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July 29, 2018 - The Ben Shapiro Show

01:02:23

Mike Rowe | The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special Ep. 12

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	She says, Michael, your grandfather is not doing well.
	He's 92, right?
	It would be so terrific, though, if before he died, he could turn on the television and see you doing something that looked like work.
	Here we are in the Sunday special with Mike Rowe.
	We'll get to talking with him.
	He's the host of Dirty Jobs, and the way I heard it, it'll be awesome.
	But first, let's talk about your impending death.
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	Well, Mike, thanks so much for coming by.
	Really appreciate it.
	That was terrific.
	Thank you.
	Honestly.
	You're the first person who's ever praised the ads at the beginning of the show, so thank you for that.
	Procrastination is the thief of time.
	I really thought you were going to sneak it in there with that, but kidding aside, I love that there's no daylight between you and the people who make the program possible.
	It's refreshingly, dare I say, authentic.
	Well, thank you.
	I appreciate it.
	Because usually what I get is, how dare you interrupt these great conversations with your money grabs?
	And then I have to remind people they're watching the show for free because this is how commerce operates.
	Yeah.
	People don't like to be reminded of that.
	You see, the filthy lucre somehow pollutes what would otherwise be a really wonderful series of observations.
	But now I'm afraid we can't take you seriously because somebody somewhere has decided to give you some money.
	Strange time span.
	So folks, you can see why I love Mike Rowe just from the outset here.
	But let's start from the beginning.
	So you now do this podcast that's listened to by tens of millions of people, and you have various... Billions.
	Billions.
	Okay, billions.
	People yet unborn on planets that have not yet been reached.
	And you have your TV shows, which have been wildly popular.
	You have books.
	Your mom wrote a book that you've been pressing lately, all about her mom.
	And that's really fantastic.
	So how did you get from doing what you were doing when you were 18.
	Is this what you saw yourself doing when you were 18?
	How did you get from point A to point B?
	Wow.
	How long is the show?
	It's about an hour or so.
	Okay, so the short version is, I was convinced as a young guy growing up in Baltimore that I would follow in the footsteps of my grandfather, who lived right next door.
	My grandfather was a guy who went to the seventh grade, and then he went to work.
	By the time he was 30, he was a master electrician.
	After that, he mastered every other trade there was.
	The guy could build a house without a blueprint.
	He was that guy.
	Had the chip, right?
	He just knew how to fix stuff.
	Take your watch apart, build your house, do whatever.
	The handy gene, tragically, is recessive.
	So, past me, I didn't get that.
	And by the time I was out of high school, I realized that I would have to get a different sort of toolbox.
	I learned to act, sort of.
	I learned to sing, a little bit.
	And I just looked at a completely different way to go.
	I eventually got into entertainment, kind of Forrest Gumped my way through the whole landscape of narrating.
	You know, I started narrating when I was really young.
	If there's a wildebeest trying to get across the vast reaches of the barren Serengeti, but being slowly eaten by crocodiles and hyenas, the odds are decent that I'm telling you about it.
	Side note, it never works out for the wildebeest, right?
	Never leave the herd.
	So I started doing those things, and like Frost says, you know, way leads on to way.
	And the next thing you know, I'm impersonating a host in front of various cameras for various networks, and one show leads to the next.
	And by the time I was 42, I realized that impersonating a host, though I had become somewhat facile at it, was not nearly as rewarding as telling the unvarnished truth, which Dirty Jobs was.
	It wound up being a A tribute to my granddad.
	My mother called me.
	I was working for CBS at the time, 2001.
	I'm in my cubicle and she says, Michael, I was hosting a show called Evening Magazine, terrible show.
	She says, Michael, your grandfather's not doing well.
	He's 92, right?
	I'm like, oh, you know, what do you think?
	She said, maybe another year.
	It would be so terrific though if before he died he could turn on the television and see you doing something that looked like work.
	So my mother calls me out when I'm about 42.
	Dirty Jobs began as a special for my granddad.
	People saw it.
	10,000 letters came in.
	You should meet my granddad, brother, uncle, cousin, sister, aunt, uncle, right?
	And so for 12 years, I went around the country profiling real people who do real jobs that typically unfold in real towns you can't find on a map.
	And that gave me a certain notoriety in cable TV.
	And Way continued to lead on to Way.
	And a lot of other great things have happened.
	I have a foundation now that focuses on closing the skills gap and the podcast you mentioned.
	It's been so much fun.
	It's a writing exercise.
	It helps pass the time on planes.
	They're short stories told in the style of Paul Harvey's The Rest of the Story.
	And while I would never imagine for a moment I could fill his shoes, it's been fun trying to follow in his footsteps.
	Well it's all really fun stuff to listen to and certainly fun stuff to watch but it's also really meaningful because you're one of the few people in the entertainment industry who really does take seriously the stuff that people in the middle of the country are doing and as the country sort of polarizes between the folks who are in the entertainment sphere or the journalism sphere or the sort of High IQ is how they would term themselves.
	It's fair.
	And the people who are actually working the jobs that actually get things done across the country.
	That's a voice that seems to have been lost a lot.
	What do you think?
	Do you think that's a really serious gap?
	And do you think that's a bridgeable gap?
	Or is that gap between sort of the people who deem themselves to be smart and the people who deem themselves to be doing jobs that matter?
	Is that destined to sort of increase as time goes on here?
	Well, there's always been a gap, right?
	Sometimes it's wide, sometimes it's less wide.
	And we all fall in love with the romantic version of ourselves, right?
	Whether you're a journalist or whether you're an actor, whatever it is you think you are and whoever it is you think you are, you become the sun in your own solar system.
	So everything else is just a planet in orbit, right?
	So I think with regard to the skills gap and regard to really any gap, It's all just symptomatic of a series of what I would call disconnects.
