Relatable with Allie Beth Stuckey - Ep 973 | What Does Mike Rowe Think About God? | Guest: Mike Rowe

Episode Date: March 25, 2024

Today, we sit down with Mike Rowe to discuss the necessity of a college degree, trade schools as a viable option, and the future of artificial intelligence. Is college the right path for everyone? How did we get to the point where college is aggressively pushed on all high schoolers? And is AI a tool for the future or a crutch that will lead to mass intellectual decline? We also dive into why people seem so certain about the future and what the Bible has to say about human finiteness and what exactly we CAN be sure of. Check out the Work Ethic Scholarship program here: https://mikeroweworks.org/ --- Timecodes: (00:46) Universal truth / Work Ethic Scholarships (07:05) Delayed gratification (10:22) Women in trade / college (21:20) AI and certainty (36:27) Intelligent design (46:00) Uncertainty in the Bible (52:00) Will Mike run for President? --- Today's Sponsors: We Heart Nutrition — nourish your body with research-backed ingredients in your vitamins at WeHeartNutrition.com and use promo code ALLIE for 20% off. Jase Medical — get up to a year’s worth of many of your prescription medications delivered in advance. Go to JaseMedical.com today and use promo code “ALLIE". Carly Jean Los Angeles — use promo code RELATABLE to get 20% off your entire order at CarlyJeanLosAngeles.com! --- Relevant Episodes: Ep 572 | Mike Rowe: These Are the 3 Steps to Loving Your Work https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/relatable-with-allie-beth-stuckey/id1359249098?i=1000552252722 Ep 940 | WEF vs. the West: The Latest in Davos’ Global Takeover | Guest: Justin Haskins https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/ep-940-wef-vs-the-west-the-latest-in-davos/id1359249098?i=1000642956352 Ep 842 | The Elites’ Plan to Replace God With AI | Guest: Justin Haskins (Part Two) https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/ep-842-the-elites-plan-to-replace-god-with-ai-guest/id1359249098?i=1000621802685 --- Buy Allie's book, You're Not Enough (& That's Okay): Escaping the Toxic Culture of Self-Love: https://alliebethstuckey.com/book Relatable merchandise – use promo code 'ALLIE10' for a discount: https://shop.blazemedia.com/collections/allie-stuckey

Hey, this is Steve Day. If you're listening to Allie, you already understand that the biggest issues facing our country aren't just political. They're moral, spiritual, and rooted in what we believe is true about God, humanity, and reality itself. On the Steve Day show, we take the news of the day and tested against first principles, faith, truth, and objective reality. We don't just chase narratives and we don't offer false comfort. We ask the hard questions and follow the answers wherever they leave, even when it's unpopular. This is a show for people who want honesty over hype and clarity over chaos. If you're looking for commentary grounded in, conviction and unwilling to lie to you about where we are or where we're headed. You can watch this D-Day show right here on Blaze TV or listen wherever you get podcasts. I hope you'll join us. What does the future of work look like with the rise of AI? Why is teaching kids the importance of delayed gratification so needed today? And also, what does God have to do with all of this? Today, I am sitting down with Mike Rowe.

You know him from his very famous show, Dirty Jobs, but gosh, he wears a lot of hats, and he is doing such good work for the future of work in this country. This episode is brought to you by our friends at Good Ranchers. Go to Good Ranchers.com. Use Code Alley at checkout. That's Good Ranchers.com, code Alley. Mike, thanks so much for coming on the show again. I appreciate it.

Thanks for having me back. We were trying to figure out if it's been a year or two or five. I know. Time. Time is so weird. And you were saying it's been weird for you for the past few years. It's just been, it's been compressed on the one hand. Yeah.

Like there have been months since 2020 that felt like they went on for almost a year. Yeah. But then at the same time, a year or two feels like a couple of months. Yeah. So it's all, it's just conflated. You know, it was just a busy, super weird time. And everybody sort of went. through it, and I think we're still processing it.

I think so, too. It's just hard for me to believe that 2019 was five years ago. Yeah. It's just so bizarre. Well, that's the thing about math, Ellie. I don't like it. That's why I have a podcast. I never have to do math.

And the math doesn't care what you think. That's true. It's like gravity. You don't really have to believe in it for it to be real. For it to work. That's true. That's true. But thankfully, I have a calculator now that can figure that out for me.

Like you don't have to have your own truth. Yeah. With numbers or gravity. And you really can't. Have you seen, though, that there is a push. There is a push now to say that two plus two can equal five. Sure. If it makes you feel good.

Yeah. Now, if you're sad about one and one being two, then, yeah, you have every right to petition. There must be something afoot with the numbers. Some conspiracy. Something to do with pie, maybe, and prime numbers getting together. Something. Yeah, and the patriarchy, I guess. Probably the patriarchy.

