In this episode, we pick up where we left off with Mike Rowe, host of the show Dirty Jobs and founder of the Microworks Foundation, a group that provides scholarships to help kids who don t have a 4 year college degree to work in the trades. We talk about the need for these scholarships, why they're a good idea, and how the government needs to get on board with the effort to create more opportunities for people who don't have a four year degree to get them into the trades and the skills they need to get into those jobs. We also talk about a new initiative that Mike is running to make sure that kids in high school are getting the same opportunities as those who do have a degree, and that they get the same benefits and opportunities that are already available to them. And we talk about why it's so important that we don't just focus on getting a degree but on getting into a trade school or a four-year college, and why it should be a two-year, five-year endeavor. This episode is a must-listen for anyone who wants to learn how to get a trade degree or get into a trades degree. It's a must listen, and it's worth the price of admission, and the benefits that come with it. You won't get much better than that. I hope you'll join us in the next episode of the Dirty Jobs podcast. If you haven't done so already, then you'll be sure to check it out! and tweet me to let me know what you thought of the episode! Timestamps: 5: 5:00 - What was your favorite part of Dirty Jobs? 6:30 - How do you think Dirty Jobs was? 7: What's your favorite dirty job? 8:15 - What do you'd like to see me do in the future? 9:40 - What s your favorite piece of advice from Dirty Jobs episode? 10:00 11:30 13:00 What s the best way to get more opportunities? 15: What s going to be the most impactful? 16:00 How do I m looking forward to doing it? 17:00 Is there a better way to do more of this? 18:00 Do you have a plan? 19:00 Are you looking for more opportunities in 2020? 21:30 What are you looking forward?
Transcript
Transcripts from "Truth Podcast - Vivek Ramaswamy" are sourced from the Knowledge Fight Interactive Search Tool. You can also explore and interact with the transcripts here.
00:00:23.000well i'm joined today on the podcast by mike roe who i had a Great conversation with a number of weeks ago on his podcast.
00:00:34.000And we had enough to talk about that we wanted to pick up where we left off.
00:00:39.000And Mike, one of the things I wanted to talk to you about was, you know, where we left off last time, I think we talked about the virtue of hard work.
00:00:50.000But we were just starting to talk off air and I just said, hey, let's just turn to the camera and do this.
00:00:56.000How many times in doing this podcast, Vivek, have you realized some of the best stuff happens right before and right after you stop rolling?
00:01:24.000I run a foundation called Microworks, and it evolved very organically 15 years ago out of a show called Dirty Jobs, which I'm still working on, which has been around forever.
00:01:34.000And the point of Microworks was to try and make a persuasive case for 2.3 million open jobs.
00:01:44.000This is back in 2008. You'll remember in those days, the headlines were obsessed with the number of people who were unemployed.
00:01:52.000And on my little show, Dirty Jobs, everywhere I went, at this time of record high unemployment, all we saw was help wanted signs.
00:02:00.000And so that's when it first occurred to me that, you know what, there's another narrative going on in this country.
00:02:05.000And it has to do not just with employment or unemployment, but with the very existence of opportunity.
00:02:12.000A lot of people think that And thought, and I think still believe, that unemployment can be cured by creating more jobs.
00:02:20.000But the skills gap shows us that that's really not the case at all.
00:02:25.000And in fact, today, I think the latest numbers you'd probably know better out of BLS, but it's like 9.5 million open positions.
00:02:31.000Most of those jobs don't require a four-year degree.
00:02:36.000They're the kinds of jobs that we featured on Dirty Jobs for decades.
00:02:39.000And so I started a foundation called Microworks to try and shine a light on existing opportunity because so many people, Vivek, just were under the assumption that opportunity is dead.
00:02:52.000And under the further misassumption that the way to fix it was just to create more jobs.
00:02:59.000I've been doing this for about 15 years, and somewhere along the way, about 10 years ago, we started offering work ethic scholarships specifically for kids who didn't want to go to a four-year school, but who wanted to become steam fitters, pipe fitters, welders, technicians, and so forth.
00:03:16.000Anyway, it's been a slow, steady increase.
00:03:24.000And it's really hard to prove that the ship is turning around when you're talking about debunking myths and misperceptions and stigmas and stereotypes.
