: Uh we had a we lived in a a small little farmhouse, and uh we had one toilet, and I went down one morning, took care of business, and stood up to flush it.
• 22:23
  SPEAKER_04: For whatever reason, I like to watch it go away.
• 22:25
  SPEAKER_04: There was something satisfying about watching something that was just in me going away, you know.
• 22:30
  SPEAKER_04: And on this particular morning it went away, and then the toilet made a sound, you know, kind of like the you know, like that pig noise in the Amityville horror.
• 22:39
  SPEAKER_04: Just a gurgling, you know, a demonic sort of disappointing screech.
• 22:43
  SPEAKER_04: And everything that had just been in me literally came flying backwards and covered me.
• 22:48
  SPEAKER_04: And so my grandfather lived next door.
• 22:50
  SPEAKER_04: Obviously, something between the septic tank and the toilet had had gone tragically wrong.
• 22:55
  SPEAKER_04: And uh my grandfather, uh being a magician of sorts, uh, dug up the yard in just the right place, found the problem in the pipe, replaced the pipe.
• 23:04
  SPEAKER_04: There was welding, there was laughing, there was cursing.
• 23:07
  SPEAKER_04: My mother brought me my first thermos of coffee.
• 23:09
  SPEAKER_04: My dad and my grandfather and I worked covered in crap uh for most of the day.
• 23:14
  SPEAKER_04: I took the day off school to do it.
• 23:15
  SPEAKER_04: It was a very satisfying day because I was I was with the the two most important men in my life, and and I saw, again, certainly not for the first or the last time, a problem, like a real problem corrected, and it just made a lot of uh chronological sense to my brain.
• 23:35
  SPEAKER_04: I wanted to do that.
• 23:36
  SPEAKER_04: The gene that my grandfather had uh cruelly and horribly skipped right over me, right?
• 23:44
  SPEAKER_04: And uh I washed out of every shop class there was in uh high school.
• 23:48
  SPEAKER_04: And it was my grandfather who ultimately said, Look, you ought to think about getting a different toolbox.
• 23:53
  SPEAKER_03: So he was like, sorry, kid, you don't have the chops to become a master electrician, go into TV.
• 23:58
  SPEAKER_03: Trevor Burrus, Jr.
• 23:58
  SPEAKER_04: No, he didn't go that far, but what he said was it doesn't matter what you do.
• 24:02
  SPEAKER_04: You think you want to do what I can do.
• 24:05
  SPEAKER_04: What you want to do is work in the way I'm working.
• 24:09
  SPEAKER_04: So, in other words, whether you're a TV interviewer or an opera singer or a writer, you can approach your craft like a tradesman.
• 24:16
  SPEAKER_04: Right.
• 24:16
  SPEAKER_04: And by that I mean like a freelancer.
• 24:19
  SPEAKER_04: Instead of, okay, I need my job, and my job will be 30 years, and it'll come with benefits and it'll be provided, blah, blah, blah.
• 24:27
  SPEAKER_04: That that's not working anymore.
• 24:29
  SPEAKER_04: And I I was never really enamored of it.
• 24:31
  SPEAKER_04: I like the idea of the uh the classic freelancer.
• 24:35
  SPEAKER_04: I always have.
• 24:36
  SPEAKER_04: You know where the word came from, by the way?
• 24:37
  SPEAKER_04: Uh tell me.
• 24:38
  SPEAKER_04: I'm going to, Nick.
• 24:39
  SPEAKER_04: Are you ready?
• 24:40
  SPEAKER_04: Okay.
• 24:40
  SPEAKER_04: It's actually I'm already sitting down, so.
• 24:42
  SPEAKER_04: No, I love the jacket.
• 24:43
  SPEAKER_04: Have I said that?
• 24:44
  SPEAKER_04: See, because I thought when I put my hat on.
• 24:47
  SPEAKER_04: I'm like, people don't know who I am without my hat, they probably don't know who you are without hat.
• 24:50
  SPEAKER_04: I get that a lot, yes.
• 24:51
  SPEAKER_04: So um in in the olden times, uh, a freelancer was a knight who served no lord.
• 24:58
  SPEAKER_04: Right.
• 24:58
  SPEAKER_04: He was just a he had his horse and he had his lance.
• 25:01
  SPEAKER_04: And his lance wasn't free, it was to the highest pit.
• 25:04
  SPEAKER_04: Right.
• 25:05
  SPEAKER_04: Um it's a very mercenary way to look at the world, but it's a great way to sort of step back and protect your margins uh in these times.
• 25:16
  SPEAKER_04: Right, in my opinion.
• 25:17
  SPEAKER_03: Well, uh talk a little bit about the what what are the what are the ways that you create uh or develop a stronger work ethic in people?
• 25:24
  SPEAKER_03: Because I I agree with you that apart from the skill set, you know, which is important and that will always change, and certainly the things that our parents or grandparents knew for sure were gonna be the, you know, it's plastics or it's computers or it's whatever, you know, you never know.
• 25:39
  SPEAKER_03: But the one thing that you can know is that if you can adapt your skills to a changing world, you're in good shape.
• 25:44
  SPEAKER_03: And if you work hard, how do you how do you create or how do you instill better work ethics in people?
• 25:50
  SPEAKER_04: I think it has something to do with being suspicious of anything that's too easy, being suspicious of anything that doesn't hurt a little bit, you know.
• 25:58
  SPEAKER_04: Uh it has something to do with uh the willingness to to find and take the reverse commute.
• 26:04
  SPEAKER_04: It's a big lesson on dirty jobs.
• 26:06
  SPEAKER_04: You know, there's a there's another bromide, another platitude out there that always kind of trap my ass a little bit, which is follow your passion.
• 26:14
  SPEAKER_04: You know, my scout master, uh my my my reverend, my dad, my everybody growing up is like, son, just just follow your passion.
• 26:22
  SPEAKER_04: It's terrible advice, you know.
• 26:24
  SPEAKER_04: On dirty jobs, I met a lot of very passionate people, but very few of them followed their passion into their current vocation.
• 26:33
  SPEAKER_04: You know, Les Swanson from Wisconsin, he cleaned septic tanks.
• 26:36
  SPEAKER_04: You know, I asked him one day, I said, Les, what do you what'd you do before this?
• 26:40
  SPEAKER_04: You know, it was like 110, the sweat's running off his face, he looks at me, and he says, I swear I was a guidance counselor.
• 26:46
  SPEAKER_04: He was a he was a psychiatrist, a psychologist.
• 26:50
  SPEAKER_04: And I said, Why'd you why'd you leave that?
• 26:52
  SPEAKER_04: And without missing a beat, he said, I got tired of dealing with other people's shit.
• 26:56
  SPEAKER_04: It's very funny.
• 26:57
  SPEAKER_04: But it was also it was uh it was very instructive because he he always thought that what he wanted to do was the thing he was told he should do.
• 27:07
  SPEAKER_04: He became passionate about something he really he really didn't care for.
• 27:11
  SPEAKER_04: When it came time to make the change, he just looked around to see where everybody was going and he went the other way.
• 27:16
  SPEAKER_04: Took him into a septic tank, owned business, couple of workers, very happy.
• 27:22
  SPEAKER_04: So uh if you're really asking how do you know that you're going in the right direction, how do you really foster a good work ethic?
• 27:31
  SPEAKER_04: I think I think you just have to identify the thing that most people don't want to do, figure out a way to do it, and then figure out a way to love it.
• 27:38
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