Probably. Something about that. Yeah. Okay. Speaking of that, speaking of school and education and how it probably because of things like that, 2 plus 2 equaling 5, caring more about how people feel than what they actually learn, education in this country is not doing well. We're paying a lot of money per pupil.

Some people think it's a funding issue, but it's really not. We have a lot of money in the public education system, and yet performance is not good. But you are trying to get into schools. You are in schools right now with the curriculum, right? Just trying to teach kids how to work hard. So tell me how that's going. Well, we're just trying to get a little balance back into public schools. And it's been a slog.

You know, my foundation awards work ethic scholarships and has for the last nine years or so. And we're in the midst of it right now. We're giving away a million dollars between now and the end of April. So shameless plug, go get some at microworks.org. But part of the reason that we do that is because when you assist people to learn a skill that's in demand, and then you circle back and talk to them a couple of years later, you wind up with a very authentic story, way more authentic than me anecdotally telling you about these people, right? And so that's what the foundation has really been working on, is getting more real stories out there on the interwebs in a convincing way.

At the same time, we've been trying to take work ethic, whatever that means to you. And well, I can tell you what it means to me, but we've distilled all of it into a curriculum. And the curriculum is based on a thing called a sweat pledge that I wrote a couple years ago as we try and quantify. work ethic. If you're going to award work ethic scholarships, you have to at least be able to talk about what it is you think you mean. And the first thing we mean is, well, there's a scholarship for everything else. And there's academic scholarships and there's talent-based scholarships and athletic scholarships. So who's making the case for work ethic? So that's the rock I've been trying to push up the hill for a while. And I think the reason we finally found some traction, perversely, is because

other people were pushing other rocks. There's the ESG rock and there's the DEI rock and there's the CRT rock. To your point, there's a lot of different agendas in education and a lot of different acronyms. So I can't prove this, but I think I think what happened in part was a lot of parents were just kind of looking around and saying, listen, I don't mind if my kids are exposed to these different ideas, but can we at least make a case for work ethic and delayed gratification and personal responsibility and attitude and all of that stuff that we kind of grew up with that used to be taught. I mean, is there a way to identify some of our historical figures and talk about their contribution vis-a-vis those virtues

instead of turning them into these kind of triggering dog whistles that they've become? Anyhow, like I said, I can't prove it. I just know that for the first time, a big public high school in Vegas called Western High has taken our curriculum and put it into the freshman class, so about 750 kids. And I've become friendly with a woman called Chris Inglestadt, who runs a terrific foundation, also in Nevada called the Inglestat Foundation. And she has supported MicroWorks in the past. And she said, look, why don't we get together? We get your curriculum in this school. school and we'll dedicate four and a half five million dollars to the top performing kids.

So like the top 50 or 100 kids who go through this program will get a full free ride scholarship to any trade school in the country. So that's pretty great. Yeah. Right. So I mean, for the first time we're able to to marry this work ethic curriculum to a big pile of money and give it to kids who demonstrate. beyond a shadow of a doubt, a level of, I'm not sure I can say the word worthiness, but that's what I mean.

Yeah. Right. We want to reward the behavior that we're all desperate to encourage. This does it. How do you teach the value of delayed gratification in a world where you really have to work to find it? If you want instant gratification, it's right there at your fingertips. and you really have to put in effort to even find a form of delayed gratification. How do you convince someone that it's worth that effort?

You can't. You can't. I mean, how do you convince somebody that two and two is really for? You know, you just have, it takes, it's terribly clever, isn't it, to say it takes time to teach delayed gratification. But it does. And it also takes failure, you know. You can ask your kid, look, you can swipe left and you can get on the TikTok or the reels and next thing you know, three hours go by, right? That happens to all of us.

It's happened to me. It happened to me this morning, actually. But how do you feel afterwards, right? How do you feel after you've spent like an hour and a half? Never good. Right. So you're getting this little dopamine thing while it's happening. and then when it's done, it's like you just ate a big bowl of candy corn or cotton candy, right?

Like your teeth hurt. You didn't learn anything at all. And you start to think, damn, did I just waste that time? Right. And the honest thing. Right. So that's time you didn't spend reading any of the great books on this coffee table or having a moment with your kid or calling a parent. or a grandparent.

I mean, when you think of the things you're not doing while you're satisfying the immediate need to be gratified, that'll break your heart. You know, so I think part of it is just letting kids experience immediate gratification and really having a conversation with them about did that really, did that nourish you in any way at all? Right? So, yeah, you can't rush delayed gratification. Hey, this is Steve Day. If you're listening to Allie, you already understand that the biggest issues facing our country aren't just political. They're moral, spiritual, and rooted in what we believe is true about God, humanity, and reality itself. On the Steve Day show, we take the news of the day and tested against first principles, faith, truth, and objective reality.