	We've become slowly and inexorably and profoundly disconnected from a lot of very basic things that when I grew up I was really connected to, like where my food comes from, where my energy comes from, basic history, basic curiosity, you know, the things that
	fundamentally allow us to assume a level of appreciation that, in my view, is the best way to bridge those gaps.
	If we don't have appreciation, if we're not blown away by the miracle that occurs when you flick the switch and the lights come on, If we're not gobsmacked by flushing the toilet and seeing all of it go away.
	When we start losing our appreciation for those things, the gap deepens.
	Well, it's extraordinary.
	There's 6.3 million jobs.
	They're available as we speak.
	We have 75% of those jobs that don't require a four-year degree.
	And yet, we're still pushing the four-year degree as the best path for the most people.
	And it just happens to be the most expensive path.
	And a lot of people, as you describe, who are kind of in the middle, have enough common sense to realize that 1.5 trillion dollars in outstanding student loans There's a version of lending money we don't have to kids who can't pay it back to train for jobs that don't exist anymore.
	And that's crazy.
	So, you know, I think there's great common sense that is still alive and well in a lot of people.
	And I think that as they look at the headlines, they're frustrated.
	And, to be fair, I think people on the coasts are coming at it from their own bias, and they're frustrated, and so a lot of frustrated people are talking really loud, past each other, and a lot of truths are inconvenient for a lot of people, and so it just gets noisy, which is a long way of saying, no, I don't think the gap will ever close.
	I really don't.
	But I'm not freaked out by that.
	Because I think the point is Sisyphean.
	The point is quixotic.
	Right?
	So let's talk about the college thing for a minute.
	Because let's say that you're somebody who's thinking about going to college.
	Under what conditions do you think somebody ought to go to college?
	As somebody who was a poly-sci major, which is about the most useless degree you can have outside of like lesbian dance theory or something.
	I minored in that, so please.
	You know, Poli-Sci is basically so you can go to law school.
	That's all Poli-Sci is.
	And this is true for what we at UCLA call North Campus Majors, right?
	All North Campus Majors was like English and Poli-Sci, all the liberal arts.
	All this stuff was prepped for grad degrees or for getting a low-level job at a newspaper or something like that.
	The South Campus Majors, the people who are in the sciences and maths, those people were actually doing something useful.
	Who do you think ought to go to college, especially because there is a concomitant worry that if you don't go to college and you go for one of these blue-collar jobs that you're talking about that don't necessarily require a four-year degree, that those are going to get automated in the near future.
	What do you think the threat of that is?
	And you have an 18-year-old kid.
	Do you tell them to go to college or not?
	Concomitant.
	That's a college word, right?
	I'd have gone with contemporaneous, but either way.
	Either way, those two C words lead to the other C word, which is curiosity.
	No, not that one.
	Curiosity, right?
	I mean, look, anybody who's curious and who can afford it should go to college.
	The thing that I deal with most often with my foundation, which focuses primarily on Jobs that don't require a four-year degree that actually exist.
	When I come out in favor of those opportunities, what comes back over the net, usually with a lot of top spin, is the accusation that I'm anti-college or anti-education.
	I'm not.
	My liberal arts degree served me really, really, really, really well.
	I got it in 1984.
	It was the product of a two-year community college and then another couple years at a university.
	When the dust settled, the whole bill was $9,800.
	Same exact thing today is $88,000.
	So, my answer to your question is, A, can you afford it?
	If you can't, Don't.
	Now, that doesn't mean don't borrow money, but if you're not afflicted with a passion for the major and you have to borrow $20, $30, $50, $80, $100,000 in order to pursue the thing you may or may not be truly passionate in order to pursue the thing you may or may not be truly passionate about, then I don't know what to say to you other than that has to be a function of either peer pressure, parental pressure, or
	Because, I get it, it's not fair to compare a liberal education to workforce development, right?
	But, at some point, the only four-letter word that truly matters is debt.
	And you can either do it or you can't.
	I'll say this, too.
	You know, when I went to school, part of what you paid for was access.
	A big part of what you paid for, right?
	All this information exists in, obviously, libraries, but mostly in the minds of professors, and you get access.
	You sit in front of them and you learn.
	Well, you know, we have in our pockets right now a device that gives us access to 98% of the known information in the world.
	You can watch lectures from MIT.
	Yale, Dartmouth, William & Mary, all the great schools for free.
	I'm not saying it's the same thing.
	I'm just saying that the cost of college is unconscionable.
	And to say that questioning it is somehow fundamentally out of bounds, I just think it's the height of hubris.
	So what do we do?
	There's a lot of talk on both sides of the political aisle right now about the sort of falling down of American industry, supposedly.
	This idea that manufacturing is going away, we're moving toward a service economy, that a lot of these jobs are eventually going to be automated or outsourced.
	What do we say to people who may not want to go to college, may want to get one of these jobs, worries that 10 years from now they're going to be basically priced out of the market by, they want to be a trucker and now there's going to be Google trucks on the roads.
	What do we do about that?
	Is there a solution to that or is it just a matter of human beings have to be adaptable?
	I mean, look, when my grandfather saw me mess up the foundation and hang the drywall not plumb, he was very nice.
	But eventually, eventually, he just said, look, you can be a tradesman if you want to.
	You just need a different toolbox.
	And it was really wonderful advice in hindsight.
	You know, the idea that I could work in Hollywood like an electrician.
	You know, the ultimate freelance, really.
	By the way, the origins of that word, you familiar with freelance?
	No.
	It was literally a free lance in medieval days.
	You know, you're a knight who served whoever hired you.
	You're a mercenary.
	Well, if you have a skill, you can do that, because the skill goes wherever you go.
	What was the question again?
	The question was, what do we do about the manufacturing jobs that could be disappearing?
	Is it something that the government can solve?
	Is it a trade problem?
	Is it a technology problem?
	Or is it just going to have to be people adjusting as time goes on?
	What if it's not a problem at all?
	What if it's simply the oldest story in the world?
