The Chris Cuomo Project - Mike Rowe

Episode Date: January 17, 2023

In this week’s episode of The Chris Cuomo Project, Mike Rowe, host of “Dirty Jobs” and founder of the mikeroweWORKS Foundation, joins Chris to discuss whether he’d go to college if he had to do it all over again, how a work truck and a college degree both serve as barriers to entry in the workforce, why a trade-friendly message is perceived as right of center in media culture, broken blenders, and much more. Follow and subscribe to The Chris Cuomo Project on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and YouTube for new episodes every Tuesday. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

We've got a real giant problem staring us in the face, and fundamentally, it's rooted in arithmetic. Every year, five for every five tradesmen who retire from our workforce, two replace them. And it's been that way for over a decade. Hey, thank you for being here for another episode of The Chris Cuomo Project. Subscribe, follow. Don't forget the free agent merch. It's making a lot more sense now to be independent, isn't it? And we're going to put together a kitty of money. It's growing all the

time. And we're going to start giving it to people who are doing the kinds of things that we want to see in the community around us. Don't follow some party putatively like they were some kind of lousy football team. You should be about you and critical thinking and people who serve your interest, the interest of your family and your community. That's what being a free agent is all about. Wear your independence proudly. That's what the merch is about. You know, branding helps us to kind of develop an identity and have confidence in it.

That's why I'm doing it. It's also why I have a very special guest for you today, Mike Rowe. You know him, the voice of the deadliest catch, that beautiful baritone. You know, he's an opera singer, classically trained. Mike Rowe works, his foundation, phenomenal, rewarding the trades. That's what I talked to him about today. Sure, we wind up talking about a lot of things

because he's really, really smart and garrulous and loves to spread out conversation, but Dirty Jobs, somebody's got to do it. What he does on Facebook, what he does with his podcast, How I Heard It, which is a great podcast, it's all united by this respect for work that makes the society around us. And let's be honest, the trades, they get a little bit of a black eye if you think about it. Would you rather be a lawyer or a plumber? Most people, I think, you know, the right answer is lawyer, right? I mean,

that's the money, that's the prestige. Is it? Have you looked at the rates of immediate job acceptance coming out of law school? How much it costs to go through college and law school versus what it is to get a plumbing certification, and then to be a businessman. I think people don't understand that. When you think of a tradesman, you think of a laborer, somebody you call and they do something. These are entrepreneurs as well, many of them, and they do very well. But that's not our value system, is it?

That's the conversation with Mike Rowe. Why do we see things the way we do about what has intrinsic value, what is it? That's the conversation with Mike Rowe. Why do we see things the way we do about what has intrinsic value, what is more versus what is less, and what it says about us? Mike Rowe is as articulate as he is famous on this issue. He understands the working class and what it means in our overall dynamic and what it doesn't mean as well as anyone. This is a conversation worth listening to and or watching. Look, no shame in my game. I've been using AG1 for over five years.

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Restrictions apply. You see the website. You'll get details and important safety information. You're going to need a subscription. It's required. Plus, price is going to vary based on product and subscription plan. Mike Rowe, as I live and breathe, thank you so much for being on the podcast. Big fan. Chris, here's to living and breathing, brother.

That's right. I'll take it. I have a low bar for existence these days. And this is absolutely gravy. Do you miss singing? Well, the glib answer is yes. But the truth is, not really, because I'm sitting in my office right now, as you can see, and just out of the range of the camera is a keyboard. And every week on the keyboard, I sit down and I write an unauthorized jingle for one of the podcast sponsors on my own

show. I've been doing this for a year. It's outrageous. Nobody has yelled at me yet. And I've got 20 jingles out there in the world. I write on myself. I record all four parts myself. Sometimes my producer sings along with me, Chuck. It's ridiculous. It's indulgent. But the short answer is, you know, once a singer, always a singer. Mike was a real singer, by the way. You may know.

If you're a micro fan, you know all this stuff. And if you're not a micro fan, then you wouldn't be listening to this. But he is classically trained as an opera singer. And I've actually listened to tapes of his because our oldest is a classically trained singer. She's not operatic. And I showed her just to show how it's such a great building block for somebody's ultimate success with what else they try to do. And I was just wondering, because, you know, you sounded great. It was obviously a passion that helped shape you as a young person. And you moved on, but you found a way.

And I think that's thematic for you, right? You have found a way to keep your passions involved no matter the pursuit. I've tried. You know, it was my granddad who told me when I was 15 years old, this is a guy whose footsteps I was determined to follow. Carl Noble, he could build a house without a blueprint, this guy. He was ultimately the inspiration for Dirty Jobs and the foundation that I run. You know, the handy gene is more recessive than you think. And it skipped over me. And I didn't get the skills

that came easily to him. He was the guy who said, get a different toolbox. Do things that you have no idea whether or not you have a facility for. In other words, he was saying, just because you love something doesn't mean you can't suck at it. Just because you're good at something doesn't necessarily mean you'll like it. And so that for me was a big light bulb moment. I went to school. I didn't care about singing, but I studied it. And I studied a lot of things that I didn't think I didn't care about singing, but I studied it. And I studied a lot of things that I didn't think I cared about. And yeah, you find a way. If you could do it over

again, Towson State you went to, right? Would you go to college? Man, that's such a great question. I didn't go to Towson State out of the gate. I graduated high school, took a few months off, had no idea what I wanted to do, and was saved at Essex Community College. It was a two-year school where for 26 bucks a credit, you could basically experiment. You do anything you wanted. And I stayed there two and a half years until I felt like at least I had a sense of what I thought I might want to do. Then I tried that for maybe six or eight months, narrating shows, impersonating a host, doing all sorts of things. Then I went to Towson, got my paper. But again, Chris, this is 1982. I graduated in 84 and a half from both those