We don't just chase narratives and we don't offer false comfort. We ask the hard questions and follow the answers wherever they leave, even when it's unpopular. This is a show for people who want honesty over hype and clarity over chaos. If you're looking for commentary grounded in conviction and unwilling to lie to you about where we are or where we're headed, you can watch this T-Day Show right here on Blaze TV or listen wherever you get podcasts. I hope you'll join us. We have a video of the young woman Chloe Hudson who went through your program and she has something to say about what she did with her scholarship. Can we play that sot of Chloe?

Okay. People say there's no opportunity for women in the children. trades. Those people never met Chloe Hudson. You entered a field that historically has been dominated by men welding. My dad, he really instilled in me that there is absolutely nothing that I'm incapable of. The women in the 40s and 50s, they blazed that trail. And they did it with red lipstick. I'm not a female welder. I'm not a welder. I'm not a tradeswoman. I'm just a welder. That's what I do for a living and I love it. Apply for a work ethic scholarship today at microworks.org. Okay, so women and welding. That's not something that you hear about often. No. Chloe is a rock star, by the way. We love her because,

to your point, she just doesn't look like a welder. Those are big fake eyelashes. That's a lot of makeup. She loves it. She really, really embraces her femininity. And the first time we met, she applied for one of our scholarships. And her story was she came very close to signing on the dotted line to go to medical school. She wanted to be a plastic surgery. She wanted to be a plastic surgeon. But, you know, 350 grand in the whole. It's scary to start your career like that. And she grew up in a household where debt was, you know, a real four-letter word. And so she just said, no, I'm going to do something else. I think we gave her six or seven thousand dollars through our program. And she got some other grants. And she went to this welding school. And she is

today just a total rock star over at Joe Gibbs' well. I mean, she's just, everybody loves her, and she loves what she's doing. And so that's what I meant before, just a little snippet like that that can make the rounds and make a kid go, well, wait a minute, how much is she making again? It's like $140, $150,000 a year and no debt. Yeah. So these stories have to get out there. Yeah.

They just have to. And, you know, work ethic is a part of it. Yeah. You know, it's crazy how quickly things have changed. My husband and I don't have any, you know, burning desire for our kids to have to go to college. And yet for us, it was an expectation. There was never any conversation or question whether we would go to college. Same thing for my parents.

My grandmother was the first one in her family to go to college. She was raised on a farm. But, you know, she saw going to college is her ticket to success and independence. She passed that down to my dad, who passed that down to us. And now it's kind of stopped. And I see that with a lot of my friends. I mean, our kids are young, but we're not so sure that's how we feel about college and higher education. And in fact, we have some fears surrounding it, considering some of those acronyms that you just listed and the ideology that's being pushed at universities.

I mean, it's just crazy to me how fast that change has happened over just a few generations. It's like the time thing we were talking about before. It's stretched out and it's compressed at the same. same time. Look, nothing ever stays the same. And we want it to. It's, it's part of the allure, I think, of history. It's, it's comforting, I would think, for parents to have a playbook. Because job one, don't screw them up, right? You just don't want to screw up your kids. So what can I do? What are the, what are some things I can say and do that are universally wise? And for a while there, it was go to college. Because,

Look, to be fair and to be honest about it, there was a time not so long ago when our country really did need to encourage more kids to affirmatively get into higher education. We needed more engineers. We needed more doctors. That's all good. The problem is the same problem all of the time. We pushed too hard and too far, and we did it. with this cookie cutter approach. This idea that there is a training manual for parents

and that somewhere near the top of it, that's very appealing. And so that trope found its way into the manual. So a whole generation of well-intended parents, combined with a whole generation of well-intended guidance counselors, told a couple generations of kids, not just, hey, this is a path you should consider. We told him that if you don't take this path, you're doomed.

Yeah. You're doomed, right? And so when we started doing that, we turned trade schools and apprenticeships into something subordinate to a four-year degree, which by extension made a whole category of jobs, vocational consolation prizes. And so all of that part of the workforce became the thing you don't want your kid to wind up doing because it's a reflection partly on their deficiency and partly on you.

