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July 21, 2024 - The Ben Shapiro Show
01:00:59
Appreciating American Exceptionalism | Mike Rowe
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The math goes like this.
Every year, five skilled tradespeople retire.
For every five who retire, two replace them.
So, we're seeing an incredible lack of interest and enthusiasm around these skilled trades.
I guess my answer is, it's true.
Inflation, super bad.
The cost of college, an enormous problem.
But, The entrepreneur who took the time to master a skill that's in demand is crushing it in this economy.
And nobody's talking about them.
On this episode of the Sunday Special, Mike Rowe joins us for a conversation about America's backbone, the American workforce.
Best known as the dirtiest man on TV from the Emmy award-winning TV series, Dirty Jobs, Rowe's talent for storytelling and commitment to American labor are evident through his ongoing work to highlight hardworking citizens across the country.
The Mike Rowe Works Foundation has awarded millions of dollars in work ethics scholarships, which aim to close the skills gap by funding training for jobs that are in demand.
On his podcast, The Way I Heard It, Rowe hosts conversations with guests on everything from history to Hollywood.
This summer, Rowe's latest project is an unapologetically patriotic feature film called Something to Stand For.
Part historical reenactment and part documentary, Rowe travels to our nation's capital to honor the patriots who built our country.
In today's episode, we discuss what it means to be a patriot and Rowe's best advice for a high school graduate in today's economy.
We also explore the implications of AI on white-collar workers and forgotten institutions of community in American lives.
Don't miss this inspiring conversation with Mike Rowe, one of America's most prominent advocates for American
labor.
And Mike.
It's great to see you again.
It's been a while.
It's been a hot minute.
2018, I want to say.
Yeah.
We were back in Los Angeles at the time.
A terrible place.
And now I'm over here in Florida.
Oh, Sodom.
Sodom in the springtime.
Yes, exactly.
Exactly.
And now we're here in Florida where it is hot and humid but free.
We all have pet alligators and it's awesome.
But a lot has happened for you in the meantime.
You have a brand new movie coming out called Something to Stand For.
Why don't we start with that?
What made you interested in doing this project?
What is the project?
Well, it's a project I've been doing for years.
I just didn't know it.
That's happened to me in a lot of things.
It happened with Dirty Jobs.
It happened with the Foundation.
The headlines sometimes, if you're lucky, will catch up to your smack and make you relevant in ways that you didn't fully plan or anticipate.
Something to stand for is really a collection of nine stories that I wrote on my podcast years ago that wound up getting adapted for the big screen, specifically for Independence Day.
It's not a political movie, I should be clear about that, but it is very patriotic, and unapologetically so, so some people might be triggered.
If they're not careful.
I mean, let's talk about that a little bit.
I mean, the fact that, you know, things that are just sort of baseline patriotic now have become controversial.
I think that that's incredibly bizarre because there is this giant divide between sort of the political chattering class and the vast majority of Americans.
The vast majority of Americans are going to watch something like your movie and they're not going to feel the politics of it.
But the chattering class obviously is going to.
What's happened to create that divide?
So much.
You know, I mean, the language is a very vulnerable target in times like these, and words stop meaning what we think they mean.
And it's well and good to have a couple of parties that disagree fundamentally on a bunch of things.
I've never had a problem with that.
But I do think the anti-Americanism that's crept into the conversation is a different thing.
And so I'm real clear in the movie, and I'm real clear when I talk about it, that I didn't write it for Republicans or Democrats or Liberals or Conservatives.
For people who still see themselves first and foremost as Americans.
And it is unfortunate that there is a cohort today that fundamentally sees themselves as something else.
And so the movie's not for them.
They're welcome to come.
But first and foremost, it was actually an article by Jim Lowry over at the National review that inspired this when that when the statues were coming down and and most recently When the statues were being dressed up with Hamas friendly garb, you know, I was just like what do we?
What are we doing?
We're going to have this whole conversation again.
So the stories I write for my podcast are based on that old Paul Harvey format.
It's a mystery essentially.
So you learn something you didn't know about somebody you do.
You get to try and figure it out along the way.
They're fun.
But I just stitched these together with a field trip of sorts to D.C., met some park rangers, met some old men, been there randomly on honor flights.
We connected at the World War II Memorial, the Marines Memorial.
It was basically a love letter to the memorials and monuments that are such a big part of our story, intercut with these weird tales about famous people that helped build our country, who you do know through the lens of something you didn't.
You know, one of the things that has really happened Is that there used to be sort of a baseline just understanding that America was a fundamentally good place and that despite all of our flaws, the constitutional principles are unique in world history, that the story of America is trying to live up to those principles.
Ever so often, Joe Biden pays lip service to this idea, but this used to be sort of a commonly understood thing.
And I think that that has fallen away and it's fallen away in sort of the most ignorant way, which is nobody even realizes that there are other cultures on planet Earth.
I mean, to truly understand how amazing America is, you really do have to understand history and that there is, like, an entire rest of the world out there.
And the rest of the world has an enormous number of truly crappy places, like, places you would never want to live, with awful values, with people who believe precisely the opposite of what we believe and have been deeply inculcated in that belief system.
And you have to have the respect for those people to at least acknowledge that they have a different belief system.
They're not just fundamentally stupid.
That that belief system is fundamentally opposed to your own.
And, you know, we're recording this right now on D-Day, and when I see how much of the online Twitter space is about, like, were we fighting the wrong people during World War II?
How good really is America?
What kind of atrocities did America commit during World War II?
