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

00:00:00.000 She says, Michael, your grandfather is not doing well.

00:00:03.000 He's 92, right?

00:00:05.000 It would be so terrific, though, if before he died, he could turn on the television and see you doing something that looked like work.

00:00:22.000 Here we are in the Sunday special with Mike Rowe.

00:00:24.000 We'll get to talking with him.

00:00:25.000 He's the host of Dirty Jobs, and the way I heard it, it'll be awesome.

00:00:27.000 But first, let's talk about your impending death. 0.98

00:00:29.000 So, you're going to die sometime soon. 0.99

00:00:31.000 Maybe not that soon. 0.99

00:00:32.000 Hopefully it'll be decades.

00:00:33.000 But when you do, you're going to feel bad because you didn't have life insurance.

00:00:37.000 71% of people said they need life insurance.

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00:01:29.000 Well, Mike, thanks so much for coming by.

00:01:31.000 Really appreciate it.

00:01:32.000 That was terrific.

00:01:33.000 Thank you.

00:01:34.000 Honestly.

00:01:34.000 You're the first person who's ever praised the ads at the beginning of the show, so thank you for that.

00:01:38.000 Procrastination is the thief of time.

00:01:41.000 I really thought you were going to sneak it in there with that, but kidding aside, I love that there's no daylight between you and the people who make the program possible.

00:01:51.000 It's refreshingly, dare I say, authentic.

00:01:54.000 Well, thank you.

00:01:55.000 I appreciate it.

00:01:55.000 Because usually what I get is, how dare you interrupt these great conversations with your money grabs?

00:02:00.000 And then I have to remind people they're watching the show for free because this is how commerce operates.

00:02:03.000 Yeah.

00:02:04.000 People don't like to be reminded of that.

00:02:05.000 You see, the filthy lucre somehow pollutes what would otherwise be a really wonderful series of observations.

00:02:11.000 But now I'm afraid we can't take you seriously because somebody somewhere has decided to give you some money.

00:02:17.000 Strange time span.

00:02:18.000 So folks, you can see why I love Mike Rowe just from the outset here.

00:02:21.000 But let's start from the beginning.

00:02:22.000 So you now do this podcast that's listened to by tens of millions of people, and you have various... Billions.

00:02:27.000 Billions.

00:02:28.000 Okay, billions.

00:02:28.000 People yet unborn on planets that have not yet been reached.

00:02:32.000 And you have your TV shows, which have been wildly popular.

00:02:36.000 You have books.

00:02:36.000 Your mom wrote a book that you've been pressing lately, all about her mom.

00:02:41.000 And that's really fantastic.

00:02:43.000 So how did you get from doing what you were doing when you were

00:02:46.000 18.

00:02:46.000 Is this what you saw yourself doing when you were 18?

00:02:48.000 How did you get from point A to point B?

00:02:50.000 Wow.

00:02:52.000 How long is the show?

00:02:52.000 It's about an hour or so.

00:02:54.000 Okay, so the short version is, I was convinced as a young guy growing up in Baltimore that I would follow in the footsteps of my grandfather, who lived right next door.

00:03:02.000 My grandfather was a guy who went to the seventh grade, and then he went to work.

00:03:07.000 By the time he was 30, he was a master electrician.

00:03:10.000 After that, he mastered every other trade there was.

00:03:12.000 The guy could build a house without a blueprint.

00:03:15.000 He was that guy.

00:03:16.000 Had the chip, right?

00:03:18.000 He just knew how to fix stuff.

00:03:19.000 Take your watch apart, build your house, do whatever.

00:03:22.000 The handy gene, tragically, is recessive.

00:03:27.000 So, past me, I didn't get that.

00:03:30.000 And by the time I was out of high school, I realized that I would have to get a different sort of toolbox.

00:03:36.000 I learned to act, sort of.

00:03:39.000 I learned to sing, a little bit.

00:03:41.000 And I just looked at a completely different way to go.

00:03:45.000 I eventually got into entertainment, kind of Forrest Gumped my way through the whole landscape of narrating.

00:03:51.000 You know, I started narrating when I was really young.

00:03:54.000 If there's a wildebeest trying to get across the vast reaches of the barren Serengeti, but being slowly eaten by crocodiles and hyenas, the odds are decent that I'm telling you about it.

00:04:06.000 Side note, it never works out for the wildebeest, right?

00:04:08.000 Never leave the herd.

00:04:10.000 So I started doing those things, and like Frost says, you know, way leads on to way.

00:04:15.000 And the next thing you know, I'm impersonating a host in front of various cameras for various networks, and one show leads to the next.

00:04:24.000 And by the time I was 42, I realized that impersonating a host, though I had become somewhat facile at it, was not nearly as rewarding as telling the unvarnished truth, which Dirty Jobs was.

00:04:38.000 It wound up being a

00:04:40.000 A tribute to my granddad.

00:05:01.000 What do you think?" 0.89

00:05:01.000 She said, maybe another year. 0.89

00:05:03.000 It would be so terrific though if before he died he could turn on the television and see you doing something that looked like work.

00:05:14.000 So my mother calls me out when I'm about 42.

00:05:18.000 Dirty Jobs began as a special for my granddad.

00:05:23.000 People saw it.

00:05:24.000 10,000 letters came in.

00:05:26.000 You should meet my granddad, brother, uncle, cousin, sister, aunt, uncle, right?

00:05:30.000 And so for 12 years, I went around the country profiling real people who do real jobs that typically unfold in real towns you can't find on a map.

00:05:42.000 And that gave me a certain notoriety in cable TV.

00:05:48.000 And Way continued to lead on to Way.

00:05:50.000 And a lot of other great things have happened.

00:05:52.000 I have a foundation now that focuses on closing the skills gap and the podcast you mentioned.

00:06:00.000 It's been so much fun.

00:06:01.000 It's a writing exercise.

00:06:02.000 It helps pass the time on planes.

00:06:04.000 They're short stories told in the style of Paul Harvey's The Rest of the Story.

00:06:09.000 And while I would never imagine for a moment I could fill his shoes, it's been fun trying to follow in his footsteps.

00:06:16.000 Well it's all really fun stuff to listen to and certainly fun stuff to watch but it's also really meaningful because you're one of the few people in the entertainment industry who really does take seriously the stuff that people in the middle of the country are doing and as the country sort of polarizes between the folks who are in the entertainment sphere or the journalism sphere or the sort of

00:06:34.000 High IQ is how they would term themselves.

00:06:37.000 It's fair.

00:06:38.000 And the people who are actually working the jobs that actually get things done across the country.

00:06:41.000 That's a voice that seems to have been lost a lot.

00:06:44.000 What do you think?

00:06:45.000 Do you think that's a really serious gap?

00:06:47.000 And do you think that's a bridgeable gap?

00:06:48.000 Or is that gap between sort of the people who deem themselves to be smart and the people who deem themselves to be doing jobs that matter?

00:06:54.000 Is that destined to sort of increase as time goes on here?

00:06:57.000 Well, there's always been a gap, right?

00:06:59.000 Sometimes it's wide, sometimes it's less wide.

00:07:03.000 And we all fall in love with the romantic version of ourselves, right?

00:07:07.000 Whether you're a journalist or whether you're an actor, whatever it is you think you are and whoever it is you think you are, you become the sun in your own solar system.

00:07:18.000 So everything else is just a planet in orbit, right?

