The Way I Heard It with Mike Rowe - 336: Nick Gillespie—A Perfectly Reasonable Chat

Episode Date: August 1, 2023

The Libertarian journalist and editor-at-large at Reason interviews Mike at FreedomFest 2023. The two discuss a myriad of topics, including skilled trades, workforce participation, and the state of education.  

Well, hello, friends. It's me, Mike Rowe, and this is episode number 336 of the way I heard it. I call it a perfectly reasonable chat with Nick Gillespie, because that's more or less what you're about to hear. Nick Gillespie is the former editor-in-chief of Reason magazine and then the editor over at reason.com, and now I think he's the editor at large. He's devoted to reason, I suppose you could say. He's a libertarian who interviewed me for Reason magazine back in 2010. And then, again, a couple years later in 2012, and both of our conversations were really good. I mean, I thoroughly enjoyed talking to the guy.

And then I ran into him a week or two ago in Memphis at Freedom Fest. And he asked if we could sit down again for another wide-ranging conversation about this, that, and the other. And I said, sure, why not? Full disclosure, my plan was to take this week off. Chuck, my intrepid producer, is back east in Virginia, or maybe North Carolina, visiting with family. And the travel schedule has just been so crazy. I thought it would be good, just to take a miss on this week.

But then I thought, wait, that conversation with Nick Gillespie was really good. And so I called him and I said, look, I know we did this for reason, but do you care if I share it over on my platform? he said, why not? So thanks, Nick. What you're about to hear was recorded in a hotel in Memphis about two weeks ago. And by the way, I haven't talked much about Freedom Fest, but holy cow, man, that's a whole other conversation. Three, four thousand freedom-loving libertarians from all over the country descended on Memphis and among them were some presidential candidates I didn't expect to see. I was invited to give the keynote, but suddenly there was Robert Kennedy Jr.

And there's Larry Elder and there's Vivek Ramoswamy. Michael Schellenberger was there. Matt Taibi was there. It was something. How I wound up on stage singing with a barbershop quartet, that's a conversation for a different time. But suffice it to say, in the midst of all of it, I was able to sit down with Nick for an hour and a half. And he was very kind. He's a fan of Microworks.

and he had heard that we're giving away a million dollars in a month or two in our second round of work ethic scholarships this year. He wanted to talk about that and a great many other things, all in a perfectly reasonable way, as you'll soon hear. In episode 336, a perfectly reasonable chat with Nick Gillespie right after this. Shameless plug! Long before she was Peggy Rowe, My mom was Peggy Noble, daughter of Carl and Thelma Noble.

It was her father, Carl, who inspired me to pitch a show called Dirty Jobs to the Discovery Channel and later start a foundation that honored the kind of work Carl Noble did for a living, trade work, skilled labor. That foundation is called MicroWorks, and today I'm proud to tell you that we've helped thousands of people get the training they need to begin a career in the skilled trades. In fact, we'd love to help you. You can apply for a work ethic scholarship right. now at microwworks.org, we've set aside $10 million for this year's applicants,

thanks to a number of very effective fundraisers, including the one with my grandfather's name on the label. I refer, of course, to Noble Tennessee Whiskey, K-N-O-B-E-L, which is now available in a variety of delicious mash bills, all of which you can peruse at noblespirates.com. In fact, if you spend $100 and use code Carl, C-A-R-L, you'll get one tube of orange bitter-infused sugar cubes for free. That's code Carl with a C to get nine sugar cubes, ingeniously engineered to make nine perfect old-fashions every time. It's my favorite way to support Microworks and my favorite whiskey to sip responsibly after a long day of interviewing people on this podcast. Pick up a bottle at Noble Spirit. com, k-n-o-b-E-L-Spirits.com.

Soon may the noble men come to bring a bottle for everyone. One day when the waitin is done, we'll take a drink and go. Mike Rowe, thanks for talking to reason. It's been a hot minute, man. It has been. It's been, what was it, 2016 or 2017? 14 was the first one. Yeah.

Which I thought went very well. Yes. 16, again, which, modesty aside, I thought was even better. Okay. So my expectation, I don't even know what to think about what's about to happen. Yeah, this, I'm thinking, you know, Spider-Man 3, the third Matrix movie, this is a disaster written all over it. But you don't know, right? You don't know where the line is until you go over it. So I think in the spirit of self-reflection, we ought to just check each other as we go. Okay. Do me this favor, if you would.

Yes. Because I can't remember. If I start to tell a story that I've already told you, just saying, dude. This is like the third time you've said this already. Is that all you have? Very good. So, well, what is your mission these days? Or I guess a better way of phrasing it, and I should have just started with this, you know, you kind of emerged as a person talking about policy on the backs of noting the tremendous mismatch

between the way we're educating our kids and the economy that's out there and also what, you know, what different kids want. And you talked about how we've made work the enemy about how vocational and technical schooling at the high school level has all but disappeared in a mad rush to push people into a college track, which, however well-intentioned, I think we both obviously benefited from going to college. So it's not either or, but it's left a lot of kids stuck in school that they don't like. And it's left a lot of employers just kind of like, where is my work? Where are my workers? Give us an update on how things are going in terms of the MicroWorks Foundation matching people who might be interested in trade jobs and employers who desperately need them. Well, I'm older than I've ever been, right? And so that's really the thing. I said some things to you 10 years ago, and I said some things on Labor Day of 2008 when we started MicroWorks that have turned out to be kind of prophetic if I don't say so myself. And while I'm not going to take a victory lap on any of it, because some of the news is bad, by and large, the operating thesis has been borne out.

We gave college a giant PR campaign that it really did need, starting back in the 70s. But all that great press came at the expense of virtually every other form of education. And as a result, we created a giant gap in the workforce between blue and white collar jobs. White were clearly ascendant. Blue was clearly subordinate. And the rift in our workforce and the labor shortage that we're seeing today, in my estimation, can be walked right back to the moment we decided to take shop class out of high school.

And so many things followed that as a result. One of those things in a completely tertiary way was a show called Dirty Jobs, which basically gave me permission to crawl through sewers and channel my internet eight-year-old. Finally. Yeah. Right. I mean, it was such an odd thing, Nick, for that show to happen the way it happened. But to your very kind preface to the question you posed, I didn't really start looking for a way to articulate a policy because I had some deeply held belief and I needed to, I needed to be heard. That crazy show blew up. And then the headlines caught up to the themes of the show. So in 2008, Dirty Jobs have been on for five years.

Suddenly, it's this hit. The country goes into a recession. Work finds its way into the headlines, along with the skills gap. And people started to call me to see if I had an opinion. And I kind of did, but honestly, it wasn't so much of mine as what was left over from buying lots of beer for lots of people who we featured on the show. listening to them, bitch, complain, moan, and just wax on about the challenges of running a small business that required skilled labor. So after hearing a lot of that micro work started, and today

15 years later, I really haven't changed a thing. We're still saying, look, the opportunities that exist are real, they're underserved, they're under-promoted, and the skills gap has widened. Last time we talked, there were 2.3 million open positions. Sorry, there were probably close to four or five in 2016. And these are like trade jobs, broadly speaking? I don't want to pay them with too broad a brush, but of the 11 million open jobs today, the vast majority don't require a four-year degree. They require training. So does that make them trade jobs? Not necessarily, but a big chunk of them are. On the consumer side, I think the real thing that's changed, that's alarming and also was pretty

easy to predict, was how long do you want to wait for a plumber? So the conversation used to be, let me talk about the myths and misperceptions that keep people out of plumbing. So people who might want to jump into that trade will benefit. And then it was, well, let's talk about some of the stigmas and the stereotypes that keep parents and guidance counselors from promoting these trades because now we're just getting in our own way. Today, it's just how long do you want to wait for a plumber? We're an electrician. Today, and this is what I had sort of hoped would happen because I think it's the final step in writing

the ship, we have to have people who don't work in the trades or who don't employ trades people to realize that they nevertheless have skin in the game. And they have to be a part of the conversation. And that is like, I don't want to wait six months for a plumber. That's right. That's when it gets personal. Has the plumbing industry and maybe other trades, you know, carpentry or, you know, just construction, things like that, have they changed the way that they go after workers? And do, have they made it easier to enter those trades? Because depending on where you live, if you live, you know, as I have at various points in the Midwest and small towns, you know, getting into something is very different than I live in New York City now. And, you know, if there's something harder than getting

into Columbia or NYU, it might be getting into the Plumbers Union. Have the trades changed the way that they attract and kind of train people? That's a really interesting point. I hadn't thought about elitism in the trades in the way that, you know, the difficulty of getting into a certain union might help set that table. I do think broadly things have changed. Your first point was from a recruiting proposition, are companies becoming more persuasive in making a case for themselves? And I think they have. But again, that's pretty broad. Some have, for sure.