Right. So it's a very powerful thing. You don't have to look any further than varsity blues to see what parents will do. Right. Right. So, you know, it's important to acknowledge that all of that happened and I think it's important too to say look is it really a mystery as to why college got so expensive when you think about that kind of pressure and you think i mean the universities have free reign essentially to charge whatever they want because their customer base is scared to death so they'll borrow whatever it takes and they don't think of it like a car or a or a tv or something transactional, they think of it as an investment in their future. And then the next thing, you know, it's college for all. And then the next thing, you know, if you're opposed to that,

you're way out of line. You're crazy. I hear this every day. Oh, Mike Rowe, he says, anti-college. No, I'm not. My liberal arts education was very valuable to me. It was also extremely affordable at $12,500. That same thing today is over 90 grand. same school, same courses, right? So, yeah, what was true for my mom and dad, my dad came through on the GI Bill, you know, what was true for his parents, it's simply not true in the same universal way.

It still might be true for a lot of kids. People, their parents listening to this right now, I'm sure, who have kids who should absolutely get into a four-year school. I don't want to suggest that that is no longer a thing. Right. But I will suggest that it was never the best path for the most people.

And that's what we've been told for a long time. Yeah. I mean, I'm thankful for my liberal arts degree too. I think my husband is valuable in a lot of ways. Looking back, I actually think I probably learned what I needed to learn, mostly in high school. But I do think that there have been a lot of benefits to my college education. So I'm with you.

When did you graduate? 2014. Oh, good for you. Yeah. That's awesome. Good for you. Yeah. So I'm thankful for it, but I absolutely see the benefit in alternate routes that, as you said, they were not even, they were not even presented to us in school at all. And if you chose, if you were one of the crazy people who chose to go to a community college or chose to not go to college, that was like, wow, did you hear about that person? That person decided not to go to college. And it was this insane stigmatized

choice. Well, that started. I mean, for me, my guidance counselor literally looked me in the face when he suggested that what's it, Pennsylvania, UPenn, James Madison, and the University of Maryland. I was a senior. I'd taken some tests.

I'd done well. He said, look, these schools will take you. You know, and there's a financial aid package. You apply for this and this. And A, I didn't have any money and I didn't want to borrow money, but B, I didn't know what I wanted to do at all. And so why would you, why would you want to borrow money to find out what you want to do? It just seemed so bananas. And I said, look, I'm going to go to Essex Community College.

I can literally walk there from my parents' house. And I'm going to, I'm going to figure it out. He literally said to me, Ali, that is beneath your potential. And he pointed to a poster that he had hanging in his office. The poster said, work smart, not hard. And it was cut right down the middle.

On the left was a picture of a kid in a cap and gown, mortar board who had just graduated, holding his diploma, smiling, looking optimistic. And next to him is a tradesman in a dark, dingy, dirty environment holding a wrench, looking down, right?

It's that moment. That's what I mean when we, you know, we were in the, this 1979, and so we're in the midst of the big push for college for everybody. And we weren't making, we weren't simply making a case for college. We were using all the other trades as a cautionary tale. Yeah. And I'll never forget that. You could end up like that guy.

That's it. Better be careful. Or else. Yeah. And that's what that's what PR does. It always goes too far and it always paints with too broad a brush and people always wind up hearing advice that they shouldn't and then taking it, which is too bad. Yeah, that is too bad. I saw the other day on a talk show, Stephen Colbert, this guy from the W.E.F and his name is escaping me right now.

but he's, you know, a part of the World Economic Forum. And he said, for the first time ever, parents don't know what to teach their children because we cannot predict what's going to happen in 20 years. He was talking about throughout the generations, you'd still be able to lay a foundation and know that those things are relevant, which I'm not really sure is true thinking about the Industrial Revolution. But he said, now we have no idea. AI, he says, is just going to completely take over. the need for humans is basically going to go away, is going to dissipate. He's big into AI. And parents, really, there's no need to even teach your kids essential skills because we don't know if those skills are going to be applicable.

I mean, that's scary to me. I don't like thinking about that. But do you think that's true? Well, I think it's true that he said it. And it's probably true that he believes it. Yeah. But, you know, he's arbitraged everything out of the business of learning and mastering a thing, but for the transaction itself. So in other words, you know, why is the value of a thing limited to its applicability?

Why is the value of a thing limited to its application in the real world? Does poetry have no value? Like, what is the application? Like, identify the things in your life that bring you the most joy and the most fulfillment and the most nourishment and ask what their actual application is. It's a, you can't let him set the table that way. Otherwise, you'll wind up answering the question the way he wants you to answer it. You know, it's not a very good question, in other words, and it's based on what I think is a faulty premise.

Your work can't be reduced to the pay. The pay is very important, obviously, because we don't work simply to fulfill ourselves, but we also don't work simply to make money. So somewhere in that transaction is the humanity. that you mentioned. And in that humanity is the individuality. And in the individuality is the great experience of life and the unpredictability and the variance. This idea that he doesn't know what's going to happen in 20 years is probably true. But why is it bad?

