Best known as the dirtiest man on TV from the Emmy Award-winning TV series, Dirty Jobs, Mike 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, a historical reenactment of 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 hot minute, and it s time to catch you up to speed. In the meantime, enjoy this episode of the Sunday Special. - The Weekly Standard Subscribe to our new podcast, Six Figures, wherever you get your news and information about what s going on in your life. If you re looking for a good time, you can find us on social media, subscribe to our podcast, tweet or text us using the hashtag on Insta: if you re listening to the podcast, and more importantly, tweet us what s good and what s up in your thoughts about it s a good one! I ll be listening to us on , right or what s cool, I ll say it s good, right and I ll do that sweet or I ll talk about it, right like that s that s good or I s good seedeed, right s or that s not that s real s , etc. , and so on, right or so much so I ll tweet it s really that s so much of that s sie s , so I s got it like that so much etc & so on and so forth, etc. etc. And all that kind of thing. Thank you so much, bye, bye
00:00:32.000On this episode of the Sunday Special, Mike Rowe joins us for a conversation about America's backbone, the American workforce.
00:00:38.000Best 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.
00:00:49.000The 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.
00:00:56.000On his podcast, The Way I Heard It, Rowe hosts conversations with guests on everything from history to Hollywood.
00:01:01.000This summer, Rowe's latest project is an unapologetically patriotic feature film called Something to Stand For.
00:01:06.000Part historical reenactment and part documentary, Rowe travels to our nation's capital to honor the patriots who built our country.
00:01:12.000In 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.
00:01:18.000We also explore the implications of AI on white-collar workers and forgotten institutions of community in American lives.
00:01:23.000Don't miss this inspiring conversation with Mike Rowe, one of America's most prominent advocates for American
00:02:16.000The 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.
00:02:27.000Something 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.
00:02:41.000It'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.
00:02:52.000I mean, let's talk about that a little bit.
00:02:53.000I mean, the fact that, you know, things that are just sort of baseline patriotic now have become controversial.
00:02:58.000I 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.
00:03:05.000The vast majority of Americans are going to watch something like your movie and they're not going to feel the politics of it.
00:03:12.000But the chattering class obviously is going to.
00:03:15.000What's happened to create that divide?
00:03:34.000But I do think the anti-Americanism that's crept into the conversation is a different thing.
00:03:43.000And 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.
00:03:52.000For people who still see themselves first and foremost as Americans.
00:03:56.000And it is unfortunate that there is a cohort today that fundamentally sees themselves as something else.
00:04:08.000But 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?
00:04:45.000But 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.
00:04:55.000We connected at the World War II Memorial, the Marines Memorial.
00:05:00.000It 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.
00:05:17.000You 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.
00:05:32.000Ever so often, Joe Biden pays lip service to this idea, but this used to be sort of a commonly understood thing.
00:05:38.000And 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.
00:05:47.000I 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.
00:05:54.000And 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.
00:06:07.000And you have to have the respect for those people to at least acknowledge that they have a different belief system.
00:06:10.000They're not just fundamentally stupid.
00:06:12.000That that belief system is fundamentally opposed to your own.
00:06:15.000And, 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?
00:06:26.000What kind of atrocities did America commit during World War II?
00:06:29.000Do 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?
00:06:46.000You 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.
00:07:00.000So anybody with a modicum of curiosity Look, you might find experts who disagree.
00:07:07.000In 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.
00:07:19.000It's why my podcast is called The Way I Heard It, honestly.
00:07:22.000I mean, six years ago, It seemed pretty clear we were headed in this direction.
00:07:27.000And 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.
00:08:39.000The 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.
00:08:53.000You 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.
00:09:01.000Like, 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.
00:09:12.000It'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.
00:09:18.000So if somebody opposes the United States, it's always blowback.
00:09:21.000It's always because we must have done something to piss them off.
00:09:25.000And this is the whole anti-Western point of view, is that the West is constantly responsible for the sins of everybody else.
00:09:31.000That if there's a terror attack, it must be because somebody made those terrorists super angry.
00:09:36.000So if only we had done something better, then the terrorists wouldn't be angry.