Some have. We can learn a lot, I think, about the recruiting messages that we see in the armed forces. They're different. The Army has a different proposition than the Navy. They're close. the Navy wants you to go on an adventure. The Army wants you to be all you can be, and you'll leave better for it as a result. The Coast Guard, I'm not quite sure what they're saying, but it's also a variation on that theme. I suspect the Coast Guard always has a lot of people going there,

because that's the safest branch. It feels like it. Now, the CB's different deal. There are trades, right? So all of these are interesting right till you get to the Marines who say, probably not for you. Yeah. Right. Right. And so there is something fundamentally interesting about, historically anyway, the challenge of recruiting into the Marines versus everybody else. It might be a bit of a stretch, but I think employers have made a mistake over the years by apologizing for the opportunities, by saying, look, it's better than you think. Or it's not as bad as you've been told. And so everything just feels subordinate going in. When in fact, right now, and this has changed a lot too, we've assisted nearly 2,000 people through Microworks.

We've awarded close to $7 million in work ethic scholarships. And for me, Nick, the big change now is it's not just me, older than I've ever been, anecdotally telling you about what I think might be a good idea for your kids. we can now bring back people who we've assisted three, four years ago and sit down just like this, and I can talk to them, and they tell their story. And when a millennial or a Gen Zier, here's a 25-year-old, 26-year-old woman talk about making $160,000 a year welding. Yeah. Right? They sit up.

They're just more persuasive than I am. The optics are better. Yeah, yeah. Right. And they have more skills than you. I mean, you can't. Yeah. Brutal.

My toolbox is a limited and not a traditional blue collar one. But yes, they do. They're highly skilled and as important, they possess the kind of work ethic that I think every parent hopes their kids inherit. And certainly every employer hopes their employees possess. Let's talk a little bit about work ethic. And I'm, you know, like you, I'm an old person who is getting older every day. And, you know, I don't want to just be the old man who is like, you know, I can remember, you know, my little league coaches, my Boy Scout troop leaders and so, you know, who just get apoplectic, you know, and it was like you're just an old man, like you're going through male menopause or something like that. I don't want to be that person. But when you look at questions, maybe not of work ethic because you start to get into value judgments. But labor force participation, right? One of the things that is amazing.

is that if you, the idea of an after-school job, you know, if you're in high school now, if you're 16 years old, you basically don't work. You know, what went into that? Why did those jobs disappear? And what are the effects of coming out of high school and increasingly, you know, people coming out of college without ever having done even, you know, a kind of make-work job for a couple hours a week. I think, boy, that's a big one. Part of the answer has to do, I believe, with the idea that we think the lower rungs on the ladder are somehow less important. Part of it has

to do with the conversation we've heard around like the minimum wage, right? And so many arguments that attempt to take an entry-level job that was never designed. to generate enough income to support you and belittle that opportunity because it's not a higher rung, right? And so we just entered into this space, I think, where we wanted all of the rungs on the ladder to be absolutely equal. And because they're not, we began to look for scapegoats, right? And we began to look for explanations as to how these lower rungs were somehow how marginalized, right? It's just all, it's goofy. There's a chronology to climbing a ladder. There's a chronology to living your life, you know, and we're supposed to be smarter as we get older.

I hope we are. But I don't know, to me, the conversations I've had with a lot of people coming right out of college is they don't want to waste their time on the lower rungs. There's an impatience with it. And that's really a shame. because the things you can learn on the lower rungs, the things you're supposed to learn are just, are manifold. I am wondering how much, and in the interim since we last talk, I co-authored a story at Reason about millennials, which, and this would have been around, you know,

2015, 2016, something like that. So around the time we talked, and it was very positive because millennials were doing pretty well, and they seemed hopeful. You know, things change. But, you know, I remember writing about how they were going to be the first generation in American, really deliver on the American dream where I thought about my grandparents who were immigrants from Ireland and Italy came here.

They left horrible circumstances. It came to bad circumstances, but they got to choose them at least. My parents and my aunts and uncles were raised in, you know, immigrant ghettos. and then went through the Depression in World War II. It was much better, but they worked during the week to have a little bit of money on the weekend to have fun. Their jobs were not fulfilling. They did not expect them to be fulfilling. My siblings and my kind of cousin cohort, we more or less got, we had many more options in our jobs.

Some of us are very expressive of who we are and what we want to do. But my kids' generation, you know, and this is I have one moment. millennial in one Gen Z, this is the delivery on the promise that their jobs are going to really express who they are and what they care about fundamentally. Right. And in the time since that article came out, and I talked to a lot of millennials in Gen Z, people who tend to be very sour and bitter, and they feel like they've been lied to and cheated. Even before COVID, after that, you know, imagine going to college or trying to go to work

during COVID, it sucks, you know? And then like, you know, you're not going to die from me. this disease, but somehow you have to stay at home, et cetera. And I realized part of it was, I was saying, like, could you imagine being told when you're 21, go out and find a job that expresses who you are and your deepest commitments, whether they're political or social or ideological? How the hell did that happen? How did work become the primary metric, the mirror that we hold up? It's a big important part of our lives for sure. But you're so Right. The pressure. I push that into circulation. Like, I believe that. Yeah. And I realize now it's kind of a, you know, it was a big miscalculation to expect young people to know what they wanted to do and then also be able to do it. Because when I look back at my, you know, entire career is a mix of dirty jobs like of the sort that you would do. And then the kind of intellectual equivalent of that of writing for teen magazines and business magazines and things that.

You would never in a thousand years want to read yourself. Right. But that's what you do in order to build the skills so that you know what you want and you might be able to get a job doing that. Sometimes, you know, you make little rocks out of big rocks. Right. Sometimes your day might have felt like grudgery. You probably written some articles that you actually didn't give a damn about. But you made your deadline and you got it done.

Right. And you were able to take some satisfaction from doing that. You know, the irony is with Gen Z and again, way too broad a brush. but I've hired a few and around my foundation, you know, they come in knowing that, okay, well, MicroWorks is trying to close the skills gap, right? MicroWorks believes that, you know, all jobs are opportunities and that some jobs have gotten short shrift and they get all that. And six months later, you know, they'll come into the office and I'll say, so look,

I've been reading some articles and the skills gap's not closed yet. Yeah. I've been here six months. okay, what's the holdup? Right. And so it's easy to poke fun at that, but I try not to because it just, who gave them that expectation? If these are snowflakes, where are the clouds from which they fell?

That would be us. Yeah, right. And so, you know, I want to give the benefit of the doubt to everybody I meet in terms of their own work ethic. I don't want to think of people as being fundamentally. lazy. The problem is they are. When I say they, I mean me. Yeah, that way. This is the fault in our stars. We're not born, eager to get up early, stay late, volunteer for the crappy jobs. We're rivers trying to get to the ocean. We get to a mountain. We don't go over it. We just go around

it. Just keep going. So, you know, there's a lot of new research since we spoke last that goes to work ethic and goes right to your point. Nick Eberstadt wrote a great book back in 20, 2016 called Men Without Work, and he republished it after the lockdowns because it just became hyper real and super relevant. According to him, 7.2 million able-bodied men in prime working age are sitting out the workforce, not just not working, but affirmatively not looking for work. Yeah. Right? That's new. That's never happened in peacetime. Well, people are still raving, raving, I tell you, about my mother's performance in the latest Pure Talk commercial. And if you haven't seen it, I encourage you to give it a look on my Facebook page and read the comments.

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that unlimited talk, text, and data on a blazing fast network for just 3499 a month really is an unmitigated bargain from an American wireless company that keeps all their customer service in this country supports our veterans in a meaningful way, as well as the Microwworks Foundation, and allows me to exploit my own mother in a national advertising campaign.

Do what my mom did. Get yourself unlimited high-speed data for just 3499 a month. At puretalk.com slash row. You can switch in as little as 10 minutes at puretalk.com slash row. Pure Talk. You know, and what do you think goes into that? Like why? I mean, part of me wants to, you know,

I agree it's problematic. And, you know, in prepping for this, I was looking at Bureau of Labor Statistics, labor force participation rights. And this is men and women. So it's the whole workforce. Basically, the only place where there are more people of a given age working than in 2021 are if you're 55 and older. All of the younger categories, there's a smaller, percentage of, you know, 25 to 34-year-olds working now than in 2001. And it's kind of like, where is that, you know, part of me wants to say, well, that's an artifact of wealth. Like you were saying, if you don't have to work for a living, why would you? So we're carrying more people. Right. But, you know, then it's kind of interesting that people over 55 are hustling more.