00:07:22.000 So I think with regard to the skills gap and regard to really any gap,

00:07:28.000 It's all just symptomatic of a series of what I would call disconnects.

00:07:32.000 We've become slowly and inexorably and profoundly disconnected from a lot of very basic things that when I grew up I was really connected to, like where my food comes from, where my energy comes from, basic history, basic curiosity, you know, the things that

00:07:54.000 fundamentally allow us to assume a level of appreciation that, in my view, is the best way to bridge those gaps.

00:08:02.000 If we don't have appreciation, if we're not blown away by the miracle that occurs when you flick the switch and the lights come on,

00:08:12.000 If we're not gobsmacked by flushing the toilet and seeing all of it go away.

00:08:19.000 When we start losing our appreciation for those things, the gap deepens.

00:08:27.000 Well, it's extraordinary.

00:08:29.000 There's 6.3 million jobs.

00:08:30.000 They're available as we speak.

00:08:33.000 We have 75% of those jobs that don't require a four-year degree.

00:08:38.000 And yet, we're still pushing the four-year degree as the best path for the most people.

00:08:46.000 And it just happens to be the most expensive path.

00:08:48.000 And a lot of people, as you describe, who are kind of in the middle, have enough common sense to realize that 1.5 trillion dollars in outstanding student loans

00:08:57.000 There's a version of lending money we don't have to kids who can't pay it back to train for jobs that don't exist anymore.

00:09:03.000 And that's crazy.

00:09:04.000 So, you know, I think there's great common sense that is still alive and well in a lot of people.

00:09:11.000 And I think that as they look at the headlines, they're frustrated.

00:09:16.000 And, to be fair, I think people on the coasts are coming at it from their own bias, and they're frustrated, and so a lot of frustrated people are talking really loud, past each other, and a lot of truths are inconvenient for a lot of people, and so it just gets noisy, which is a long way of saying, no, I don't think the gap will ever close.

00:09:39.000 I really don't.

00:09:40.000 But I'm not freaked out by that.

00:09:42.000 Because I think the point is Sisyphean.

00:09:46.000 The point is quixotic.

00:09:48.000 Right?

00:09:48.000 So let's talk about the college thing for a minute.

00:09:50.000 Because let's say that you're somebody who's thinking about going to college.

00:09:53.000 Under what conditions do you think somebody ought to go to college? 0.64

00:09:55.000 As somebody who was a poly-sci major, which is about the most useless degree you can have outside of like lesbian dance theory or something. 0.60

00:10:01.000 I minored in that, so please.

00:10:05.000 You know, Poli-Sci is basically so you can go to law school.

00:10:07.000 That's all Poli-Sci is. 1.00

00:10:09.000 And this is true for what we at UCLA call North Campus Majors, right? 0.88

00:10:12.000 All North Campus Majors was like English and Poli-Sci, all the liberal arts.

00:10:16.000 All this stuff was prepped for grad degrees or for getting a low-level job at a newspaper or something like that.

00:10:22.000 The South Campus Majors, the people who are in the sciences and maths, those people were actually doing something useful.

00:10:27.000 Who do you think ought to go to college, especially because there is a concomitant worry that if you don't go to college and you go for one of these blue-collar jobs that you're talking about that don't necessarily require a four-year degree, that those are going to get automated in the near future.

00:10:39.000 What do you think the threat of that is?

00:10:40.000 And you have an 18-year-old kid.

00:10:42.000 Do you tell them to go to college or not?

00:10:43.000 Concomitant.

00:10:46.000 That's a college word, right?

00:10:47.000 I'd have gone with contemporaneous, but either way.

00:10:49.000 Either way, those two C words lead to the other C word, which is curiosity.

00:10:54.000 No, not that one.

00:10:55.000 Curiosity, right?

00:10:56.000 I mean, look, anybody who's curious and who can afford it should go to college.

00:11:00.000 The thing that I deal with most often with my foundation, which focuses primarily on

00:11:06.000 Jobs that don't require a four-year degree that actually exist.

00:11:09.000 When I come out in favor of those opportunities, what comes back over the net, usually with a lot of top spin, is the accusation that I'm anti-college or anti-education.

00:11:21.000 I'm not.

00:11:22.000 My liberal arts degree served me really, really, really, really well.

00:11:26.000 I got it in 1984.

00:11:27.000 It was the product of a two-year community college and then another couple years at a university.

00:11:33.000 When the dust settled, the whole bill was $9,800.

00:11:35.000 Same exact thing today is $88,000.

00:11:40.000 So, my answer to your question is, A, can you afford it?

00:11:44.000 If you can't,

00:11:46.000 Don't.

00:11:48.000 That doesn't mean don't borrow money, but if you're not afflicted with a passion for the major and you have to borrow $20,000, $30,000, $50,000, $80,000, $100,000 in order to pursue the thing you may or may not be truly passionate about,

00:12:08.000 Then, I don't know what to say to you other than that has to be a function of either peer pressure, parental pressure, or really bad guidance counseling.

00:12:18.000 Because, I get it, it's not fair to compare a liberal education to workforce development, right?

00:12:26.000 But, at some point, the only four-letter word that truly matters is debt.

00:12:32.000 And you can either do it or you can't.

00:12:35.000 I'll say this, too.

00:12:36.000 You know, when I went to school, part of what you paid for was access.

00:12:40.000 A big part of what you paid for, right?

00:12:43.000 All this information exists in, obviously, libraries, but mostly in the minds of professors, and you get access.

00:12:49.000 You sit in front of them and you learn.

00:12:52.000 Well, you know, we have in our pockets right now a device that gives us access to 98% of the known information in the world.

00:12:59.000 You can watch lectures from MIT.

00:13:01.000 Yale, Dartmouth, William & Mary, all the great schools for free.

00:13:06.000 I'm not saying it's the same thing.

00:13:07.000 I'm just saying that the cost of college is unconscionable.

00:13:15.000 And to say that questioning it is somehow fundamentally out of bounds, I just think it's the height of hubris.

00:13:30.000 So what do we do?

00:13:32.000 There's a lot of talk on both sides of the political aisle right now about the sort of falling down of American industry, supposedly.

00:13:40.000 This idea that manufacturing is going away, we're moving toward a service economy, that a lot of these jobs are eventually going to be automated or outsourced.

00:13:46.000 What do we say to people who may not want to go to college, may want to get one of these jobs, worries that 10 years from now they're going to be basically priced out of the market by, they want to be a trucker and now there's going to be Google trucks on the roads.

00:13:58.000 What do we do about that?

00:13:59.000 Is there a solution to that or is it just a matter of human beings have to be adaptable?

00:14:03.000 I mean, look, when my grandfather saw me mess up the foundation and hang the drywall not plumb, he was very nice.

00:14:14.000 But eventually, eventually, he just said, look, you can be a tradesman if you want to.

00:14:21.000 You just need a different toolbox.

00:14:24.000 And it was really wonderful advice in hindsight.

00:14:27.000 You know, the idea that I could work in Hollywood like an electrician.

00:14:32.000 You know, the ultimate freelance, really.

00:14:35.000 By the way, the origins of that word, you familiar with freelance?

00:14:39.000 No.

00:14:39.000 It was literally a free lance in medieval days.

00:14:44.000 You know, you're a knight who served whoever hired you.

00:14:48.000 You're a mercenary.

00:14:50.000 Well, if you have a skill, you can do that, because the skill goes wherever you go.

00:14:56.000 What was the question again?