00:09:39.000Or if only we had been kinder to the Japanese during World War II, then Pearl Harbor never happened.
00:09:44.000Or if only we were less interventionist on the foreign policy front, then we wouldn't see chaos all over the world.
00:09:49.000As 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.
00:09:55.000And so then the question becomes who's making a good decision versus who's making a bad decision.
00:10:00.000And put on top of that the trap of the binary?
00:10:04.000I 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.
00:10:31.000Oh, he thinks America's the best, period.
00:10:36.000The 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
00:11:35.000And they can't, it seems, think about what's really on the table.
00:11:41.000I think maybe it's because judging is so much easier to do and so much more fun, right?
00:11:47.000So 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.
00:12:12.000One 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.
00:12:19.000We can't blame them for their activities.
00:12:21.000They're the same exact people who are very, very harsh on the Founding Fathers.
00:12:24.000So they'll be very harsh on George Washington for being a slaveholder, which, of course, I mean, slavery is bad.
00:12:30.000But turns out that most of the world did not get that in approximately 1770.
00:12:34.000In fact, most of the world was still holding slaves in 1770.
00:12:38.000And so the understanding that is completely meritless for them.
00:12:43.000Those 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.
00:12:49.000Those people require all of the context and nuance that can be mustered for them.
00:12:52.000But 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.
00:13:01.000This 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.
00:13:12.000Robert George, my friend, is the philosophy professor over at Princeton.
00:13:16.000He does a thought exercise with his students where he says, okay, let's say that you're living in 1861 Alabama.
00:13:36.000But, you know, we have this very flattering view of ourselves that we are the only perfect people in history.
00:13:41.000And everybody else in history is a sinner, even if those are the people who develop the principles that we stand on the back of.
00:13:47.000If 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.
00:13:56.000And, you know, I didn't live through the enlightenment, but I do think that the enemies of actual thought and understanding are certainty.
00:14:26.000We look back and we are so certain That we would have not made the same mistakes that were made then.
00:14:33.000And by the way, never mind there's more slavery on the planet today than there was in 1860.
00:14:39.000Just out of sight, out of mind for most Americans, but that's the case.
00:14:44.000And then drag yourself 160 years forward.
00:14:47.000And you know, what are our great, great Great-grandchildren are going to look back at us.
00:14:52.000What statues currently beloved in the public square are liable to be torn down a century and a half down the road?
00:15:02.000How are we going to think about, oh I don't know, meat eaters?
00:15:07.000For 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.
00:15:40.000But 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.
00:16:02.000But, 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?
00:16:11.000It'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.
00:16:28.000And 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.
00:16:40.000And that's what we somehow have to get back to, I think.
00:16:43.000We'll get to more on this in just one moment.
00:16:47.000Like, for example, let's say that there's a judge who worked for you, and that judge put together a bunch of specious charges, then worked the prosecutor to get somebody convicted unjustly.
00:16:56.000You know, I'm not referring to anybody in particular here, but let's say that you want to get rid of that person, you wanted somebody better.
00:17:01.000ZipRecruiter might be a good place to go.
00:17:35.000We've been using it here at DailyWire for literally years.
00:17:38.000You can try it right now at ZipRecruiter.com slash DailyWire.
00:17:40.000ZipRecruiter is the smartest way to hire.
00:17:43.000So, I want to ask you because obviously you're a master storyteller.
00:17:46.000Of the stories that you tell in Something to Stand For, do you have a personal favorite?
00:17:50.000What's your favorite story that you talk about in the movie?
00:17:53.000It'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.
00:18:01.000They're all a reveal, you know, and I don't want to wreck it for people, but I'll tell you...
00:18:09.000The 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.
00:18:26.000We 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.
00:18:38.000I film in Georgia, where the tax breaks are nice, but they're even better in Oklahoma.
00:18:43.000So 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.
00:18:49.000So this mostly takes place in Oklahoma.
00:18:52.000But to stitch it together, I drove the old Bronco into D.C.
00:18:59.000And while I was there, Ben, I went to Arlington, I went to all the big memorials, and their honor flights were everywhere.