It's an artifact of comfort for sure. Yeah. I don't know if it's an artifact of wealth. I do think that if we succeed in making work the enemy, as a society, if we succeed and identifying the proximate cause of our misery as this antiquated routine of getting up and driving in and so forth and so on, then yeah, we're going to look for any dodge we can find in order not to do that. But you don't have to be wealthy not to work. You just have to be able not to work in order not to work. Yeah, yeah.

So wherever the standard is, it's being met by lots and lots and lots and lots of people. And so part of that might be, you know, that families have a little bit more money, so they're letting kids stick around longer without paying rent or, you know, leaving the nest. Some of it is surely, you know, transfer payments. You know, I know George W. Bush was a sale as a conservative, but he was a compassionate conservative. And when he took office, you know, right around the time of the tech bubble bursting, he expanded a variety of welfare benefits that he never really closed.

So when the economy took off, so people, you know, we're able to get food stamps, we're able to get, and we can argue about whether or not these are good things in general. But as a society, you know, both kind of in a family level and at a governmental level, we support more people not working than we use. Right. He also says that you're talking about senior, Bush senior? No, W was the passionate concern. That's right.

Now, his dad, I believe, was the guy who talked about a thousand points of light. That's right. Okay. One of which we should point out, especially to younger people, was throwing up on a Japanese politician. Which is kind of great. I think we should. I wish politics had him. He threw up on a Japanese politician.

But didn't his son get a shoe thrown at him by an angry Japanese reporter? Well, I think it was an Iraqi or a Middle Eastern. Are we really going to conflate Japan and Iraq? on this podcast? Yeah, I don't think I am. I don't think I'm going to. Somebody may have. Point being, if we're in a society where a thousand points of light are real, that is to

say many, many, many charitable endeavors run by passionate people who care deeply about approving light in their zip code, right? If that's the world that we're in, then we might be able to look at Eberstadt's numbers and go, okay, what are these 7.2 million? able-bodied men doing if they're not affirmatively looking for work. Might they, he said hopefully, be engaged with one of these points of light? Might they be doing something to contribute to society and ultimately to themselves as a result of this?

And unfortunately, the data says, no, they're not doing that at all. What they're doing is spending over 2,000 hours a year on their screens. They're swiping left, they're swiping right. They're TikToking. They're just doing that thing. And look, that might be a little too disparaging. Maybe what they're doing on their screens is taking deep dives into thoughtful conversations like this one or taking free courses from MIT.

I don't know. But whatever it is, it's new. Whatever they're doing, it's not public service. it's not work as we understand it. They're outside of the mechanism. They're not even drug dealing for God. They're not even drug dealing. It's just a new level of laziness.

To drill down on this a little bit, though, too, like you started talking about men. And, you know, Nick Eberset's book, along with Richard Reeves, has a book out called Of Boys and Men, which also looks at it. Let's focus a little bit on the gender component of this. Are women dropping out of the workforce in the same way? I don't know, Nick, what is a woman? Yeah, that's true. That's a good question. Really, we're going to do this?

Yeah. Well, I can tell you anecdotally, my foundation, the amount of people who apply for work ethic scholarships, there are more men than women, but they're a shockingly high number of women. And these are for jobs that traditionally were just considered more male. Correct. In fact, like welding is a...

Welding's a terrific example. We've been trying to do a better job of telling the stories of the people that I've just mentioned. And we just shot with five of them, created five PSAs, which modesty aside are terrific. And my favorite one is with a woman named Chloe Hudson, who applied for a work ethic scholarship six years ago. We gave her a little bit of money. She was this close to borrowing a few hundred grand to be the plastic surgeon that she had always dreamed of becoming. But froze up at the last second is an awful lot of money. And she just didn't want to do it.

Flash forward, she is a rock star, right? She's just killing it. Everybody loves her. She's so good at what she does. What she do? Right now she's working over at Joe Gibbs, right? So she's working on race cars. You know, she had worked in various other fields prior to that, but always welding.

It just made sense to her, which is so interesting if you juxtapose a plastic surgeon with a welder. It's a different kind of surgery, right? Yeah, I don't know, but there's a lot of similarity. Well, I'll tell you where it gets dissimilar. There's zero debt. Yeah. There's 160 grand a year. And there is the abject admiration of lots of men who look at her and see the talent that she has. She sat, just like we're talking right now, which she said, I'm not the best female welder. I'm not a weld her. She doesn't care about the gender. She aggressively doesn't care about it. She cares about the talent, right? So, you know, I'm tempted to say some things broadly about what's going on with gender and the workforce, but I think the book you

referenced is on point. I think we're failing our boys badly. I think about it too in terms of when you were talking about, you know, we try to avoid work, if possible. I remember a moment. I would hear this from, you know, my relatives and friends of mine who, you know, who had parents and grandparents the same age, and you would always hear the same story, and it finally clicked to me, which was that, you know, the depression hit, 1929 came, and grandpa could never find work again. But grandma somehow was like cooking for people, cleaning, running a rooming house, you know, doing all things. And like, finally about the 30th time I heard that, I was like, how is it that, like, women during the Depression started working like 20 jobs, whereas the men,

including my father's father, just kind of disappeared and would show up every once in a while when he sniffed, you know, welfare money or a paycheck. And it's like, there's something different about men, I think, that is disturbing. I mean, we're all, you know, we have the Jughead Jones trait where we will, you know, put in as much time to avoid work as just getting it done and then getting on with the rest of the thing. So what about this? What if women, in a general way, are more like a general practitioner? And what if men in a general way are more like a specialist? Maybe men gravitate toward the kind of skill that feels like a speciality, right?

And maybe women, historically anyway, because they have to do so many different things, just approach work from a different angle. I think the modern-day farmer and the old-day farmer, for that matter, are probably the best example of what I'm talking about. It's not a gender thing. It's just this idea that if you're going to be a successful farmer, you better understand the environment. You better understand ecology. You better understand food science.

You better understand plumbing. You better understand veterinary science. You have to do a lot of everything. You also have to be able to transact like when you're selling your crops or your... You better understand business. You better understand supply and demand. You better, you know, farmers are plagued by something really that almost nobody else is. and that's, they overproduce.

They're so good at what they do. They're so efficient, right? One and a half percent of the country is feeding 330 million people three times a day and the rest of the world. And so, you know, they have to look at work differently in my view. And just a quick sidebar too, before I forget. I think it's so interesting. I learned years ago, a miner told me this.

He said, with respect to work, there are many, many, many, many, many jobs. but there are only two industries, farming and mining. Every single thing in this room, in this hotel here at Freedom Fest, every single thing is either grown from the ground and turned into something useful that we can eat or sit in, or it's pulled from the ground and fashioned by a tradesman into something useful. So those are the only two industries that matter. Everything else becomes a more specialized thing.

You know, so maybe there's something in this idea of industries versus jobs, were careers versus vocations, and just the way we think about work when we're young, to your earlier point. I mean, how did you think about it in terms of when you were describing your childhood and your dad's childhood, there was adversity in it? There were challenges and things. Do you feel like those tempered you in a way, that actually made your parents' job maybe a little easier than it would be today for a wealthy

set of parents? You know, part of it is if you think about something like Abraham Maslow's hierarchy of needs. You know, he never used a pyramid, but we're in Memphis named after a city with pyramids. There's a big pyramid right around the corner from here. So I'm going to invoke a pyramid. But, you know, all of humanity has moved so far up the pyramid that we're all like pharaohs. now. Nobody's actually schlepping rock anymore. And as a result, you become pickier and choosier and things like that. But to go to your point, I went to college because I didn't want to live

with my parents and I could afford it and I paid for it myself. And then when I graduated at college, I would work so I could get money to travel in a 1970 Plymouth Valiant that broke down because I stupidly thought that I could actually do two nups. By the way, I mean the Valiant. Are you kidding me? Who doesn't buy a car? called the valiant. Well, it was indestructible I found because I had screwed up the timing belt. I had ruined virtually every aspect of it, but it would still keep going. But I would work for three months or six months. And then over a number of years, I was like, okay, well, what am I good at? And what do I like doing? And I kind of crept into journalism. I worked in Johnson and Johnson

personal product factories. I did a lot of horrible jobs. But then it started, you know, what I was good at and what I wanted to do and what the world would pay me for all sort of to come into more focus. Well, let's go back to your car, man, because look, I, valiant. The coward dies a thousand deaths. Yeah. The valiant, but one. I mean, never mind the fact that cars used to be named amazingly cool things. Now we have what the probe or whatever it is. Not that there's anything wrong with probing. But, you know, save my life. There is something valiant and something noble about everything you've just described.