schools. And I went back the other day just to see what the exact same course load would cost for an out-of-state student today. At the time, my AA degree and my BS degree cost a little under $12,000. Today, it's a little over $90,000. So, would I go to college if I had it to do all over again? Probably not. I would probably lean into my sense of curiosity, which I think is still intact. I would use this thing, my cell phone, and an internet connection to access 99.8% of all the known information in the history of the world. And then I would go about the business of trying to master a skill that's truly in demand. So let's talk about that. My beef with the student debt forgiveness. Okay, I understand all the arguments. I understand why people say, why should I pay for somebody else's education? Nobody did this for me. Where does it start? Where does it end? Who qualifies?

Who doesn't? I get all of that, but that goes to the how. My problem is with the why. And I don't know what the return on investment is anymore for the college kid. There's no question that we have two generations buried under college debt. There's no question about that. There's no question that college, university costs too much. And government does not chase after why they charge so much the way they do charge after who borrows and how they borrow. What do you make of the proposition of the return on investment of going to college? I think it's a canard, right?

I think that if we're going to talk about college as an investment, then we can't elevate it above the investment of a work truck for a man who makes his living building colleges, right? That work truck required a loan. That loan has interest. That interest accrues. That's a critical tool to that man's vocation. Just as a diploma or any kind of certification is a tool. It's part of the toll you have to pay. It's a barrier to entry. The question is, should it be a barrier? Now,

there's no negotiating with a truck. You can't right to the heart of why we've got $1.7 trillion in student loans on the books. And in my opinion, it goes right to the heart of why colleges and universities, many with $30, $40, $50 billion in endowment, feel justified to raise their rates. We've told an entire generation of kids that they're screwed without a diploma. At the same time, we've taken shop class out of high schools and we've attached so many stigmas and stereotypes and myths and misperceptions to a whole category of essential work. And then we scratch our heads and say, Jesus, how can we have 11 million open jobs? How can we have the cost of college being so high? The real question, Chris, is how couldn't it be any other way, given all we've done? So, personal anecdote, I have a niece, Personal anecdote, I have a niece.

I have a lot of nieces. She's at Harvard. And she gets offered a job by a social media platform. And what was interesting to me was, one, does she go back and finish? Yes, because her mother would have killed her. But she got the job that she would have dreamed of while she was in college. But for a skill set, she did not develop at Harvard University. It was technological and marketing expertise that she understood from her own studies and pursuits and hobby interests, really. And it was really a critical thinking moment for me. I always knew there was an imbalance

of a cost in college that's a simple function of supply and demand, and that it's a power center. a cost in college that's a simple function of supply and demand, and that it's a power center. And a lot of people who are in elected office wind up finding their way into the employ of a university. So they're certainly not really that determined to have that university system have less cash on hand. And then I started to see it everywhere. When we do demographics, how do we split up voters? College-educated and non-college-ge educated, right? That's as big a dividing line as anything else. And I've always felt it to be a false metric because it assumes the obvious. If you don't have a college education, you're an idiot and you're going to fall for things. When I think it's equally true that no, people who don't have a college education may be more

attached to the significance of the issues in a household slash business slash personal impact because they're living their lives in a lot more of a direct way than people who are still getting an education. You want to be a doctor. You want to be a lawyer. You want to be a professor. You want to be a research scientist. There are certain areas where you're going to need a lot of education. There's no question about it. And likewise, Chris, if you want your kidney to be replaced or your brain to be operated on, it's not unreasonable to glance over at the wall and hope to see some diplomas hanging there. Yes. Harvard Medical School would be nice, right?

I get all that. But, man, the trick here is that you have 330 million people in this country, and they're not all the same. And when it comes to education, we paint with such a broad brush. We talk so platitudinously as though the best path for the most people is written in the stars, right? As if it's been ordained from on high that thou shalt attend a four-year school or suffer the consequences. You're going to wind up turning a wrench if you don't do this. So it's a value proposition. And that's why I get a lot of heat for this, you know, because people say, look, it is an investment in your future and you make

it all about the money, Mike. You make it all transactional. Well, I'm sorry, but jobs are transactional. Paychecks are transactional. All tools are transactional, including this thing we're talking about right now. So to talk about the value of a degree from Harvard versus a degree like I have from Essex Community College, an associate of arts degree, to suggest that one is more valuable than the other is madness. Now, to suggest that one is more expensive than the other is madness. Now, to suggest that one is more expensive than the other is perfectly rational. When I started my little crusade, MicroWorks, out of dirty jobs, this is maybe 15 years ago, on Labor Day it was, one of the first things I did

was I looked at that ranking thing you were talking about, right? It's not just the demographic divide in terms of who gets hired, but Time magazine, Newsweek at the time, every year, top 100 universities, top 50 universities, the froth that they whip up, the insecurity. I mean, you can draw a straight line from that to varsity blues. And I wrote to those publications and I said, guys, whatever, I get it. Do your thing. Rank the Ivy League. Rank the general university system. But why aren't you ranking trade schools? Why aren't you ranking community colleges? Why aren't we looking for the best place to become a six-figure welder or a six-figure mechanic? Why are we doing it? Believe it or not, one of them actually took

me up on it. Forbes started ranking trade schools. But it's a tough thing to ask. And most of them, when you do ask, they look at you like you got two heads. I think it's about marketing, branding, values, PR. I mean, I see it everywhere now in our society because I really do believe, and I know every election is the most important of our generation. And, you know, we're always stuck, especially in our media culture and making something new the most, the biggest, the best. So I get all that. And I'm not even condemning all of it. If I were to advertise for a job for any position on my team, okay, I would get dozens and dozens and dozens of resumes immediately from people 25 to 55 with no experience to they've been everywhere, they've done everything. I couldn't find an HVAC guy.