Do you know how ignorant you have to be about Imperial Japan or about Nazi Germany or, in the Cold War era, about Soviet Russia in order to even make the moral comparison between the United States and its activities over the course of the 20th century and these other countries?
It's a really good point.
You have to be aggressively ignorant.
You have to be willfully ignorant in ways you didn't have to be 30, 40, 50 years ago, because the very device that you just mentioned is your pathway into all of the known information in the history of the world.
So anybody with a modicum of curiosity Look, you might find experts who disagree.
In fact, I'd argue part of the reason we're living in such a fraught time is because it's tough to find experts who agree, and it's difficult also to find historians who are all on the same page about everything.
It's why my podcast is called The Way I Heard It, honestly.
I mean, six years ago, It seemed pretty clear we were headed in this direction.
And as people are claiming to be the true source of knowledge, I kind of wanted to inject a little bit of humility into that and step back and say, look, I'm not an expert, but I do have the same unprecedented access to the past as you.
And I am curious about it.
And I don't mind reading things that are inconvenient or that challenge my worldview.
But your first point to me is the best point.
You must get out of your zip code.
You must get out of your state.
You must get out of the country.
And when I say must, I don't mean it's imperative that you do, but if you truly want to wrap
yourself in a cloak of appreciation and gratitude for the incredibly good cards that we all
have in this country, then you can't just be the blind man who grabs the tusk on the
elephant and says, oh, look, I found a bunch of ivory or the tail and says, oh, I found
this or the trunk or the legs.
It's a big world and the differences are wildly disparate.
And it's so true.
The best way to truly appreciate what happened in 1776, and on the 6th of June, and on so many important dates, including current dates, is to have some sort of understanding from whence we came.
You know, one of the ironies of the sort of anti-American perspective is that it really is a sort of America-centric viewpoint, as I say.
Like, in order to understand how amazing America is, as we say, you have to actually understand other cultures and then understand what America is in opposition to those other cultures because, again, it's a world filled with people.
But that never seems to take place.
It's this sort of America-centric view where the only place that matters on Earth is America and also America's the only country with agency.
So if somebody opposes the United States, it's always blowback.
It's always because we must have done something to piss them off.
And this is the whole anti-Western point of view, is that the West is constantly responsible for the sins of everybody else.
That if there's a terror attack, it must be because somebody made those terrorists super angry.
So if only we had done something better, then the terrorists wouldn't be angry.
Or if only we had been kinder to the Japanese during World War II, then Pearl Harbor never happened.
Or if only we were less interventionist on the foreign policy front, then we wouldn't see chaos all over the world.
As opposed to the idea that, no, actually, pretty much everybody on earth has free will and agency, and they all get to make decisions for themselves.
And so then the question becomes who's making a good decision versus who's making a bad decision.
Right.
And put on top of that the trap of the binary?
I think a lot of what's happened today that has fostered all of the anti-American sentiment, or at least a big chunk of it, is this idea that if I stand for the flag, if I sing the national anthem loudly, if I put my hand on my heart and recite the pledge proudly, then for some reason that gets processed as, oh, he thinks the country's perfect.
Oh, he thinks America's the best, period.
Beat it if you disagree.
The whole notion of nuance, Ben, you know, the whole idea that you can love an idea, love a notion, and come together and celebrate the intent of the founders, Along with the incredible sacrifice of every man and woman who's ever worn the uniform like if we're not allowed to do that without immediately saying But that's not to say that we haven't made a whole bunch of mistakes or but that's not to say that we of course We have a long way to go
Of course it's a work in progress.
Of course we're not finished.
But that's the nuance that's lost.
So to make the case for Jefferson, to make the case for Washington, to talk about the
incredible genius of those minds, people simply can't hear it because they can't see these
men in their own time.
They have to see them now.
And they can't, it seems, think about what's really on the table.
I think maybe it's because judging is so much easier to do and so much more fun, right?
So we've kind of abdicated the thinking part of the dialogue and replaced it with the judging part and then completely arbitrage the whole notion of context out of it.
And so it's black or white.
It's blue collar or white collar.
It's good or bad or right or wrong and so forth and so on.
And so bye bye nuance, right?
One of the things that's so ironic about all that is the very same people who will go soft on terrorists because obviously those terrorists have motivations of their own.
We can't blame them for their activities.
They're the same exact people who are very, very harsh on the Founding Fathers.
So they'll be very harsh on George Washington for being a slaveholder, which, of course, I mean, slavery is bad.
We all get it.
But turns out that most of the world did not get that in approximately 1770.
In fact, most of the world was still holding slaves in 1770.
And so the understanding that is completely meritless for them.
Those people have to be robbed of all nuance but all nuance must be provided to people in the here and now who are doing truly evil things.
Those people require all of the context and nuance that can be mustered for them.
But a historic figure whose principles you are living on the back of In the end, what this comes down to is an extraordinary level of narcissism and ingratitude for the past.
This belief that you sprang full-fledged into existence with this set of principles, and so everything that you think that is good and true is because you reasoned your way to it yourself.
Robert George, my friend, is the philosophy professor over at Princeton.
He does a thought exercise with his students where he says, okay, let's say that you're living in 1861 Alabama.
You were brought up in 1861 Alabama.
How many of you are working with the Underground Railroad?
How many of you are siding with the North as opposed to the Confederacy in the Civil War?
And every hand goes up.
And he says, you're lying.
That's obviously not true.
That's obviously not true.
But, you know, we have this very flattering view of ourselves that we are the only perfect people in history.
And everybody else in history is a sinner, even if those are the people who develop the principles that we stand on the back of.
If you think about enlightenment as the corollary to woke, like we couldn't call it enlightened again because we already went through that period, so now it's this period.