	I mean, I'm not a history major, but I read about the Luddite revolution.
	I read about what happened in textiles.
	I read about the advent of looms and what that meant.
	It was the same exact argument then.
	Everybody always says it's different this time, and maybe it is.
	I don't know.
	But everybody always says it's different, and it almost never is.
	In fact, I don't think it's ever been different.
	So I don't know I don't know.
	Can I envision a time when driverless cars and pilotless planes are going all around?
	I suppose I could.
	Do I think we'll live to see it?
	I don't think so.
	I think you might see a truck driving down the highway in the next 20 years that's completely automated.
	But I also think you're going to see a human sitting behind the wheel.
	So, okay, so you're just optimistic in general about the possibility that a lot of these jobs will continue to exist because there's a lot of pessimism from people like, for example, we had Eric Weinstein from Peter Thiel's company last week.
	And he was deeply concerned about the possibility, as a lot of people are, that a lot of these blue-collar jobs are just going to go away and you're going to have to end up with some sort of universal basic income where people who are not the creatives end up not working but being supported by the creatives.
	Because all of these blue-collar jobs eventually end up being automated and destroyed over time.
	I want you to answer that.
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	Okay, so to restate the question for those who forgot it during that ad, the basic question was, a lot of folks right now on both sides of the aisle are worried about the bifurcation of an economy where it becomes in what they're calling now an IQ economy.
	The idea that if you are a creative type, if you're somebody who can do stuff that machines can't do, that artificial intelligence can't do, You'll have a job in the future and your job will be relatively safe.
	And if you are somebody who is working as a truck driver, that you're basically going to be screwed and there isn't going to be a lot of job opportunity available to you.
	Do you think that's something that's not going to happen?
	Or if it does happen, is there a solution like universal basic income that people are talking about?
	That's beyond my pay grade.
	Personally, I'm very suspicious of that simply because you might solve a financial problem, but I think you're going to create some unintended consequences by essentially telling people that here's a big pile of something that you need and you don't have to do anything for it.
	I just think on a really fundamental, primal level, you're moving the cheese.
	And I don't know what's going to come out the other side, but I just can't imagine it's going to be good.
	You said bifurcated, right?
	I mean, I think it's binary.
	Yes, splitting it.
	Yeah, exactly.
	I think it's a false choice.
	You know, I think heads and tails are always going to be on the same coin, and this idea This idea that you're an artistic left-brain person over here, or this non-artistic right-brain... What is that?
	I remember in the election, I think it was Rubio who talked about more welders, less philosophers.
	Which is very much in keeping with what my foundation says, right?
	But only on a practical need.
	But I objected to the idea that a welder can't quote Nietzsche or Descartes, right?
	I mean, I object to the idea that a philosopher can't run an even bead down a seal.
	This idea that it's one or the other is a very limited toolbox kind of thought.
	And I think what you said before is exactly right.
	The answer to that question It's purely adaptive.
	Our ability to adapt and to think more broadly and to take more advantage of the unlimited access that we all have to the same bottomless compendium of knowledge and to be excited by it, to explore that.
	I just think part of the solution has to start with curiosity.
	It has to.
	I don't have a magic eight ball and I have no idea what's truly coming and I would never want to pretend to, but just because I can't tell you why I think we're going to be okay doesn't mean we're not.
	We're going to figure it out.
	Because we always have.
	And I'm just very suspicious of the argument that says this time we won't.
	It's just too complicated.
	One of the things that troubles me is when I look at the, because I do politics all day, right?
	So when I look at the political situation, what I see from both sides is this tendency toward seeing yourself as a victim of general trends.
	So on the one side, you have people who say we're victims of racism or institutional privilege.
	And on the other side, you have people saying we're victims of foreign trade and we're victims of economic development.
	And people who say you should, Put your own house in order first seemed to be getting a lot of flack for that.
	So as an example, my friend Kevin Williamson wrote for National Review.
	He wrote a piece specifically about some of these dying towns in the Rust Belt that were very heavily based on manufacturing and factory work.
	And he wrote this piece basically saying that if your town is dying and you're sitting there waiting for your job to come back, you're being a fool.
	Leave the town and go somewhere else.
	It got all sorts of blowback as somebody who's supposedly looking down his nose at the working class.
	And Kevin grew up so poor that his mom was stealing hangers from motels when he was a kid.
	Is that something that we as a people can overcome or is this just endemic to human nature that we're always going to blame everybody else for our own problems?
	Yeah.
	We're always going to blame people for our problems.
	I mean, I think that's how we start.
	I think, you know, I mean, we don't come into the world, in my view, as pure as we're often told.
	I mean, you have kids, right?
	I mean, you've got two kids sitting next to each other.
	One's three, one's two.
	They're playing.
	This one wants that toy.
	This one doesn't want to give the toy up, so the one leaves over and takes the toy, maybe bashes the other one over the head with it.
	I mean, this is... You know, we come in covetous.
	We want.
	We take.
	Whatever it is, it can't be our fault.
	We're the sun in our solar system.
	We're the center of our universe, you know?
	How do we realize that we're not?
	It's kind of a clunky analogy, but whatever it is that allows us to assume in our infancy that somehow the universe has come around us to take care of us, that translates to this idea that my town can't die.
	My job can't go away.
	I had it and now it's gone.
	Gone.
	And so, time out.
	Party foul.
	Not cool.
	Right?
	And so it's, I don't mean at all to make light of it, and I read the article that you're talking about.
	He got creamed for that.
	Destroyed, yeah.
	And then he got creamed again.
	Yeah, exactly.
	Like cream creamed, right?
	But look, outrage is for sale.
	Everybody knows.
	No one knows it better than you, I don't think.
	But finding a way to talk about that issue along with many others that doesn't immediately alienate half the country is the thing that I look at as a challenge every single day.
	It's what I do on my Facebook page.
	It's what I do with my foundation.
	It's what I try and do on shows like this.