00:14:58.000 The question was, what do we do about the manufacturing jobs that could be disappearing?

00:15:01.000 Is it something that the government can solve?

00:15:03.000 Is it a trade problem?

00:15:04.000 Is it a technology problem?

00:15:06.000 Or is it just going to have to be people adjusting as time goes on?

00:15:09.000 What if it's not a problem at all?

00:15:11.000 What if it's simply the oldest story in the world?

00:15:14.000 I mean, I'm not a history major, but I read about the Luddite revolution.

00:15:18.000 I read about what happened in textiles.

00:15:20.000 I read about the advent of looms and what that meant.

00:15:24.000 It was the same exact argument then.

00:15:27.000 Everybody always says it's different this time, and maybe it is.

00:15:32.000 I don't know.

00:15:33.000 But everybody always says it's different, and it almost never is.

00:15:36.000 In fact, I don't think it's ever been different.

00:15:38.000 So I don't know

00:15:40.000 I don't know.

00:15:41.000 Can I envision a time when driverless cars and pilotless planes are going all around?

00:15:47.000 I suppose I could.

00:15:48.000 Do I think we'll live to see it?

00:15:50.000 I don't think so.

00:15:52.000 I think you might see a truck driving down the highway in the next 20 years that's completely automated.

00:15:59.000 But I also think you're going to see a human sitting behind the wheel.

00:16:02.000 So, okay, so you're just optimistic in general about the possibility that a lot of these jobs will continue to exist because there's a lot of pessimism from people like, for example, we had Eric Weinstein from Peter Thiel's company last week.

00:16:16.000 And he was deeply concerned about the possibility, as a lot of people are, that a lot of these blue-collar jobs are just going to go away and you're going to have to end up with some sort of universal basic income where people who are not the creatives end up not working but being supported by the creatives.

00:16:30.000 Because all of these blue-collar jobs eventually end up being automated and destroyed over time.

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00:17:45.000 Okay, so to restate the question for those who forgot it during that ad, the basic question was, a lot of folks right now on both sides of the aisle are worried about the bifurcation of an economy where it becomes in what they're calling now an IQ economy.

00:17:57.000 The idea that if you are a creative type, if you're somebody who can do stuff that machines can't do, that artificial intelligence can't do,

00:18:04.000 You'll have a job in the future and your job will be relatively safe.

00:18:08.000 And if you are somebody who is working as a truck driver, that you're basically going to be screwed and there isn't going to be a lot of job opportunity available to you.

00:18:15.000 Do you think that's something that's not going to happen?

00:18:17.000 Or if it does happen, is there a solution like universal basic income that people are talking about?

00:18:22.000 That's beyond my pay grade.

00:18:24.000 Personally, I'm very suspicious of that simply because you might solve a financial problem, but I think you're going to create some unintended consequences by essentially telling people that here's a big pile of something that you need and you don't have to do anything for it.

00:18:39.000 I just think on a really fundamental, primal level, you're moving the cheese.

00:18:44.000 And I don't know what's going to come out the other side, but I just can't imagine it's going to be good.

00:18:49.000 You said bifurcated, right?

00:18:50.000 I mean, I think it's binary.

00:18:52.000 Yes, splitting it.

00:18:52.000 Yeah, exactly.

00:18:53.000 I think it's a false choice.

00:18:54.000 You know, I think heads and tails are always going to be on the same coin, and this idea

00:19:00.000 This idea that you're an artistic left-brain person over here, or this non-artistic right-brain... What is that?

00:19:11.000 I remember in the election, I think it was Rubio who talked about more welders, less philosophers.

00:19:21.000 Which is very much in keeping with what my foundation says, right?

00:19:26.000 But only on a practical need.

00:19:30.000 But I objected to the idea that a welder can't quote Nietzsche or Descartes, right?

00:19:38.000 I mean, I object to the idea that a philosopher can't run an even bead down a seal.

00:19:43.000 This idea that it's one or the other is a very limited toolbox kind of thought.

00:19:50.000 And I think what you said before is exactly right.

00:19:54.000 The answer to that question

00:19:56.000 It's purely adaptive.

00:19:59.000 Our ability to adapt and to think more broadly and to take more advantage of the unlimited access that we all have to the same bottomless compendium of knowledge and to be excited by it, to explore that.

00:20:13.000 I just think part of the solution has to start with curiosity.

00:20:17.000 It has to.

00:20:18.000 I don't have a magic eight ball and I have no idea what's truly coming and I would never want to pretend to, but just because I can't tell you why I think we're going to be okay doesn't mean we're not.

00:20:32.000 We're going to figure it out.

00:20:34.000 Because we always have.

00:20:36.000 And I'm just very suspicious of the argument that says this time we won't.

00:20:41.000 It's just too complicated.

00:20:51.000 Seeing

00:21:07.000 Put your own house in order first seemed to be getting a lot of flack for that.

00:21:11.000 So as an example, my friend Kevin Williamson wrote for National Review.

00:21:13.000 He wrote a piece specifically about some of these dying towns in the Rust Belt that were very heavily based on manufacturing and factory work. 0.97

00:21:21.000 And he wrote this piece basically saying that if your town is dying and you're sitting there waiting for your job to come back, you're being a fool. 0.97

00:21:27.000 Leave the town and go somewhere else. 0.97

00:21:28.000 It got all sorts of blowback as somebody who's supposedly looking down his nose at the working class.

00:21:33.000 And Kevin grew up so poor that his mom was stealing hangers from motels when he was a kid.

00:21:37.000 Is that something that we as a people can overcome or is this just endemic to human nature that we're always going to blame everybody else for our own problems?

00:21:44.000 Yeah.

00:21:45.000 We're always going to blame people for our problems.

00:21:48.000 I mean, I think that's how we start.

00:21:51.000 I think, you know, I mean, we don't come into the world, in my view, as pure as we're often told.

00:22:01.000 I mean, you have kids, right?

00:22:02.000 I mean, you've got two kids sitting next to each other.

00:22:04.000 One's three, one's two.

00:22:06.000 They're playing.

00:22:08.000 This one wants that toy. 1.00

00:22:10.000 This one doesn't want to give the toy up, so the one leaves over and takes the toy, maybe bashes the other one over the head with it.

00:22:15.000 I mean, this is... You know, we come in covetous.

00:22:20.000 We want.

00:22:21.000 We take.

00:22:22.000 Whatever it is, it can't be our fault.

00:22:23.000 We're the sun in our solar system.

00:22:25.000 We're the center of our universe, you know?

00:22:28.000 How do we realize that we're not?

00:22:31.000 It's kind of a clunky analogy, but whatever it is that allows us to assume in our infancy that somehow the universe has come around us to take care of us, that translates to this idea that my town can't die.

00:22:50.000 My job can't go away.

00:22:53.000 I had it and now it's gone.

00:22:55.000 Gone.

00:22:56.000 And so, time out.

00:22:59.000 Party foul.

00:23:00.000 Not cool.

00:23:01.000 Right?

00:23:02.000 And so it's, I don't mean at all to make light of it, and I read the article that you're talking about.

00:23:07.000 He got creamed for that.

00:23:08.000 Destroyed, yeah.

00:23:09.000 And then he got creamed again.

00:23:10.000 Yeah, exactly.

00:23:11.000 Like cream creamed, right?

00:23:13.000 But look, outrage is for sale. 0.77

00:23:16.000 Everybody knows.

00:23:18.000 No one knows it better than you, I don't think.