00:19:09.000Old 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.
00:19:23.000Dude, 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.
00:19:59.000And again, final thought on it, it just goes to show.
00:20:02.000Part of the movie is very, very scripted.
00:20:05.000You 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.
00:20:13.000It'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.
00:20:33.000That is, that kind of storytelling does require a level of humility that demands you let go
00:20:40.000of your plan and point the camera at the most interesting thing that's going on.
00:20:44.000So you've made a career out of doing exactly that, is taking stories that may have been
00:20:48.000left behind and bringing those to light.
00:20:51.000Obviously that's true of dirty jobs and many of the blue collar jobs that seem to go neglected
00:21:30.000All these things have happened over the course of the past few years.
00:21:34.000And 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.
00:21:40.000So 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?
00:21:50.000However, 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.
00:22:08.000My foundation really tries to encourage a level of entrepreneurship along with the curiosity required to master a skill that's in demand.
00:22:18.000The 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.
00:22:28.000A guy spends $8,000 and gets his welding certification, and he begins to work.
00:22:36.000And then he expands that certification.
00:22:40.000Maybe 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
00:23:08.000They have more work than they can do, Ben.
00:23:11.000Today, 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.
00:23:22.000I talk about that all the time because debunking that nonsense is important.
00:23:27.000But 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.
00:23:34.000Or, Oh my God, I had no idea That plumbers were in such demand here, here, and here.
00:23:39.000The conversation today is, oh my God, you're telling me I have to wait four days for a plumber a week?
00:23:46.000You're telling me I have to wait eight days for an electrician?
00:23:53.000Everything you just said is true, but underneath it is some really bad math, or troubling arithmetic, as Lincoln called it, with regard to...
00:24:39.000Inflation credentialing, something else we could talk about, a real problem.
00:24:43.000The cost of college, an enormous problem.
00:24:46.000The unintended consequences of forgiving student loans, all that stuff is part and parcel of the madness that's happening right now.
00:24:54.000The entrepreneur who took the time to master a skill that's in demand is crushing it in this economy.
00:25:01.000They're setting their own schedule and nobody's talking about them.
00:25:06.000And that's too bad because as examples go, they're good ones.
00:25:10.000We'll get to more of Mike Rowe in a moment.
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00:26:20.000So let's talk about that fact that our economy has been geared
00:26:25.000toward the college graduate for 60 years at this point.
00:26:29.000That basically for the last three generations, there's been a huge push that every single person needs to go to college.
00:26:34.000You and I talked about this back in 2018.
00:26:36.000And many of these people are not getting degrees in anything productive.
00:26:39.000It's not like they're going into a STEM field, where they're actually learning a skill set.
00:26:42.000They're doing what I did, and they're getting a poli sci degree, mainly so they can go to law school.
00:26:46.000Or 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.
00:26:52.000But a lot of those degrees are effectively worthless or counterproductive, given that they're now being put into serious debt.
00:26:58.000So let's say that you have an 18-year-old, and you're now thinking about college.
00:27:02.000This has actually become a big issue in my personal community because obviously you've
00:27:04.000seen a wide increase in anti-Semitism on a lot of these college campuses.
00:27:09.000So I'm getting a lot of questions on a personal level from Orthodox Jews who are coming to
00:27:38.000What would you be telling an 18-year-old who isn't necessarily going to be a doctor?
00:27:41.000Yeah, I mean it would have to be a very personal conversation.
00:27:44.000One of the things I've become deeply skeptical of is cookie cutter advice, bromides, platitudes.
00:27:52.000The desire to paint with a broad brush is part of the reason we got into this problem, right?
00:27:57.000People 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.
00:28:09.000But then, as with all PR, we went too far.
00:28:12.000And we weren't content to simply say, look at all the great things that higher education give you.
00:28:17.000We 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.
00:28:30.000We'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.
00:28:36.000Then 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.
00:30:19.000So, you know, the access to all of that information is wildly different than it was when I graduated in the mid-80s from school.
00:30:29.000And 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.
00:30:42.000Not energy, not real estate, not healthcare.