And, you know, I didn't live through the enlightenment, but I do think that the enemies of actual thought and understanding are certainty.
And arrogance.
And I see an awful lot of certainty today and a real conspicuous lack of humility.
To your point, you know, your professor could just as easily drag it forward, right?
And say, think about the certainty you have today around that topic.
Call it slavery.
All right?
We look back and we are so certain That we would have not made the same mistakes that were made then.
And by the way, never mind there's more slavery on the planet today than there was in 1860.
Just out of sight, out of mind for most Americans, but that's the case.
And then drag yourself 160 years forward.
And you know, what are our great, great Great-grandchildren are going to look back at us.
What statues currently beloved in the public square are liable to be torn down a century and a half down the road?
How are we going to think about, oh I don't know, meat eaters?
For instance or or the whole topic of abortion obviously a lightning rod but you know it it's the parallels are real right and and this idea that we're so quick to judge everything that came before us but no awareness that we're going to be judged the exact same way later that That, to me, can be explained by a simple lack of curiosity and a lack of humility.
But look, let me just add real quick, too, that at least as far as this movie goes, and whenever I attempt to do something on the TV or the radio or whatever, the first job is never to lecture.
It's never to scold.
No one wants a sermon, unless it's Sunday morning, and even then I'm not so sure.
People want to be entertained.
And you guys know that.
You've done amazing things.
But, you know, balancing all of this is a conversation that I really want to have with you because it's so easy to go too far, right?
It's so easy to turn it into a polemic when what people really need and what I think the best pathway into, you know, improving our understanding of history and offering some kind of olive branch to the other side is to first entertain.
And when I think of Tip O'Neill and Ronald Reagan, you know, going out for a steak after fighting, trying to tear each other's throats out during the day, that's different than the lip service you referred to earlier.
And that's what we somehow have to get back to, I think.
We'll get to more on this in just one moment.
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So, I want to ask you because obviously you're a master storyteller.
Of the stories that you tell in Something to Stand For, do you have a personal favorite?
What's your favorite story that you talk about in the movie?
It's a great question and a truly vexing one, because if you know the old Paul Harvey format, the rest of the story, they're all a surprise.
They're all a reveal, you know, and I don't want to wreck it for people, but I'll tell you...
The greatest thing that happened filming the movie, and by the way, this entire, all of the recreations, which are pretty elaborate, were all shot in Oklahoma.
There are 300 actors in this thing.
They're all from Oklahoma.
The entire crew is from Oklahoma.
We started talking about the advantages of leaving Sodom and Gomorrah, where I'm currently broadcasting from, You're in Florida, where it's hot and free, and in Nashville.
I film in Georgia, where the tax breaks are nice, but they're even better in Oklahoma.
So for a whole lot of practical reasons, I wanted to tell some stories from the heart, and I wanted to do it from the heartland.
So this mostly takes place in Oklahoma.
But to stitch it together, I drove the old Bronco into D.C.
on this field trip on steroids.
And while I was there, Ben, I went to Arlington, I went to all the big memorials, and their honor flights were everywhere.
Old men, 80s, 90s, met a couple guys in their hundreds, wheelchairs, there with their families, there with volunteers, going to these memorials, going to these monuments, going to these statues.
Dude, I mean, I know you've seen it, but when you see tears streaming down the worn and leathered face of a man who risked his life to make yours better, sitting there, looking at that wall of stars at the World War II Memorial, and really seeing for the first time that collective expression of gratitude built for him, I'll tell you, man, I'm not overly earnest, but the movie, I hope, will have an exponential impact and really magnify that little thing.
And again, final thought on it, it just goes to show.
Part of the movie is very, very scripted.
These stories are very deliberate.
You know, I tell them from an empty stage in an empty theater, and then we bring them to life, but it's the unscripted moments.
It's the people you run into, and thank God there's a behind-the-scenes camera always rolling with me, and you suddenly find a story you didn't know you needed to hear from a guy you didn't know existed, who was brought to a place by people who loved him, To reconnect with the sacrifice he made once upon a time.
That is, that kind of storytelling does require a level of humility that demands you let go
of your plan and point the camera at the most interesting thing that's going on.
So you've made a career out of doing exactly that, is taking stories that may have been
left behind and bringing those to light.
Obviously that's true of dirty jobs and many of the blue collar jobs that seem to go neglected
by the media.
So I want to switch over to that topic for a moment because one of the things that's
happening in election 2024, again without getting too political, is the feelings about
the economy are heavily divided.
Obviously you have a group of people who've done quite well in the current inflationary
economy.
The people who've gotten absolutely clocked in the face is everybody in the middle class,
blue collar workers.
Inflation has trashed them.
Their wages have not kept up with the inflation.
They've seen their prices on everyday goods and services go up tremendously.
Going to a restaurant at a cheap restaurant is now luxury.
Being able to afford dinner is very difficult.
Gas has gone up.
All these things have happened over the course of the past few years.
And then they're being told by the media that basically it's all a myth, that really there's nothing for them to worry about.
So when you are talking with folks who are working blue-collar jobs, what's the experience that you're getting from them on the ground right now?
It's largely that.
However, there is a line in the blue-collar world that often gets conflated, if not outright ignored, and that's the line between blue-collar workers, both union and non-union, who fit really the cohort you've just described, and the entrepreneurs.
My foundation really tries to encourage a level of entrepreneurship along with the curiosity required to master a skill that's in demand.
The entrepreneurs that I've stayed in touch with, and we've had about 2,000 people go through MicroWorks, it's one of the great unreported stories of our time.