00:23:21.000 But finding a way to talk about that issue

00:23:26.000 along with many others that doesn't immediately alienate half the country is the thing that I look at as a challenge every single day.

00:23:35.000 It's what I do on my Facebook page.

00:23:37.000 It's what I do with my foundation.

00:23:39.000 It's what I try and do on shows like this.

00:23:42.000 I've spent a lot of time on MSNBC, CNN, Fox.

00:23:45.000 I'll talk to anybody who wants to have a fun, light-hearted, yet grown-up conversation.

00:23:51.000 And no matter where I go,

00:23:53.000 People's heads explode.

00:23:55.000 There was a week a few years ago where I went on Glenn Beck and then two days later I went on Bill Maher.

00:24:05.000 You know, I had three million friends on Facebook at the time.

00:24:08.000 A couple weeks later, I had two million.

00:24:11.000 You know, my buddies on the right just simply didn't know what to do with the optics of me sitting next to Bill Maher.

00:24:19.000 And my pals on the left just had no notion of how to square the cognitive dissonance that forced their heads to explode when they saw me sitting there with Glenn Beck.

00:24:28.000 They just didn't know what to do.

00:24:29.000 It'll happen here.

00:24:31.000 It happens every six months.

00:24:33.000 So, what I'm saying is, we're in the world now where it's not what we say that gets us in trouble, it's what we don't, and it's not where we are that makes people's eyebrows arch, it's who we're sitting next to.

00:24:49.000 It's the proximity of outrage.

00:24:53.000 Right?

00:24:53.000 It's the geography of all of it.

00:25:14.000 Obviously, now when I go and speak at Berkeley, I require 600 police officers.

00:25:18.000 Where did all of this come from?

00:25:21.000 I remember people being very angry during the Bush administration.

00:25:23.000 I don't remember it being anywhere near like this, the level of anger that's in the society.

00:25:27.000 People have attributed that to economics.

00:25:29.000 People have attributed that to cultural splits.

00:25:32.000 Where do you think that that anger is coming from?

00:25:35.000 Well, look, I hate to say it, but I think part of it is social.

00:25:40.000 I mean, I have a show now on Facebook.

00:25:42.000 I'm thrilled to be on that platform.

00:25:44.000 And my show is a celebration of bloody do-gooderism.

00:25:49.000 But I also own guns.

00:25:52.000 Social is a tool.

00:25:53.000 Guns are a tool.

00:25:55.000 And we're right on the verge, I think, of discovering some really interesting parallels between the First and Second Amendment.

00:26:03.000 And I think people who would never ever consider

00:26:10.000 We're good

00:26:28.000 As a weapon.

00:26:29.000 Then it's a weapon that you have.

00:26:32.000 You don't need a license for it.

00:26:34.000 Anybody can have it.

00:26:35.000 The question is, how are you going to use it?

00:26:38.000 And most people simply don't have the training or the maturity to handle it.

00:26:44.000 And so the violence and the anger and the outrage that you're seeing, I think in part is a result of having an unlimited amount of access to a platform

00:26:55.000 That gives you both the mechanism to say whatever you want and the anonymity and the comfort to hide behind it.

00:27:04.000 And so people are very shrill and they're very brave in those scenarios.

00:27:12.000 And look, all of that is just the portent to a mob.

00:27:17.000 Yeah.

00:27:36.000 With the rise of the social media and with the rise of the technology, I think there's something else that's happened too.

00:27:39.000 And I don't know where you are religiously or where you get your values from, but I feel like there's a dramatic lack of central values in people's lives.

00:27:46.000 That people are now looking for value in the anger.

00:27:50.000 That people feel fulfilled because they're angry.

00:27:52.000 And the angrier you are, the more fulfilled you are.

00:27:54.000 The more it shows that you're an authentic human being if you're angry.

00:27:57.000 I think.

00:28:21.000 You know, it's a nature-nurture question, right?

00:28:23.000 I mean, obviously it has a lot to do with how you're raised, but in the end, you have to hit the reset button and really decide for yourself, not just what you think, but why.

00:28:34.000 This confusion between passion and conviction.

00:28:41.000 There's a line, I think it was Yeats, at the end of The Best

00:28:46.000 The best lack all conviction and the worst are filled with passionate intensity.

00:28:51.000 Right?

00:28:52.000 So that's it.

00:28:53.000 If you don't have the certainty of your convictions, if you can't make a case, if you can't answer the question you just asked me, which I'll try and get to in a sec, then what is left?

00:29:07.000 You know, nothing is left but an explanation of how you feel.

00:29:12.000 And so, if your philosophy ultimately redounds to an explanation of how you feel, then you're completely beholden to whatever feeling you might be experiencing at any given point.

00:29:24.000 And then you're just one of those people who follow their passion.

00:29:27.000 Right?

00:29:28.000 Good luck with that!

00:29:32.000 Personally, my philosophy has a lot to do with being suspicious of anything that feels easy, just as a general rule.

00:29:45.000 Being wary of all earnestness, in the words of Travis McGee, John D. MacDonald, one of my favorite fictitious characters, who in hindsight actually formed the basis of my entire business model.

00:30:00.000 And gratitude.

00:30:01.000 A good-natured skepticism, a ton of gratitude, and some honest intellectual curiosity will probably be the best replacements, at least that I can think of, for getting right to the point of, let me tell you how I feel.

00:30:19.000 I really don't care how you feel, honestly.

00:30:24.000 Over a beer, it's kind of fun.

00:30:25.000 You're talking my language right here.

00:30:26.000 I just don't care.

00:30:27.000 I mean, it's so much more interesting to understand why you believe what you believe than it is to hear about what you believe.

00:30:36.000 And that's why mobs are boring and that's why protests are tiresome.

00:30:39.000 Because all the placards just simply say, this is how I feel and this is what I believe.

00:30:44.000 I want to talk in a second about some of the practical, hard-headed advice that you have for young people.

00:30:48.000 Are you going to do that thing again?

00:30:49.000 Because I can't wait.

00:30:50.000 You bet.

00:30:50.000 It's happening right now.

00:30:51.000 Get ready for it.

00:30:52.000 I'm ready.

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00:31:57.000 All right, well, we're back, and I can feel my wallet just got this much fatter because of what just happened.

00:32:02.000 I just gave it away.

00:32:02.000 Yeah, and mine is gone.

00:32:03.000 Because I keep buying everything you're selling.

00:32:06.000 Well, I mean, this is how I make my money, so I'm glad.

00:32:08.000 If I can get Mike Rowe to fall for my advertisements, I mean, I can get anyone.

00:32:12.000 Ben, how many times are you accused of selling out?

00:32:17.000 I get it.

00:32:17.000 I get it every week.

00:32:18.000 Their heads explode when they

00:32:40.000 When this weird mix of like commerce and art, dare we say art, you know, collide.

00:32:47.000 They come together in this happy nexus of serendipity and yet it's mind-boggling to people.

00:32:54.000 My first job in TV was at a home shopping channel.

00:32:57.000 I sold out before I had anything to bargain.

00:33:04.000 I was serious before when I said I really applaud what you're doing because this show is utterly without pretense.

00:33:13.000 I have no idea what you're going to ask me next and the only thing more liberating than that is I'm convinced that you don't either.

00:33:20.000 Except we're gonna stop every 15 seconds to take care of the brute realities of keeping these... Are these lights?

00:33:27.000 Yeah, they are, I think.