Why does he need to know? Does you want to know what the sunset's going to look like tonight? I hope not. You know, I think about that a lot, you know, in terms of certainty and uncertainty and, you know, our need for it. Like, we all need to feel secure enough that we can function. In other words, we need to know the sun is going to come up. But if it came up the same way every day for 20 years, if the sunrise always look the same, and if the sunset always look the same,

we'd go out of our minds. We'd be bored to death because uncertainty is variety, right? So, yeah, I don't know what to think of people who look at their crystal ball and go, okay, it's impossible to predict what's going to happen. Therefore, we should stop doing all these things or start doing all these new things. That seems silly to me. Yeah. I mean, Google Luddite Revolution and read about the loomers and read about what happened in the

textile industry back in the, was at the 1700s. Yeah. I mean, all these fears, all of that uncertainty, it's, history is just a wheel, you know, and it's spinning and it's moving. And I think sometimes that so many people believe we're living in an unprecedented moment simply because they're going through it. It's unprecedented to you. Right.

But, you know, been there, done that. In different ways. Everything's old. When you think about the past 100 years and how much has changed and how little you could predict going from, you know, 1930 to 1940 from 1960 to 1970, whatever it is, or let's say 20 years, certainly from 1960 to 1980, you couldn't have predicted a bunch of the things that developed. Even going back further than that, I'm sure that there were a lot of people who couldn't have predicted the printing press.

And I also think about how there are skills. that maybe are less needed today than they were 20 years ago, but that doesn't mean that those skills aren't valuable. Say today that it's less important for you to be a good writer or a good speaker because everything has predictive text and you can kind of just use a template. But still, being a good communicator and a good writer can make you stand out. It's actually, I think, because it is so, I don't know, know, it's not as in demand seemingly that it can actually be more valuable. It can make you,

it can give you access to different parts of the world and different people than you would be able to otherwise because so few people can speak well and write well and communicate well and relate well to other people. So just because something isn't as needed as it was 20 years ago doesn't mean that it doesn't have value. Absolutely. And then we shouldn't teach it. Of course. Yeah. I mean, What value do the classics offer? Right? A lot of people look at that and go, it's just not relevant to me,

so we shouldn't teach it. And you can go, again, if you ask that question, if you say, where is the value? Look, it's an interesting argument for me to make because it's ultimately going to bring me back to defending the very liberal arts degrees,

which I think are so egregiously overpriced right now. But it's important, you know, it's important to know things that you don't use. It's important to master things that have no practical application in your life. It's not enough to simply do that. Then you become the art history major who's on the dole. Then you become the polysci major who's asking if you want fries with that and so forth. So your life has to be a balance.

But yeah, I would really suggest that, The people most responsible for developing AI are probably very good communicators. They're probably very good writers. They probably experienced all the things that allowed them to craft this incredible tool. Now the people who will come to rely on this tool exclusively and to the detriment of their own growth, well, they're just going to be the batteries in the matrix. They will, to this guy's point. point be they'll they'll shed their humanity and and they'll be the stars in their own versions

of idiocracy right and they won't be able to write or think for themselves and they and they won't be able to quote a sonnet and they won't be able to reflect on the strange compression and extension of time after a lockdown and they might just think that two plus two equals five if the computer says so And if it makes them feel good. And besides, who are we to, who is anyone to challenge my own truth? I'm living in my own little, right? So look, if we have to go through all of that silliness only to come out on the other side and realize back to delayed gratification that anything worth knowing takes time,

anything worth feeling takes time. So these, my granddad used to say shortcuts. lead to long delays. I think that, I think, I see that now everywhere I look. And so if AI's here, AI's coming, there's no doubt about it. The question is, are we going to see it and use it as a tool? Or are we going to embrace it as a, as a crutch? Are you worried about the future of work as it relates to the dominance of AI? Yeah. I'm not totally freaked out about it

because I don't have a crystal ball either. And I think 20 years from now, I don't think the species is going to just shed the humanity the way this guy's talking about. Right. It's Yuval Harari, by the way. That's his name. Big W.E.F. guy. Yeah. Didn't he do Sapiens?

Is he the guy that wrote that book? Big thick book? Maybe. I don't know, Bree can check it for us and let me know. Pretty sure. Look. Yes, he is. All right. There you go. So that guy's smart. Yeah.