A guy spends $8,000 and gets his welding certification, and he begins to work.
And then he expands that certification.
Maybe he's welding underwater.
Maybe he's doing different kinds of fairly esoteric Parts aspects of welding that most people don't know but more often than not what he does is he buys a van and he hires a buddy who's a plumber and Then he gets another guy who's an electrician and then they got some heating and air conditioning guys and before you know it you have a mechanical Contracting company lean to three vans half a dozen guys killing it
They're killing it.
They have more work than they can do, Ben.
Today, you want to talk about... People are still talking about the shortages and the disconnects and the stigmas and stereotypes that might be preventing people from getting into the plumbing field.
I talk about that all the time because debunking that nonsense is important.
But the real conversation that's happening today isn't, Oh my God, I didn't know you can make 150 grand as a plumber or a welder.
Or, Oh my God, I had no idea That plumbers were in such demand here, here, and here.
The conversation today is, oh my God, you're telling me I have to wait four days for a plumber a week?
You're telling me I have to wait eight days for an electrician?
This is happening.
Everything you just said is true, but underneath it is some really bad math, or troubling arithmetic, as Lincoln called it, with regard to...
The Civil War deaths.
Only here, the math goes like this.
Every year, five skilled trades people retire.
For every five who retire, two replace them.
Now it's closer to one and a half.
And it's been like that for nearly 20 years.
So we're seeing an incredible lack of interest and enthusiasm around these skilled trades.
The skills gap still gets a fair amount of press, but it's really a will gap.
I guess my answer is, it's true.
Inflation, super bad.
Inflation credentialing, something else we could talk about, a real problem.
The cost of college, an enormous problem.
The unintended consequences of forgiving student loans, all that stuff is part and parcel of the madness that's happening right now.
The entrepreneur who took the time to master a skill that's in demand is crushing it in this economy.
They're setting their own schedule and nobody's talking about them.
And that's too bad because as examples go, they're good ones.
We'll get to more of Mike Rowe in a moment.
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So let's talk about that fact that our economy has been geared
toward the college graduate for 60 years at this point.
That basically for the last three generations, there's been a huge push that every single person needs to go to college.
You and I talked about this back in 2018.
And many of these people are not getting degrees in anything productive.
It's not like they're going into a STEM field, where they're actually learning a skill set.
They're doing what I did, and they're getting a poli sci degree, mainly so they can go to law school.
Or if they can't go to law school, they get a poli sci degree and then hope to latch on at some sort of white-collar job doing desk work somewhere.
But a lot of those degrees are effectively worthless or counterproductive, given that they're now being put into serious debt.
So let's say that you have an 18-year-old, and you're now thinking about college.
This has actually become a big issue in my personal community because obviously you've
seen a wide increase in anti-Semitism on a lot of these college campuses.
So I'm getting a lot of questions on a personal level from Orthodox Jews who are coming to
me like, I have an 18-year-old.
My kid doesn't want to be a doctor, doesn't want to be an engineer.
What do I do with my kid?
And what I've been saying to them is you might want to think very seriously about seeing
if you can find an apprenticeship for your kid with a good business and seeing if you
can take all the money you're going to pour into college and then maybe give them a chestnut
that they can use to build a business once they actually have a skill set.
What's the case you'd make to an 18-year-old?
When is it good to go to college?
When is it bad to go to college?
What would you be telling an 18-year-old who isn't necessarily going to be a doctor?
Yeah, I mean it would have to be a very personal conversation.
One of the things I've become deeply skeptical of is cookie cutter advice, bromides, platitudes.
The desire to paint with a broad brush is part of the reason we got into this problem, right?
People started to say, in an attempt, To make a more persuasive case for higher education, they started to say all sorts of great things about those outcomes.
But then, as with all PR, we went too far.
And we weren't content to simply say, look at all the great things that higher education give you.
We had to say, if you don't do that, you're going to wind up over here turning a wrench with some vocational consolation prize.
Right?
Always happens.
We always, always, always go too far.
We're trying to make a case for a thing that needs some love, but we do it at the expense of all the other things.
Then you pull shop class out of high school contemporaneously with that and remove from view all optical proof of these other vocations and presto, you got a whole generation of kids who don't even know these jobs exist.
Right?
So we did that, and that was super dumb.
And now, you know, parents are looking for advice.
We are looking for a simple thing to say to an 18-year-old kid who's trying to weigh and measure the whole thing.
But it's tough for the reason you just brought up.
I always used to think, look, Regarding my own liberal arts education, I value it a great deal, but it didn't cost a great deal.
I went to a community college that happened to have some great teachers, and then I went to a university for a couple years.
Got my basic communications degree from Towson State.
And when I add it all up, right, the community college, a couple years at the university, graduated in 1984, the whole thing was $12,200.
Today, the same course load, same schools, it's like $94,000.
Today, the same course load, same schools, it's like $94,000.
And so my thing was always, look, you can't say a thing is valuable at any cost without
having a rational conversation about debt.
So I always kind of stayed in, in that lane.
And in that lane, I've been able to say, look, I got this device here.
You know, I, like we said earlier, I'm, I'm tapped into 99% of the known information in the history of time.
I just watched a lecture on my device over at MIT for free.
Okay.
So, you know, the access to all of that information is wildly different than it was when I graduated in the mid-80s from school.
And the fact that the price has increased at the rate it has, I mean, nothing, Ben, nothing in the history of Western civilization has become more expensive than a four-year degree over the last 40 years.
Not energy, not real estate, not healthcare.
Nothing, right?
And yet...