It's rooted in practicality. It's the part of the iceberg that you don't see, which incidentally brings me back to the pyramid. A lot of people, like if you look at those three pyramids in Egypt, have you ever seen the imagined graphic that shows you the subterranean look of what's beneath the pyramids? I'm afraid to look, but tell me. Picture the Washington Monument. Like, what if the pyramids are just the top of the Washington Monument? What if under them are hundreds or thousands of feet of this giant rectangle? A pyramid is just the top of a thing.

But we tend to look at pyramids as this... The apex of something, literally. Literally. But we don't imagine what might be under it. Right. Right. So... Do you think then that we, you know, kind of as a...

We've lost, you know, the process of what goes on underneath. Oh, hell, yeah. To all of this, including work. I mean, because, you know, when I think about it, it's also, you know, the work that you do, or maybe not to work, the activity you do, maybe in your 20s. And I think this is true on some level of every socioeconomic level, but you wander around because you don't know who you are. You're not supposed to know who you are.

And you're supposed to go out and, you know, have a lot of adventures and a lot of experiences, and hopefully that which doesn't kill you makes you a little bit smarter, maybe not stronger, and you kind of figure out what path you want to actually take. How many times do you have to touch the hot stove before you realize that's not a thing I want to touch? No, I'm thinking more actually about the old orange juice concentrate cans in the freezer, and I would touch my tongue to that every time because I was like, this time it's not going to stick. Wow, well, you know what? I mean, here we are.

We are. Maslow would have said something very different about you. That's true. Right? But yes, that's it on steroids. Our peripheral vision seems to have vanished. We can only see the stuff that's right in front of us, right? We can't see a pyramid as anything other than a three-dimensional triangle that sits on the ground.

This is my whole career now that I think about it. I mean, celebrating the work that's out of sight and therefore out of mind, which is just simply a thing that wasn't done on TV. And then we started to do it. And then a conversation unfolded that said, wait a minute, there is an awful lot of things going on that we can't see that matter a lot. Right. And so for me, I think everything we're talking about right now is a mix of two really interesting things. It's the stuff you can't see that is nevertheless salient. And then it's the stuff that is impossible to not see the most. marketing, the PR, the name of the car, the valiant, right? All of that thought that goes into

branding work, all that thought that goes into promoting opportunity, that's PR in its purest form. So when you have something that's that overt, trying to make a persuasive case for the part of the pyramid you can't see, you've got a pretty interesting challenge. It's a pretty interesting balance. But if you only look at the surfacey promoy thing, then I think you wind up kind of where we are now with millions of jobs that have great opportunities attached to them that people are highly skeptical of. Right. Right. So, you know, a more balanced conversation might lead to a more balanced workforce. So, I mean, have you talked to education associations or I mean, is there a move towards, you know, more vocational training?

And that's even, you know, that's the wrong term for this. You know, fewer people are going to college. I was just looking at the numbers. In 2019, about 66% of high school graduates immediately went on to some form of higher ed. And it is down in 2021 to 62%. So it's declined. COVID, I'm sure, as part of that, you know, various factors. go into that. But it's still, and if you go back to 1970, it was something like, you know,

it was like, I think, under 50 percent of people immediately went into college. So we're in, you know, a peak period. But, you know, have you talked to high school people, you know, are they changing the curriculum or the way that they talk about what do you do when you graduate from here? The conversation's definitely changed. But again, in pockets, a lot of this is geographical. As for the curriculum, you know, my foundation now has a curriculum that's in 20 schools. We hope to get in many, many, many more. That's a tough sell, you know, for all sorts of reasons. So I don't know on a macro level really where we are with this.

But I do know that when we started, I talked to some educators in Peoria. And, you know. You're making that up. I swear I'm not because Caterpillar was an early partner. And there they are. This is a classic. Like, Cat's a great case study for a case study. company that is constantly trying to recruit for great jobs that people don't think are great jobs.

And part of the reason, Nick, is because guidance counselors, in their very hometown, they're in Illinois, the proposition to a kid is, okay, four year over here, you know, we've got opportunities over here. And if you don't do this and if you don't do that, you know what you're going to wind up doing? You're going to wind up turning a wrench over at the cat dealer down the road. You don't want to do that, right? Well, guess what? The cat dealer down the road, turn the wrench, is killing it.

He basically set his own hours at this point. Some are unions, some are not. It depends. But that's what I mean. It's like the perception really is very granular. And it's very, it's show me a guidance counselor who's doing it right. And I'll show you one who's getting it wrong. I don't know what the research really says, honestly, in a broad way.

But I can feel it tipping. And I also don't know. how to react when you say that fewer people are going to college now, right? Because my gut wants to high five you. My gut wants to say, great, $1.7 trillion in student loans, a huge number of those people you referenced who go to college don't finish, like maybe half. You know, are they bundled into that number? The first time we talked, you asked me a great question in it. You asked me to explain the fact that so many kids who graduated from college by and large were making a better living than those who didn't go to college, who just had high school.

And whatever answer I gave you, I thought about it later. I was like, no, crap. The better answer is most of those charts. In fact, I've never seen one that has as part of the rubric a cohort of people who finished high school but went on to master a skill that was in demand by any, could be an apprenticeship program, could be a trade school, whatever it was. That cohort is never represented. And what I've realized since our earlier conversations, and now that the foundation's 15 years

old, is that's where we live. We're looking for people. Education's not the enemy. The four-year school is not the enemy. We both benefited, I think, from a liberal arts degree. Tremendously, yeah. I got mine in 84. I'm guessing you were there in 85.

85, yeah. And I worked for a while, and then I went to grad school and got a master's and a PhD. Look at you go. Look at that. Total cost of your education, if you had to back the envelope it? God, you know, let's see, probably, I mean, in contemporary dollars, it would be. No, back then. Oh, you know, it's hard to say because I got financial aid and I worked and I took out a few amount of loans.

But I came out of a PhD with my PhD, including undergrad, maybe $10,000 in debt total. In debt. My entire thing, two years of community college year off, back to school, got a BS in communications and some other minors and whatever. I think the whole thing, the whole thing was $12,900. today, same schools, same course loads, 92 grand. Right? So, I mean, good God. So when you tell me fewer people are going to college, I'm glad,

but I'm not glad because I'm anti-college and I'm not glad because I'm anti-education. You just hate those kids. I just hate those specific children. Yeah, but it is a kind of interesting question, right? I think so. Are those, the people who aren't going to college, are they doing something else, or are they just hitting the next level, you know, in Minecraft or World of Warcraft or something like that.

Right. And look, I don't think it's fair or nice even to compare a liberal arts degree to a skilled trade. I just think the proposition is different. But it is fair to say that I can get the exact equivalent of a liberal arts degree if I'm curious and I have an internet connection on a smartphone. Right. 99% of the known information in the world is now in my pocket. And I can access it whenever I want. That wasn't the case in 1984 for me. So the access to the information is different. If I may, I would also say for me, and I suspect this is true, a lot of people, you know, in a similar boat, going to college, among other things, gave me an appreciation for the wider world.

Oh, yeah. If I hadn't gone to college, you know, I don't know. Like I might have ended up working near my hometown or in a sub-trade job because the idea of being a carpenter or a mechanic, you know, and everybody can thank me for not going into either of those fields, given my 10 thumbs. You know, but like saying like, oh, well, you know what, you can make something out of your life. And by that I don't mean like how you get to do this or that, but it's like you can choose your own adventure. Yeah. Which is really important, I think.

And that can be one of the great goals of education. hear much about that anymore. When people talk about college now, it's you go there in order to make 90K, you know, within two years of graduating or this or that or having that credential, which I think is a loss. It's understandable because the price goes up. And also when you have second and third and fourth generation kids going to college, you know, the parents aren't going to sit around. My father didn't graduate high school. He literally had no idea what I was. I did in college. When my older brother, who was a national merit scholar, like, it was a really smart guy, my parents were like, well, you're going to college, but they did, they were like, you know,

how do you do that? They knew people got into college, but they didn't know how. Right. So, do, do, do do do do do. Dumb. I love stories like this. Seven years ago, a guy named Ben Still was a musician. He had zero interest in running a food company, but he was annoyed that so much imported meat was being deceptively marketed and labeled as domestic and decided to fix the problem. The result was a company called Good Ranchers. It's a completely honest, totally transparent meat company that deals directly with American farms and ranches and promises to deliver high-quality American-grown meat for a fair price. Today, that promise. And Ben's absolute determination nation to keep it has not only propelled good ranchers into the top tier of meat delivery companies,

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E-Haw! That's the point of the liberal arts. To me, that was what the transaction was about. You're a curious person, and we're going to satisfy your curiosity. We're going to encourage you to study all kinds of different things that you may or may not be interested in. And then when we're done with you, you'll get your paper. But you're not going to be qualified to do anything. Right. What you're going to be is a better well-rounded person, more so than you were when you went in.