I had to call a friend who is a builder to help me figure out how to vent the gas fumes out of my garage so my daughter, who sleeps on top of my garage, doesn't kill me or grow a third eye. Everybody was too busy. Yes, I live out on Long Island, and it's not that big a population. In New York City, it takes you a year to get a contractor to do something. I started looking around the country. You want to get your driveway paved. Good luck. You go on Angie's List.

Oh, there are plenty of tradespeople there. They're just not free. And I started to think about it. What are we doing here? And then I looked at the people in my community where I live, which has a really big trade culture. Not all the kids in our high schools go to college because dad owns a landscaping company, mom and dad run this. That happens out where I am in the hamptons in suffolk county but those kids get no shine they get no love and i believe that at a time of reassessment right cancel culture me too you know party system all these things we're going through what is

identity i think that should be on the table how do we do it look my foundation shines them up every day some other foundations i know of do some pretty good work. Some TV shows do some pretty good work. What you're really talking about, Chris, is better PR for a chunk of the workforce that by and large lab. Obviously, I can't tell you anything there you don't know already, but education is politicized. Work itself is politicized. And if you're going to confront the myths and misperceptions and the stigmas and the stereotypes that keep hundreds of thousands of people from exploring these 11 million open jobs we have right now, then you have to be persuasive, which means you can't shake your finger and you can't give them a lecture and you can't give them a sermon and you can't be the middle-aged white dude standing on the porch shaking your fist and screaming about

work ethic and going on and on about snowflakes. We're the clouds from which the snowflakes fell, right? It's a big, giant, hairy conversation. And part of it, you know, I listened to your podcast the other day. You had my friend Dave Ramsey was on. It just talks very basically about supply and demand. The demand and supply around the workforce is about to catch up to us, in my view, in a way that is really going to amplify your concern. We're not going to be talking about, hey, you know, this guy can make a great living if he learns this skill, or hey, wait, this employer's in real trouble if he can't recruit more people over here. The conversation

is going to shift from that weird seesaw binary back and forth labor versus management nonsense, not nonsense, but right, the typical thing. And it's going to become, it's going to come down to questions like this. How long do you want to wait for that HVAC guy for real? How long do you want to wait for the plumber? How long do you want to sit there flicking the switch, waiting for the lights to come back on? We've got a real giant problem staring us in the face.

And fundamentally, it's rooted in arithmetic. Every year, for every five tradesmen who retire from our workforce, two replace them. And it's been that way for over a decade. You don't have to look too far into the future to understand when the math collapses in on itself. And when it starts to go splat, when people can't get a plumber, maybe then we'll start to have a different conversation about trade schools versus four-year, about endowments, about scholarships, about apprenticeships. Maybe then we'll start to think about what high school would look like with a robust shop program back in the curricula, right?

But I'm afraid until the fat part of the bat is really agitated, until guys like you and me and regular families just trying to get through their life can't get their gutters fixed, can't get the solar panel on, can't get the spring well dug, whatever it is, until it hits home at that level, we're going to still see people having conversations about Yale versus Dartmouth or Harvard versus Penn and so forth and so on. And what's the point? A bunch of those kids wind up living with their parents when they graduate, by the way, because the job market, we've largely turned into a service economy, which is different than a trade economy, by the way. From an economic theory standpoint, it is different. It's different

if I do your taxes as a service versus whether I build your house. They have different implications economically, and they're even categorized differently by economists. But I think that it is a really fundamental question, and it doesn't get discussed. Now, obviously, I'm talking to Mike because he owns this space, okay? He's got a foundation that gives scholarships for kids and young adults to do trades. His shows obviously give us this sense of what we all want to believe about ourselves, which is that we respect the man and the woman with the grease between their nails. But you don't want to be them. And what I don't understand is where that comes from. I mean, I understand where it comes from, but what is it doing for us?

Because the other jobs are gone, okay? You're not going to be a lawyer and get a great job. I had a waitress the other night at a restaurant who just graduated from my law school. True story. And I said, well, I don't get it. You graduated. When I graduated, oh, your dad was Cuomo, whatever. When people from my law school graduated,

if they were near the top of the class, you know, if they had done well, which I did, they had a gig and they were waiting to see if they passed the bar exam. Because if you failed the bar exam, you know, then it was like all this drama. She does not have that job because they are not available because everybody is full.

They're not making partners. It's changed. And I'm now like kind of obsessed with it and you know I've always been a fan of yours I loved meeting you when you were at CNN and I felt that you would have had a bigger footprint at CNN if the perception of what you were about with trades and helping that part of America didn't play as being far right of center in media culture. And I never saw it like that, but I always wondered why. I was always waiting for you to become like a face of the network because everybody likes you and you do everything well. Thanks. I had no idea what to expect over

there. And for your listeners who don't know, Jeff Zucker hired me in 2000, I guess it was 12, maybe 13. And I did a couple seasons of a show called Somebody's Gotta Do It. And it looked an awful lot like Dirty Jobs. In fact, you know, it was a way to complete the phrase. It's a dirty job and somebody's gotta do it. Well, the dirt was on Discovery and Somebody's Gotta Do It was on CNN.