	I've spent a lot of time on MSNBC, CNN, Fox.
	I'll talk to anybody who wants to have a fun, light-hearted, yet grown-up conversation.
	And no matter where I go, People's heads explode.
	There was a week a few years ago where I went on Glenn Beck and then two days later I went on Bill Maher.
	You know, I had three million friends on Facebook at the time.
	A couple weeks later, I had two million.
	You know, my buddies on the right just simply didn't know what to do with the optics of me sitting next to Bill Maher.
	And my pals on the left just had no notion of how to square the cognitive dissonance that forced their heads to explode when they saw me sitting there with Glenn Beck.
	They just didn't know what to do.
	It'll happen here.
	It happens every six months.
	So, what I'm saying is, we're in the world now where it's not what we say that gets us in trouble, it's what we don't, and it's not where we are that makes people's eyebrows arch, it's who we're sitting next to.
	It's the proximity of outrage.
	Right?
	It's the geography of all of it.
	What do you think has changed about that?
	Because I remember five years ago, I used to speak on college campuses, and I didn't require any security.
	The outrage industry was there, obviously, but it wasn't nearly at the tenor that it is now, where people are digging through things people said 10 years ago to try and find the one thing they said that they can get them fired over.
	And obviously, now when I go and speak at Berkeley, I require 600 police officers. - Yeah.
	Where did all of this come from?
	I remember people being very angry during the Bush administration.
	I don't remember it being anywhere near like this, the level of anger that's in the society.
	People have attributed that to economics.
	People have attributed that to cultural splits.
	Where do you think that that anger is coming from?
	Well, look, I hate to say it, but I think part of it is social.
	I mean, I have a show now on Facebook.
	I'm thrilled to be on that platform.
	And my show is a celebration of bloody do-gooderism.
	But I also own guns.
	Social is a tool.
	Guns are a tool.
	And we're right on the verge, I think, of discovering some really interesting parallels between the First and Second Amendment.
	And I think people who would never ever consider or associate a firearm with goodness are ironically using speech as a real cudgel and restricting it in so many ways.
	The arguments are really interesting.
	And if you look at social as a weapon, Then it's a weapon that you have.
	You don't need a license for it.
	Anybody can have it.
	The question is, how are you going to use it?
	And most people simply don't have the training or the maturity to handle it.
	And so the violence and the anger and the outrage that you're seeing, I think in part is a result of having an unlimited amount of access to a platform That gives you both the mechanism to say whatever you want and the anonymity and the comfort to hide behind it.
	And so people are very shrill and they're very brave in those scenarios.
	And look, all of that is just the portent to a mob.
	It all leads to sort of mob mentality.
	And I think that's what you've probably seen.
	Things get accelerated.
	And then there's no place left for it to go.
	And so they have to act out.
	Yeah, conversations get shut down.
	It really is, it's deeply unfortunate.
	I also think that, you know, with the rise of the social media and with the rise of the technology, I think there's something else that's happened too.
	And I don't know where you are religiously or where you get your values from, but I feel like there's a dramatic lack of central values in people's lives.
	That people are now looking for value in the anger.
	That people feel fulfilled because they're angry.
	And the angrier you are, the more fulfilled you are.
	The more it shows that you're an authentic human being if you're angry.
	quell that anger and actually have a reasonable conversation with someone, this means you're inauthentic.
	It means that you're hiding what you truly feel.
	But if you're really pissed off, that means that you are an authentic, decent human being.
	And so the more angry and indecent you are, the more decent you are by this perverse logic.
	Where do you think people ought to get their values?
	I mean, your values are very practically based.
	Is it just from how you grew up?
	Is it from a religious background?
	Where does that come from?
	I think, you know, it's a nature-nurture question, right?
	I mean, obviously it has a lot to do with how you're raised, but in the end, you have to hit the reset button and really decide for yourself, not just what you think, but why.
	This confusion between passion and conviction.
	There's a line, I think it was Yeats, at the end of The Best The best lack all conviction and the worst are filled with passionate intensity.
	Right?
	So that's it.
	If you don't have the certainty of your convictions, if you can't make a case, if you can't answer the question you just asked me, which I'll try and get to in a sec, then what is left?
	You know, nothing is left but an explanation of how you feel.
	And so, if your philosophy ultimately redounds to an explanation of how you feel, then you're completely beholden to whatever feeling you might be experiencing at any given point.
	And then you're just one of those people who follow their passion.
	Right?
	Good luck with that!
	Personally, my philosophy has a lot to do with being suspicious of anything that feels easy, just as a general rule.
	Being wary of all earnestness, in the words of Travis McGee, John D. MacDonald, one of my favorite fictitious characters, who in hindsight actually formed the basis of my entire business model.
	And gratitude.
	A good-natured skepticism, a ton of gratitude, and some honest intellectual curiosity will probably be the best replacements, at least that I can think of, for getting right to the point of, let me tell you how I feel.
	I really don't care how you feel, honestly.
	Over a beer, it's kind of fun.
	You're talking my language right here.
	I just don't care.
	I mean, it's so much more interesting to understand why you believe what you believe than it is to hear about what you believe.
	And that's why mobs are boring and that's why protests are tiresome.
	Because all the placards just simply say, this is how I feel and this is what I believe.
	I want to talk in a second about some of the practical, hard-headed advice that you have for young people.
	Are you going to do that thing again?
	Because I can't wait.
	You bet.
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	I'm ready.
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	All right, well, we're back, and I can feel my wallet just got this much fatter because of what just happened.
	I just gave it away.
	Yeah, and mine is gone.
	Because I keep buying everything you're selling.
	Well, I mean, this is how I make my money, so I'm glad.
	If I can get Mike Rowe to fall for my advertisements, I mean, I can get anyone.
	Ben, how many times are you accused of selling out?
	I get it.
	I get it every week.
	special, like every Twitter, every comment on the YouTube video below, every single one.