It's still there.
So I still make that point a lot.
But to your point, the idea that not only is it too expensive, but it's damn dangerous.
That too many of these schools are aggressively and willfully ignoring our past, if not changing our past.
I hate to say indoctrination centers because, you know, that's turning into a platitude as well.
And I don't want to paint with too broad a brush.
But I'll tell you this, I've been doing this 16 years, raising money for work ethic scholarships and giving a couple million bucks away every year.
Never before, not since Labor Day of 2008 anyway, has higher ed made my job easier.
Never before have the headlines sent more people with deep pockets to Microworks to say, you know something, I'm simply not going to reward Harvard.
And with respect, I know you graduated there, but come on, man, $51 billion in endowment, and we are now forgiving the loans from some Harvard grads?
What are we doing?
I mean, tell me if I'm wrong.
I think I got this right, though.
In the late 1950s, the average GPA for a Harvard graduate was something like 2.6.
2.7?
Today it's 3.9?
Talk about inflation.
What's happening at Harvard, what's happening at Brown, what's happening at Dartmouth and Yale and so forth is extraordinary, both on the front that you mentioned, the protests, the plagiarism tearing through the administration.
All of that stuff is making parents and donors nervous in ways that are totally different from the mere outrageousness of the cost.
So what do I tell an 18-year-old in light of all of that?
I say put every single option on the table, and I mean from apprenticeships, all of the scholarships, the Ivy League, community colleges, every single thing, and don't forget about the magic box that gives you access to the best liberal arts degree you could ever have at an affordable price.
Don't forget that.
But weigh it, and measure it, and make your decision, and know that in the words of Led Zeppelin, there'll still be time to change the roads you're on.
There's so many bubbles that are associated with higher education.
There's the price bubble, where obviously the demand has outstripped the supply largely because of subsidies from the government, because you can get easy, cheap money from the government to go to college, and so everything the government subsidizes has become more expensive.
And then you have the ideological bubble that has expanded and expanded and expanded and
I think separated off the normal American from the universities in a particularly perverse
way.
I really think that, I've said this for a long time, there's been a lot of attempts
to explain the phenomenon of Donald Trump or the blue collar love for Donald Trump as
a sort of reflection of economic concerns.
What I've always said is that that's wrong.
It's a cultural concern.
It's the fact that Donald Trump took these people seriously as opposed to all the college
graduates who were staffing up the Obama administration, really kind of looked down on people who worked
blue collar jobs and who saw those people as having bitter clinger values.
Donald Trump has always represented a cultural challenge to an endemic hegemony of the left more than he has an economic challenge per se.
And so there's that bubble, this ideological bubble that exists on campus.
And then there's this third bubble that I think is really going to burst pretty quickly.
And that's something we talked about back in 2018, but with regard to blue collar jobs.
And as it turns out, it's actually more of a threat to white collar jobs, and that is AI.
So there's a lot of talk about how AI was going to put a bunch of blue collar workers
out of work circa 2018.
And here there was a lot of talk specifically about, say, truck drivers.
And that was a concern.
It remains a concern.
We are close to self-driving technology, which is going to lower the cost on a lot of goods and services, obviously, because shipping costs are very large when you're talking about supply chains.
However, the vast majority of jobs that are set to just get destroyed by AI are all in the white-collar domain.
A huge number of lawyers are going to lose their jobs because of AI.
A huge number of journalists are going to lose their jobs because of AI.
If you have a college degree in the liberal arts, your job just became way more expendable.
If you have an art degree, AI is gonna be able to outdo you very quickly.
I don't know whether that's because it was made by people who had those kinds of degrees,
or whether it's simply that it's easier to synthesize information in these sorts of verbal
or artistic forms than it is to actually work in the real world.
And you've seen this with machines.
Machines are very good at performing simple tasks, but they can't clean your room for you,
because that involves a bunch of different tasks put together.
It's like there's gonna be a resurgence in the blue collar market,
and there's gonna be a downturn in some of the white collar market.
Look, if you're a fan of irony, it's delicious.
And I say that with great respect to anybody who's gonna be adversely impacted,
but I spent a lot of time, 2016, 17, 18, every symposium I was invited to,
every talk I gave, every think tank that welcomed me,
It always came back, not to AI, but to tech in general, and robotics, and the displacement impact that that was going to have on the jobs that my foundation typically focuses on.
And I spent a lot of time, you know, trying to thread that needle.
I talked a lot about the Luddite revolution.
I talked about the fact that, look, it's not going to be as clear as you think it is.
There will be an impact.
And there are some robotic welding situations happening now that are Mind-bogglingly efficient and effective, and it did have an impact.
But it didn't have the impact that anyone thought, not nearly to the degree.
In fact, if you want job security right now, it is plumbing, steam fitting, electric, and it's the skilled trades.
It's all that stuff.
It's never been more secure than it is right now.
But wow, dude, the AI thing.
Somebody sent me a link the other day.
And said, you just got to click on this, Mike.
I asked the program to narrate a couple of paragraphs of this thing I'm working on in the style of Mike Rowe narrating Deadliest Catch.
And I clicked on it, and I listened to it.
And had he not told me what it was, I would have simply assumed, yeah, that's something I did five or six years ago.
I don't remember it, but it's me.
Well, it's not.
And so you're right.
I believe the impact on all the fields you mentioned is going to be real, but you mentioned art too.
And I'd love to riff on that with you for a minute because when you take the art out of a thing, whatever the thing is, that's, that's almost always the beginning of the end of the thing.
And it's true of shop class.
It's true of the skilled trades.