You know, I can't compete with his curriculum, Viette. But, you know, I just wonder how many people have outsmarted themselves. I don't know. I believe that we're only, what, 2100 generation. generations old as a species. We haven't been here a long time. It seems like every new generation, though, like we said, thinks that this is it. This is it. We've never seen times like this. But every one of those 2100 generations have said the same thing, because at some point, they were at the absolute height of human understanding. But what have we done? I mean,

what have we done with this incredible understanding? Like the greatest medical minds in the world thought it best to drain the blood out of George Washington when he was suffering at the end of his life to fix him. That didn't work. There was a time when we were pretty sure lobotomies were the right way to go. Right. You know, we've been long uncertainty for as long as we've been on the planet. And time and time and time again, we learn new things.

And that's just a polite way of saying we've been proven wrong. We were pretty sure. We were pretty sure the sun was going around the earth. Yeah. And in fact, we even burned a few guys alive. Sorry, Galileo. You know, wrong on that one. Oops.

We were so sure. Yeah. And so, yeah, the thing I think about and worry about and look for, is who sounds the most certain. And I used to be comforted by certain sounding people. And now I have to admit, I'm more skeptical of them. Because it seems like we've had a front row seat in the last three or four years

of this weird compressed time, right? To see certain sounding people be proven dead wrong. Normally it takes decades, but we're seeing it like, oops. Yeah, like real fast. Same day. Right. Yep. Somebody else brought the receipts.

You're wrong. Yeah. So that's amazing. Now, this guy, you're already, he, it's interesting to talk about, it's interesting to talk with certainty about the uncertainty two decades hence. Yeah. Because you can't be wrong. No one can say you're wrong about that.

But I'll tell you this, I narrate this show called How the Universe Works. I've been doing it for decades. And by the way, spoiler alert, we still don't know. But that's the name of the show. And it's great. And it's filled with scientists and physicists and mathematicians because thanks to Hubble and some other telescopes, the amount of information coming back to us is so breathtaking. And it's so mind bending that I,

often find myself in the booth with a new script in front of me and the producer from the UK will be like, yes, we have to go back and redo a couple of things from two months ago. There have been some changes. Yeah. Isn't that amazing? It's amazing. But, Ali, the changes are like, oh, remember when we said there were 200 billion galaxies in the known universe, turns out, thanks to some new photos and some new triangulation,

there's actually two trillion. Yeah. Oh, big news. So I narrate it. And I sound as certain as I can when I say it, right? Two trillion galaxies in the known universe. Think of it. And we spend paragraphs and very expensive graphics illustrating the hugeness of this.

We're literally looking back through time near the moment the Big Bang was a thing. And concluding, the best minds in physics are concluding that they're two trillion universes. Two months later, I'm back in the booth. Turns out it's more like $150 billion. In other words, Mike, you're just a narrator, but you were off by roughly $2 trillion. You were like... Which is huge. It's a big number.

But doesn't that make you? I don't know if you've spoken before about your faith, but doesn't that make you realize how finite and limited we are? And that it's very likely that all of this has been created by someone who is infinite, an intelligent designer who knew better than we did. What it does for me is it reminds me of the importance of humility. and it reminds me in a certain sounding world. Why do our newscasters work so hard to sound so certain? Why do they look into the lens, the way I'm looking into this now, and work so hard? Why do all the spokesmen out there say, take it from me?

Everywhere we look, there is a conspicuous lack of humility. And that show and science in general would it make? me think of is where did the humility go. It's okay not to be certain of how many galaxies there are in the known universe. It's okay to believe an intelligent designer is the ultimate architect of all of it. It's okay to doubt that too. But it's not okay to be so damn sure. And it's that what are you selling that that informs you with so much certainty and i and i realize this is tricky right because if you're talking to a person of faith their faith is rooted in certainty and to question that is to question a deeply personal decision but the bible describes faith is

the assurance of things hoped for which i think that that is like a really good definition of It's not confidence in ourselves, how I would define it. It's actually that humility that you're talking about, that, wow, I'm clearly finite. I'm clearly limited. And if the top scientists are off by trillions and trillions, and they're telling me that they know maybe there's a God that transcends all of our knowledge, it's got to come from something infinite. if our smartest people are still limited in their capacity to understand it. And so, yeah, faith is the assurance of things hope for. But it's not confidence in my ability to know that there is a God.

It's confidence that I am so limited that the only explanation for all of this has to be someone bigger and better and wiser and more creative than I am. That's how I describe it. My friends in the science world, the reasonable ones, I think, would agree with all of that right up to only. They would say, no, no, that's not the only explanation, but it is an explanation. And it is an explanation worthy of great exploration, for sure. But the minute you use words like only, then you're in a box and you're in a place where there is no other option. And, you know, I mean, I don't know how far we want to go in this direction,

but like free agentry is a big part of faith, right? You have to come to it through your own, maybe science is the wrong word, but through your own journey, through your own exploration. You asked earlier, how do you teach delayed gratification? You could have just as easily asked how do you teach faith? You can't, in my view. What you can do is talk about it. and you can present the evidence.