00:30:56.000But to your point, the idea that not only is it too expensive, but it's damn dangerous.
00:31:03.000That too many of these schools are aggressively and willfully ignoring our past, if not changing our past.
00:31:11.000I hate to say indoctrination centers because, you know, that's turning into a platitude as well.
00:31:17.000And I don't want to paint with too broad a brush.
00:31:20.000But 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.
00:31:29.000Never before, not since Labor Day of 2008 anyway, has higher ed made my job easier.
00:31:37.000Never 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.
00:31:51.000And 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?
00:32:25.000What'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.
00:32:43.000All of that stuff is making parents and donors nervous in ways that are totally different from the mere outrageousness of the cost.
00:32:54.000So what do I tell an 18-year-old in light of all of that?
00:32:59.000I 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.
00:33:20.000But 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.
00:33:29.000There's so many bubbles that are associated with higher education.
00:33:31.000There'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.
00:33:44.000And then you have the ideological bubble that has expanded and expanded and expanded and
00:33:47.000I think separated off the normal American from the universities in a particularly perverse
00:34:53.000We 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.
00:35:03.000However, the vast majority of jobs that are set to just get destroyed by AI are all in the white-collar domain.
00:35:09.000A huge number of lawyers are going to lose their jobs because of AI.
00:35:12.000A huge number of journalists are going to lose their jobs because of AI.
00:35:16.000If you have a college degree in the liberal arts, your job just became way more expendable.
00:35:21.000If you have an art degree, AI is gonna be able to outdo you very quickly.
00:35:26.000I don't know whether that's because it was made by people who had those kinds of degrees,
00:35:30.000or whether it's simply that it's easier to synthesize information in these sorts of verbal
00:35:36.000or artistic forms than it is to actually work in the real world.
00:35:41.000Machines are very good at performing simple tasks, but they can't clean your room for you,
00:35:45.000because that involves a bunch of different tasks put together.
00:35:47.000It's like there's gonna be a resurgence in the blue collar market,
00:35:50.000and there's gonna be a downturn in some of the white collar market.
00:35:54.000Look, if you're a fan of irony, it's delicious.
00:35:59.000And I say that with great respect to anybody who's gonna be adversely impacted,
00:36:03.000but I spent a lot of time, 2016, 17, 18, every symposium I was invited to,
00:36:09.000every talk I gave, every think tank that welcomed me,
00:36:13.000It 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.
00:36:27.000And I spent a lot of time, you know, trying to thread that needle.
00:36:29.000I talked a lot about the Luddite revolution.
00:36:31.000I talked about the fact that, look, it's not going to be as clear as you think it is.
00:37:42.000I believe the impact on all the fields you mentioned is going to be real, but you mentioned art too.
00:37:49.000And 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.
00:38:28.000And then we walked it behind the barn and shot it.
00:38:31.000And that's how we got SHOP Class out of high school, right?
00:38:33.000We started by retweaking the language and removing the art.
00:38:38.000When 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.
00:39:01.000And 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?
00:39:14.000What's going to happen to the way we think about creativity and originality and ownership and money?
00:39:22.000How are we going to assign a value to a fake that's better than the original?
00:39:27.000What is scarcity going to mean in all of these places?
00:39:32.000It'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?
00:39:48.000If a difficult thing is now made with such ease, how are we to think about that, too?
00:39:57.000I'm involved in a minor legal matter at the moment, and I asked ChatGPT a legal question.
00:40:06.000And 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.
00:41:09.000There 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.
00:41:30.000I mean, I think that people even now are underestimating what AI is going to do.
00:41:35.000I remember I was first shown an exhibition of ChatGPT-1, like the original version, it must have been two and a half
00:41:42.000And 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?
00:41:55.000And it churned out five paragraphs of pretty well-written prose about the conflicts between liberalism and democracy and all of this kind of stuff.
00:42:03.000And I remember my wife was there, too.
00:42:04.000We looked at each other like, that can't be real.
00:42:06.000And, of course, not only was it real, it was, you know, a very early iteration.
00:42:10.000And 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.