00:33:28.000 Keeping these lights on.

00:33:29.000 And so, look, I...

00:33:32.000 You used the word authenticity before in a couple of different ways.

00:33:37.000 I think it's one of the most important concepts going right now because the country starved for it, starved for it, but we're not quite sure what it is.

00:33:46.000 But it has something to do with the way you're doing this.

00:33:48.000 Well, I think I appreciate that.

00:33:50.000 I think that the authenticity break is actually, it has something to do with the election of President Trump, I think, to get political.

00:33:56.000 You know, we would rather have an authentic

00:34:00.000 Quasi-conman in the White House, then we would have an inauthentic harpy like Hillary Clinton. 1.00

00:34:05.000 We would much rather have somebody who is actually the person that he says he is.

00:34:10.000 Everybody knows what Trump is at this point.

00:34:12.000 Everything is baked into the cake with President Trump because he's just out there about it.

00:34:17.000 Pretty much you could hit him with anything at this point and he would probably survive it.

00:34:20.000 He's like a cockroach after a nuclear explosion.

00:34:22.000 He's going to survive it.

00:34:23.000 And that's not that's meant in the best possible way.

00:34:25.000 He is a political.

00:34:26.000 I mean, when I say cockroach after a nuclear explosion, I don't mean that as bad as it sounds.

00:34:29.000 I mean that it's a quality in a politician that is hard to come by.

00:34:32.000 Bill Clinton had it, too.

00:34:33.000 But the sort of feeling like we can trust you because we know that what you're saying is what you actually believe is something that that is is really effective right now, given how produced everything is and because everybody is so afraid of these social media mobs.

00:34:46.000 Authenticity is in short supply.

00:34:48.000 What do you make of Trump?

00:34:49.000 How did he come about and what have you made of him so far?

00:34:52.000 It's the question on everybody's mind.

00:34:54.000 I understand.

00:34:54.000 He's the sun around which the universe apparently revolves.

00:34:58.000 Look, I was invited on Meet the Press the Sunday after the election.

00:35:04.000 And they asked me that same question because a couple weeks earlier, I was asked that question on Facebook.

00:35:09.000 And I answered it very candidly.

00:35:11.000 I said he's going to win.

00:35:12.000 I said he's going to win running away.

00:35:14.000 I wish I had listened to you.

00:35:14.000 I lost a bunch of money on the election.

00:35:16.000 No, there was no doubt about it.

00:35:17.000 I mean, for me, look, I had just spent 10 years in Wisconsin, Michigan, Western Pennsylvania, all through it.

00:35:26.000 I mean, to me, from what I saw, it was obvious.

00:35:31.000 But I'll tell you my Trump story.

00:35:34.000 I've got a few of them, but the one that was public, I raised money for my foundation in a lot of unorthodox ways. 0.90

00:35:44.000 You know, for years I had these things called crap auctions.

00:35:47.000 Collectibles, rare, and precious. 0.97

00:35:50.000 And I would go in my garage and I would take out a piece of crap that I'd accumulated in my dirty travels, right?

00:35:58.000 And I would sell it in the QVC style. 0.93

00:36:01.000 And I'd give the money we raised to the foundation.

00:36:04.000 We raised hundreds of thousands of dollars.

00:36:06.000 So when the election was at its fever pitch, I had a show on CNN at the time called Somebody's Gotta Do It.

00:36:16.000 And the show is no longer on CNN, it's actually on TBN.

00:36:21.000 I had to move it because it was preempted constantly because the election ramped up in such a way.

00:36:26.000 So I

00:36:28.000 I went online and basically said to Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton, and Bernie Sanders, I said, nice going guys, you just got my show booted off the network.

00:36:37.000 I'll forgive you if each of you will make a donation to my foundation.

00:36:41.000 What I'm looking for from you, Bernie, is one of those crumpled suit coats you always wear.

00:36:49.000 Send that to me and I'll auction it off.

00:36:51.000 Hillary, send me one of your pantsuits, right?

00:36:53.000 And I said to Trump, I said,

00:36:56.000 Send me one of your bathrobes and an autograph.

00:36:58.000 You know, a bathrobe out of your... So, heard nothing from Bernie Sanders.

00:37:03.000 Heard nothing from Hillary Clinton.

00:37:06.000 Donald Trump sent me an autographed bathrobe with his name signed on it.

00:37:11.000 He had it hand-delivered to me. 0.98

00:37:14.000 So, the next week, I put on his bathrobe, and I sit down at my kitchen table, you know, I got my iPhone set up, and I'm doing an episode of Crap.

00:37:25.000 I auctioned the thing off, got $18,000 for it.

00:37:27.000 Like that, okay?

00:37:29.000 So, I got a lot of heat for wearing a Donald Trump bathrobe.

00:37:34.000 I don't care.

00:37:35.000 The money went straight to the Work Ethic Scholarship Program.

00:37:38.000 The moral of the story is,

00:37:41.000 He understands who's watching.

00:37:45.000 And he understands what's happening.

00:37:47.000 It doesn't have anything to do, I don't know, I can't speak to his polemics, his politics, I don't need to say anything to get myself in any more hot water.

00:37:57.000 He sent the robe.

00:37:59.000 Nobody else did.

00:38:01.000 And I really, I really didn't expect him to.

00:38:04.000 But a deal's a deal.

00:38:06.000 So I auctioned it off and I thanked him.

00:38:08.000 And the money went to a great cause.

00:38:11.000 My only other interaction with him, we got a call months ago from the White House to talk about supporting a thing that just happened this week, this big initiative around vocational education.

00:38:26.000 Yeah, Ivanka Trump's been pushing that. 1.00

00:38:28.000 Yeah, her people called, and we had a really candid conversation.

00:38:31.000 And look, I'll tell you what I told him.

00:38:32.000 I said, look, I'd love to.

00:38:35.000 I mean honestly I'd love to because what you're talking about is the mandate of microworks.

00:38:43.000 It's what I've been, I mean from the day Barack Obama went in office, we started our foundation Labor Day 2008, we're 10 years this year.

00:38:53.000 And I've been, to the extent that I'm able to call for anything, I've been calling for this exact thing.

00:39:00.000 A PR campaign for good jobs that actually exist, and a genuine focus on alternatives to a four-year education.

00:39:08.000 But I said, look, if I put on a Make America Great hat, half the country will not hear me.

00:39:16.000 And so it has nothing to do, forget my personal politics, do what you can politically.

00:39:23.000 What I'm doing now is not political at all.

00:39:26.000 It's one of the few areas I believe right and left still share with these Venn diagrams.

00:39:35.000 There's not a lot of shared real estate left.

00:39:37.000 But the definition of a good job in 2018 is something we're all going to have to figure out.

00:39:45.000 And look, I call them as I see them.

00:39:47.000 What they did this week around the skills gap,

00:39:52.000 As you would say, good Trump.

00:39:54.000 Good Trump.

00:39:55.000 So tell us a little bit more about vocational training.

00:39:58.000 You know, as somebody who went to bitoney colleges and can barely pick up a hammer, what does vocational training actually constitute? 0.97

00:40:05.000 Because when I hear it, it sounds like a welding shop classroom, middle school or something.

00:40:10.000 What exactly is it?

00:40:11.000 And why should people undergo it if they're seeking a job in one of these industries?

00:40:16.000 Vocational training is the most direct line you can find between where you are now and an actual opportunity.

00:40:25.000 It's job training.

