Producers' Pick | Mike Rowe: The Absurdity of COVID Restrictions

Micro has found some time in his busy schedule to change his same jean shirt. It turns out, according to reports, he's not wearing the same shirt. He's wearing look-alike shirts. There, you found a loom and you said, I can make one shirt. I'm going to make it over and over again. Is that true?

Well, it goes deeper than that, Brian. The loom in question, I built from trees and natural resources on my property in my attic. And so every morning now, you know, I'm teaching myself to, uh, to sew and loom and yeah, that's where all my shirts come from.

Uh, I diet myself, you know, I grow the Indigo here. It's turnkey. Do you have a solar laid? I did, but I upgraded that for, I don't even know if you're up to speed with what's going on now, but they've got a moon powered moon. Right. Right.

So it's no good during, you know, the dark period, but when the moon is full, the reflection's powerful enough to drive the lathe as well as the loom. So we've got, we're dialed in over here. Yeah. I've been using moon energy for a long time.

I didn't know you were, so this has really caught me by surprise. Well, you know what? I, um, I, I, I, I read somewhere that it really worked and I believed it because I believe everything I read today, you see. And so, yeah, it's all coming together for me.

Yeah. I couldn't believe how confused, right. You know, I'm really confused because I've been listening to podcasts and I take all of them as scripture. So I believe that everything that I ever heard ever is true. So, you know, we talked about this last week, sort of when you were gracious enough to carve a few moments from your very busy schedule to sit on my podcast and it struck me, I wish we'd have talked more about this weird sort of nexus between the need to be skeptical and the need to be able to trust somebody, something, somewhere, you know, it just really seems to be the thing that's creating so much of the confusion around us right now.

We just can't seem to find that sweet spot. I know, by the way, the way we heard it, you were kind enough to interview me. We finally worked out a way that I could actually go on your podcast, use audio and video. You know, you have that awkward moment where I just stare straight ahead and you stare at me and I keep saying, can you hear me?

And you can't. And I was actually, as soon as I get off, I'm going to post the video of that awkward moment, which was really four minutes long because people keep writing and saying, you know what, your podcast was good, but that goat rodeo that precedes it where you and Killme look at technology like a cow looking at a new gate, that's the stuff we want to see. Well, the other thing was, so I do, I tape the Saturday show that you can't get enough of. So I have a chance to do that show and then I do your podcast and I go, great. And all of a sudden I left my phone in my office.

I just go meet with everyone I'm supposed to meet with. I come back, it's an emergency, log off. I have to, evidently, if I don't log off, there is no podcast. I had the control of your career.

I always sought. I mean, I can, so I had to go find a way to log off. Yeah. Well, I mean, just so your listeners understand when you do a podcast on my platform, we say goodbye, but you don't really go anywhere. You just have to wait five seconds for everything to upload. Then you close your computer and go on with your life. You said goodbye, slammed the computer shut and ran out of your office so fast you left a hole in the wall shaped like you running, which caused my technical team all kinds of trouble. But look, it's all, it's all good. It's up. Everybody loves you.

They're buying your book. You know, it was time well spent. I agree. So good news. One of the first things we talked about is you were in a, went to a diner and, and the whole thing is, it's a bigger picture now, but tell us about your mass story.

Oh yeah. It was just a very, very small moment in an otherwise inconsequential meal, but I went to meet a buddy at a diner that morning and you know, I walked in quickly and he was sitting in a booth about 10 feet from the door. So I just walked straight to him and there was some screaming behind me and the hostess had run back to her stand saying, sir, sir, sir, I need, I need to see your vaccination card. And I said, okay, you know, you know, don't want to make any trouble, but I'm already in. And for crying out loud, of course I'm vaccinated.

Everybody, I lived north of San Francisco, everybody's vaccinated. So I showed her my card and she said, okay. And I said, thanks. And I turned to walk to the booth and she said, and could I just ask you to put on a mask while you walk over there to the booth? And I've, I've never done this before.

I'm not calling for civil disobedience. I'm not trying to be a jagged little pill, but it, it just struck me. The absurdity of the moment struck me.

And I said, you know, I can't do that. And there was this weird awkward pause. And she looked at me behind her mask and I looked at her and my buddy is now maybe six feet from me.