And I think that freaked a lot of people out too, right? I mean, it's just, it's kind of a weird migration. And suddenly my show is partnered with Ordain's, it's just, it's kind of a weird migration and suddenly my show is partnered with Ordain's and it's doing pretty well. But as you know, Chris, breaking news is not a thing I had to worry about over at Discovery. The first year of that show, somebody's got to do it, was preempted 50% of the time. A new episode coming up, you promote it, the whole thing, you work your ass off, it looks great. And then, you know, Castro dies.

Or there's a riot. Or the election goes off the rails. And so it was very, very difficult for that show to find its footing over there. You need consistency. But I also felt there's a political perception of this. Like when people listen to this, podcast is doing well, knock on wood. The most consistent feedback I get is, well, you've changed. You're obviously a center-right guy. I have more experience.

I'm 52 years old. As far back as I can remember, I've been involved in politics. It was always happening in my house. My father got into politics. I'm the youngest by a lot of my family. So when I was four, he got into elected politics. When I was seven, he lost his first big race. When I was eight, he was made secretary of state and now officially in the game. And then he was lieutenant governor and then he ran for governor and he was a big sensation, all this stuff.

I grew up in it. I have never seen politics as anything but a scourge on my existence because of how it effed up my family life. Okay. Because it sucks being examined that way. It just sucks. And I really always am very light, even on the Trump kids who are all adults. I get defending daddy. I get that you're not going to see it. Now it's different than if they were 11 or 12 or 20, but I get it because you're so scared. Everybody's against the person that you love,

especially in their situation. It must be very intense. I get it. I have never identified with any of these groups because I have seen through them my entire life. I have heard all the conversations that you started hearing after the segment's done when the people are like leaving the set

and they're treating each other totally differently than they were just on television because that's the game and that's what they're doing. And I always joke with people and they'll be like, well, look, you're a Democrat. Me thinking that the former president lied way too much about things that matter too much and chasing him for it, especially when he started to target my family,

does not make me a Democrat. And I always say to them, find me a Democrat with a shotgun in their bedroom. Yeah. But that's who we are. When people hear you pushing the trades, they think, oh, this guy's a righty. And we're so stuck in that system, forget about the education system, that people don't want to see it with clear eyes.

But I don't understand why somebody doesn't jump on it as an opportunity because it's such a big need. It's going to happen just simply because the supply and the demand thing is going to force it. And we're all going to wind up with more skin in the game than we thought. But to go back, you know, the cognitive dissonance of being a guy, a little right of center on a network like cnn is is really interesting to me because i don't know how many people have had shows like full-on commissioned multi-season shows on cnn and fox but i have in fact jeff actually did me a solid your old boss when it became clear that somebody's got to do it, was really not going to find a steady home at CNN, even though the feedback was just terrific.

I had just finished shooting the fourth season, right? And you're a TV guy. This never happens, right? The election was heating up 2016. It was going to be a big thing. And Jeff said to me, Mike, I am going to wind up in the Donald Trump business. And if you're upset that your show has been preempted historically, it's only going to get worse. So I'm going to give it back to you. I actually own that show, right? He gave it back, including the unaired season four. That show is now cut up into half hours, and it aired over the last five years on the Trinity Broadcasting Network. Now, think about that. That's even further to the right than Fox.

A show went from CNN to TBN. I have a show now on Fox. I have a show on Discovery. I got my own podcast. I'm only mentioning this because it's really, really hard to deal with people who can't see you, but through the lens of the platform you occupy. The thing that will really sum this up, and it is relevant to the overall conversation we're having, but I didn't realize the extent to which our country had become this siloed until one week in 2016 when I went on the Bill Maher show, real time, to have a conversation

like I'm having with you, to talk about the skills gap, to talk about skilled trades, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. That show was seen by 8 million people. And my buddies on the right just crapped right up their backs. They were so appalled that I sat there next to Bill Maher and had a civilized conversation about a topic that matters to me. Two days later, I went on the Glenn Beck show. And I sat down there with Glenn Beck and talked for an hour about the exact same thing. In fact, we had the exact same conversation.

And my buddies on the left had a vapor lock. They melted down. How could you, Mike? How could you sit next to that guy? And I swear, if you went on my Facebook page at the time, there were six million people there, almost equally divided. Each side equally appalled, not at anything I said, but the fact that I had the temerity to sit next to the wrong guy. Right. That's where it all began. And to answer your question, to somehow see a trade-friendly message associated with the right? When in the 70s and 80s, when you think about the unions,

when you think about the Democrats, when you think, I mean, that was over there then. I mean, holy crap, the programming choices, the platforms, the networks, the personalities, the politics of it all. People are just going out of their minds trying to parse a level of cognitive dissonance that simply shouldn't be there. It has to be there, and I'll explain the obvious to you and to most of you listening as well, but it's important for us to repeat things because we get caught up in watching the game and being drawn into the game of our political culture. We treat it like football.

Like, I'm a Jets fan. The Jets suck. They'll always suck. But I pretend every year that this is our year and that something has changed because that's the nature of that game of fandom. But we shouldn't be fans in politics. The plus is everybody wants to own the group that you're speaking for and about. The Democrats, the centrists, the righties, the fringes, the mainstreams, the core, everybody respects the working man and woman who's making

their own way, who's building the country. Everybody wants that brand. So they're all happy to say, yeah, I'm pro them. Now what they do for them, that's something else. The negative is in a binary zero sum political system, everybody has to take a side. Now, people will say in response, wait a minute, that's not what you say on your show, and I'm not on the side. Two things. One, two things can be true at once. This is the system. And either you play by that game or you don't.