00:40:27.000 It's not esoteric.

00:40:29.000 It's not theoretical.

00:40:30.000 This is what you need to be able to do in order to get money for doing it.

00:40:35.000 It's very, very simple.

00:40:37.000 And it can apply to, it's not just welding and steam fitting and pipe fitting and things like that.

00:40:42.000 There's healthcare areas.

00:40:43.000 There's so many opportunities that require vocational training.

00:40:47.000 But the first thing to understand is what you just said is exactly right.

00:40:52.000 The language matters.

00:40:54.000 The language matters hugely and, you know, shop class, we didn't just get shop class out of high school like that.

00:41:01.000 It was a process.

00:41:03.000 Shop used to be called vocational arts.

00:41:08.000 The first thing we did was we took the art out of it and then we made it vo-tech.

00:41:12.000 And then it was just vocational education.

00:41:15.000 And then eventually it became shop. 1.00

00:41:18.000 At which point it's easy to walk it out back behind the barn and put a bullet in its head. 1.00

00:41:22.000 And that's what we did. 0.99

00:41:23.000 We took shop class out of high school.

00:41:27.000 Is there a more persuasive way to show an entire generation of kids what's important than by eliminating it from view?

00:41:38.000 And the entertainment industry has contributed to this also.

00:41:41.000 I mean, like, every joke is always about shop class.

00:41:44.000 Every joke is always about the guy who's the plumber.

00:41:46.000 The ideal that you aspire to if you watch TV is never the person who actually is working one of the jobs that you're talking about.

00:41:53.000 It's always a lawyer or a doctor.

00:41:54.000 Those are the glamorous jobs, apparently.

00:41:55.000 Nobody ever actually talks to a lawyer or doctor before making a show about lawyers and doctors being glamorous jobs, because as a lawyer and with a wife as a doctor, it is not a glamorous job, it actually turns out.

00:42:04.000 But the entertainment industry obviously circulated in New York and L.A., made up of a bunch of people like me, people who can't handle a hammer.

00:42:13.000 How does Hollywood contribute to this sort of skills gap and problem, do you think?

00:42:18.000 Mightily.

00:42:19.000 You know, you're talking about a Cold War on work, and it's waged on multiple fronts.

00:42:25.000 Hollywood leads the charge, to your point. 0.98

00:42:27.000 If there's a plumber on a show, he's 300 pounds with a giant butt crack.

00:42:31.000 That's what plumbers look like, right?

00:42:33.000 All of them are the recipients not of a skilled trade, but of

00:42:38.000 Some kind of vocational consolation prize.

00:42:41.000 It's what you do if you can't do this.

00:42:44.000 Right?

00:42:45.000 So, that's the working assumption.

00:42:49.000 And Hollywood has confirmed those stigmas and stereotypes in a multitudinous number of ways.

00:42:57.000 Madison Avenue has done the exact same thing.

00:43:00.000 You see the same portrayals in advertising as you do in popular culture.

00:43:05.000 Books!

00:43:06.000 I mean, look, I'm pals with Tim Ferriss, but, you know, we always laugh when we talk about this, because when he published The 4-Hour Workweek, it was one of the first examples I pointed to.

00:43:16.000 This is a great bestseller.

00:43:17.000 It's full of good advice.

00:43:19.000 But the titular promise is how to get so much more by doing so much less.

00:43:25.000 All the propositions on any financial ad that you're ever going to see or read are going to... It's pregnant with the possibility of retiring sooner, working less.

00:43:39.000 If you're unhappy, the proximate cause of your unhappiness probably has to do with your damn boss or your damn job. 1.00

00:43:48.000 That's how you make work the enemy. 0.99

00:43:51.000 You identify it as the reason for your unhappiness and then you juxtapose it with all kinds of other images that you can't have, right?

00:44:02.000 And now you have a whole new gap in there.

00:44:06.000 My foundation evolved really as a PR campaign for jobs that actually exist and a challenge to this idea that the most expensive path was the best path for the most people.

00:44:20.000 So yeah, I have lots of opportunities and lots of examples because this town is rife

00:44:28.000 But look, it's everywhere, Ben.

00:44:29.000 It is on bookshelves.

00:44:31.000 It's on your television.

00:44:32.000 And it's in parents.

00:44:34.000 Look, and this goes back.

00:44:36.000 This is the reptilian part of our brain.

00:44:39.000 We want something for our kids better than we had.

00:44:41.000 Doesn't matter how good we had it.

00:44:44.000 Doesn't matter.

00:44:45.000 Because we want something better.

00:44:48.000 That's okay.

00:44:48.000 That's normal.

00:44:50.000 But at some point,

00:44:52.000 Back to defining what a better job or a good job really is.

00:44:56.000 Parents can't agree.

00:44:58.000 Guidance counselors can't agree.

00:45:00.000 Guidance counselors in high schools now, in many cases, are evaluated and comped based on their ability to help X

00:45:11.000 So,

00:45:37.000 One of the things that I love that you talk about is the meaning of work.

00:45:40.000 As you say, there are a lot of folks in our society who seem to think that less work is better, and that retiring early is the thing, and then you see all these people who retire at age 66, and by 68 they're dead.

00:45:50.000 Because if you're not working, then

00:45:52.000 You're not doing anything.

00:45:53.000 It's been my view for my entire life that people were legitimately born to work until you die.

00:45:57.000 And even if you don't have work, you find things to work at.

00:46:00.000 Whether it's you go and you volunteer somewhere, you're working with a charity, people need to feel purpose and people find purpose in work.

00:46:07.000 But you have an interesting perspective on this because the way that

00:46:11.000 I was brought up, you know, in the schools that I went to, the way that I think people of my generation were brought up is find something that's meaningful and then try to find a job in the thing that you find meaningful.

00:46:20.000 Whereas one of the things you preach is find a job and then try to find meaning in that job, which is kind of polar opposite.

00:46:25.000 Can you talk about that a little bit?

00:46:27.000 Well, look, I mean, in the end,

00:46:30.000 What you want is meaningful work, and let's define meaningful work as an activity that you're passionate about, that moves the needle in some way, and that compensates you in a way that excites you.

00:46:47.000 The question is, how do you get there?

00:46:50.000 And today, the path starts with passion.

00:46:54.000 It starts with, well,

00:46:56.000 Sit down and think about it.

00:46:57.000 What would make you happy?

00:47:00.000 What do you see yourself as doing?

00:47:03.000 Identify that thing.

00:47:04.000 Now, let's put together a plan.

00:47:06.000 What sort of education do you need?

00:47:09.000 How much time should it take?

00:47:11.000 You put all these shoulds in front of it, and now you have a plan, and when you get to that place,

00:47:19.000 Congratulations, you've done it.

00:47:21.000 Right?

00:47:22.000 That's insane.

00:47:24.000 Right?

00:47:26.000 That's insane.

00:47:26.000 It's kind of like saying, all right, you want to be happy in your love life.

00:47:31.000 All right?

00:47:32.000 Are you going to go in search of your soulmate?

00:47:35.000 Or are you going to go where the people are and start getting to know them?

00:47:41.000 Right?

00:47:42.000 It just depends on how hard you want to make it.

00:47:44.000 So one of the big lessons from Dirty Jobs was

00:47:47.000 The people on that show, collectively, were having a much better time than the average person would suspect they would be having, given the fact that most of them were covered in other people's crap, or crawling around in some godforsaken pit of despair, or doing some vocational consolation prize thing, right?

