This is Gary and Shannon and you're listening to KFI AM six forty, the Gary and Shannon Show on demand on the iHeartRadio app.
A couple weeks ago, we told you the story of high school juniors who were getting seventy thousand dollars a year job offers because, among other things, they didn't want to go to college and get a degree in left handed medieval puppetry. They wanted to do something where their skills would be used immediately, and for many of these cases in mechanical ways, working with their hands and getting
paid right away. And one of the places that allows you to do that is the Heavy Metal Summer Experience sheet metal piping, electrical plumbing trades at the Heavy Metal Summer Experience. Angie Simon is executive director and co founder of Heavy Metal Summer Experience, and she joins us now. First, Angie, thanks for taking time for us today.
And Gary, I really appreciate you having me on. Thank you very much.
Hey, I'm the father of a son who did not want to go to college. He wanted to work with his hands and he's been doing that and I'm I'm I love the idea, I love the the creativity, I guess, even though that seems like we kind of fell away from the old trades when it comes to getting jobs. Where where did this come from? Where did heavy metal summer experience come from?
Well, Gary, I was the president and CEO of a mechanical contracting firm up here in northern California.
I'm in the San Francisco Bay area.
And you know, I think I think I realized we were a union contractor.
We had sheet melon pipe fitters.
And I realized that so many of the kids in the neighborhoods, they all expect to go to college, but many of the kids weren't.
Excited about it. They didn't want to go to college. So I decided we were in a we were a neighbors with an underserved area, East.
Palo Alto, and we decided that we would run a summer camp in our shop to teach the East Palato high schoolers about trades because a.
Lot of them weren't going to go to college. And it was I did that.
I decided to do this, and my friend up in Seattle recurrements and decided to do it with me. So the two of us kind of formed what we decided to name Heavy Metal Summer Experience, and it was basically a summer camp to teach high schoolers about the mechanical, elexical, and plumbing trades. And the first summer it was just an amazing experience. These kids and their parents were so appreciative.
Many of these kids didn't even know how to use a tape measure, and now all of a sudden, a bunch of them have been in our trades.
This was back in twenty twenty one.
I have I've railed about this for a long time since somebody paid me to sit in front of a microphone. And that is that we complain, not we you and I don't complain about this. People who are younger than I was complaining they don't have the money to buy a house, but they're also not doing the math or the realization of well, you went to four year college, you got a degree in philosophy or whatever you got,
and you did it all on student loans. You're never going to be able to afford a house at that point. But if you work in the trades, you work with your hands, even while you get your philosophy degree, you're going to be paid for actual work.
Is Do you see that as well? Am I am? I crazy?
No, not at all. You know, I tell the story. So I'm retired now, I'm in my sixties. But when I started at Western Allied, and I was there thirty five years, I had gone to college for five years, which is kind of the typical.
I enjoyed that last year, and I worked.
For one other company for a year, so I'd been out of college, I mean out of high school for six years when I started at Western Allied and there was a pipefitter that was my age, I think, by maybe a year older, and he had just bought his first house.
In the Bay Area and I just barely.
Got out of college and was paying my parents back. I didn't have any student loans because my parents failed to help me. But the fact that he was able to buy a house in the Bay Area because he started at eighteen years old and been working for.
Six years, and he had part of that time he lived.
At home with his folks, and he saved enough money to buy a house. So absolutely, that's I mean, we all get a late start. I mean the average age of people going into the apprenticeships right now is twenty seven years old, so they're obviously doing other.
Things for the first ten years before when they get out of high school.
And that's my thought was, let's encourage some of these high school kids to join the unions and the trades right out of high school, and amazing, by the time they're twenty five years old, they're going to be a journey person and making six figures.
Yeah, that's I just don't think people understand that the amount of money that you can make immediately, whether it's a welding like an AA degree in welding from a community college somewhere, which here in California is basically free, you're going to be able to get out there and have a steady job with good benefits. Often is there a specific area or a specific trade that you think is the most in need of bodies right now?