	I see.
	Okay, so...
	People say when I run for president that my inauguration will begin, fellow Americans, but first, an ad from Birch Gold.
	Like, this is really what all the comments say below this video, right here, right now.
	So I get it.
	I get it every week.
	Right?
	It's just that people, their heads explode when they, when this weird mix of, like, commerce and art, dare we say, art, you know, collide.
	They come together in this happy nexus of serendipity and yet it's mind-boggling to people.
	My first job in TV was at a home shopping channel.
	I sold out before I had anything to bargain.
	I was serious before when I said I really applaud what you're doing because this show is utterly without pretense.
	I have no idea what you're going to ask me next and the only thing more liberating than that is I'm convinced that you don't either.
	Except we're gonna stop every 15 seconds to take care of the brute realities of keeping these... Are these lights?
	Yeah, they are, I think.
	Keeping these lights on.
	And so, look, I...
	You used the word authenticity before in a couple of different ways.
	I think it's one of the most important concepts going right now because the country starved for it, starved for it, but we're not quite sure what it is.
	But it has something to do with the way you're doing this.
	Well, I think I appreciate that.
	I think that the authenticity break is actually, it has something to do with the election of President Trump, I think, to get political.
	You know, we would rather have an authentic Quasi-conman in the White House, then we would have an inauthentic harpy like Hillary Clinton.
	We would much rather have somebody who is actually the person that he says he is.
	Everybody knows what Trump is at this point.
	Everything is baked into the cake with President Trump because he's just out there about it.
	Pretty much you could hit him with anything at this point and he would probably survive it.
	He's like a cockroach after a nuclear explosion.
	He's going to survive it.
	And that's not that's meant in the best possible way.
	He is a political.
	I mean, when I say cockroach after a nuclear explosion, I don't mean that as bad as it sounds.
	I mean that it's a quality in a politician that is hard to come by.
	Bill Clinton had it, too.
	But the sort of feeling like we can trust you because we know that what you're saying is what you actually believe is something that that is is really effective right now, given how produced everything is and because everybody is so afraid of these social media mobs.
	Authenticity is in short supply.
	What do you make of Trump?
	How did he come about and what have you made of him so far?
	It's the question on everybody's mind.
	I understand.
	He's the sun around which the universe apparently revolves.
	Look, I was invited on Meet the Press the Sunday after the election.
	And they asked me that same question because a couple weeks earlier, I was asked that question on Facebook.
	And I answered it very candidly.
	I said he's going to win.
	I said he's going to win running away.
	I wish I had listened to you.
	I lost a bunch of money on the election.
	No, there was no doubt about it.
	I mean, for me, look, I had just spent 10 years in Wisconsin, Michigan, Western Pennsylvania, all through it.
	I mean, to me, from what I saw, it was obvious.
	But I'll tell you my Trump story.
	I've got a few of them, but the one that was public, I raised money for my foundation in a lot of unorthodox ways.
	You know, for years I had these things called crap auctions.
	Collectibles, rare, and precious.
	And I would go in my garage and I would take out a piece of crap that I'd accumulated in my dirty travels, right?
	And I would sell it in the QVC style.
	And I'd give the money we raised to the foundation.
	We raised hundreds of thousands of dollars.
	So when the election was at its fever pitch, I had a show on CNN at the time called Somebody's Gotta Do It.
	And the show is no longer on CNN, it's actually on TBN.
	I had to move it because it was preempted constantly because the election ramped up in such a way.
	So I I went online and basically said to Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton, and Bernie Sanders, I said, nice going guys, you just got my show booted off the network.
	I'll forgive you if each of you will make a donation to my foundation.
	What I'm looking for from you, Bernie, is one of those crumpled suit coats you always wear.
	Send that to me and I'll auction it off.
	Hillary, send me one of your pantsuits, right?
	And I said to Trump, I said, Send me one of your bathrobes and an autograph.
	You know, a bathrobe out of your... So, heard nothing from Bernie Sanders.
	Heard nothing from Hillary Clinton.
	Donald Trump sent me an autographed bathrobe with his name signed on it.
	He had it hand-delivered to me.
	So, the next week, I put on his bathrobe, and I sit down at my kitchen table, you know, I got my iPhone set up, and I'm doing an episode of Crap.
	I auctioned the thing off, got $18,000 for it.
	Like that, okay?
	So, I got a lot of heat for wearing a Donald Trump bathrobe.
	I don't care.
	The money went straight to the Work Ethic Scholarship Program.
	The moral of the story is, He understands who's watching.
	And he understands what's happening.
	It doesn't have anything to do, I don't know, I can't speak to his polemics, his politics, I don't need to say anything to get myself in any more hot water.
	He sent the robe.
	Nobody else did.
	And I really, I really didn't expect him to.
	But a deal's a deal.
	So I auctioned it off and I thanked him.
	And the money went to a great cause.
	My only other interaction with him, we got a call months ago from the White House to talk about supporting a thing that just happened this week, this big initiative around vocational education.
	Yeah, Ivanka Trump's been pushing that.
	Yeah, her people called, and we had a really candid conversation.
	And look, I'll tell you what I told him.
	I said, look, I'd love to.
	I mean honestly I'd love to because what you're talking about is the mandate of microworks.
	It's what I've been, I mean from the day Barack Obama went in office, we started our foundation Labor Day 2008, we're 10 years this year.
	And I've been, to the extent that I'm able to call for anything, I've been calling for this exact thing.
	A PR campaign for good jobs that actually exist, and a genuine focus on alternatives to a four-year education.
	But I said, look, if I put on a Make America Great hat, half the country will not hear me.
	And so it has nothing to do, forget my personal politics, do what you can politically.
	What I'm doing now is not political at all.
	It's one of the few areas I believe right and left still share with these Venn diagrams.
	There's not a lot of shared real estate left.
	But the definition of a good job in 2018 is something we're all going to have to figure out.