You know, I'm old enough to remember when I was in high school, that stuff was called the vocational arts.
And then they took out the art, and it became VOTEC.
Once you hyphenate something, you know, forget it.
The end is near.
VOTEC turns into a bunch of squishy other acronyms I don't even remember.
And then we just settled on SHOP, right?
SHOP.
And then we walked it behind the barn and shot it.
And that's how we got SHOP Class out of high school, right?
We started by retweaking the language and removing the art.
When I think of AI and when I think of the possibility, I mean, what are you going to do when the machine with the help of AI can create a Picasso or A Manet or a Monet or a Renoir or a Da Vinci that is virtually indistinguishable, even with the greatest authenticators and the greatest umpires coming in.
And when they can't tell the difference between a Beatles song that was just discovered that nobody ever heard and the fake that was just discovered that nobody ever heard, right?
What's going to happen to the way we think about creativity and originality and ownership and money?
How are we going to assign a value to a fake that's better than the original?
What is scarcity going to mean in all of these places?
It's going to not just change the way people get paid to do stuff, it's going to fundamentally Jack, with our whole value system and the way we assign gratitude to a thing, right?
If a difficult thing is now made with such ease, how are we to think about that, too?
Final point.
I'm involved in a minor legal matter at the moment, and I asked ChatGPT a legal question.
And what came back in Fifteen seconds were six perfectly worded, chronologically sensible paragraphs that analyzed this fairly complicated legal matter in a way that took my actual attorney three weeks, and I don't even want to say how much money.
Right?
So, all of this is true.
And it's all happening.
And NVIDIA is now worth 3 trillion plus dollars.
And it's happening right in front of us, Ben.
Right in front of us.
And, you know, back to the very, very beginning of our conversation, part of what is happening, we don't have time to process this.
We don't have time to process the history 250 years ago.
It seems.
We don't have time.
I think we still have collective PSD from the lockdowns.
We don't have time to read the real Anthony Fauci, although you should.
It's pretty great.
There are so many important things that we don't have time to process that I think that too goes into this whole boolean base of that which has left us breathless and disconnected and fearful and yet weirdly certain in all of our unfounded opinions.
I mean, I think that people even now are underestimating what AI is going to do.
I remember I was first shown an exhibition of ChatGPT-1, like the original version, it must have been two and a half
years ago.
And during this exhibition, I remember, they said, the person who was showing it to me, said that they had given it this prompt, and the prompt was a basic political question, like, can liberal democracy survive?
And it churned out five paragraphs of pretty well-written prose about the conflicts between liberalism and democracy and all of this kind of stuff.
And I remember my wife was there, too.
We looked at each other like, that can't be real.
And, of course, not only was it real, it was, you know, a very early iteration.
And then we came back to a similar seminar a year later, and I was noting to somebody, well, you know, I've been playing with ChatGPT a little bit online, and I can see these errors.
I've made videos about it.
We're like three versions beyond that.
What you're seeing publicly, we are way beyond that.
What I'm being told by people who work in this industry is that we're three to five years away from artificial general intelligence, which is a completely different thing than what we're talking about now.
Artificial intelligence is you enter a prompt and then the AI answers you by giving you the best answer it can.
We're getting to the point with artificial general intelligence where it prompts itself,
where it basically decides what questions it wants to ask and then it pursues those
answers faster than any human brain or network of human brains can.
And that's going to boggle everybody's mind.
I mean, it's going to destroy the way everything works.
And so I think that ironically what you're actually going to see is a reversion to many
of the things that we have abandoned in favor of the tech world.
So we abandoned getting together in person in favor of the tech world.
We abandoned, you know, church in favor of the tech world, in favor of sort of pseudo-social
interaction.
But it turns out that the way that we're going to end up finding human connection is going
to not, we're not going to be able to mediate that via technology anymore.
We're actually going to have to, like, get together in person.
We're going to have to go to events again.
We're going to have to see people face-to-face, and that's going to receive enormous priority because everything else, as you say, can be done unbelievably cheaply.
If I want to have a conversation with Mike Rowe two years from now, I'm just going to be able to type in, speak to me as Mike Rowe and have a conversation with you, but it's not going to be the same as if you and I got together over a cup of coffee.
That's right.
Remember the old song?
I think it's so groovy now that people are finally getting together.
I think it's wonderful.
I think you're right.
I think there's going to be a giant reversion to something fundamental.
Back to my question, how long you want to wait for a plumber?
You know, AI is not going to change the answer to that.
The answer is going to be, I don't want to wait.
I want him now.
Right?
So some things that have been out of favor are going to become wildly Wildly in favor.
And so much of what we've been told is aspirational and what we've aspired to is going to freak us out.
And yeah, I don't even know how to think about it other than to say it is all going, I think, things are going to get so basic.
I posted something yesterday.
Riley Gaines was on my podcast.
I mean, brave, brave, brave kid, 24 years old, you know, and, and I, I said to her on the podcast and I just wrote this and I might live to regret it.
I don't know.
But I said, you know, Riley, you are, you're the, uh, you're the kid in the emperor's new clothes.
You're, you're the only one surrounded by all those talents, people who, who pointed and said a thing.
That everybody was pretending not to see.
And I only bring that up because I think in some way our whole conversation is informed by people who are willing to say the thing that they clearly see to be true.
Those who disagree, but the majority of people in Hans Christian Andersen's story were the townspeople.
And they were the ones who had to figure out whether or not to open their mouth.
And most of them didn't.
And then they had to figure out whether or not to open their mouth after the kid said what was self-evident.
And some of them still didn't, right?
But many did.