00:42:21.000We're like three versions beyond that.
00:42:23.000What you're seeing publicly, we are way beyond that.
00:42:26.000What 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.
00:42:34.000Artificial intelligence is you enter a prompt and then the AI answers you by giving you the best answer it can.
00:42:41.000We're getting to the point with artificial general intelligence where it prompts itself,
00:42:45.000where it basically decides what questions it wants to ask and then it pursues those
00:42:49.000answers faster than any human brain or network of human brains can.
00:42:55.000And that's going to boggle everybody's mind.
00:42:57.000I mean, it's going to destroy the way everything works.
00:42:59.000And so I think that ironically what you're actually going to see is a reversion to many
00:43:04.000of the things that we have abandoned in favor of the tech world.
00:43:07.000So we abandoned getting together in person in favor of the tech world.
00:43:10.000We abandoned, you know, church in favor of the tech world, in favor of sort of pseudo-social
00:43:17.000But it turns out that the way that we're going to end up finding human connection is going
00:43:21.000to not, we're not going to be able to mediate that via technology anymore.
00:43:25.000We're actually going to have to, like, get together in person.
00:43:27.000We're going to have to go to events again.
00:43:29.000We'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.
00:43:36.000If 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.
00:44:40.000I 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.
00:44:53.000But I said, you know, Riley, you are, you're the, uh, you're the kid in the emperor's new clothes.
00:45:01.000You're, you're the only one surrounded by all those talents, people who, who pointed and said a thing.
00:45:08.000That everybody was pretending not to see.
00:45:13.000And 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.
00:45:25.000Those who disagree, but the majority of people in Hans Christian Andersen's story were the townspeople.
00:45:33.000And they were the ones who had to figure out whether or not to open their mouth.
00:46:01.000Maybe 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.
00:46:14.000But we are entering this brave new world, you know, where we're all seeing the same thing but concluding different things as a result.
00:46:24.000And 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.
00:46:43.000And what will we do when efficiency has so completely eclipsed effectiveness that all we're left with is this calculus of time and verisimilitude.
00:47:02.000And, final thought, you said what came back was some pretty good prose.
00:47:36.000There was no way that it could, it could mimic a human sense of humor.
00:47:39.000And now you could use it as a joke writer.
00:47:41.000I mean, it's, it's, it's gotten, it's gotten that much better that quickly.
00:47:43.000I 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?
00:47:52.000like man walking through rainstorm with trees in the background casting shadows on his face
00:47:58.000and he has a downcast look on his face.
00:48:00.000And it churns out something that looks like an actor doing that in a few minutes.
00:48:05.000What that will program for is people who can write scripts, obviously,
00:48:11.000and who can be descriptive in their language for the prompts.
00:48:30.000And 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.
00:48:36.000He was making the argument that you should basically blow them up then so that people can continue to drive trucks.
00:48:40.000And my answer to that was that that's not a real solution because AI is being developed by a multiplicity of countries right now.
00:48:47.000And so you can either be the leader in that or you can get your ass kicked in it.
00:48:52.000There'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.
00:49:01.000I 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.
00:49:09.000I mean, many of us, I have a job that didn't, it literally didn't exist 30 years ago.
00:49:13.000It existed in, like, a weirdly other form, in sort of terrestrial radio, maybe.
00:49:18.000And if you go back 100 years, it existed in the form of giving lectures on circuit, maybe.
00:49:21.000But, like, running a podcasting company, it's a medium that didn't exist, right?
00:49:26.000I mean, a giant media company that does the kind of stuff that we do.
00:49:29.000So, it's gonna generate jobs in ways that we have not really thought of, and in some ways, it's gonna democratize those jobs.
00:49:36.000In 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.
00:49:46.000The industrial revolution, it democratizes the use of machine power.
00:49:52.000The information revolution democratizes access to information, which used to be the preserve of just the very wealthy.
00:49:57.000And what we're getting now with the AI revolution is a democratization of intelligence itself, which is a shockingly different thing.
00:50:03.000What people are worried about is that the meritocracy is geared on behalf of the intelligent.
00:50:07.000What happens when intelligence is available to literally everyone?