And then you're going to get yourself hired somewhere. And then you're going to learn a practical skill, right? That's how it always tracked for me. Now, though, the pressure for a kid to declare a major, the pressure to declare and announce the road you're going to go down. It's very hard to get off of that road. And so if you choose poorly at 17 or 18. Or you're locked into a nightmare. You're not just a nightmare. It's a very pricey fever dream. Yeah. Right?

Now you're protecting your investment. Now you're holding the paper. Maybe you owe your dad. Maybe you owe Freddie or Fannie Mae. Whatever it is, it's so, so hard for kids to go the other way now. I thought about this, too, after we spoke. Oh, and remind me to tell you about Steve Forbes, who I just ran it to. I got a great Steve Forbes story for you.

Steve Forbes is still trying to figure it out. Right? He's thinking about going to law school. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, God, I was just so tickled to see him. You know what? I'm just going to... No, no, no. I remember what it was. Sorry. I got a lot to tell you. Marco Rubio. Yeah. After we spoke in 2016, there was a presidential debate, big one. You'll remember all 17 of those luminaries up there, right? This is like a mini-series. I think it's still going on. It's, God, can't help us. Marco said something. In response, I forget what the question was, but he said, what this country needs are more welders and fewer philosophers.

Big applause line. And later that evening on my little social channels, I mean, thousands of people were saying, hey, Mike, this guy's singing your song. Yeah. This guy gets it. And I thought, oh, crap, I'm doing something wrong because that's not at all what I mean. All right. That's the binary thought. Right. What I responded to in the wake of that was, look, what our country needs are more welders who can talk intelligently about Descartes and Nietzsche. And what our country needs are more philosophers who can run an even bead. Yeah. Right.

It's not this or that. That's that blue-collar, white-collar trap thing. If you're not this, you must be that. No, that's not what we're about. That's a great point. And I mean, if anything, one would hope that the 21st century, whenever it's a lot of, get started is going to be different. It's not going to be binary, like the 20th century was. Labor versus management. These are idiotic oppositions that serve nobody, but, you know, Democrat

versus Republican, liberal versus conservative, like we are digging into binaries that made the 20th century, in many ways, fantastic, you know, the best century so far, but also a hellhole, right? How do you think the whole work from home phenomenon right now fits in with that? That feels like a new thing that's really defining people and separating people? I think during COVID it was a very stark distinction, you know, the kind of what was called the laptop class or the bathrobe class. I found it kind of revolting in the sense of, you know, for those of us who could work from home, and, you know, I was able, on Amazon, I was able to buy a higher resolution web cameras. And I was able to do many more video interviews, you know, because everybody

was around. And I knew a lot of people in my circumstance who were like, let's not rush back to work. You know, we can wait this out. And this was, they had no idea who was delivering the packages that were, you know, showing up magically at their door every day. And it was kind of amazing to see that kind of divide. And I find that, you know, deeply troubling because this goes to your point that, like, a lot of us are not thinking about, okay, how does the whole system work? We only see the things that we want to see. Having said that, I've been working from home. I've been telecommuting, as it used to be called, since about 1996. I've had stints in offices since Unreason has a big office in DC. But I am of a mixed mind. I think, again, it's kind of a reversion to the 19th century,

you know, where most people before factories, most people work from home. And you have the same nightmare. You know, when you wake up in your workplace, your hearth is, you know, you get out of bed and there you are. There you are. Right on time. It's a little bit, you know, tough. But I do think what we're seeing is a shift away from strictly markations between work and non-work and life. And I think they pose certain types of challenges because you do, it is kind of nice to have an office that's away from your home so that you're keeping things a little bit different. But it's also, it's a melding that is quite good. And we need to start coming up with better ways of thinking about this stuff so that we

organize it so it doesn't all slop into one another. Have you heard the back and forth between Elon Musk and Kevin O'Leary on this? That would be interesting. And now I'm hoping, I thought you were going to say between Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg, who are obviously in love with each other and this battle wrestle. I would love to see Kevin O'Leary dropped into that Thunderdow. I'd like to see him referee it. Okay.

Yeah. In a thong. Yes. Vision I'll never get out. I might like to take that one back if you guys. Ed is Yeah. Musk is basically saying this is a moral issue. Yeah. Get to work. It's morally wrong for a giant chunk of the workforce to work from home simply because A, they can or B, they want to.

That's not the deal, right? It's a hell of a thing. Right. O'Leary is saying, that's stupid. You have to adapt and adopt and play the cards we have. And, you have. And, you just gave millions of people a taste of something they want more of. So I have 54 companies that I run. And the majority of them are not coming. In fact, none of them are coming to work every day. Some are coming half the time and many aren't coming at all. But they're all getting their work done and so forth and so on.

But you'll love this. O'Leary then says, but when I have a question, I call them, and maybe it's two in the morning. Tough shit. Yeah. Maybe they're on vacation. I don't care. Right. If you're going to do this, then if you're going to blur the work life line as an employee, then I'm going to blur it as an employer. And you are now a doctor on call with a pager in 1980. And I'm running the hospital. Right. And that made me think, oh, well, then that at least, now we have a pendulum swinging boat. ways and now would the person who would prefer to work from home be comfortable with that new distinction or would they say no no no I want it to be just like it was when I was at the office

but I don't want to be at the office right I think it's a conversation worth having I agree and I mean this is how things evolve and change and the technologies and the organizations that last are the ones that you know kind of figure out how to benefit people more. I know I moved from Los Angeles to a small town in Texas, a prison town, in fact, in Texas. Guy, you should write brochures. Yeah. And come to, what was the name of the town? Huntsville, Texas. Oh, Huntsville, yeah, now with prisons. Terrific. Yes, that's right. You know, now with, well, it always had prisons. It was built in order to kind of house prisoners. But in any case, when I moved from L.A. to Texas, I was like, I am never going to work again,

like, because I can work from home. Why would I ever do any work? And it turned out to be the exact opposite. And I think this is pretty common where I had a home office. I had a fax machine, a plain paper fax machine, which was like unbelievable. Look at me, you know, the son of peasants owning a plain paper fax machine in like 1996. And every time I could hear the fax machine click on, I could be deep asleep. I could be out in the backyard cutting the grass, you know, with no earphones on or anything. And I would immediately be in and making sure. sure that that wasn't the most important facts of my life, of my work life. And so it takes a while to get all of this stuff right. Right. And it, I mean, it takes decades and societies, just like

individuals have learning curves. But I'm glad to hear that Kevin O'Leary is pushing back on, you know, the idea of, okay, the emergency is over. So now we should return back to a bullshit 1950s IBM, AT&T model of work. Right. But it's not all fun and game. Yeah. I don't know it was bullshit, but it was the thing that evolved naturally from that which preceded it. And to argue that that's going to be the way it always is forever and ever amen. Or that that's the golden age to which we must return. Aspire. I mean, this is the, you know, what I think is so great about the current moment we live in for all of the problems and whatnot.

It's just that the proliferation of choices and options that individuals get to make about how to live their life. about where to live, about what work to do, even to work is fantastic. It can be overwhelming. We all have moments. I'm sure you remember the, oh, God, it was a Robin Williams movie, Moscow on the Hudson, where he plays a saxophone player from the Soviet Union who escapes and comes to New York. And then it's like gobsmacked when he's standing in a grocery aisle. And I think it's all of the different types of toothpaste.

Can't believe it. Yeah. That's a Boris Yeltsin moment. He's paralyzed by the amount of choice. And I think sometimes that happens to us as a society. But if the response to that is like, we've got to shut down choice and we have to have two or three networks, two or three types of jobs, two or three genders even, and that's it. Like, we're doing it wrong. Look, in that movie, the scales fell from his eyes, but only when he saw the totality of the choices.

And it happened, too, when Boris Yeltsin walked into that. it was a Randall's supermarket in Texas, right? You know, he was still very much the Soviets guy, and he was finishing his tour here. It was pudding pops. He saw the pudding pops, and he wept for his people, because around the pudding pops was all that fresh produce. And it was just everywhere. He later wrote, that's when I knew. We're just dead man walking. We're not going to win this. We can't. you know, but it comes from seeing the thing that's underneath the pyramid. It comes from seeing he had to see it. A guy at that level, still, it wasn't enough to hear about the prosperity in.