	And look, I call them as I see them.
	What they did this week around the skills gap, As you would say, good Trump.
	Good Trump.
	So tell us a little bit more about vocational training.
	You know, as somebody who went to bitoney colleges and can barely pick up a hammer, what does vocational training actually constitute?
	Because when I hear it, it sounds like a welding shop classroom, middle school or something.
	What exactly is it?
	And why should people undergo it if they're seeking a job in one of these industries?
	Vocational training is the most direct line you can find between where you are now and an actual opportunity.
	It's job training.
	It's not esoteric.
	It's not theoretical.
	This is what you need to be able to do in order to get money for doing it.
	It's very, very simple.
	And it can apply to, it's not just welding and steam fitting and pipe fitting and things like that.
	There's healthcare areas.
	There's so many opportunities that require vocational training.
	But the first thing to understand is what you just said is exactly right.
	The language matters.
	The language matters hugely and, you know, shop class, we didn't just get shop class out of high school like that.
	It was a process.
	Shop used to be called vocational arts.
	The first thing we did was we took the art out of it and then we made it vo-tech.
	And then it was just vocational education.
	And then eventually it became shop.
	At which point it's easy to walk it out back behind the barn and put a bullet in its head.
	And that's what we did.
	We took shop class out of high school.
	Is there a more persuasive way to show an entire generation of kids what's important than by eliminating it from view?
	And the entertainment industry has contributed to this also.
	I mean, like, every joke is always about shop class.
	Every joke is always about the guy who's the plumber.
	The ideal that you aspire to if you watch TV is never the person who actually is working one of the jobs that you're talking about.
	It's always a lawyer or a doctor.
	Those are the glamorous jobs, apparently.
	Nobody ever actually talks to a lawyer or doctor before making a show about lawyers and doctors being glamorous jobs, because as a lawyer and with a wife as a doctor, it is not a glamorous job, it actually turns out.
	But the entertainment industry obviously circulated in New York and L.A., made up of a bunch of people like me, people who can't handle a hammer.
	How does Hollywood contribute to this sort of skills gap and problem, do you think?
	Mightily.
	You know, you're talking about a Cold War on work, and it's waged on multiple fronts.
	Hollywood leads the charge, to your point.
	If there's a plumber on a show, he's 300 pounds with a giant butt crack.
	That's what plumbers look like, right?
	All of them are the recipients not of a skilled trade, but of Some kind of vocational consolation prize.
	It's what you do if you can't do this.
	Right?
	So, that's the working assumption.
	And Hollywood has confirmed those stigmas and stereotypes in a multitudinous number of ways.
	Madison Avenue has done the exact same thing.
	You see the same portrayals in advertising as you do in popular culture.
	Books!
	I mean, look, I'm pals with Tim Ferriss, but, you know, we always laugh when we talk about this, because when he published The 4-Hour Workweek, it was one of the first examples I pointed to.
	This is a great bestseller.
	It's full of good advice.
	But the titular promise is how to get so much more by doing so much less.
	All the propositions on any financial ad that you're ever going to see or read are going to... It's pregnant with the possibility of retiring sooner, working less.
	If you're unhappy, the proximate cause of your unhappiness probably has to do with your damn boss or your damn job.
	That's how you make work the enemy.
	You identify it as the reason for your unhappiness and then you juxtapose it with all kinds of other images that you can't have, right?
	And now you have a whole new gap in there.
	My foundation evolved really as a PR campaign for jobs that actually exist and a challenge to this idea that the most expensive path was the best path for the most people.
	So yeah, I have lots of opportunities and lots of examples because this town is rife But look, it's everywhere, Ben.
	It is on bookshelves.
	It's on your television.
	And it's in parents.
	Look, and this goes back.
	This is the reptilian part of our brain.
	We want something for our kids better than we had.
	Doesn't matter how good we had it.
	Doesn't matter.
	Because we want something better.
	That's okay.
	That's normal.
	But at some point, Back to defining what a better job or a good job really is.
	Parents can't agree.
	Guidance counselors can't agree.
	Guidance counselors in high schools now, in many cases, are evaluated and comped based on their ability to help X number of students matriculate into a four-year school.
	That's the goal, right?
	So we've got our thumb on the scale in so many different ways, and ultimately what we're left with is a giant hot mess of misunderstanding, myths, stereotypes, and misperceptions that are affirmatively keeping people from pursuing a litany of opportunities. and misperceptions that are affirmatively keeping people from pursuing a litany of opportunities. - So one of the things that I love that you talk about is the
	As you say, there are a lot of folks in our society who seem to think that less work is better, and that retiring early is the thing, and then you see all these people who retire at age 66, and by 68 they're dead.
	Because if you're not working, then You're not doing anything.
	It's been my view for my entire life that people were legitimately born to work until you die.
	And even if you don't have work, you find things to work at.
	Whether it's you go and you volunteer somewhere, you're working with a charity, people need to feel purpose and people find purpose in work.
	But you have an interesting perspective on this because the way that I was brought up, you know, in the schools that I went to, the way that I think people of my generation were brought up is find something that's meaningful and then try to find a job in the thing that you find meaningful.
	Whereas one of the things you preach is find a job and then try to find meaning in that job, which is kind of polar opposite.
	Can you talk about that a little bit?
	Well, look, I mean, in the end, What you want is meaningful work, and let's define meaningful work as an activity that you're passionate about, that moves the needle in some way, and that compensates you in a way that excites you.
	The question is, how do you get there?
	And today, the path starts with passion.
	It starts with, well, Sit down and think about it.
	What would make you happy?
	What do you see yourself as doing?
	Identify that thing.
	Now, let's put together a plan.
	What sort of education do you need?
	How much time should it take?
	You put all these shoulds in front of it, and now you have a plan, and when you get to that place, Congratulations, you've done it.
	Right?
	That's insane.
	Right?
	That's insane.
	It's kind of like saying, all right, you want to be happy in your love life.