00:50:11.000Where you don't have to be, you know, a trained writer from Oberlin in order to pen a novel.
00:50:16.000You 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.
00:50:24.000And 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.
00:50:32.000AI 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.
00:50:40.000But back to appreciation, what's the impact on the townspeople?
00:50:45.000I 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.
00:50:55.000But how will AI improve or foster a greater level of gratitude?
00:51:04.000Or emotional intelligence or anything with the townspeople.
00:51:09.000And I only ask because, you know, the audience always gets left behind in these kinds of conversations.
00:51:16.000You 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?
00:51:33.000Take them away, and suddenly we're left with a kind of, well, I mean, it's the ultimate arrogance.
00:51:42.000We're just building little monuments to ourselves, little prototypes, just doing things in front of no one.
00:51:49.000So 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?
00:52:10.000Anything, right now, it used to be that the distance between a luxury good and a common good was 10, 20 years, right?
00:52:17.000Something 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.
00:52:27.000I remember a time, you remember a time, when cell phones, you know, the big clunky things, those were only for rich people.
00:52:33.000That's something that rich people had.
00:52:44.000The 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.
00:52:52.000On the other hand, as you say, you know, what is the impact going to be on the common man?
00:52:55.000It's going to have two impacts, in my view.
00:52:57.000One impact is going to be the same as every other market-based advance has had.
00:53:01.000Things are going to become better and they're going to become cheaper.
00:53:03.000So, your access to goods and services are going to become more efficient because that's always
00:53:08.000what happens when you develop new products and services that are incredibly efficient. On
00:53:12.000the other hand, I think when people say two cheers for the free market instead of three
00:53:16.000cheers, I've always had sort of an objection to that in the sense that I think when people say
00:53:20.000that, what they're trying to say is that the market is not everything. And my response is
00:53:24.000always, who said the market was everything?
00:53:26.000Meaning like, that's like saying two cheers for a hammer because it's not a screwdriver.
00:53:46.000What generates the original feelings of meaning, that's a very different thing.
00:53:49.000That's why I think that The dual effect of a very highly technocratic society and a very highly secular society.
00:53:58.000That'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.
00:54:06.000Then you're looking at kind of a Noah generation, right?
00:54:08.000You're looking at the pre-Noah flood generation.
00:54:09.000You 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.
00:54:17.000But what leads to a reversion away from that arrogance are those social centers I was talking about.
00:54:22.000And predominantly here, I mean, people need to go back to church.
00:55:00.000But 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
00:55:08.000they're all there also they're going to each other's houses for lunch and we'll
00:55:11.000go to people's apartments that are tiny will go to people's big
00:55:13.000giant houses like that if that's used I think America used to habitually be that I
00:55:19.000mean this is what the total talks about is sort of this idea that that
00:55:22.000America was a giant town square and people used to associate we've taken away all
00:55:25.000the associational activities and when you get rid of that it's going to be
00:55:30.000nearly impossible for technological development not to end in complete isolation
00:55:35.000from one another I got my I'm in such violent agreement with that
00:55:40.000You know, the country still needs the Boy Scouts.
00:56:35.000And we have waged a weird kind of war on those entities.
00:56:42.000And look, in my foundation, I've got this thing called a sweat pledge.
00:56:46.000And I get all kinds of grief, you know, for this, because it's a pledge you have to take.
00:56:52.000Now, I can't enforce it, but because we award work ethic scholarships, we try and put some semblance of sides on that.
00:57:00.000And there are various hoops people have to jump through.
00:57:03.000But this sweat pledge, skill and work ethic aren't taboo.
00:57:06.000Terribly clever acronym that came to me after half a bottle of bourbon.
00:57:11.000But 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.
00:57:34.000So, 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.
00:57:57.000And 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.
00:58:11.000They also benefit the people themselves.
00:58:17.000And 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.
00:58:51.000And 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.
00:59:03.000It needs to happen in schools, and it needs to happen in churches.
00:59:07.000What 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?
01:00:06.000And of course, it's great to be with you.
01:00:08.000Likewise, 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.