And this was Yeltsin. This is Boris Yeltsin. Wow. Yeah. That's why he started drinking so much. Well, sure. And drinking a rich variety of juices available at Randalls now on sale. And this is a good way to segue into something that I want to talk with you.

about, which is your whiskey line. Oh. And one of the reasons why I want to talk about that is because I was looking at the way that you guys promote it and the way that you talk about it and whatnot, and you have a bit on the website about like Our Story. And it was your, it's called Noble whiskey, K-N-O-B-E-L, and that's your grandfather's name. Yeah, that's my pop. And could you tell the story of that? Because what I think is beautiful about it is that it's a tribute to the past, but it's also something very modern and kind of forward. Yes, Carl Noble was a magician who lived next door to me where I grow up. He also happened to be my grandfather. And when I say magician, he didn't pull rabbits out of hats, but he got up

clean, wandered out into the world, came home dirty, and as a result, something was fixed. Something was better. He could take your watch apart and put it back together, blindfolded. Same thing with a combine. He could build a house without a blueprint. He was that guy. He only went to the seventh grade, but he had the chip, right? I was pretty sure I was going to follow in his footsteps because I wanted to. I really, really wanted to.

And when you're 13, well, that's your passion. You follow your passion. But of course, the handy gene is recessive, as you certainly know. And so I had to get a different toolbox. And it was my pop who said, do that, get a different toolbox. You can be a tradesman. That's a state of mind. But find something.

I don't care. Who cares if you're passionate about it? Just find something you're good at and figure out how to love it. Right. So that was the best advice I ever got. And that got me in entertainment. And way leads on to way. And the next thing I knew I was 42 and he was dying. Well, he was 90.

And my mother called me. I was working for CBS. And she said, you know, your grandfather is 90 years old. He's not going to be around forever. Wouldn't it be great if before he died, he could turn on the TV and see you doing something that looked like work? And the next day, I took a cameraman into the sewers of San Francisco, and that's how Dirty Jobs started.

Five years later, micro-work started when our economy went into a recession, and Dirty Jobs was a giant hit, and I wanted to do something with these good cards I got and try not be a completely rapacious capitalist and give something back. So the TV show Dirty Jobs and the Foundation MicroWorks were both dedicated to Carl Noble. He only had girls, and when he died, you got a weird name, and his name died with him. And then the crazy thing happened that I want to talk to you about around essentiality and the notion of essential work. Because when we locked down a couple years ago, that expression got dragged back into the headlines. Right. Essential work.

Essential work. non-essential. Exactly. And man, was this an eye-opener for me because Dirty Jobs was the grandfather of essential working shows and the pressure, the enthusiasm really from fans saying, bring the show back. And the network was into it and I was into it. So I started filming Dirty Jobs again during the lockdown and to sort of commemorate the madness of that decision, both because I swore I was done in 2012 and because I'm going out to film at the precise moment when we were at the height of our

the sum of all fears. Yeah. Right. So I wanted to do a show about essential work when we were locked down, not because I thought that these jobs are more essential than your job or any other job, but because I realized in that moment

that all work is essential. There is no such thing as a non-essential job because everybody's essential to somebody. So I had a little parapetia there in the midst of my quasi-retirement, and I went back to work and I thought, you know, what better way to celebrate all this than put my grandfather's name on some really decent five-year-old Tennessee whiskey

that came to my attention. You know, you can't just launch a whiskey brand that's five years old. You have to find the juice. And through a weird set of circumstances, I got a line on it. I told myself, if it tastes good, I'm going to go for it, and it tasted good. So I started selling it as a fundraiser for MicroWorks online. We've been doing it for a year and a half.

The feedback's been great. And now I'm in the freaking whiskey business, Nick. So one of the things that's fascinating is, I mean, that's a way of telling a story about the past. It doesn't trap us in the past because one of the other things, I mean, I think America as a kind of concept has always struggled. with the past where we're proud of it or we look at a revolutionary route, but then we're also ashamed rightly of all sorts of terrible things that happened in the past. And the question is, how do you pay respect to the past without being trapped? You know, how are you informed by the past but not trapped in the past? So that, man, that gets to it because when Trump said,

let's make America great again, the opposition really didn't have. too much of a choice other than to take the position that it was never great in the first place. And so they did. And suddenly things got reduced into such a horrible binary where, you know, a lot of my friends who were very, very anti-Trump were suddenly making arguments. I know they didn't really believe. Because the proposition, the table had suddenly been set to prove that America was not exceptional, to prove that this country was never great, right?

That's what he forced them to do. They didn't have to do it, but they took debate. They took the bait. By the way, to be fair, the same thing is true of Black Lives Matter, right? When people told me that Black Lives Matter, and when they said it with passion and maybe even shook their finger, I found myself going, well, duh, I know that. Why are you telling me a thing that I know? And I suddenly found myself saying things like, well, all lives matter, which of course became heretical and deeply insulting.

But like that's how we do it, right? We grab a bromide, we turn it into a platitude, and then we got a megaphone and we scream it. And we force people to take positions they normally wouldn't take. How do you venerate? How do you elevate the past without turning it into a one-dimensional mythology? Honestly, the only way I can think of to do that is to make sure you look at what's under the pyramid and tell both sides. Now, I'm trying to sell some whiskey, so I'm not going to tell you about my grandfather's

shortcomings. I'm not going to tell you about his disappointments because that's just bad marketing. But if I were really sitting down with you over a beer and trying to express the measure of the man, you would hear the good, the bad, and the ugly. You'd hear the rest of the story. Right. Right. Yeah.

And so when I write stories on my podcast, I still try to do that. I try and leave you, I try and make you a little uncomfortable by reminding you that Hitler like to paint. And he loved dogs. You're a real animal lover, right? So, you know, it's fun to create cognitive dissonance in people's minds. Bad guys don't always twirl their moustaches and wear black hats and good guys, right? Yeah, yeah. So that's, I think, what you're asking.

You know, how do you tell the truth, how do you get at the truth of a thing without becoming an apologist? Right. Or becoming where it's just a scorched earth tar, you know, policy. So that nothing good has happened in the past. Or all of our idols have feet of clay. Don't you think today, though, too, that, I mean, like the only way to, to be credible today is to speak hard truths to your own tribe. God, I hope so.

I mean, I feel like that's kind of in short supply, at least in terms of, you know, political discourse. We haven't been seeing that. And as a result, I think Republicans and Democrats are, you know, they're too preoccupied with, you know, scorching the other side than actually kind of doing the internal work to say like, hey, maybe we, we need a new script because neither of them is doing particularly well with voters. Right.

Owning the libs. Yeah. I mean, it's fascinating to me that somebody like Joe Biden has the same approval rating right now in his presidency that Donald Trump had at this point. And that's not good. The federal government is not going to close America's skills gap. They have an important role to play for sure. but if we're serious about reinvigorating the skilled trades on a national level, we need more organizations like Skills USA making a real difference on a local level.

These guys have been around since 1965, and today they are relevant like never before, with hundreds of chapters in schools all over the country and hundreds of thousands of students participating and competing every year. Nobody is doing more to train the next generation of skilled workers than Skills USA. And I'm encouraging you to at least consider being a part of this movement. Skills USA advisors and volunteers aren't just teaching trades.

They're launching careers and strengthening the backbone of our country by mentoring the next generation of industry leaders. In high school, you could be among the people who are making this movement explode. Join the skilled trades movement. Support career and technical education programs through Skills, There's no better way to do it. You can volunteer at a local chapter. You can start a chapter in your own town. Or you can just go to their website and see the impact for yourself and see too how easy it is to get involved. Thousands of kids are being introduced to the trades in a way that's absolutely positively moving the needle.

The goal is a million members by 2030. I think it's doable. I'm doing what I can to help them. Learn more at skillsusa.org. slash Mike. That's skillsusa.org slash mic. I'm talking skills, U.S. Skills, U.S.S.S. U.S.S.S.S.S. USA. You know, and it's not good for either of them, but it's definitely not good for American, right? No, because government in a lot of ways is like TV. We get what we deserve. Yeah. They want better TV? Watch better TV. That's right. Want better candidates? Vote for better candidates and so forth. I was just thinking of Bill Maher when you said that. Bill Maher, he's somewhat famously said I didn't leave the Democratic Party. The Democratic Party left me. And now suddenly my news feed is carpet bombed with him saying

things that I find myself agreeing with. Which is odd. I mean, he's an interesting character who has, I think, started to do work where he's less worried about the other side and it's kind of like working through his own, you know, complications. And I think he's. think that's a good thing. I think it's certainly a model for media people to be doing. Right. Rather than just kind of, you know, constantly trying to throw people off balance by attacking the other side. So what's your plan then? What's the role of... Well, I'm going to run. I'm going to announce my presidential run in a couple of... Do it now, man. Do it to me because I think this conversation, with your permission, I'm going to share it with my podcast listeners.