00:03:37.000And so what I was telling you off air was that I'm finally kind of coming out of the closet with this thing in the sense that I've been beating up Congress for years.
00:03:47.000I've gone to multiple committees and I've testified about the need for some kind of PR campaign on a national level to make a more persuasive case for all these jobs and to try and get shop class back in high schools and at the same time try and tell kids that the best path for the most people isn't necessarily a four-year degree.
00:04:08.000That's been my priority on the foundation side.
00:04:14.000The headlines have caught up to my own smack.
00:04:17.000I've decided rather than wait for the feds to do this campaign, we're just doing it ourselves.
00:04:22.000We filmed dozens of testimonials with people who have gone through our program, welders primarily who are now making over six figures a year with no college and no debt.
00:05:31.000Of thinking that there's a problem, and that it is government's job to solve that problem.
00:05:38.000And then even further, that's not generally my impulse, but that there's a government created problem.
00:05:45.000And therefore, it's government's job to solve that problem.
00:05:47.000I think a part of what you described in the skills gap is Largely, I think a government-created, government-subsidized problem.
00:05:56.000But even still, the thing I love about you is you didn't wait for government to come fix the government-created problem.
00:06:01.000Actually, private action can still fix a lot of government-created problems sooner than government can fix the government-created problems.
00:07:11.000I absolutely think the skills gap is a real thing, but I think it's also a will gap.
00:07:17.000And I think that it's not a great mystery why we have 9 million open jobs, $1.7 trillion in student loans, and 7.5 million able-bodied men affirmatively sitting out the workforce.
00:07:30.000These are symptoms of I think, of a larger underlying belief.
00:07:38.000We've had our thumb on the scale for a very long time with regard to the kinds of jobs we deem to be aspirational, with regard to the types of education that we think...
00:08:12.000And then you have subcategories of alternative education, like vocational.
00:08:17.000But they all become these subordinate alternatives for people who seemingly weren't cut out for the best path for the most people.
00:08:30.000I think that it's very difficult to talk about problems without talking about I think it's hard to talk about any of these things without being super mindful of the language that we're using and all of the preconceived nonsense and baggage that unfortunately comes along with it.
00:08:49.000Yeah, a couple interesting thoughts there, just as you're talking.
00:08:55.000Actually, I'm curious for your view on this.
00:08:59.000You did make the point about somebody being able to get the job as a welder or plumber or whatnot, make six-figure salaries without debt.
00:09:09.000That's an enticing economic proposition relative to somebody who's graduating with a four-year college degree and is saddled with debt that leaves them further behind in the workforce.
00:09:22.000Kind of an interesting question if you were to make kind of a prediction now and roll this forward a few years.
00:09:30.000Do you think that dynamic mostly changes the underlying problem, even beneath the symptom of bringing up between the lines of what you're saying, but the cultural cache and expectation, and then language is a expression of what your underlying cultural norms and values really are?
00:10:01.000Do you think that there's just more of a departure between cultural hierarchy that sort of departs from economic hierarchy as they've mapped onto each other for the last 20 years?
00:10:13.000Maybe they come apart, but we have two different kinds of sort of social structures and honor hierarchies.
00:10:18.000I'm curious for your take on which way you see it breaking.
00:10:21.000Yeah, look, I think you didn't intend it to be a trick question, but it is because it presupposes the idea that I'm going to be able to say something that applies evenly to a lot of people.
00:10:37.000The temptation to try and sum up, as you know, in politics, it seems to me that you're in the business of saying a thing that resonates with the fat part of the bat.
00:10:51.000To get your show renewed, to get elected, to get your product sold, you have to say things that apply to large numbers of people.
00:11:00.000But when it comes to things like job satisfaction and educational efficacy and so forth and so on, so many things impact it that I think the best we can hope to do is be mindful that of all the things we can't control, one of the things that we can is the prevailing definition of a good job.
00:11:22.000That's actually in our collective ability to shape and argue about As attitudes change and as language evolves, I think tech plays another role as well.
00:11:36.000And full disclosure, I went to a community college for a couple of years and then I went to work and then I went to a university and then I got a bachelor of science degree, of course, in communication and speech with a little bit of English and a touch of philosophy.