Well, I do think the three we focus on that we call them the skilled trades of mechanical, electrical, and plumbing. I will say that I think going forward all three need people desperately, but electrically, I think electricians are going to be where the real shortage is because of all the electrification as well as the solar and all the energy across the nation.
All ship factory is being built. I really do think we're going to be really short of electricians.
But right now in construction, we are short four hundred thousand jobs.
Now, I mean people.
We don't have enough people to fill four hundred thousand jobs and forty percent of our industries retiring in the next five to seven years. So you know, if you're interested in getting a good job that pays, well, get into the trades, because boy, there is so much opportunity in the next ten years.
What's your favorite trade? What do you like to tinker with?
Well, I guess I would say that probably I worked for a sheet metal and piping contractor, and I guess I have a little favorite towards sheet metal, just because I think the stainless and the welding and it's kind of fun.
I like seat metal, but that's I think piping is good too, but I don't. I'm a little more afraid of electrical.
So yeah, that'll give you a good buzz if if you're not careful, it'll let you know when you do something wrong.
All right, can you hang on for well, Angie, can you hang on for another segment?
I want to talk specifically about what goes on during the camps, where they are, and how people can sign up for those.
I'd love to all right.
Angie Simon is executive director and co founder of Heavy Metal Summer Experience. If you're interested, if your kids are interested, if you want your kid to be interested, you can go to HMS dot org heavy Metal Summer Experience HMSE dot org. A great location map as on there, including a bunch here in the West, the City of Industry Commerce down in San Diego, you got Ventura. All of these places are going to be having summer camps with
Heavy Metal Summer Experience. We'll come back with Angie here in just a moment.
You're listening to Gary and Shannon on demand from KFI AM six forty.
We've been talking with Angie Simon.
She's the executive director and co founder of Heavy Metal Summer Experience. To help expose young kids to the trades. We need more people in the trades, sheet metal, piping, plumbing, trades.
You can explore all of them.
You become part of a team that's going to build community in all of this. Each of the camps that they run is unique, and there are several of them, not just here in California, but throughout the country if you're listening in other parts of the world. Angie, the heavy Metal Summer Experience, What is it? What does it entail for say a sixteen seventeen eighteen year old.
Kid, Well, Gary, Every camp is free to the kids, so they go in and they don't pay anything for this camp.
Typically they're going to be thirty to forty hours of.
Camp, so they are different schedules depending on the location. Some of them will do it in one week, some of them will do it in two weeks in the afternoons because they're often run in contractors' shops or in union training center, so it depends on the shop. For example, if it's the contractor's shop, it might have to be in the afternoons. So they're going to run it for
two weeks in the afternoons. But the day one they show up, they get a set of red wing boots that we have a Metal Summer Experience paid for, and they get their own set of work boots because.
That makes you feel like you're really in working in the shop.
And then throughout that forty hours they're going to be doing sheet metal piping, then to be welding, they're going to be soldering. They'll be making projects. Make a toolbox that they can take home. They make a lamp out of piping that they can take home, They learn how to wire the lamp, and they just do a whole bunch of projects. We talked a lot about safety, We
talk a lot about well. We also talk a lot about technology, because I think people don't realize how much technology is using construction nowadays.
Robotics and AI, all of that's being used in construction, so it doesn't mean we're just digging ditches and construction anymore. And then when.
They're done getting toward the end of that, they get a graduation metal, the stainless seal metal, and they get a bag of handfuls from either Milwaukee.
Or Duwalt, which are partners of ours for Heavy Metal Summer Experience. We have some amazing partners. So it's a great week.
Of them learning a little bit about what it means to be in the trades, and you know, they you can.
Just see how much they really enjoy working with their hands.
Is this.
Is this a replacement for the lack of shop classes that we've seen in high schools taken away?
I feel very strongly it is.