00:48:06.000 These people aren't supposed to look happy, they're not supposed to look self-actualized, they're not supposed to look prosperous. 0.67

00:48:12.000 The dirty little secret of Dirty Jobs was that

00:48:15.000 Easily 40 of the people we featured on that show were multi-millionaires.

00:48:19.000 We never talked about it because I didn't want it to be a polemic.

00:48:24.000 But success doesn't look like the version we've been sold.

00:48:30.000 At all.

00:48:32.000 At all.

00:48:33.000 So, you know, having fun with that kind of cognitive dissonance is great.

00:48:39.000 Showing people examples of the plumber

00:48:42.000 Who began his or her trade with learning a skill and now has seven trucks and 32 employees.

00:48:49.000 That's important.

00:48:50.000 Those people over and over again.

00:48:52.000 The septic tank inspector up in West Wisconsin.

00:48:56.000 The skull cleaners in Oklahoma City.

00:48:59.000 I can go down the list.

00:49:01.000 None of them set out to do what they were doing.

00:49:05.000 None of them began with what would make me happy.

00:49:10.000 These people looked around to see where everybody was running, and they ran in the opposite direction.

00:49:17.000 That's where they found opportunity.

00:49:19.000 Then they found a way to get good at it.

00:49:21.000 Then they learned their trade, and then they mastered it.

00:49:25.000 Then they found a way to be passionate about it.

00:49:28.000 So they got to the same place, but they didn't start on this snipe hunt of what will make me happy.

00:49:37.000 They looked around and said, where are the jobs?

00:49:41.000 Do you think that same thing applies in personal relationships?

00:49:48.000 I think it applies in everything.

00:49:50.000 I think our brain is obviously our best friend and our worst enemy.

00:49:58.000 It'll do whatever we tell it to do.

00:50:01.000 If you assign it a task, it's going to go until it can complete it or die trying.

00:50:09.000 Just be careful of what you assign it to, you know?

00:50:12.000 I mean, if you tell your brain the only way you're going to be happy is if you find your soulmate, you better be prepared to embark upon a worldwide, never-ending tour of chronic disappointment.

00:50:26.000 It's going to be expensive, right?

00:50:28.000 I'm not saying settle.

00:50:29.000 See, it's another binary choice.

00:50:31.000 This is what people are going to say to me.

00:50:33.000 They're going to be like, so you're just saying just go by, what, arranged marriages?

00:50:38.000 Well, I don't know, but statistically, arranged marriages do pretty good, you know?

00:50:44.000 They do pretty good!

00:50:45.000 So, I'm not saying that... No, but you're right in the sense that, you know, there's always talk about passion nowadays, passion in marriage, and what the social science tends to show is that passion in any relationship is that it's very high at the very beginning, and companionate love is that it's very low, and then in very short order, passionate love drops precipitously, and companionate love increases precipitously.

00:51:06.000 And so, you can bet on passionate love, but no matter how you bet on passionate love, within a year, that passionate love is going to be declining.

00:51:12.000 The question is whether the companionate love is actually going to last.

00:51:15.000 And so, if you go into it with... Time frame.

00:51:16.000 Exactly.

00:51:17.000 If you go into it with the mentality that this is something you're going to have to stick to, the chances you have a successful marriage are going to be a lot better than, I'm going to go into it because I'm passionate about it.

00:51:24.000 Because every job eventually becomes a job.

00:51:27.000 No matter how passionate you are about your initial belief in a job, and I love my job, and I'm sure you love your job, eventually, it gets to the point where, yeah, I got to get up this morning, got to go to work.

00:51:34.000 And still, you're getting up and going to work.

00:51:36.000 Happiness is a terrific symptom.

00:51:42.000 It's a terrible goal. 0.99

00:51:45.000 It's just a terrible goal, because it's a sucker's bet.

00:51:51.000 If happiness were that tangible, then the same thing would make everyone happy.

00:51:56.000 But obviously, it doesn't.

00:52:01.000 I'm sure of that.

00:52:03.000 I'm not sure of much, but I'm sure of that.

00:52:05.000 I wrote this thing.

00:52:06.000 You'd get a kick out of it.

00:52:07.000 It started, like most everything I do, as an attempt to amuse myself.

00:52:12.000 But after a bottle of wine one night,

00:52:16.000 My foundation awards work ethic scholarships, so we need to have some mechanism by which we can try to account for work.

00:52:28.000 I mean, how do you measure character?

00:52:29.000 It's virtually impossible.

00:52:30.000 But I wrote this thing called a Sweat Pledge.

00:52:32.000 Skills and work ethic are not taboo.

00:52:36.000 Aren't taboo.

00:52:37.000 Sweat, right?

00:52:37.000 And you have to sign it.

00:52:38.000 It's a 12-point pledge.

00:52:41.000 Sort of part 12-step process, part scout law, right?

00:52:48.000 And some people really, really, really hate it.

00:52:51.000 But one of the first things is, you know, I'm grateful.

00:52:55.000 I won the greatest lottery of all time.

00:52:58.000 I live in America.

00:53:00.000 Two, I do not follow my passion.

00:53:03.000 Three, it goes down all of these things.

00:53:05.000 It was like a little personal manifesto for me.

00:53:10.000 But I only bring it up because it's become increasingly more important to my foundation and now the more I look back on it, it's hysterical, Ben, how outraged people get.

00:53:25.000 I give away maybe $5 million so far, right?

00:53:28.000 Not a ton by foundation standards, but it's a chunk.

00:53:30.000 It's money, yeah.

00:53:32.000 Every year about $800,000 goes out.

00:53:35.000 And every year people say, well, why do I have to sign the sweat pledge?

00:53:41.000 And I said, well, you don't have to.

00:53:43.000 It's entirely possible this particular pile of free money might not be for you.

00:53:48.000 And it goes, what do you mean?

00:53:53.000 I'm like, well, I mean, there are many scholarship funds that award academic achievement.

00:53:59.000 I'm more interested in awarding attendance, right?

00:54:02.000 I mean, athletic achievement, talent, there are all kinds of rubrics and metrics for measuring

00:54:09.000 I'm gonna send you a sweat pledge, Ben.

00:54:24.000 Okay, sounds good.

00:54:25.000 Let's hone in on, for a second, the first principle that you mentioned, which is that you won the lottery because you live here, which is something with which I totally agree.

00:54:34.000 But that's a pretty controversial proposition these days.

00:54:36.000 Sure.

00:54:37.000 And it's become almost partially a left-right proposition, unfortunately.

00:54:42.000 Where you see there's a poll that came out just within the last month that suggested that Republicans, particularly, were very proud to be members of the United States, very proud to be American, and they were very proud to be American when Obama was president.

00:54:53.000 This was not dependent on who was president.

00:54:56.000 It was 73% of Americans who were Republicans were proud when Obama was president.

00:54:59.000 It's 77% now.

00:55:00.000 And for Democrats, it was like 54% were positive when it was Obama, and now it's like 38% because of President Trump.

00:55:06.000 Why do you think there are so many people in the country who look at the situation that they've been handed, which is the freest, most prosperous country in the history of humanity, and think to themselves, I'm a victim in this scenario?

00:55:19.000 Not to discount anybody's actual hardships or past, but why do you think that that's become such a prominent thing in what clearly is a land of opportunity?

00:55:25.000 Because it's not clear.

00:55:26.000 It's not clearly.