And that dynamic is at work with everything we've talked about.
It's at work with AI.
It's at work with our politics.
It's at work with our history.
Maybe it's because we have so much information at our disposal coming at us from so many different directions that we can find something to automatically gainsay whatever it is the other side says they see.
But we are entering this brave new world, you know, where we're all seeing the same thing but concluding different things as a result.
And I don't even know what to make of that, except to quote Huxley, who said, in Brave New World, I think, that the greatest threat to democracy was total anarchy, but the second greatest threat was total efficiency.
And what will we do when efficiency has so completely eclipsed effectiveness that all we're left with is this calculus of time and verisimilitude.
And, final thought, you said what came back was some pretty good prose.
You know?
And that was my feeling too with my legal experience, but back to the art.
Look, this is the first batter in the first inning of a very long game.
You and I are going to live to see what comes back is some pretty good poetry.
And that's when I get, that's when I'm not sure what to say.
It's wildly improved.
I mean, I remember just even a couple of years ago, it couldn't make a joke.
Like it had no sense of humor.
There was no way that it could, it could mimic a human sense of humor.
And now you could use it as a joke writer.
I mean, it's, it's, it's gotten, it's gotten that much better that quickly.
I don't know if you've seen some of the, some of the artistic renderings that have been done by, I think it's called Soma, uh, the, the, the video AI where you insert Where are you, Ben?
like man walking through rainstorm with trees in the background casting shadows on his face
and he has a downcast look on his face.
And it churns out something that looks like an actor doing that in a few minutes.
What that will program for is people who can write scripts, obviously,
and who can be descriptive in their language for the prompts.
But it's gonna transform everything.
Where are you, Ben?
I'm like, what do you think?
I mean, I heard Tucker Carlson say the other day, something about, look, I mean, if we see it coming,
like what's the argument for not blowing up the data centers?
Right.
And my argument for not blowing up the data centers, and I had this exact argument with Tucker back in, I think, 2018 about self-driving trucks.
He was making the argument that you should basically blow them up then so that people can continue to drive trucks.
And my answer to that was that that's not a real solution because AI is being developed by a multiplicity of countries right now.
And so you can either be the leader in that or you can get your ass kicked in it.
Those are basically your two choices.
There's no choice where you just get rid of all of these efficiency based developments and then you don't get overtaken by other countries with significantly worse values.
I mean, what I think that is going to emerge is, as always, the market ends up You know, creating new jobs in new ways that none of us have ever thought of.
I mean, many of us, I have a job that didn't, it literally didn't exist 30 years ago.
It existed in, like, a weirdly other form, in sort of terrestrial radio, maybe.
And if you go back 100 years, it existed in the form of giving lectures on circuit, maybe.
But, like, running a podcasting company, it's a medium that didn't exist, right?
I mean, a giant media company that does the kind of stuff that we do.
So, it's gonna generate jobs in ways that we have not really thought of, and in some ways, it's gonna democratize those jobs.
In the sense that if you look at the various revolutions that have taken place over time, the agricultural revolution basically democratizes the use of animal power.
The industrial revolution, it democratizes the use of machine power.
The information revolution democratizes access to information, which used to be the preserve of just the very wealthy.
And what we're getting now with the AI revolution is a democratization of intelligence itself, which is a shockingly different thing.
What people are worried about is that the meritocracy is geared on behalf of the intelligent.
What happens when intelligence is available to literally everyone?
Where you don't have to be, you know, a trained writer from Oberlin in order to pen a novel.
You can just say, okay, here's my ideas for the novel and I'd like it in the style of X. And suddenly that intelligence is available to you in a way that it simply wasn't before.
And so you could see outgrowths of skill sets that are, it's in the same way that steroids, you know, can make a baseball player hit the ball further.
AI is going to make people able to do things that they weren't able to do before in intelligent ways that they didn't originally have the capacity to do probably.
But back to appreciation, what's the impact on the townspeople?
Right.
I mean, it's always easier to default to the truck driver or the artist or the, you know, the person who is about to be displaced from the thing.
But how will AI improve or foster a greater level of gratitude?
Or emotional intelligence or anything with the townspeople.
And I only ask because, you know, the audience always gets left behind in these kinds of conversations.
You know, we tend to default to, you know, the performer, whether it's a comedian or a musician or, you know, somebody's in front of a bunch of people making sounds, doing something, right?
Take the townspeople out of it.
Take them away, and suddenly we're left with a kind of, well, I mean, it's the ultimate arrogance.
We're just building little monuments to ourselves, little prototypes, just doing things in front of no one.
So I think about the townspeople in that story all of the time now, because I think the audience, by and large, has been relegated to something That's less important than the performer itself?
No, I think that's true.
Anything, right now, it used to be that the distance between a luxury good and a common good was 10, 20 years, right?
Something that a very rich person had was something a very rich person had, you know, for 20 years and then eventually the price would lower through competition and eventually it would be a commonplace item that we all enjoy.
I remember a time, you remember a time, when cell phones, you know, the big clunky things, those were only for rich people.
That's something that rich people had.
This is like the late 80s.
And then now everybody has that, including very poor people.
The distance from luxury item to common item is now incredibly quick.
I mean, we're talking about, like, months.
The access that rich people have to AI is effectively the same as the access that poor people have to AI, which could actually create a certain leveling effect that could be good.
On the other hand, as you say, you know, what is the impact going to be on the common man?
It's going to have two impacts, in my view.
One impact is going to be the same as every other market-based advance has had.
Things are going to become better and they're going to become cheaper.