And the second thing is, the core of this country does not play the game. They watch it the way I watch the shit-ass Jets. But I'm not on the field. And I am not even in the stadium. But I watch the game. And I enjoy the game because that's what I know from my culture. Same thing with our politics. And I believe that this is all related.

That if you want people to get out of this idea that college or bust, you have to look at all of it. Why are we college or bust? Because it's elite versus the regular people, the uneducated, the unwashed, the deplorable. And that is a function of the game. And I really believe that sometimes the only way to change something is to come at it from a totally different way. And what I want for people is, I would love for there to be more parties. I'd love for there to be ranked choice voting. I'd love for there to be term limits in Congress. I'd love it. Big ambitions. What's a lot easier and which each of us controls is Mike Rowe is leaving whatever party. Chris Cuomo, you know, I've never been a party guy,

but I'm leaving the party because I'm not going to follow any group. I'm a free agent. I'm an independent. And whatever works for me on that particular issue, that's who I'm going with. Now, we saw this in the midterms. We call these people swing voters,

and it's always been deceptive. No, the core of the country breaks center left right. It could go either way. It depends on the issue. And that's why when we talk big social issues, the Americans believe in reproductive rights for women. It's like three out of four say yes. You know, now you'll break that up into parties

and it starts to get very imbalanced, but that's the point. And I believe the trades and respecting this signature American value is a way in to saying, who doesn't think we need more people who can build and fix what we value most as an asset, which is our home.

And if you don't like that, if you don't like what my grandfather was, if you don't like what my brother is, Andrew is a master mechanic. And it really is a lens into how he does governance. You can like his positions. You can not like his positions. I fight with him all the time. But the guy's a fixer. The guy can fix things, fix a washing machine, fix an engine, fix a boat hatch. He's a fixer. He's got those skills. I say, what about IT? So before you dismiss me as going back

to the Roman days, who do you think figures out software? You think they teach you that at Harvard? They teach you the science of it. But these are job skill applications that are the future, and they're not going to be learned just in college. We don't fake the funk here. And here's the real talk. Over 40 years of age, 52% of us experience some kind of ED between the ages of 40 and 70. I know it's taboo, it's embarrassing, but it shouldn't be.

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prescriptions you need an online consultation with a health care provider and they will determine if appropriate restrictions apply you see the website you'll get details and important safety information you're going to need a subscription it's required, the price is going to vary based on product and subscription plan. The Chris Cuomo Project is supported by Cozy Earth. Why? Because I like their sheets. That's why. A lot of people don't get a good night's sleep for a lot of reasons. One of the ones that you can control is bedding. One out of three of us report being sleep deprived. Okay, well, what is it? Well, it stresses all kinds of things, but the wrong sheets can make you hot, can make you cold. I'm telling you, I don't even believe it either, but Cozy Earth sheets breathe. And here's what I love about them. Cozy Earth's

best-selling sheet is a bamboo set, okay? Temperature regulating. G gets softer with every wash. I'm not kidding you. All right. Now, so if you go to CozyEarth.com and you enter the code, enter the code Chris, and you can get up to 35 percent off your first order. CozyEarth.com and the code is Chris. Let me go back to your metaphor, which I like a lot. It is a game, and most games do and are defined by a binary outcome. Football is a game. Baseball is a game. Politics is a game, especially in a two-party system. This or that, good or bad, right or wrong, left or right, right? I think, and I can't speak for anybody but me, but my time at CNN, I had a front row seat. It felt like that game culture, that game metaphor had already started but was really and truly starting to impact and infect news. I don't want to see news as a game. I don't want to see news as a game. You know, I don't want to see journalism as a binary outcome. I want journalists who are deeply skeptical of anybody who's in power and deeply indifferent

to their ratings. Now, I know that's pie in the sky because they entered into that world where they were going to be weighed and measured by the very thing that I'd be weighed and measured by over on Discovery or on my Facebook show or any other show. So I think you're right. I think that by and large, our society is informed by this binary game metaphor. And I think what's happened is it's leached into all of our institutions, not just politics. It's leached into medicine. It's leached into science. It's leached into journalism. Everyone has been so firmly trained to either love the Jets or hate them. Everything has sort of distilled down into a this or that thing, right? And of course that impacts the trades because when it comes to work,

you know, there's a long list of stuff we can't control, but we can control the definition of a good job. We actually get to decide what that is. And God help us, we have. We did it. We took the bait and decided that jobs are inherently good or bad. And we have a whole list of jobs that are good slash aspirational. What a coincidence that those jobs require the most expensive form of education available. What a coincidence that that education cost more than it's ever cost. And again, not to beat the dead horse, but one more roundhouse at it. I mentioned my degree, 12 grand to 90 grand in less than 25 years. Nothing in the history of Western civilization has become more expensive more quickly than the cost of a four-year degree. Not energy, not real estate, not healthcare.

While its value has gone down. Exactly. The return on the investment has declined. The cost for entrance has jumped. And the only way to explain it is because it has very little to do with education. It has a lot to do with contacts, and it has a lot to do with ego, and it has a lot to do with fear. You asked this question earlier, Chris. You said, I'm not sure why we put the pressure on our kids that we do to do these things. I don't know why either, but it is a fault in our stars. It has something to do with my granddad wanting something better for his and my dad wanting something better for me. Well, how much better, really, can I want it for my kids? I mean, for God's sakes, I killed it. I'm doing okay. I got five shows on

the air. I got a podcast. I got a best-selling book. I got Emmys. I run a foundation I'm very proud of. I'm engaged in every single thing I do, every single day I do it. But there's still something in me, and I don't know what it is, but it's something in me that says, oh gosh, it's got to be, you know, the kids have to have it better. What can we do for them? That's normal, but we can decide what better looks like. Yep. And we can get our thumb off the scale. And we can try to get out of this terrible binary trap.