I mean I feel like, I mean, I'm sure my age, but there was still shop classes when I was in high school. But I feel that if we had more of these shop classes and Vogue tech type classes in our high.
Schools, we wouldn't have to do this because they would learn about that. So I kind of.
There's some states that are much better than California in regards to that, that have better shops in their high schools.
But really it's just a way.
I think we also need to change of perception about cut construction. That people we need to understand that's not like a secondary backstep job. I mean, this is a really great career. You get benefits, you get you know, health care and tensions, and I mean, you.
Can retire at fifty five if you start at eighteen, and you're going to have full benefit at that point.
So I do think that if we could get this back into our high schools, then maybe we wouldn't need these summer camps anymore. But listen, I started in twenty twenty one with two camps and twenty eight kids, and this summer we have fifty one camps across the United States and Canada, and I have almost nine hundred kids.
In the camps. Wow, it's just gone crazy.
And for the kids or for maybe adults that are listening that have kids that are in this world and you know they're mechanically inclined, or they're not cut out for college, or however you want to put it, this can easily lead to a job just from the instructors that are involved with the camps, right, I mean, they'll hire some of these kids right away.
The instructors or the contractors that are running the camps, and they in the camps, they meet the union's folks, they meet how they learn how to apply for the apprenticeship, they.
Learn what it takes.
And many times the contractors, if they're hosting a camp, will hire the graduates on the spot and say, hey, come work as a pre apprentice.
You know, I make sure you can go up on time for six months and everything else, and then they get them in the apprenticeship.
So we have in La in the La La area, we.
Have three camps this summer, and well actually four depending on what you call the La area. But we have one in Commerce, we have.
One in the City of Industry, we have one in San Diego, and one in Ventura next summer. Those are all Most of our camps are pretty well full this summer.
It's kind of late at this point. But next summer, I think we will also add Pomona. We may also add Vista and Fresno potentially so in the California area.
But again, they're all over the United States, and we even have some in Canada, and they can check our website out if you google Heavy Metal Summer Experience you'll find us.
And you're also looking for hosts as well, not just in participants, but you're looking for people and companies that will host these camps.
True, true, And like, for example, I just talked to somebody in Vista. They have actually have a high school in Vista that does do welding, which I thought was very exciting. They'd like to do a summer camp there, and Vista is I think, I think it's northeast.
Of San Diego.
So we're going to work on trying to see if we can make that work for the folks and have them be a host next summer. But we are looking for host contractors or training centers to help us with that. We don't provide actually run the camp. We support them with all the resources to run the camp, and we kind of handhold them the first summer. And I'll tell you the thing is, we get pretty much one hundred
percent return from the host. So if I had fifty one camps this summer, I'll start with fifty one next summer, and then I'll probably add another twenty or thirty.
So we're busy.
Well, that's great, And listen, this is an exciting thing because I'm a huge proponent of this kind of work. I'm a huge proponent of this kind of availability of this work for kids because we turned away from it for so long that we're starting to see the effects
of that. Where you know, people don't know how to if people don't even know how to fix stuff around their own house, and you'd be willing to you know, you're going to pay several hundred bucks, and if you're on the receiving end of that several hundred bucks, good for you.
And this is a good way to do it, Angie go.
It's not that.
Hard to change out your garbage disposal. I mean, if if you know, if you've learned a little bit of things, but instead of having to hire somebody to do it, so I do think.
I do think it's time for us to slowly think change a little bit. I'm a mechanical engineer. I went to college here in California, but but I still think it's so important that so many kids this is what you need them to do. And if you know, look at our website if you want to help this. We also would be happy to accept any.
Donations anybody give us. So, Garry, thank you for having me on. I really appreciate.
Well.
One personal question is where'd you go to college?
Yes, I went to cal Poly and San Luis obispo Oh.
Yeah, my father graduated from cal Poly. My daughter just graduated last summer from from cal polyly.