00:13:24.000So, I just think, for anybody with a curious mind that has access to the available tech and is willing to To learn a skill that's in demand.
00:13:34.000I don't think there's ever been a better time for that person to be entering the workforce because they have at their disposal an arsenal of tools that I certainly didn't have growing up, and I bet you didn't either.
00:14:13.000But without the nuance that you just drew.
00:14:16.000And actually, what you said speaks to me because I actually did take a lot away from my liberal arts education as well.
00:14:23.000It was the right path for me even though I recognize as a policy matter the fact that we have wrongfully created financial incentives to skew people in that direction and to take debt while they're at it that creates exactly the pragmatic worker shortage that we face in this country and the opportunity that somebody could have to actually take a different path If we just didn't distort their incentives to see it.
00:14:46.000I see both of those things as being true at once.
00:14:48.000And what I worry about a little bit is people in what I will call our movement, right?
00:14:52.000So this provocational movement latching on to a anti-intellectualism that is unnecessary because it's not really what motivates what we're saying or why.
00:15:08.000But you think about like Thomas Jefferson, right?
00:15:12.000He invented – I'm sitting on a swivel chair right now.
00:15:14.000You can see me swiveling one way or another.
00:15:18.000I wanted to clarify that for the record.
00:15:21.000But the swivel chair was invented by Thomas Jefferson, actually, while he was writing the Declaration of Independence.
00:15:28.000You know, Benjamin Franklin, the Franklin stove was invented by Benjamin Franklin as he was ideating the vision for a great nation who gave us the freedoms that you and I enjoy.
00:15:37.000And I just think part of the American way is that there is an element of both of that that is at our nation's heart, that daring, ambitious quality of what we make and what we create through our own hard work, but through a level of curiosity that abounds.
00:15:52.000And I would be ashamed to sort of see The pro-work, pro-skills training-based mentality that folks like you and I would like to bring to bear in our culture, to have a casualty of that be that any intellectualism that sometimes, if we're not careful, kind of goes right along with it.
00:16:12.000I think you may see what I'm saying here because you just said it.
00:16:16.000Look, it's such a problem, Vivek, because it's not – that's a self-inflicted wound.
00:16:26.000And so it's kind of like – I never really understood why the Republican Party and conservatives in general sat back and watched as – Call it kindness, was arbitraged out of their platform.
00:16:44.000Somehow or another, they accepted the idea that, okay, you're cold, you're uncaring, you're ruthless, you don't have a heart, right?
00:17:39.000It's not like the skilled labor movement or the unions or anybody who sees themselves as fundamentally skilled wanted to divest themselves of traits like entrepreneurship, individuality, and curiosity, but we let it happen.
00:18:00.000And so, you know, there was a moment, you might remember this in 2016 during the Republican debates, where Marco Rubio had a huge applause line.
00:18:15.000I forget what the setup was, but he basically said, you know, what this country needs is not more philosophers, we need more welders.
00:18:26.000And the next day on my social channels, I've got thousands of people saying, hey man, this Rubio guy, he's really singing your song.
00:18:34.000And I had to say to people, you know, people who follow me and people who support my foundation...
00:18:41.000I have to say, look, he's actually not singing my song.
00:18:46.000I don't have anything against philosophers.
00:18:49.000In fact, I think it's kind of important.
00:18:52.000I think what our country needs are more philosophers who can run a straight and even bead with a welding torch and more welders who might be able to contribute to a conversation around Nietzsche or Descartes or...
00:19:08.000So the idea of being a well-rounded, curious person who just happens to make $150,000 a year welding or looking after your pipes, that's an image we have to get back.
00:19:25.000Otherwise, we're just going to be left with these one-dimensional notions of hardworking people possessed of some level of skill, but who are really not very well-read and who, frankly, need to be taken care of by some, either their employer or their union or somebody, right?
00:19:56.000I mean, it's a reductionist – I mean, frankly, Mike, before you and I met the way you're – I'm like having my head in the sand at times.
00:20:05.000And so there's various parts of popular culture that just never found their way to me because whatever.
00:20:10.000But I didn't know Dirty Jobs until it was in the context of the first time you and I were set up to chat and then I learned about it.