And that way, you need the lowest rated show that you can have. Well, it's important to have benchmarks. Yeah, you know, it's like you don't know how high you can soar until you know how low you can go. If you want to soar with the Eagles, you must wallow with the pigs. That's right, yeah. Well, what I was going to ask you about, because my career at Reason, and I'm actually coming up on 30 in October, I've been at Reason for 30 years. Reason was founded in 1968, and in that work span, I've done a lot of different things. it as an assistant editor. I became editor in shift to the print magazine and of the website. I helped launch our video platform. Like almost every seven or eight years, I would change my job. And that

was interesting. And one of the things that reason has been able to do over the past 30 years or so is to kind of go with the dispersion of old style media. You know, we work broadly speaking in an industry where there were, you know, three giants, right? There were, you know, I mean, it sounds like 1984 or something like that. But, you know, there were three continents. Now there are a million different empires, many of which haven't even been mapped yet. And it seems to me your career follows that track too, because you started at places like you mentioned CBS. You worked at QVC, which was really kind of a game changer. When it came around, you were on the Discovery Channel, which now seems to be an abatement even as Discovery owns like half of the cable.

more than that box, right? Yeah. But cable is also disappearing and you seem to have found a life, I think you started doing it on Facebook, kind of direct to audience storytelling and whatnot. And, you know, where do you go from that? Because you are moving into like, you know, wherever the sun is kind of sweeping, you're getting there first. No, and I mean, I find that fascinating. Well, you know, thanks. I mean, it does feel sometimes when I look back at it that I was ahead of the curve a little bit. But lately, I've really been feeling like I'm behind it in the sense that cable is contracting. Streaming is just, that's a tiger by the tail. Everything is changing. Certainly the news business is changing. Substack, I think is going to be a very, very big deal.

Some of the people here at Freedom Fest, Schellenberger, Matt Taibi, Barry Weiss, these are the journalists of our time. And they're reporting on a platform. that is just growing with more and more credibility. And it's fascinating to think of somebody like Matt Taibi and Barry Weiss who left, you know, Taibi left Rolling Stone, right. Which is, you know, like, wow, that's amazing. Barry left the New York Times because she said, you know, I think, you know, both famously and also rightly that she didn't want to spend her life trying to reform something.

She wanted to build her own, you know, institution. and it's easier to do that than ever. And it does change, you know, the number of people you reach, the intensity of the relationship. I mean, it has a lot of ripple effects. Yeah, it does. What happened to me, really, was I lucked out so much in that I was able to keep a foot in both worlds.

So I did really well in cable, right? And I've been working for Discovery since 1993, like you. That's 30 years. You know, I don't know how many different shows. There was only one, well, two big ones, dirty jobs and Deadliest Catch. You know, both have been on the air 20 years. You know, one is still in production. You know, I pitched Deadliest Catch a Predator, but it never took off.

You know what? I'll talk to your agent if you want because I think, you know, I think I could sell that. Yeah. To Catch a Deadly Predator. Oh, that would be very good. I see. And then is a dirty job. To catch a deadly predator is a dirty job.

especially if you're naked and afraid. That's right. Down under. That's how we land the plate. You did seize it in Australia. I did dirty down under, yeah. You were looking for the facts of life girl and growing pain. She's not there.

I went everywhere, but I'll tell you what is there, the same level of curiosity and enthusiasm for this topic. And it did remind me that it's one of the truly universal things people can talk about. So that's where I got lucky. My pop, whose name is now in a bottle of whiskey, gave me some excellent advice. And what it turned into was a chance to ruminate on work. And that changed. This sounds impossibly grand, but it changed cable. There are over 30 shows. I can draw a straight line to dirty jobs, right? It's this big giant topic. And I never wanted to leave cable because I was prospering. in being there. But seven and a half million people on a Facebook page, you can't ignore. I'm very mindful of that. Did a show for Facebook, did 100 episodes of returning the favor. But I never did what Dave Rubin is doing. I never did what the guy on the, what is his name, Sean Evans, on the hot ones, you know, where Rick Beato on. I really enjoy those programs. And I've really admired their ability to carve out a platform with no network oversight at all.

It's their advertisers. And, of course, they're masters at YouTube. You have to be careful. You can blow yourself up still. But in relative terms, it's a much, much more targeted way to reach your audience. You, of course, are doing the same thing, right? Yeah, I mean, it's analogous for short. Here's a question, do you worry about, and this is something where I think we might be at the right hinge point where I know I don't worry about it that much.

Younger people do and older people do. You'll hear people say, well, you know, we don't have anything in common because everybody is narrowcasting. You know, you watch the things that you like. I watch things that I like and everybody else. And like we have maybe one or two things in common. I don't worry about that partly because I remember what it was like listening to. the AM radio, which, you know, in fairness was remarkably diverse. Because, you know, if there were six people in the car and maybe one in the trunk, every seven songs had to cycle through every possible

audience segment. But having said that, you know, just feeling totally stultified by turning on ABC, NBC, and CBS, you know, or just everything was so narrow. Sure. Because it was, you know, So, like, I don't miss that. But I'm curious, do you miss that kind of, you know, common text that we all participate in? Well, the thing I miss is the shared experience of many, many millions of people. Like, the next, the day after the Super Bowl, we all have something to talk about. And, you know, must see TV on Thursday nights. Yeah, yeah.

That kind of a point. Who did you miss wings, you know? Wings, right. I forgot about it, but you're right. I watched every episode. Yeah. That seems to be missing. So we're in our silos a little bit more, right?

As long as we have something large and bigish. And on a selfish level, I'm not too worried about it because I, this sounds vanglorious, but I have a brand. You have a brand. After 30 years of doing this, Nick Gillespie is, in my mind, a mix of skepticism and reasonableness. That's your brand. Right? Shit.

Sorry. And a snappy dresser. Yeah. I was going for like aging backwards. Well, Benjamin Button on us. Yeah. But that's a broad brand. And it's very much for sale today because we need, in my view, we need a lot of skepticism.

My brand is just more of a good nature to vuncular curiosity around what people do for money and a bit of a philanthropic attempt to assist if I can be of use. But those things can apply all over the place. So if you're asking on a business level, on a selfish level, I don't worry at all. If you're asking me as a consumer, then yeah, I guess it's like, what do they call it, phoma, fear of missing out. Yes. I think we're in the golden age of television right now.

This is television. I stumbled across a show not long ago called The Offer, okay, the Making of the Godfather. It's on Paramount Plus. I had to subscribe and I watched it. And it was so daggone good. It made me anxious about what else is out there that I'm missing. And it's a lot. I just watch something called The Jury, which is terrific.

Yeah, I have watched that myself. Every single person's an actor except one dude on the jury. And he turns out to be like Jimmy Stewart. He restores your faith in humanity. But the weird... The breakout star of that, which sounds ridiculous to say, but it's James Marsden. The only guy who's already an actor. Who plays a great parody version of it.

I hope it's a parody version of himself. I hope it is too. I haven't seen it done that well since Matt LeBlanc. Yes. In episodes played a version of himself, which seemed pretty real. So my point is there's a weird level of anxiety when you discover how much good stuff there is. How many good bands have you never heard? How many great books have you never read?

And now, how many wonderful podcasts? Yeah. Who the hell has? There are three million podcasts out there. Mine's pretty good. Yours is terrific. Joe Rogan talks for three and a half hours at a time. And there's more listeners at the end than when he started.

I mean, that's. So that's what the seven and a half million men are doing. Exactly. That's what they're doing. They're just, they're on their screen. They're listening to Rogan. They're not working, but by God. Take supplements.

Or psilocybin. That's not a bad way to be. It's not bad. Yeah. But so where does that end? I guess here's a question for you. Maybe this is a way to kind of this conversation, like one of your shows, one of your series could go on. Never ends.

Yeah. But we are in a funk as a society, I think, like that. And I think back, you know, I've referenced my parents a bit. I can remember them talking about when, you know, the war ended. My father had fought in World War II. He landed in Normandy. it was a Purple Heart recipient, et cetera. But when the war ended, they were like, okay, good, well, we're not at war anymore,

but we're just going to be poor for the rest of our lives because, you know, they grew up for, then the Depression hit. And then like during World War II, everything was rationed and, you know, it was like kind of a shitty existence. And they were like, okay, we're just going to, you know, that's what it's going to be. Sure. And then by 1950, they were like, you know what, something had changed. And like suddenly, almost everybody could become middle class or you could rise from where you were. The world got richer.