Let's make a deal had three doors, dude. It wasn't door number one or door number two. There was the curtain. There was the box. You know, you could make your choice. And sometimes, yeah, maybe you get stuck with a donkey with a couple boxes of borax strapped to its back. And maybe you get the car. But at least you're not stuck in this horrible college or no college, blue collar or white collar.

We are going to destroy ourselves from the inside out if we keep talking about the color of collars. Yeah. And it doesn't even apply anymore. I mean, it's also, you know, look, it's naive on so many levels, right? Because just because, so a partner at a law firm does not do what an associate does, okay? The person running the hospital or the master of spine and skull-based surgery does not do what a nurse does or what the internist does. So the idea that, well, I don't want to be a plumber. I don't want to be cleaning shit my whole day. Well, first of all, you're cleaning shit no matter what your job is in one way or another in any job, okay? You're going to have somebody on top of you and you're going to take

shit, okay? At least you can see it and you can smell it with your hands. It doesn't take you until you get home at night to figure out just how much shit you had dumped on your head. But a guy who owns a dozen plumbing trucks and has six teams out on the road is not pulling shit out of a toilet for a living. And if he is, it's in his 42-foot Henriquez that's a sport fishing boat that he's off trying to catch tuna in. So I get that part. And I told this to my kid the other day. Now, our oldest is in her second year of college. She doesn't know what she wants to do. And yes, I see the hypocrisy in all of this, please. If there's one thing I am all the time, it's self-loathing. But- Well, you're consistent, man.

I said to her, here's what I would do if I were you. I would definitely take time off, and I would just figure out what you want to do in the world that helps somebody else. Figure out what it is. If you're doing that, you're never going to work a day in your life. I really believe that. I said, and just think of it this way. One of the main things we have to do for our kids to get them ready for college, now that the SATs have gone away, God forbid you be measured. Or judged. Yeah, don't be judged.

No, no, because that's not how life works, right? We have you do service projects. You're going to have the grades. You're going to have the sports. You probably won't be getting recruited for sports. Otherwise, it would be a more simple process like mine was. But they do service projects. They go out.

They inoculate dogs in Honduras. They go and they help service projects. They go out, they inoculate dogs in Honduras. They go and they help the homeless. They maybe even sleep outside with the homeless. Why? Because that is the better that we should be expecting. Not Mike's gonna do better than grandpa did because he's wearing a suit and a tie or that he's making a certain kind of money because there was an expectation by your grandfather, my grandfather, who was a grave digger and then a grocer, that that life is easier. Maybe, maybe not.

Maybe it's not better. But maybe it's not better. And when we want a kid to be prepared to go to a good college because the college sees that what they do is help people, and they all talk about that in their service mission at school, never pays off. You wind up taking the job that pays you the most, that puts you in a corporate structure, that gets you to where you want to be, and it's not about helping society. Not for everybody, but I'm saying that's not what the system is about. That's my point. We got to rethink it. We are in control of more than we think.

And we should be deeply skeptical of anyone who's talking in broad strokes. That to me is the real devil in all of this because it's so often well-intended. The guidance counselor means well when they reinforce this idea that you're screwed if you don't get into college because they're looking at big, giant actuarial tables and they're looking at salaries and they're concluding all sorts of things. And the politician does the same thing. You don't get elected by getting behind a message that's real good for Chris Cuomo's daughter who doesn't know what she wants to do in her sophomore year, right? That's not how you get elected. That's not how you become a CEO.

You almost have to deal in tropes and platitudes and cookie cutter advice. But we've gone too far with all of it. And, you know, back to Ramsey, because I really just did listen to that episode and I, and I really liked it. You know, he, he, he talks about that supply and demand. He says, you can't get off the roller coaster in the middle of the ride, right? Which makes sense. But I say, coaster in the middle of the ride, right? Which makes sense. But I say, you can't get on the roller coaster unless you're this tall. We've all seen the signs, right? The tiger with the hand out, the paw out. We are all this tall. We're on the ride, you know, and now we have to hang on. And then we get off and we wander through the park and now we're smarter than we were than when we got on the roller coaster. We can look at the carousel and go,

oh, no, that's not for me. We can look at the loop-de-loop. We can look at the hellhole. We can look at all the different rides and we get a little smarter as we go. And that's what college should do when it's at its best. It should help you cross some shit off the list.

It should help you lean in a little harder to stuff that you didn't know you thought you liked. There's just not enough time. There's not enough patience to let kids fall on their face and fail. You know, I profiled over 350 people on dirty jobs in 20 years. And the crazy thing, you know, and again, here I am about to generalize after just telling you it's the worst thing you can do. Change is hard. If that control group knows something

that the rest of us don't know, and I assure you they do, one of the things is don't follow your passion. Don't do that. Bring it with you, right? Bring it with you. By all means, be passionate about whatever it is you do. But this notion that you have to follow around this dream that you have, that's not how the world works anymore. And I could give you hundreds of examples of very passionate septic tank cleaners making a very, very comfortable living who will tell you that, no, this was not my wish fulfillment. You know, Les Swanson from Wisconsin, season one, Dirty Jobs. The guy was a guidance counselor and then a psychologist for 25 years. And then he bought a septic tank cleaning truck and now he's killing it. It is mid-50s. So I guess it's just a long way of saying it's a crooked path, and we have to embrace the crookedness of it. But we don't. We sell this

straight line, and this is what you have to do, and woe unto thee who wanders off. Are you kidding me? My whole life is a Forrest Gumpian wonderlust. Well, that's because your life is about ands more than ors. So Marshall Goldsmith, this is his line. He's the guy who brought mojo into corporate parlance and understanding of performance. He's a friend and a coach. He says a lot of things.