So that's my and my son graduated from cal Poly. So that's good. We got the connection. So that's and there's a.
There's a college just hands on, hands on that we learned by doing, so they really do stressed. I took the welding class at cal.
Polic that's literally their their slogan is learned by doing.
Yeah it is, and I was terrible at welding. I learned that really quick.
Well, it's an absolute pleasure to meet you, Angie, and we wish you the best of luck with Heavy Metal Summer Experience again. If you want information about it, go to h M s E dot org Heavy Metal Summer Experience h M s E dot org with all the information about the current camps that are going on this summer, about future camps that are there, and encourage your kids to get involved.
Angie, thank you, Jerry, thank you so much for having me and I love you helping them and get.
The word out.
Absolutely, we'll talk again.
I promise this is It's too good of a program to ignore, all right, Angie, I'm their executive director, co founder of Heavy Metal Summer Experience h M s E dot org.
You're listening to Gary and Shannon on demand from KFI AM six forty.
Well.
As we get closer to Memorial Day, more on our news and Bruis tomorrow in Lancaster coming up. But weekend travel is expected to break the travel more than forty five million people expected to hit the roads between today and Monday. Triple A projects forty five point one million people traveling at least fifty miles from home during that four day period. That would be an increase of one point four million from last year. Were still short of
the record. They said the previous Memorial Day travel record was two thousand and five. They said forty four million people were on the road. We were just talking with Angie Simon, executive director and co founder of that great program called Heavy Metal Summer Experience, about getting kids involved in the trades.
Hey, Ared, just to let you know, my daughter is part of this program where she's actually graduating this June at sixteen, but yet she's a cybersecurity expert and she's already got a job that's yeah, paying over three hundred thousand dollars a year now she's just sixteen, and they will pay for her schooling too if she wants it.
That's a that's a good start.
Hey, Gary, this was great. Yeah, my son was one of those. He was JC and got a welding certificate, certified welding and all. He's working for one company now knocking down seventy five bucks an hour. It's really good college eight for everybody.
Yeah, seventy five bucks an hour and then probably more for overtime. So that's that's well into the trip six figure salary.
What's up, Gary, flying fish out here at the airport Fish. I love that trade segment you just had you. And another thing about the trades. If you're a convicted felling or whatever, they're leanient to that. Try to have a convicted fill and become a police officer or a lawyer or whatever.
And it's probably been done.
But at the same time, I know because I'm part of that, but I'm making excellent money out here at the Airport Electrical.
Love you Baby, talk to you. Thanks Fish.
Yeah, it's one of those one of those paths that has not been well worn recently. We need to start getting kids down that path. So the Associated Press comes out with a story regarding Kamala Harris. Many of her supporters and detractors thinks the think that she'd have better odds running for governor than rather than running for president for what would be a third time, if you can believe that, and they discuss why she might want to
run for governor and why she might not. So I have not been keeping up with the Gavin Newsom podcast, but apparently he recently had Mark Halprin on there, who a longtime NBC reporter who's got his own podcast, which is really fantastic, by the way, and he sat down with Mark Halprin Gavin Newsom did on the Gavin Newsom Podcast and said, in this context about Kamala Harris and whether or not she would run, he predicted that she
would top the field in whatever primary exists before. We like a governor if she run, because Newsom says, in order to run for governor, you have to have a burning why, and if you can't enunciate that why, then the answer is no, why the hell would you want the job? Whereas Gavin Newsom would say why the hell would you want the job? So ap goes through and they explain a couple of reasons why she might want the job. First of all, you get your name back
up into the upper echelons of the Democratic Party. Yes, she was the vice president, but she has lost a lot of that Q score after an absolutely awful presidential campaign in twenty twenty.
I mean awful.
She didn't even win California in the primaries when she ran. Originally, the campaign that was put together after Joe Biden dropped out last summer was also very short. It was short on money for a time, and it didn't ever gain ground.