Maskless, everybody in the place is maskless because they're all sitting down and eating. And I think something happened in the universe, Brian, at least for her. And I don't want to put words into her, her mind, but I could see something in her eyes. And she said, she said, I understand. And so I smiled. I think she smiled from behind her mask and I just walked and I sat down in flagrant violation of California state law.

Thank you. That is, it's as crazy as micro get, but that's now where the country is. As you know, New Jersey started in Connecticut, Illinois, and now today, starting tomorrow, it's going to be announced today, the governor of New York state says, no more, if you're vaccinated, no more indoor masks. Obviously no outdoor masks. You guys in California had outdoor masks or no restaurants at all. Now they're realizing it and they can't even control the narrative anymore. Mike, what happened?

Why are these blue states waking up? Well, I think Hans Christian Anderson answered the question perfectly many years ago when he wrote a great fable called the emperor's new clothes. When the emperor was convinced that his tailors had made him beautiful garments, when in fact they hadn't made him anything at all. He was naked, sitting on his chair, naked, being created down the street as throngs of thousands of people in the town came out and everybody applauded and everybody oohed and odd because nobody wanted to admit that the emperor was naked. So they all pretended he had these beautiful clothes on until a kid standing in the front row is looking around and he sees the naked emperor and he's like, Hey man, that dude's naked. And once he said it, other kids said it and then some adults said it and that people began to nod.

And then very quickly it became clear that the emperor's new clothes didn't exist. And so in some way, I think that's what we've been living through for the last couple of years. We've been asked to believe that which is unbelievable. We've been asked to lend credibility to that which is incredulous. We know it makes no sense to stand cheek to jowl in an airport, you know, or sit cheek to jowl on a plane and then stand six feet apart in an airport. We know it makes no sense to walk through a diner with a mask only to take it off when you're seated.

You know, we know it makes no sense to cover a kid's face who's two years old or five years old or 15 years old so they can go to school. We know it's, we know it. And yet for two years, very few people said anything.

Well, now the kids spoke up and people are nodding their heads and we're coming out of our stupor. From the Fox News Podcast Network, I'm Ben Domenech, Fox News contributor and editor of the transom.com daily newsletter. And I'm inviting you to join a conversation every week. It's the Ben Domenech podcast.

Subscribe and listen now by going to Fox News Podcasts.com. So you mentioned on Friday, last Friday, you know, I think this is a turning point, this Hopkins study. And I said, Mike, I hope so, but no one's covering it.

They're not carrying it. Well, on the Sunday shows, they started talking about the hygiene theater, my words, but they started saying, you know, this might not be effective. And the shutdown was this. And I even saw it on CNN at nine in the morning.

They actually said the Hopkins study said that a lot of these, a lot of these sacrifices and restrictions didn't amount to much, didn't save much. And now we're in the situation now where it's rippling through. And I keep, can't get my eyes off Canada. When I see these truckers ringed Ottawa, they're now blocking a bridge that goes to Michigan. And they're saying, we don't, we don't even want mandates just for us lifted.

We want it up for the whole country. And three provinces have crashed. These are the truck drivers of the world, the anonymous people that deliver the food and the packages and allow you to rebuild your house because the materials are at your doorstep or at a Home Depot. They have had enough. Are you fascinated by this as a, as a man who knows more working class people than almost anybody else?

Well, I'm not surprised by it. It does confirm something that I've always believed, which is simply that the kinds of workers we're talking about, whether they're truckers or plumbers or steam fitters or pipe fitters, or, you know, they're on the front line of work, which means they're also engaging with the public in a, in a pretty unique way. They, they have a take on what's happening, especially the truckers. I mean, these guys, they have basically been in lockdown their whole lives. They live in relative isolation. They travel, but they're alone by and large.

And so I think that as a group, they've got a really unique perspective. And of course, my take on the whole thing is that right now we're between 50 and 60,000 truckers short of where we need to be in this country. I don't even know what the numbers are in North America, but you ignore the truckers at your peril because if those guys, well, we're seeing it happen right now, they're parked and they're sitting there and the wheels are going to come off the bus. I don't, I don't think they're holding the country hostage. I don't think they're doing anything outside of their, their right to do. But I think among the other things that they're reminding people of is the simple fact that these whole, this whole lockdown would have been unsurvivable without people in trucks, bringing the things to your home that you need, whether it's your food, whether it doesn't matter that they are truly on the front line of civilized life right now, you can't ignore them.