00:20:18.000But my impression was that you would be the caricatured face of that Marco Rubio punchline, which I still think is like making a valid enough point.
00:20:32.000So I want to engage with it, but it's not really the whole story.
00:20:34.000But there's a depth and nuance to your perspective that's sometimes lost in the Twitterification of it.
00:20:42.000And I think it's important that we celebrate the totality of what it means to be a contributing, thinking, independent-minded, functioning worker in an economy or even citizen of a nation of which part of it is being a productive functioning worker in an economy or even citizen of a nation You know, I might even go one step further.
00:21:09.000Further than you in terms of – you made two different lanes.
00:21:11.000I might make four, actually, which is – I agree with 100% of what you said.
00:21:17.000Welders who have at the tip – like all of us do now, fortunately, at our fingertips in the internet that opens up a knowledge base that – actually, some of the most intellectually curious people I've met.
00:21:29.000Surprise is some of my old classmates and neighbors in Manhattan when I say this is – People that show up at our campaign events in Iowa or New Hampshire or Michigan as we travel this country, many of whom did not have more than a high school degree, but often know more about central bank digital currencies than my former colleagues on Wall Street.
00:21:52.000And that's not a dig at the Wall Street.
00:21:55.000It's just true because curious, hungry people Independent-minded people armed with an internet can secure knowledge for themselves.
00:22:05.000But welders who happen to know something about philosophy and philosophers who know how to make something with their hands.
00:22:11.000And then there will be people who are philosophers that literally you couldn't make them particularly good at doing things with their hands.
00:22:19.000I know people who fall in this category.
00:22:21.000There's part of me that falls in this category.
00:22:23.000I'm not going to pretend to be something I'm not either.
00:22:28.000And then there's also people who might just be exceptional at making things with their hands that just don't have an innate interest in philosophy.
00:22:38.000But the plurality of each person being able to achieve their own fullest potential, for some people that will be a well-rounded potential.
00:22:49.000For some people, it will be actually a particularly salient, unidimensional skill that they just want to cultivate and make the best version of themselves.
00:22:58.000That's what we need to provide more space for such that My path today is really, or at least maybe not today, but for much of the last 20 years has been the only path to living your American dream.
00:23:11.000But in fact, true pluralism is my path can't be the only path, but my path still can be a path, but it's one among many available for self-actualization.
00:23:20.000Well, you can see why it's such a conundrum for people who are trying to cut through and say a thing that resonates with the masses.
00:23:31.000We've entered into the era, I think, of specialities.
00:24:37.000Being a whole person requires you to be able to change a tire, fix your brakes, balance a checkbook, pay your taxes, maybe offer some useful advice to your kids.
00:24:51.000You just have to be able to do all that.
00:25:58.000I'm sure not a day goes by where you don't see these things, and you're going to see it a lot more in the next couple of months as you do your thing.
00:26:05.000But it just feels like in a rush to cut through, in a rush to be heard, we frame things in this, what Gutfeld calls it, a prison of two ideas, right?
00:26:17.000It's just everything is black or white, blue collar or white collar, this or that.
00:26:25.000And it's part of the trap that has fueled the underlying causes that have led to a great many of these symptoms that I think we now see as problems.
00:26:37.000I mean, on a practical level, as it relates to your work, through the nonprofit at least, how does that make you think about whether, even if you're training someone in a skills-based role, whether there's some room for...
00:26:56.000I don't know, 10% to be actually completely outside of that.
00:27:01.000Oh, I only bring that up because yes, there is this internet thing that can be a portal to so much knowledge, but just in my own journey, maybe a lot of us go through this.
00:27:13.000There is this thing of habituation too, right?
00:27:16.000Which is Like, curiosity, part of it's innate, and part of it's inborn, but like most things, like virtue, you only gain it through practicing it, too.
00:27:29.000And so it starts as a really tiny muscle, but it atrophies if you don't flex it early.
00:27:34.000And so, like, I wonder, to make sure we don't fall into this prison of two ideas, even in terms of what we practice here, like, maybe liberal arts colleges need a few more classes in being a mechanic or need a carpentry class.