There's a great book. Josh McDowell, I think, wrote it. The evidence demands a verdict. Great title. You know. Could have just easily been a science book. So in the end, I think that most people

will put their faith in something because we have to. otherwise we're living in that world where we're not sure the sun is coming up. We're living in Harari's world where, hey, we don't know what's going to happen in 20 years. So what's the point? Yeah. Right. So you can't be untethered or unmoored from everything.

The question today is, where do you put your faith and to what degree? Do you put it in the politicians? Do you put it in our elected officials? Do you put it in our media? What institution do you still have faith in? Is it medicine? Because I can fill a room with a lot of certain sounding doctors who just can't seem to agree on everything from vaccines to mercury to autism. We can go down the list.

So, you know, I try and be good-humored about it because it's almost like a British sketch comedy. when you imagine 330 million people, desperate for the playbook we were talking about before, desperate not to screw their kids up with bad advice, desperate to get everything right. And everywhere they look are certain sounding experts who can't agree with each other, accusing people who are skeptical and simply looking for the truth of being deniers. I mean, so if you don't fall in line, you're not a good-natured skeptic who's simply not convinced yet. You're just a denier.

You're faithless, potentially. So the country wants a playbook, in my view, and I don't know how to help them in that regard other than to say there are a couple things that I still believe are universally true, regardless of where you put your faith. And one of those things is work ethic. One of those things is curiosity. You know, you don't have to be faithful or faithless to be curious. You can be genuinely engaged in a search for something bigger than yourself.

And if you're willing to work hard at it, and if you're patient, then you're going to arrive at something that probably feels like the truth. Is it? I don't know. I haven't got that far in the book yet. But that, honestly, it's such a great point you made about the fact that this guy is looking 20 years ahead and because he can't see the future concludes something dark. You could just as easily look just as far ahead and see just as little and conclude from that adventure and joy and wonder. This is the life we have. We don't know how it's going to end. We know it's going to end, but we don't know when and we don't know how. We don't know the specifics of what's coming. So in a really general way, we have to decide to either be fundamentally freaked out by all this tech. We don't understand. We don't

understand and all the uncertainty that looms or in on the joke fundamentally like okay we're a miracle the odds of us sitting right here as we are and talking the fact that we exist the fact that we're walking around fog in a mirror living in this country in this time i fundamentally you know we've said some very pessimistic things in the last hour but there's never been a better time to be alive there's never been a better place to be alive. There's never been a more interesting time to have curiosity rewarded than right now. You know, that's something that I love. I know that I keep going back to like the faith conversation,

but as you were talking, I thought about so many things. One thing that I love about the Bible is that, you know, there's a lot of debate over whether the Bible is inspired by God. Of course, I believe that it is. And some people would say, no, it's just written by man. But what you see over and over again in so many of the stories is man's certainty in his own strength and his own wisdom and his own infinite ability to succeed by himself and God coming in and saying not so fast. Not so fast, Sparky. Yeah.

That when you think about the Tower of Babel, let us create this big tower to glorify ourselves and God not allowing it to happen. That's part of why I think the Bible is so believable because if it were just PR for human beings, the people who wrote it, would have made themselves look a lot better. But that's the beauty of the Bible is that it really all is about how awesome God is, how infinite he is, and how weak and silly and stupid we can be. And of course, in all this pessimism,

when I hear someone like this guy, I'm like, well, we've never known the future. To me, my, you know, my assurance and the assurance of a lot of people in the audience is that I'm not in charge.

We have a saying, all we can do is the next right thing in faith. with excellence and for the glory of God. In any given moment, I mean, that's the only thing I can control. I don't have the capacity to control or care about every single thing that's going on in the world right now, certainly not in 20 years. But I can trust that God has put me on this tiny speck of eternity to make the world around me better for his glory, which includes hard work.

That's a very biblical concept. To work hard and to cultivate and to maximize and to beautify. And when I make things smaller like that and when I remember my own personal responsibility to my family, my community, whatever resources God has given me, things become a lot less scary. And I think that's part of like the beauty of what you do is that you tell people, focus on what your hands can do. Focus on what your mind can do, what your resources can do.

That can make a huge ripple effect and a big difference. But instead of only focusing on what's out there and what's out there. what random, you know, W-E-F guy is saying, focusing on what is in front of us and what we can do to make things better, there's just, there's a lot of comfort in that. So it's micro macro. Yeah. We were joking. I thought you were saying, that could be, that's like a whole play on words.