	All right?
	Are you going to go in search of your soulmate?
	Or are you going to go where the people are and start getting to know them?
	Right?
	It just depends on how hard you want to make it.
	So one of the big lessons from Dirty Jobs was The people on that show, collectively, were having a much better time than the average person would suspect they would be having, given the fact that most of them were covered in other people's crap, or crawling around in some godforsaken pit of despair, or doing some vocational consolation prize thing, right?
	These people aren't supposed to look happy, they're not supposed to look self-actualized, they're not supposed to look prosperous.
	The dirty little secret of Dirty Jobs was that Easily 40 of the people we featured on that show were multi-millionaires.
	We never talked about it because I didn't want it to be a polemic.
	But success doesn't look like the version we've been sold.
	At all.
	At all.
	So, you know, having fun with that kind of cognitive dissonance is great.
	Showing people examples of the plumber Who began his or her trade with learning a skill and now has seven trucks and 32 employees.
	That's important.
	Those people over and over again.
	The septic tank inspector up in West Wisconsin.
	The skull cleaners in Oklahoma City.
	I can go down the list.
	None of them set out to do what they were doing.
	None of them began with what would make me happy.
	These people looked around to see where everybody was running, and they ran in the opposite direction.
	That's where they found opportunity.
	Then they found a way to get good at it.
	Then they learned their trade, and then they mastered it.
	Then they found a way to be passionate about it.
	So they got to the same place, but they didn't start on this snipe hunt of what will make me happy.
	They looked around and said, where are the jobs?
	Do you think that same thing applies in personal relationships?
	100%.
	I think it applies in everything.
	I think our brain is obviously our best friend and our worst enemy.
	It'll do whatever we tell it to do.
	If you assign it a task, it's going to go until it can complete it or die trying.
	Just be careful of what you assign it to, you know?
	I mean, if you tell your brain the only way you're going to be happy is if you find your soulmate, you better be prepared to embark upon a worldwide, never-ending tour of chronic disappointment.
	It's going to be expensive, right?
	I'm not saying settle.
	See, it's another binary choice.
	This is what people are going to say to me.
	They're going to be like, so you're just saying just go by, what, arranged marriages?
	Well, I don't know, but statistically, arranged marriages do pretty good, you know?
	They do pretty good!
	So, I'm not saying that... No, but you're right in the sense that, you know, there's always talk about passion nowadays, passion in marriage, and what the social science tends to show is that passion in any relationship is that it's very high at the very beginning, and companionate love is that it's very low, and then in very short order, passionate love drops precipitously, and companionate love increases precipitously.
	And so, you can bet on passionate love, but no matter how you bet on passionate love, within a year, that passionate love is going to be declining.
	The question is whether the companionate love is actually going to last.
	And so, if you go into it with... Time frame.
	Exactly.
	If you go into it with the mentality that this is something you're going to have to stick to, the chances you have a successful marriage are going to be a lot better than, I'm going to go into it because I'm passionate about it.
	Because every job eventually becomes a job.
	No matter how passionate you are about your initial belief in a job, and I love my job, and I'm sure you love your job, eventually, it gets to the point where, yeah, I got to get up this morning, got to go to work.
	And still, you're getting up and going to work.
	Happiness is a terrific symptom.
	It's a terrible goal.
	It's just a terrible goal, because it's a sucker's bet.
	If happiness were that tangible, then the same thing would make everyone happy.
	But obviously, it doesn't.
	I'm sure of that.
	I'm not sure of much, but I'm sure of that.
	I wrote this thing.
	You'd get a kick out of it.
	It started, like most everything I do, as an attempt to amuse myself.
	But after a bottle of wine one night, My foundation awards work ethic scholarships, so we need to have some mechanism by which we can try to account for work.
	I mean, how do you measure character?
	It's virtually impossible.
	But I wrote this thing called a Sweat Pledge.
	Skills and work ethic are not taboo.
	Aren't taboo.
	Sweat, right?
	And you have to sign it.
	It's a 12-point pledge.
	Sort of part 12-step process, part scout law, right?
	And some people really, really, really hate it.
	But one of the first things is, you know, I'm grateful.
	I won the greatest lottery of all time.
	I live in America.
	Two, I do not follow my passion.
	Three, it goes down all of these things.
	It was like a little personal manifesto for me.
	But I only bring it up because it's become increasingly more important to my foundation and now the more I look back on it, it's hysterical, Ben, how outraged people get.
	I give away maybe $5 million so far, right?
	Not a ton by foundation standards, but it's a chunk.
	It's money, yeah.
	Every year about $800,000 goes out.
	And every year people say, well, why do I have to sign the sweat pledge?
	And I said, well, you don't have to.
	It's entirely possible this particular pile of free money might not be for you.
	And it goes, what do you mean?
	I'm like, well, I mean, there are many scholarship funds that award academic achievement.
	I'm more interested in awarding attendance, right?
	I mean, athletic achievement, talent, there are all kinds of rubrics and metrics for measuring value, but where's the work ethic?
	So that's what we try and do.
	And forgive me, I'm trying to bring this back to the answer to the question you posed, but I forgot what it is again.
	So have I.
	I mean, you took me on the journey and now we're left adrift here.
	I'm going to send you a sweat pledge.
	I'm going to send you a sweat pledge, Ben.
	Okay, sounds good.
	Well, Let's hone in on, for a second, the first principle that you mentioned, which is that you won the lottery because you live here, which is something with which I totally agree.
	But that's a pretty controversial proposition these days.
	Sure.
	And it's become almost partially a left-right proposition, unfortunately.
	Where you see there's a poll that came out just within the last month that suggested that Republicans, particularly, were very proud to be members of the United States, very proud to be American, and they were very proud to be American when Obama was president.
	This was not dependent on who was president.
	It was 73% of Americans who were Republicans were proud when Obama was president.
	It's 77% now.