00:27:47.000But let's say the person training to be a carpenter maybe has like a course on, you know, Nietzsche.
00:27:53.000And maybe if that's not his speed, then maybe on World War II. Or maybe Frederick Hayek.
00:28:03.000But look, we kind of had it for a while, right?
00:28:07.000We had shop class in high schools for a very long time.
00:28:10.000And we had them there even though we knew that maybe a majority, certainly a plurality of the kids there weren't going to be predisposed for a career in the trades.
00:28:21.000But we kept those classes present because we wanted everybody in that high school to at least see some optical proof that there was another part of the workforce that didn't require a suit and a tie and a cubicle and so forth.
00:28:40.000When we took shop class out of high school, we unleashed the Kraken.
00:28:47.000I can't think of anything that's led to more unintended consequences, both to our workforce and to our educational system in general, than that one harebrained, hopelessly misguided decision.
00:29:06.000I don't think some evil, wicked puppeteer was, you know, sitting in a corner twirling his mustache and laughing maniacally as he implemented his master plan to screw up millions and millions of kids.
00:29:19.000I think it came in part from budgetary issues, but mostly I think it came from a concerted PR campaign to elevate every other form of education.
00:31:24.000By 1979, I was a senior in high school, and I was called down to the guidance counselor's office before graduation to have a chat with Mr. Dunbar about my future.
00:34:28.000And to this day, guidance counselors are bonused, not on their ability to get kids into trade school, but in their ability to get kids into a four-year school.
00:34:36.000We're making the same goddamn mistake over and over and over.
00:35:06.000You know, the trade school versus professional school.
00:35:10.000Why this distinction between a trade and a profession?
00:35:13.000What does it mean to sort of have intellectual curiosity if you're in a profession versus a trade?
00:35:19.000Maybe there is no profession versus a trade.
00:35:21.000Maybe that's a prison of two ideas in its own right.
00:35:25.000Or a distinction without a difference.
00:35:27.000A distinction without a difference, which is to say that they're just words and they don't mean anything and they don't have – they only – We only make them mean something by making real mistakes in the real world as a retrofitted way of trying to make otherwise meaningless words mean something and maybe the words should just stay meaningless.
00:35:46.000There's one other moment where this thing hit me like a ton of bricks.
00:36:08.000And I'm standing backstage kind of preparing my thoughts and one of the organizers walks up to me and hands me a typical brief, you know, just kind of put together on the organization, current thinking, best practices and so forth.
00:36:20.000And on the front page, it says, as a matter of officialdom, We no longer refer to ourselves and would prefer not to be referred to as the future Farmers of America.
00:36:42.000To your point, in much the same way the word trades has become somewhat of an obstacle, the word farmer had become an impediment to their prime directive, which is to recruit kids into this organization to prepare the next generation of folks who grow our food.
00:37:01.000So, these are two houses on the same street.
00:37:05.000You know, the future of the trades and the future of farming.
00:37:08.000And, you know, our country relies so incredibly on skilled tradespeople And the modern farmer.
00:37:18.000And both of these cohorts are struggling with language, myths, misperceptions, stigmas, and stereotypes that are making it difficult for them to swell their ranks.
00:37:30.000And we are all paying the price for it.
00:37:33.000And you can walk it right back to language.
00:37:35.000If we're living in a time, and we are, where farmer has become a bad word to farmers...
00:37:44.000Then we got to get the wheels back on the bus.
00:38:04.000Last time we chatted, you said you were going to be remarkably transparent, never deliver a speech from prepared notes, and document this whole hot mess you Forrest Gumped your way into.
00:38:29.000By any measure, we're – and to be really honest with you, ahead of where we wanted to be from a campaign strategy.
00:38:34.000We wanted to be in third place by the end of the year.
00:38:36.000I think we're looking at inching into third place in most of the national polling now, if not soon.
00:38:42.000I'll be at the debate stage in August.
00:38:44.000I think that turns the race upside down and we're going to – My view is I'd rather speak truth, to your point about transparency, I'd rather speak truth at every step of the way and lose an election rather than to play some political snakes and ladders and win.
00:38:59.000My gut instinct from traveling the country right now at least is, actually that is the winning strategy, but we're going to find out.