00:55:28.000 Of all the divides, the one that worries me the most is the divide between people who are genuinely, genuinely convinced that opportunity is dead and those who are not.

00:55:41.000 Right?

00:55:42.000 The ones who are artificially convinced, or just, you know, paying lip service to it, they don't matter.

00:55:48.000 But there are a lot of people who really and truly, truly believe the system is rigged, and they truly believe opportunity is dead.

00:55:56.000 That's a... they scare me.

00:55:59.000 Not because I'm frightened of them, but because that belief is... that'll kill us.

00:56:06.000 I mean, if that belief really and truly spreads, it'll kill us.

00:56:09.000 This is why the skills gap becomes weirdly political.

00:56:12.000 It shouldn't be.

00:56:13.000 It's just opportunity.

00:56:15.000 It's just 6.3 million jobs sitting there, vacant.

00:56:20.000 But when I point that out, it's very difficult because everything is politicized today, right?

00:56:26.000 What comes back is, well, what does the existence of opportunity mean?

00:56:31.000 In a country where we're fighting over the fact that opportunity may or may not be dead, it's proof positive that it's not.

00:56:39.000 Now that's a problem, right?

00:56:40.000 The optics don't line up.

00:56:41.000 So then you have economic experts, with whom I really can't engage because I'm not an economist, but they will tell you why the skills gap is a myth.

00:56:50.000 So here's how it breaks down.

00:56:51.000 If I point to six million available jobs, my friends on the right

00:56:56.000 will tell me that those jobs are available because human beings are fundamentally lazy.

00:57:02.000 My friends on the left will tell me that those jobs are available because employers are fundamentally greedy.

00:57:09.000 And that's where we are.

00:57:11.000 We can't think beyond the fact that our basic philosophies require us to see humanity as either lazy or greedy.

00:57:21.000 Now the truth is, in my opinion, we're both lazy and greedy.

00:57:26.000 Right?

00:57:28.000 And we're neither lazy nor greedy.

00:57:31.000 We're all of it and none of it.

00:57:33.000 And all of it gets measured out in unequal amounts.

00:57:37.000 But we don't

00:57:38.000 We don't have time today to parse the nuance of that.

00:57:43.000 It simply has to be one or the other.

00:57:46.000 So when I post a picture of me standing next to the flag on the 4th of July, I get a lot of pushback.

00:57:54.000 And I think a lot of people who are pushing me back don't really want to push back.

00:57:58.000 They just don't want to see me doing something patriotic because the lines have been drawn.

00:58:06.000 And now if you're

00:58:08.000 If you're patriotic, well then you must be on the right.

00:58:12.000 That's also really super dangerous.

00:58:15.000 It's a false choice and we have to push back against that.

00:58:22.000 It's incumbent upon us.

00:58:24.000 I think you're doing a decent job of it.

00:58:27.000 I'll try, thanks.

00:58:28.000 I mean, no, honestly, look, you're as biased as I am.

00:58:31.000 You're as biased as the next person, but you can point these cameras at anything you want, and you're pointing them at honest, thoughtful conversation.

00:58:40.000 Well, thanks.

00:58:41.000 Let's talk a little bit about, so you have a unique perspective on life.

00:58:44.000 What are your parents like?

00:58:45.000 And this gives you the opportunity to talk a little bit about your mom, because you have a brand new book that your mom has written that you're pushing right now.

00:58:50.000 So what were your parents like?

00:58:52.000 Well, they were a lot like what happily they still are.

00:58:56.000 Oh good, okay.

00:58:57.000 Yeah, my dad is 86 years old.

00:58:59.000 Thank God.

00:59:00.000 He delivers Meals on Wheels once, sometimes twice a week, and he volunteers at the hospital once a week.

00:59:08.000 My mom is 80.

00:59:09.000 She still sings in the church choir, and she writes every day.

00:59:15.000 She's been writing me letters for as long as I can remember.

00:59:18.000 I started reading them online, and people started saying, you should write a book, and so she has.

00:59:25.000 She wrote a book called About My Mother.

00:59:27.000 If I were you right now, you know what I'd do?

00:59:29.000 I'd say, I'm going to ask you that question real quick, but first, about my mother, Peggy Rowe, it's available at MikeRowe.com slash Mom's Book.

00:59:36.000 Check it out, it'll change your life.

00:59:38.000 And it will.

00:59:39.000 I mean, look, never mind what the book is about.

00:59:42.000 I mean, it's 14 short stories, and they're all terrific, and anybody who's ever been a mother or a daughter will love it.

00:59:48.000 What's amazing is my mom has written a book at 80.

00:59:51.000 She's 80 years old, and just decided, I want to write a book.

00:59:54.000 And it's good.

00:59:56.000 And I'm so proud of her because, hell man, people half her age, with way more opportunity.

01:00:05.000 They don't.

01:00:06.000 She did a thing.

01:00:08.000 My parents are both completely engaged with the world around them and still in love with each other.

01:00:14.000 So here's a final question for you before we have to run.

01:00:18.000 Grit and opportunity and opportunism and enthusiasm and curiosity, these are all the things that you like to talk about.

01:00:24.000 Do you think these are inborn qualities in people?

01:00:26.000 Are these things that you can cultivate?

01:00:27.000 Or is it a little bit of both?

01:00:29.000 Because obviously there's some people who, there's a case made that there's some people who just can't get over that hump, and there's some people who are automatically benefited from birth with these qualities.

01:00:38.000 How much of it can be cultivated and how much of it is just that's the way you are?

01:00:41.000 I think all of it can be cultivated.

01:00:44.000 I really do.

01:00:45.000 Look, I think change is the hardest thing, but to our earlier point, we come into the world

01:00:53.000 Utterly selfish, completely dependent, and totally, totally at the mercy of the people around us.

01:01:05.000 If we don't change from that,

01:01:08.000 You can cultivate an outlook of gratitude.

01:01:16.000 You can cultivate opportunism.

01:01:20.000 You can also cultivate hypocrisy.

01:01:23.000 You can cultivate smallness and meanness.

01:01:26.000 I believe

01:01:31.000 Some people will always have it easier.

01:01:34.000 Of course.

01:01:35.000 Nobody's starting from the same starting line.

01:01:37.000 It's okay.

01:01:39.000 It's never been that way.

01:01:40.000 But it's 100% up to us where we finish.

01:01:43.000 Well, Mike Rowe, it's such a pleasure to have you here and I really appreciate your time.

01:01:46.000 Everybody should go check out your podcast.

01:01:48.000 They should check out your mom's book.

01:01:49.000 Everything that you're doing.

01:01:50.000 And what's the best way to reach you with your website?

01:01:53.000 I'm on Facebook and MikeRowe.com.

01:01:56.000 I'm hard to miss.

01:01:56.000 Go check it out.

01:01:57.000 Mike Rowe is awesome.

01:01:57.000 Thanks so much for stopping by.

01:01:58.000 Appreciate it.

01:02:05.000 The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special is produced by Jonathan Hay, Executive Producer Jeremy Boring, Associate Producers Mathis Glover and Austin Stevens, edited by Alex Zingaro, audio is mixed by Mike Karamina, hair and makeup is by Jeswa Alvera, and title graphics by Cynthia Angulo.

01:02:19.000 The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special is a Daily Wire Forward Publishing production.

01:02:23.000 Copyright Forward Publishing 2018.

The Ben Shapiro Show - July 29, 2018

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

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