But in terms of what gives you an earned life, I call it an earned life. One is because you're going to have to work for everything that matters. Everything that matters in your life is hard. What you make yourself as an individual, your individual behaviors, what you are in your community, what you are wherever you work,

you know, as a parent, partner, whatever relationship construct you have in your life, your fitness, it's all hard work if you want it to go the way you want it to go. Then he says, you gotta have more ands. And this is what I say when I get attacked from the left about this idea of college. I say, the irony is you want me to be non-binary

in my thinking about identity. Okay. But you are binary and you're thinking about whatever you don't agree with. We need to be non-binary in all of our thinking. So you need trades people and diploma people. You don't need necessarily to say this one's good and this one is not because you absolutely need both. And I have to tell you, the data is not good for the diploma people. It's just not good. It's a social value that is based

on expectations that no longer exist in our economy. And you can realize that or not, but the numbers are what they are. But there are two things that happen in American society, and it's different than other societies. We only live by facts that we prefer. We do not live by facts here. And I think it's about maturity and age and evolution of culture.

We keep doing things that we know don't work. Our political system is perfect proof of this. You cannot find someone who is a fan of yours who will say, yeah, this two-party system, man, this is the way to do it. This is the way to do it. You know, I like this. This is good.

Nobody, and that's because no other mature democracy does it this way. Sure, UK has two dominant parties, but it's got five that are players. And in a parliamentary structure, you have stakeholders that are parts of coalitions. Closest thing we can do to a coalition is what's happening within the Republican Party right now, which is where you have a minority because of a thin margin that has oversized leverage. For a moment. And they're exercising that.

And that doesn't bother me because that's just what for a moment. And they're exercising that. And that doesn't bother me because that's just what the game is. If you don't like that, I got much bigger changes to make than what's happening in the vote for speaker. But I do believe to end where we began, this is about narratives and layers of thought and feeling and rationale

that will only be countered with layers of thought and feeling and rationale. And only be countered with layers of thought and feeling and rationale. And if we want things to be different, nothing changes if nothing changes. And that's why I wanted people to hear where you're coming from on this and to have them revisit some of your work and efforts because I don't know anybody who's any deeper into this

who's a big shot than Mike is. Every once in a while, somebody dips in, you know, that they care about working men and women, and that's cool. But it really is the nexus of where all your work is. And I really believe it's our future. Thanks. If we're landing the plane now,

we're starting to go back to the first question you asked me. It was a good one. You know, if you had to do it all over again, would you go to college? Because you asked me a binary question, I gave you a binary answer. I said no. But don't forget the part of the answer that said, I've got new information. I know what it feels like to be on the roller coaster now. I know what it feels like to go on a lot of rides. And what I learned along the way is that I have something I didn't have in 1984.

I have this. I have this thing I'm zooming on with you right now. I watched a lecture last week from MIT for free, the same exact lecture that kids are paying a fortune for. I don't mean to say that the two are identical, but there exists a portal today that didn't exist when you and I came through the university system. And anybody who's curious can scratch that liberal arts itch as hard as they want. And that's what I want to be clear about.

I get a lot of heat because no matter how hard I try and nuance it and talk through it, I still wind up looking like the anti-college, anti-education guy. I am not. I'll say for the record and again and again, you are screwed without an education. Now, I'm not going to tell you exactly what an education means. It means a lot. You know, it could be an apprenticeship. It could be community college.

It could be homeschool. It could be Harvard. It's all of it. But never confuse my position with anti-education. I couldn't agree more with what you said about, you know, the yin and yang of this whole thing. It's two sides of the same coin. We need a highly educated chunk of our workforce to handle the most complicated jobs that are out there in medicine, science, exploration, and so forth.

But to somehow suggest that that's more or less important than the skilled trades, well, that's what we've done. And we're woefully out of balance as a result. And the only missing thing that we really didn't talk about that matters a lot is work ethic. That's an individual thing. And it's the opposite. It's the opposite of the bromides and the platitudes and the cookie cutter advice that can only be gleaned from looking at charts. We award at Microworks work ethic scholarships. We've given away $6 million.

And we limit it to kids who don't want to go to a four-year school and who are able to distinguish themselves by making a persuasive case, or at least trying to. Show me references. Show me a video. Write me an essay. Make a case for yourself. Chris, it's unbelievable. I've been doing this for 15 years, and every year we help 250, maybe 300 kids. And the first six years of this was hard because all my evidence was anecdotal, and I can only talk to you in broad terms about what I think I think and what I believe I've seen. Now, I'm circling back.

And every year, we sit down with people that we helped five or six years ago. And the guy you described before is real. The guy who learned how to weld with a $6,000 certification and then hired his buddies and then hired a plumber and bought a van and then bought another van and got an electrician and an HVAC guy and now has a three million dollar a year mechanical service businesses. That guy is real. I know him. I know many like him. And the path to prosperity in this country, one of the paths is still absolutely positively defined by the willingness to learn a skill that's in demand, show up early, stay late, take a bite of the poop sandwich when it comes around to you, because that's the way the world works, and you'll get there. I can prove it. The shows I work on attempt to celebrate that, and the conversations that we're having, hopefully, will drive it forward too.

I believe in it. I see it everywhere. I mean, again, you know, the other day, can't figure out the dryer. I have two identical dryers in my house. Same setting, same temperature setting. Check the back. I thought maybe the exhaust pipe, not pipe, you know, the Expander Flex aluminum foil thing. Redaped that thing on there.