Part of it was because the compressed timeline, but other parts of it were She was just not a great candidate, And there is a concern that if she jumps into the presidential race again, it's going to drop her a Q score rating down even more because she's already bowed out what my bout out.
It's not the right word.
She already came up short, I'll say, in the two previous presidential elections. So if she becomes a governor of a great state, then maybe she just starts to slowly rebuild some of that Q score so that down the road she could be up for say a cabinet position or whatever she chooses to do, run for a president, etc.
The other one is this is a safer bet. There's no reason to think the moment she decides to get into the race or announces that she's going to get into the race, she will immediately be at the top of the polls.
Everybody knows that.
I could ask you to name three other Democrats that are running for governor, and very few people could come up with more than one name, So she would have the name recognition immediately if she decides to get in. There are other questions, though, and the AP points these out. Would voters welcome her back a longtime consultant for Republicans, a guy named Kevin Madden, says she doesn't like her chances. Sorry, Kevin doesn't like her chances in either governor's race or
the presidential race. And it's unusual for somebody to come back and be able to win the presidency after two losses. You know who else did that? Joe Biden had run for president before a couple of times and was the rare politician who was able to overcome those two losses.
The thing that Joe Biden had.
Going for him was the campaigns were spaced out, he didn't do them consecutively, and he had the opportunity to sort of let the past cloud everybody's memory. The other thing is she's not necessarily going to run up against a Republican in November in California. Of course, our open primary, we just take the top two candidates, and based on what we've seen with that open primary since it's been in place the majority of the time, it's two Democrats running against each other.
Can she do that?
And how does she do Does she position herself to the left, does she position herself in the middle, how would she possibly do that? And then the final question that they ask is would she even want to go to Sacramento the job of governor of California right now where homelessness and health issues and housing prices and unemployment, all of these things, a massive budget deficit.
Is that what she wants to jump into.
That's a lot of work, and I'm not sure she wants to get into that sort of thing.
So I do think she is running for governor.
I do think she'll overcome all of those negatives perhaps that were brought up in that article.
But we shall see.
You're listening to Gary and Shannon on demand from KFI am six forty.
Morning Shower Evening Shower Science says there's one is better than the other, and we'll explain why and which one. But if you're a morning shower, evening shower er or maybe multiple show er, we did get a talk back from somebody who doesn't shower at all, they said, so we'll explain more of that. We get into trained Science.
Swamp Watch comes at the top of the hour. More on the President's big beautiful bill that passed the House yesterday, and also a decision out of the Supreme Court which was a split decision, which means it goes back to, in this case, the Oklahoma State Supreme Court's decision about religious charter schools.
So that's coming up.
Michael Monks has joined us, and he has his fingers is freshly showered fingers, freshly showered fingers on the pulse of a very dirty lay. We've talked before about this potential plan to raise the minimum wage for tourism workers. Really the main I guess venue for this would be hotels over sixty rooms.
Is that what it is?
The bar the hotels with over sixty rooms, that's correct, and also the concessionaires at Lax Airport thirty dollars an hour minimum wage by twenty twenty eight. It will increase starting in July and then we'll go up a couple bucks incrementally until it reaches thirty in twenty twenty eight,
in time for the Olympics. This is an organization, an organized group that has said, look, we are going to be so important when the Olympics come to town, for all of these world travelers, we deserve to make a proper wage for it. And the city council seems to agree. I mean, they have one more vote to do tomorrow. This is an ordinance that requires two votes, but they've already voted twelve to three once, So that gives you
the idea that tomorrow was just a ceremonial rubber stamp. Well, at least eight hotels now say, oh, okay, we're not going to take part in the Olympic. Is it the block room where media organizations and athletes and tourism companies they'll rent blocks of rooms or reserve blocks of rooms for the Olympics, And now they're saying, these hotels are we don't want to have anything to.
Do with that.