	And for Democrats, it was like 54% were positive when it was Obama, and now it's like 38% because of President Trump.
	Why do you think there are so many people in the country who look at the situation that they've been handed, which is the freest, most prosperous country in the history of humanity, and think to themselves, I'm a victim in this scenario?
	Not to discount anybody's actual hardships or past, but why do you think that that's become such a prominent thing in what clearly is a land of opportunity?
	Because it's not clear.
	It's not clearly.
	Of all the divides, the one that worries me the most is the divide between people who are genuinely, genuinely convinced that opportunity is dead and those who are not.
	Right?
	The ones who are artificially convinced, or just, you know, paying lip service to it, they don't matter.
	But there are a lot of people who really and truly, truly believe the system is rigged, and they truly believe opportunity is dead.
	That's a... they scare me.
	Not because I'm frightened of them, but because that belief is... that'll kill us.
	I mean, if that belief really and truly spreads, it'll kill us.
	This is why the skills gap becomes weirdly political.
	It shouldn't be.
	It's just opportunity.
	It's just 6.3 million jobs sitting there, vacant.
	But when I point that out, it's very difficult because everything is politicized today, right?
	What comes back is, well, what does the existence of opportunity mean?
	In a country where we're fighting over the fact that opportunity may or may not be dead, it's proof positive that it's not.
	Now that's a problem, right?
	The optics don't line up.
	So then you have economic experts, with whom I really can't engage because I'm not an economist, but they will tell you why the skills gap is a myth.
	So here's how it breaks down.
	If I point to six million available jobs, my friends on the right will tell me that those jobs are available because human beings are fundamentally lazy.
	My friends on the left will tell me that those jobs are available because employers are fundamentally greedy.
	And that's where we are.
	We can't think beyond the fact that our basic philosophies require us to see humanity as either lazy or greedy.
	Now the truth is, in my opinion, we're both lazy and greedy.
	Right?
	And we're neither lazy nor greedy.
	We're all of it and none of it.
	And all of it gets measured out in unequal amounts.
	But we don't We don't have time today to parse the nuance of that.
	It simply has to be one or the other.
	So when I post a picture of me standing next to the flag on the 4th of July, I get a lot of pushback.
	And I think a lot of people who are pushing me back don't really want to push back.
	They just don't want to see me doing something patriotic because the lines have been drawn.
	And now if you're If you're patriotic, well then you must be on the right.
	That's also really super dangerous.
	It's a false choice and we have to push back against that.
	It's incumbent upon us.
	I think you're doing a decent job of it.
	I'll try, thanks.
	I mean, no, honestly, look, you're as biased as I am.
	You're as biased as the next person, but you can point these cameras at anything you want, and you're pointing them at honest, thoughtful conversation.
	Well, thanks.
	Let's talk a little bit about, so you have a unique perspective on life.
	What are your parents like?
	And this gives you the opportunity to talk a little bit about your mom, because you have a brand new book that your mom has written that you're pushing right now.
	So what were your parents like?
	Well, they were a lot like what happily they still are.
	Oh good, okay.
	Yeah, my dad is 86 years old.
	Thank God.
	He delivers Meals on Wheels once, sometimes twice a week, and he volunteers at the hospital once a week.
	My mom is 80.
	She still sings in the church choir, and she writes every day.
	She's been writing me letters for as long as I can remember.
	I started reading them online, and people started saying, you should write a book, and so she has.
	She wrote a book called About My Mother.
	If I were you right now, you know what I'd do?
	I'd say, I'm going to ask you that question real quick, but first, about my mother, Peggy Rowe, it's available at MikeRowe.com slash Mom's Book.
	Check it out, it'll change your life.
	And it will.
	I mean, look, never mind what the book is about.
	I mean, it's 14 short stories, and they're all terrific, and anybody who's ever been a mother or a daughter will love it.
	What's amazing is my mom has written a book at 80.
	She's 80 years old, and just decided, I want to write a book.
	And it's good.
	And I'm so proud of her because, hell man, people half her age, with way more opportunity.
	They don't.
	She did a thing.
	My parents are both completely engaged with the world around them and still in love with each other.
	So here's a final question for you before we have to run.
	Grit and opportunity and opportunism and enthusiasm and curiosity, these are all the things that you like to talk about.
	Do you think these are inborn qualities in people?
	Are these things that you can cultivate?
	Or is it a little bit of both?
	Because obviously there's some people who, there's a case made that there's some people who just can't get over that hump, and there's some people who are automatically benefited from birth with these qualities.
	How much of it can be cultivated and how much of it is just that's the way you are?
	I think all of it can be cultivated.
	I really do.
	Look, I think change is the hardest thing, but to our earlier point, we come into the world Utterly selfish, completely dependent, and totally, totally at the mercy of the people around us.
	If we don't change from that, You can cultivate an outlook of gratitude.
	You can cultivate opportunism.
	You can also cultivate hypocrisy.
	You can cultivate smallness and meanness.
	I believe Some people will always have it easier.
	Of course.
	Nobody's starting from the same starting line.
	It's okay.
	It's never been that way.
	But it's 100% up to us where we finish.
	Well, Mike Rowe, it's such a pleasure to have you here and I really appreciate your time.
	Everybody should go check out your podcast.
	They should check out your mom's book.
	Everything that you're doing.
	And what's the best way to reach you with your website?
	I'm on Facebook and MikeRowe.com.
	I'm hard to miss.
	Go check it out.
	Mike Rowe is awesome.
	Thanks so much for stopping by.
	and bye.
	Appreciate it.
	The Ben Shapiro Show's Sunday special was produced by Jonathan Hay, executive producer Jeremy Boring, associate producers Mathis Glover and Austin Stevens, edited by Alex Zingaro.
	Audio is mixed by Mike Caromina.
	Hair and makeup is by Jesua Alvera and title graphics by Cynthia Angulo.
	The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special is a Daily Wire Forward Publishing production.

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