Nope, that's not it. I call. I got a great relationship with the appliance guy. He says, I'm sending you a new one. I said, well, no, I got to fix this one. He says, can't find anybody to fix it. They don't even really make them to be fixed anymore. He believes in planned obsolescence, that they make shit to break after a certain amount of time. But he also said, I don't even know. I can send you, we have service contract people. You signed up for it.

But more times than not, unless it's the washing machine where it's a cleaning issue, they're going to recommend replacing whatever it is, especially if it's a couple years old. This is such a whole different conversation. But real quick, I played Tim Allen's brother on Last Man Standing, his little brother, right? The first time I met the guy, we were standing backstage, and it's the technical dress. So we have an audience, and we're back there, and it's right before we're going to film that evening.

And we start talking about this same thing, and he's got a grandkid, and he had a busted blender. So he sits down with his grandkid to show him how to fix the blender. Big teachable moment. He's so excited. Now, he's telling me this story, and we're just on the other side of the door. The studio audience is on the other side. And Tim Allen, it's just getting more and more worked up. He says, Mike, I get the blender, right?

And I start to unscrew the parts. Well, you know what? There's no goddamn parts. The whole thing is one piece of extruded plastic. Soul deadening. Heart crushing. And my kid's looking at me like a cow looking at a new gate, and I'm trying to fix this blender, but I can't even open the goddamn... And then the director starts yelling, we miss our cue. The audience

laughs, and veins are bulging. But you're not alone, right? The country's full of people who are looking at blenders made of single pieces of extruded plastic and saying, Jesus Christ, what have we done? What are we doing? We're not making things in a sensible way. We're not looking at a supply chain in a reasonable way. And we're not educating kids in a way that's going to lead to a job that actually exists. So it's a big topic. There's room for people from every network, from every political leaning to sit down and come together and talk rationally

about how to get our workforce balanced again. And it just makes me laugh to think of Tim Allen missing his cue because he's so pissed off about this very thing. It's because it's real and it hits home, literally and figuratively. Mike Rowe, I appreciate the work you do. I'm always a call away to help with any of your efforts and you're always welcome wherever I am. Thank you. And let's circle back and talk about

the thing we talked about before we started talking about this. Yeah, that thing. That's what we'll do. You know what? That's a stupid tease. Your audience should know. Okay, go ahead. Dirty jobs. Somebody's got to do it. Returning the favor. The way I heard it. Every show I've ever worked on, I've tried to bend into the skilled trades, to touch it, right? Chris and I were talking about what would a show look like that hit the nail on the head, right?

about what would a show look like that hit the nail on the head, right? What would American Idol look like if it were geared toward finding the best plumber or the best welder? What would Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous look like if the whole point was to lean in to a successful middle-class career that featured balanced lives of people who knew how to fix shit, right? What would that show look like? And what I said to you before we started the podcast was, I've never been able to find a network or a production company who's willing to make that show because that show has never existed before in a way that really resonated with one exception, this old house. This old house, I think, is still on. I think it's been on over 40 years. But it's PBS. It's modest. Nobody gets a pie in the face. There's no competition. There's no quarterly hour assessment of who's watching and who's not. So maybe we're entering into a time

when we're finally ready to do the kind of show that we were talking about. But for now, the best we can hope to do is scream about blenders that can't be disassembled and shake our hands, shake our fists at the heavens and say, why? It used to be, at least there was a point of pride. I love teaching my kids, the oldest one's now driving, my son's about to be driving, change your oil, change a tire. You know what I mean? Assuming your car has a spare tire. Now the tops of the engines have these hermetically sealed dust covers that they call on them that you need a special tool for that they only sell at the dealership. And once you get it off, look, a lot of it's computers, but my brother laments this more than I do because he really loves the, you know, the old-fashioned muscle car engines. I say,

but from a skill set position, someone built a computer. And even though it takes a computer to assess which sensors you need and more and more of our engines, you know, they still work simple combustion for now, you know, suck, squeeze, bang, blow, not the title of my favorite porno, but the, you know, sucking in air and gas, squeeze it, bang is compression, blow is the exhaust. And people have to learn how to fix them and know how to put them together and know what the parts are. And yeah, you can make machines that'll work you out of existence, but not always because they can never be creative. Here's my gift to you, my parting gift, Chris Cuomo. I don't know if you title your episodes.

If you do, I don't know how you come up with titles. But if you don't, you should seriously consider calling this one Suck, Squeeze, Bang, Blow with Mike Rowe. It's snappy. It rhymes. And I think it's an episode I'd be proud to share. Done, done. And I look forward to the summons and complaint. Mike Rowe, thank you very much.

I look forward to seeing you and talking with you again soon. The best for the New Year, brother. And thank you for the work you do. Anytime. Mike Rowe, one of his many irons in the fire is Dirty Jobs on the Discovery Network. And it's up with its new season, killing it as always.

I'm sure you'll check that out, as well as his Facebook program and his podcast and everything else he has going. Because he is fighting for the right things. It's entertaining, but it's intriguing as well. Why don't we value the working class more than we do? It's all just labels and symbols. Are we really setting ourselves up for success? Are we really setting our kids up for success? Hmm, makes you think.

And that's the point of the podcast. So thank you very much for watching the Chris Cuomo Project. Please subscribe. Please follow. Keep coming with your comments. I love it. The free agent merch, I'm telling you, a lot of it went during Christmas. That's awesome. But there's a lot

more there now. So please wear Being an Independent proudly. I'll see you next time.