So, your access to goods and services are going to become more efficient because that's always
what happens when you develop new products and services that are incredibly efficient. On
the other hand, I think when people say two cheers for the free market instead of three
cheers, I've always had sort of an objection to that in the sense that I think when people say
that, what they're trying to say is that the market is not everything. And my response is
always, who said the market was everything?
Meaning like, that's like saying two cheers for a hammer because it's not a screwdriver.
Well, right, but it's a hammer.
So, like, the market is very good at being a market.
It's not very good at being a virtue generator.
It's not very good at being a meaning generator.
The market doesn't generate meaning.
The market channels your feelings of meaning into a pricing system.
That's it.
What generates the original feelings of meaning, that's a very different thing.
That's why I think that The dual effect of a very highly technocratic society and a very highly secular society.
That's really dangerous because when you don't have any centralizing set of values and you combine that with the ability to do literally anything.
Then you're looking at kind of a Noah generation, right?
You're looking at the pre-Noah flood generation.
You can do anything you want, and you have the capacity to do anything you want, and you're incredibly rich, and that's going to lead to the kind of arrogance that you're talking about.
But what leads to a reversion away from that arrogance are those social centers I was talking about.
And predominantly here, I mean, people need to go back to church.
I mean, it's really just that simple.
It sounds really, you know, basic, but it's true.
If you go back to You know, the richest people of all time in the early 20th century.
You're talking about, like, Rockefeller.
So Rockefeller was very famous for being a church-going person.
He went to church and the idea was that he went to the same church as the poor guy.
Right now, in American society, those institutions don't exist anymore.
What is the thing that the very rich people go to, that the poor people also go to?
Even if you go to a common event now, that's not the way that it works.
If you're very rich, you've got the luxury box, and if you're a common person, you're in the bleachers.
That income gap is really large.
But if you go to my shul, if you go to my synagogue, then there are people of all different income strata who are not only shoulder yeah exactly I mean
they're all there also they're going to each other's houses for lunch and we'll
go to people's apartments that are tiny will go to people's big
giant houses like that if that's used I think America used to habitually be that I
mean this is what the total talks about is sort of this idea that that
America was a giant town square and people used to associate we've taken away all
the associational activities and when you get rid of that it's going to be
nearly impossible for technological development not to end in complete isolation
from one another I got my I'm in such violent agreement with that
You know, the country still needs the Boy Scouts.
I'm an Eagle Scout.
I sent out 50,000 congratulatory letters.
Sorry to be a stickler about that, but you know, I'm an Eagle Scout.
I sent out 50,000 congratulatory letters.
I largely forgot about the impact that organization had on my life until I was in my 40s and was
able to look back at it and see it's the connective tissue you're talking about, Skills USA, the
4-H club, and then as you get older, the Jaycees, the Lions Club, the Rotarians.
Bush got a lot of crap for talking about the thousand points of light, but that's what all of these things are.
They're the grout in the giant wall of tile.
that holds everything together.
And we have waged a weird kind of war on those entities.
And look, in my foundation, I've got this thing called a sweat pledge.
And I get all kinds of grief, you know, for this, because it's a pledge you have to take.
Now, I can't enforce it, but because we award work ethic scholarships, we try and put some semblance of sides on that.
And there are various hoops people have to jump through.
But this sweat pledge, skill and work ethic aren't taboo.
Terribly clever acronym that came to me after half a bottle of bourbon.
But it's not only out there, Ben, it's now a curriculum, and we're getting it into high schools, and the very first tenant on this 12-point pledge says, I believe I have hit the greatest lottery of all time.
I live in America.
I walk the earth.
Above all things, I'm grateful.
So, if you and I can't agree on the importance of gratitude in the scheme of things, then my foundation can't help you, and this particular pile of free money is simply not for you.
And this thing goes down the list.
I said earlier, nobody wants a lecture.
They don't.
Nobody wants a sermon.
They don't.
But sometimes they kind of need both.
And this idea that these old virtues still matter, not to the benefit of rapacious capitalists like Rockefeller, who did in fact benefit from people's work ethic.
They also benefit the people themselves.
These virtues are truly egalitarian.
And I've never met anybody who's suffered because they had a decent attitude and a healthy understanding of delayed gratification and some measure of personal responsibility shot through with a commitment to work ethic.
Nobody's ever been hurt by that.
So, sorry for the tangent, but when you combine a code A credo with, you know, slogans and mottos.
These things are easy to make fun of.
And I've made fun of them many times in many different circles.
But they matter.
And when you ask a kid, or even an adult, to hold up your hand, dammit, and read these things out loud, and tell me we're on the same page, or beat it.
That needs to happen.
It needs to happen in schools, and it needs to happen in churches.
What else is a church but a bunch of like-minded people who came together around a shared understanding or belief system on some basic things, none of which have anything to do with your tax return?
To your point.
So, yeah man, that intangible stuff, that grout between the tiles, that is the very stuff that we're talking about.
It's why I made the movie, I did.
It's why I run the foundation, I do.
It's why I try to tell the kinds of stories I can.
And it's why, you know, I talk to people about all of this.
This discourse, man.
This is the public square.
We're doing it right now, Ben.
I'm glad you had me back.
By the way, I was happy to help launch your little Sunday program all those years ago.
You're welcome.
Well, the movie is something to stand for.
Mike Rowe.
I can't wait to see it myself.
Mike, really appreciate the time.
And of course, it's great to be with you.
Likewise, let's do it again in, I don't know, five years, five months, or we'll get our avatars and our ciphers together and we'll just hit the proper keys and nobody will know the difference.
Michael, I really appreciate it.
I appreciate it.
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