I thought you were saying your name. Well, I. But now I see micro, I got it. It's micro macro macro. Yeah. We were talking before somebody said action about, about names. know, and I said it's weird. Most of my friends call me micro. We all call each other by our first names, Frank, John, Steve, Billy, Micro. And so in my business and in the foundation,

micro macro has become a turn of phrase, and I use it whenever I'm dealing with something that's bigger than my arms can encircle. Two trillion galaxies, right? It's macro. It's big. AI, it's macro, 20 years down the road, macro, uncertainty in general, macro, the collapse of our institutions, macro. Micro is exactly as what you've described. It's one person at a time, it's one skill at a time, it's one foot in front of the next. And in small successes, you know, you work your way to something that looks like enlightenment, hopefully. And so, yeah, I, I know my limitations. I'm not a macro guy.

And I know that when I feel like I'm doing the right thing, it's when I can chart it and see it. This school in Vegas, I think, is the right thing. I met those kids. And we'll be able to track them. We'll be able to tell their stories. That makes sense to my brain. I can't go too much beyond that without getting into that weird.

I'll start making predictions. Well, let me tell you about 20 years from now. I don't know what I'm talking about. You could have a podcast, you're a co-host. If you could find someone named Macro, it could be Micro, Macro, and you could talk about the big things and the small things. I'm just pitching it. No, actually, I wrote it up, not as a podcast, but as a series of documentaries

for the Discovery Channel years ago. I like it. They didn't. Oh, darn. Darn. Well, maybe one day. Too cerebral, micro. Yeah.

Okay. Well, thank you so much for sharing your. wisdom with us today. Where would you want to direct people? If they want to find out more about your program, scholarships, all that good stuff, where can they go? Microwworks.org is the place to apply for a work ethic scholarship. We'll have a million bucks or so available through April. And we'll probably do it again later in the year. We try and do two million a year and that's there now. But sensing who your audience is, and I confess, I'm not 100% sure who listens to this program, but I'm getting a sense that they,

I'm getting a sense that they would love a program I do on TBN called The Story Behind the Story. And we're in season five now. And these are recreations of short stories I wrote over the years about things you didn't know about famous people you've heard of. Like in the old Paul Harvey style. Yeah. They've turned into a thing. and people really like them. And each week I sit down with the guy who runs that network.

And he talks about the biblical and scriptural underpinnings buried in the story. He basically tells me why he thinks I wrote the story. And then I tell him the truth about why I wrote it. And then we discuss them in terms of like a morality play. People seem to like it. I bet your audience would too. Oh, I think so too. Okay.

Last question. I said that I took in some questions from my Instagram audience. We didn't get into all of them. But a persistent question is, what would it take for you to run for president? How many people would follow you on Instagram? 550,000. That's pretty good. It would take a lot, you know.

Actually, that's not true. It would be easy. Running for president would be easy and probably fun. But modesty aside, Ali, the risk of winning is simply too high. Yeah. then what then what i mean i i don't know i the only reason i'm i would like kind of consider public office now is because i'm i'm older than i've ever been and and i know i couldn't be accused of grabbing and clutching and and striving i i don't understand there's a lot i don't understand but

how in the world did we get okay with people getting into office and never leaving? Yeah. I mean, what is that? What is that? Like the whole plan was, you run your farm, you run your business, you raise your family, you care about your country, you're a good citizen, give them four years, maybe eight. You know, if you're really called, look, even George Washington took a pass on the, what, the third term or the fourth, when he's like, I'm out.

Yeah. Nobody leaves anymore. You know, Mike Gallagher left not long ago. Good for him, four years and out. But nobody leaves. Yeah. It's amazing to me. I guess because they crave the certainty and maybe the power.

Maybe they're just sure that there are two trillion universes out there, galaxies or whatever it is. Yeah. They're just not going to let go of it. They're sure. Yeah. Yeah, maybe so. Well, if you ever change your mind, you've got at least a few people in a relatable audience who would vote for you. Excellent. There you go.

Good. Thank you so much, Mike. I really appreciate it. Always fun. Hey, this is Steve Day. If you're listening to Allie, you already understand that the biggest issues facing our country aren't just political. They're moral, spiritual, and rooted in what we believe is true about God, humanity, and reality itself. On the Steve Day show, we take the news of the day and tested against first principles, faith, truth, and objective reality. We don't just chase narratives and we don't offer false comfort.

We ask the hard questions and follow the answers wherever they leave, even when it's unpopular. This is a show for people who want honesty over hype and clarity over chaos. If you're looking for commentary grounded in conviction and unwilling to lie to you about where we are or where we're headed, you can watch this D-Day show right here on Blaze TV or listen wherever you get podcasts. I hope you'll join us.