I hear you. And guess what, just so you tell you, in New Zealand, a convoy of freedom protesters standing up against vaccine mandates, believe it or not, New Zealand and Australia, extremely oppressive. And in America, according to Brian Brass, a trucker who's organized the American effort, he's going to start in Sacramento, could go to right to Washington, DC. Man, I know that Joe Biden likes to get, I know that he will fear being helpless to this, but if they want to ring Washington, DC, we know they could shut that down. It's basically shut down anywhere with all the traffic. So that is, that is a problem they can avoid by releasing all the restrictions.

Lastly, go ahead. Well, I was just going to say, we've said before that this thing ends when it goes splat. I don't know what splat means exactly, but it's going to be a critical mass. It's maybe it's a trucking convoy. Maybe it's some kind of civil disobedience. Maybe it's, you know, look, the Democrats in Virginia chose a hill to die on regarding the mask mandates.

And from what I can tell this morning, they died on it. Their own party has turned on them. It's changing. It's changing in Virginia. Don't know when or how it's going to happen in New York or when or how it's going to happen in DC, but it's going to happen. There's just no playbook for it, but we're coming out of this thing and we're doing it in fits and starts. And ultimately that's good news.

Couple of things. You've been on the air for 30 years. Joe Rogan's been doing it between standup and his podcast.

He's been saying he'd been doing it for 10 years. I imagine if you've been on television, on stage for this amount of time, there's some things you said in the nineties that don't hold up in 2020. I never thought I had to say that, but now they're trying to cancel him. They're trying to cancel The Rock, Jimmy Fallon, Jimmy Kimmel, Howard Stern, on things that they say there were a whole lot of maybe not acceptable then was just on the edge. Now they would never say it individually. I imagined here's Joe Rogan on this new revelation cut 19. You know, in a lot of ways, like all this is a relief because it's like, just cause that video had always been out there.

It's like this is a political hit job. And so they're taking all this stuff that I've ever said that's wrong and smooshing all together. But it's good cause it makes me address some that I really wish wasn't out there. You should apologize if you regret something. I do think you have to be very careful to not apologize for nonsense.

Correct. So there, you know, Dave Portnoy, who's always trying to be canceled. He's always on the edge and barstool. He says, I will never apologize. Rogan got yelled at by the president. Trump says you should never apologize. We know that's how he feels. So did Governor DeSantis. He said you can't apologize.

How do you feel about what's going on right now and how they're attacking him? I apologize when I'm sorry. If I, you know, we're talking about a compilation tape where Joe used that word that we're not allowed to say anymore, even if you're talking about how evil that word is. Right. I listened to something over the weekend.

Uh, your listeners would probably love, um, Sam Harris has a podcast called making sense. And he just talks about the, the, the childlike way that we've become enthralled to the language and the mystical and the magical powers that we've assigned to certain words. Right. And we're grownups trying to have a grownup conversation about the changing lexicon and the various rhetorical devices we use that has nothing to do with racism, but if we're not allowed to use the words and the context of the conversation about the changing nature of the language, then we just don't understand the difference between hate and syntax. And that makes us, that makes us children. So look, if you're sorry, apologize. If you're not sorry, say, I know what was in my heart. I know what was intended.

And so no, I can't, I can't do the perp walk for something that I don't feel sorry for. That's my view, but don't ask me tomorrow. It might evolve Brian.

Right. Everything is always changing fast. Well, the one thing that doesn't change your podcast is great the way I heard it. He also the host of dirty jobs. It's back in action on discovery and how America works on Fox business. You are a very busy guy, Mike.

That's a lot of jean shirts. Well, look at the, at the risk of throwing my arm out, patting myself on the back, our next round of work ethic scholarships coming up in a week and a half on micro works, we've got a million dollars we're giving away to people who want to learn to drive a truck, uh, run a welding torch, learn plumbing, or maybe build a loom in their attic powered by moonlight in order to keep their own garments. Everything's full circle. Mike Rowe. Thanks so much. Thanks Brian. Take care from the Fox news podcasts network subscribe and listen to the Trey Gowdy podcast. Former federal prosecutor and four-term U S Congressman from South Carolina brings you a one of a kind podcast. Subscribe and listen now by going to foxnewspodcasts.com.