And these are major, large hotels that had previously made agreements with LA twenty eight, the local Olympics organizing committee, And what they've said is, look, we made an agreement with you with the knowledge we had at the time on how our economics worked, and that includes how much
we're paying our workers. So if by the time twenty twenty eight rolls around, these workers are making around eight dollars or more an hour more on top of what they're being paid today, the rates we agreed to are no longer economically feasible. So these are eight hotels that said, look, we're out if this thing passes on Friday. Those hotels
include the Moxie, some ac hotels. There's the Los Angeles Airport Marriott, the Airport Renaissance, the Hyatt at the Lax, the West Los Angeles West Beverly Hills, the Garland Hotel, and that was reported by the LA Daily News earlier. The Hotel Association of Los Angeles has put out a statement saying, look, hotels are already struggling. Tourism is down in Los Angeles right now. We're banking on the Olympics offering an attempt to revive this, but you're kind of killing this baby in its crib.
Well and your point of the you know, it goes up in July and then incrementally raising it to get to thirty bucks an hour by twenty twenty eight. There's no guarantee that between now and then we see the increase in tourism I that they would like to see. Some of these hotels are saying we, in fact, our forecast is low because of what you just said.
The tourism numbers have been down.
It's not just these big hotels that have come out instead of these This is a very organized hotel group. These are large hotel properties and connected to large national chains. There are smaller hotels and we're talking sixty rooms, and there are small owners of one, maybe two hotels who have also come to city Hall and said, look, our
numbers are way down. The airport has also come and said, we don't officially take a position on what you're voting on, but here's the data, and the data shows the tourism in la is not good domestically or internationally right now, and so we don't think our businesses could sustain higher wages for the workers right now because the revenue is.
So low cynically, and I actually think this is a position held by the unions. If these hotels pull out of the block agreements that they've already decided that they would be part of, could they then turn around and charge more for the rooms during the Olympics.
It seems that the hotels are suggesting that the original agreement was based on a different set of economic circumstances. So if this is the new reality, thirty dollars an hour minimum for their workers, it could be a new negotiation, you know, like we can't charge the rates that we said we would when we agreed to this originally.
By the time twenty twenty eight rolls around.
We're paying this much to our workforce, We're gonna have to charge more to the people who were coming to town for these Olympics, and then the union will also have to face the possibility of seeing workers lose their jobs. I know there's been mixed results on the fast food side of this. We had this debate last year when the wage went up to twenty dollars minimum for fast food.
Some fast food workers did lose their jobs.
Some restaurants did shudder, but the others have eaten the cost and just paid their workers. And we'll have to see how this plays out in the hotel industry if this thing passes tomorrow. I would expect that it will pass tomorrow because it was so overwhelmingly approved last week, and the second vote is just you know, formality at this point. But we might we might hear some of these comments from people in the gallery.
Thank you, Hey, it's my pleasure. Thanks for showering today. Uh, you don't know that, I did, I know, Wait what I know?
How do you.
A note to self thicker curtains?
Thank you?
Michael Monks from KFI News Reminder, tomorrow we're going to be live at Bravery Brewing in Lancaster for our news and brews, and we would love it if you would come on out and say hi, because we have some stuff that we're given away.
Bravery has some stuff that they'll be giving away.
We have the debut of our kfipa on tap and in cans for you to buy and take home with you and share with friends. Bravery Pizza Kitchen is going to be open with their award winning pizza, including one specifically modeled after the Gary and Shannon Show pizza. All of that is going to be tomorrow. We'll be live out there and we would love it if you would
come on out and say hi. Up next Supreme Court vote on charter schools, religious charter schools, the big beautiful bill Bill I should say, and a new report coming out from the Department of Health and Human Services. So all that is just around the corner. Gary and Shannon. We'll be back right after this. You've been listening to The Gary and Shannon Show, You can always hear us live on kfi A six forty nine am to one pm every Monday through Friday, and anytime on demand on the iHeartRadio app.