The 50s is a decade filled with anxiety and hysteria, you know, both about juvenile delinquents and homosexuals and, you know, civil rights and communists and all this. But people got on with their lives and kind of were enjoying themselves in a way that they had in five years before. I remember, you know, the difference between about 1979 and 1984, something had. happened, you know, and part of it is, you know, part of it is related to politics and policy. Part of it is just things change. But I feel like we're in a funk and we have been for most of this century, actually. Yeah. You know, because of 9-11, I mean, and actually maybe because of the tightness of the

Gore-Bush election, that kind of like people are like, holy cow, like, are we just making this stuff up, you know, where everything is down to the flip of coin. but then 9-11, you know, the financial crisis, the rise of Trump to some degree, COVID, certainly. How do we get out of this funk if, like, a lot of what we've been talking about is like, you know what, there's a lot of really good stuff going on. People have more autonomy. People can choose their adventures.

There's more good stuff out there to drink and to watch, you know, and to drop. You name it. Yeah. But, you know, we start with that. You start with that. You know, something provides. Like there's never been a better time in the history of the world to be alive. And to drink my whiskey then right now.

Why wait? It's an amazing time to be alive. If you're going to get sick, you might as well get sick in this country today. This is it. And so forth and so forth. You don't want to be Pollyanna about it. But it's important to say that. I also think it's important to know, or at least to acknowledge,

that I agree with every single thing you've said as you look back through that time period. I'd push back a little and say, I'll find, you're 60 years old now, right? I'm about to be. Congratulations. I'll bet you I could find a 60-year-old man in any of those periods you described who feels exactly the way you feel now. Because in relative terms, what you've just done is look back and apply your own experience to a timeline that I'm very familiar with.

I'm in violent agreement with everything you're saying, but a Gen Zier couldn't give a crap. It means nothing to them. They're right where we were when we were 18. When things were pretty screwed up when we were 18, geopolitically, there were challenges, there were all kinds of things to worry about. For sure. I mean, for me, I think about it. This is why I think the story of the whiskey kind of stuck with me.

But my parents were like, oh, well, when I was 21, I went to Normandy and not on vacation. You know, we were poor. We didn't have clothes. We didn't go to college, et cetera, and that, you know, the kind of memory of poverty in America. Here's what's different. It's broad-based. It gave me like, okay, whatever, however bad things might be, you know, at least I'm not that. But whatever relative analysis you're conducting, you're doing it at a time in your life that is singular. And today, you're at a different time.

You've got more experience. You've got all sorts of other things to process. But I will say this, I do think we're in a funk, and part of the funk could be the siloing that we were talking about. Faith popcorn was a... You know her? Yeah, the brand forecaster. Yes. Yeah, yeah.

So the popcorn report predicted trends. Yeah. And she predicted something called cocooning. Right. Right? Where basically she presaged this time when, you know, people would be. start delivering food to us and we would have less and less reason to leave our homes. And of course, she was awfully right about that.

And it changed the size of the homes we live in. It changed all sorts of things. But then I remember she came out and she said, cocooning is so 1985. Now it's burrowing. Now we're not just in our cocoons. We're going deep because the remote, the access to all of the great entertainment, that we've just programmed our whole entire lives.

So part of why we're in a funk is probably because we're just inside too much looking at screens. It just could be that simple. We've cocooned ourselves. I was going to say that about the screen stuff. One of the things that's interesting is that there's a move that I've been following, which I find really fascinating in the arts in particular, like in painting and sculpture, to really kind of do things that bring the audience out. more because you can access everything via screens and it's great, it's liberating, it opens up the world,

but more and more people want to be in a room where something is happening around them. Yeah. And with other people. Well, why are we here? I mean, freedom fest. Yeah. I mean, you know, 5,000 people who have something in common want to be together. You can't have a festival alone.

Right. I mean, you can, but it's kind of tragic. But that immersive, crowd-based creation of meaning, you know, where the art isn't happening on the wall or on the screen. It's happening among the people connecting. Yeah. I find that fascinating. I do too.

And I know how enriched and nourished I feel after an experience like that. But you're talking about a funk. It's not a new idea, but it's the collapse of our institutions. And it's the trust. Yeah. Like, we need to be skeptical. That's why I'm a fan of your brand. But to encourage skepticism today,

is to encourage a form of denying. And there are a lot of people, this whole Kennedy thing, I'd love to get your take on him to him. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has got a lot of people all twisted up, right, and a lot of different ways. And I heard a guy I respect Sam Harris making sense, right? He has got a podcast. And he listened to Kennedy on Rogan and basically said that he wouldn't have

him on his podcast, at least not at this point, because he didn't want to platform ideas that he believed were fundamentally irresponsible. And I was so struck by that because I think what Sam might be missing in this is this default that we've always had back in the simpler time that you described when the initials behind a person's name really were important. A scientist with bona fides mattered. expertness mattered. And so the trust that we had in our medical community and in our political class that was never super high, but it's never been lower than it is now. So it's just that. It's been a straight line decline, you know, Gallup and Pew and a couple other places

have been tracking trust and confidence in American institutions, particularly government, you know, for more than 50 years. And it's just almost the straight line decline. So like, that's honestly, Nick, what? And that is, if I may, that I think it's totally legitimate. Because when you look at, you know, if you take the federal government, you know, Washington, D.C. since 1968 or 1972 or whenever, you know, they have done everything possible to abuse our trust and confidence in them. It's like they're double dog deria. It's like the. And they're like, okay, well, we got away with that, you know.

Now what? I mean, the office of the president had more trust and confidence in it when Nixon resigned than it has now. And probably for good reason, right? But we can't rest there, right? Because if you go, I write a lot about this. If you go from a high trust society to a low trust society, things fall apart in ways that are horrific, including we vote in more government because everybody's afraid the barbarians are at the gate. Yes.

So we need something to protect us, which then speeds up things in businesses. have acted poorly, you know, religions, the Catholic Church has not fully come to terms with a massive scandal, you know, and it's like, of course, that erode social trust and confidence, you trust people less and less, you go out less and less, you know. It's a thousand cuts. Yeah. It's death by a thousand cuts. You know, kind of have a renaissance, not of stupidity of just like, okay, blind trust. But how do we build up new institutions and how do we salvage the ones that are going to persist? I think I know part of the answer, but I love this metaphor, though,

of death by 1,000 cuts, you know, versus 1,000 points of light. Right. I mean, those two things fit hand and glove. But, geez, I think five years ago, who was the doctor that Kennedy talked about that Rogan invited to come back and debate? Peter Hotez. Hotez, okay. Five years ago,

had Peter Hotez said, look, I'm an expert. I'm a doctor. I've litigated this. I've looked at this. I'm not going to dignify it. I think a lot of people probably would have nodded and said, oh, okay. Today, I feel like that guy didn't get the memo. We just lived through an incredible time when a lot of very certain sounding people made a lot of very dogmatic proclamations that turned out to be dead wrong. Without reservation, this week, don't wear a mask, next week, wear a mask. The following week, maybe wear a mask, right? It's like me. I'm a narrator.

I'm paid to sound certain. So when I narrate how the universe works and tell you that there are 200 billion known galaxies in the universe, I sound like I sound now. And two weeks later, when they call me back in to reread it, because as it turns out, they're two trillion, right? Not a typo, but new tech, new numbers, right? I sound the same. I sound exactly the same as when I'm off by $2 trillion as I do when I'm right.

So does the president, so does Hotez, so does Joe Rogan, so is Robert Kennedy Jr. So this whole love affair with certainty and this whole thing that Sam Harris was saying, it's like you guys have to understand that there is no goodwill left. Right. Reasonable people who embrace a level of skepticism that I personally espouse have every right to look at your credentials and go, persuade me. Right. So I want HOTES or somebody to step up.

And that's my answer to your question. We're in a funk because the rug has been pulled out from under the expert class. and the experts are not making a fundamentally persuasive case for the rest of us. Instead, they and their apologists are saying, we're not going to dignify that with the debate. Well, I'm sorry. I don't think that plays in Peoria anymore. Not today. That sounded certain, didn't it?

That's a very good note to end on, I think. That's not bad at all. I think you're absolutely correct in that, you know, there are ways to rebuild trust and confidence. We do this individually in our lives all the time. Yes. We can do it societally. We can do it in our institutions. It's, you know, and the beginning of that turn around, I think,

comes in acknowledging the limits of our knowledge and when we're wrong. And then how do we go about doing a better job? And look, you play a role in this, Nick. I really believe. I know in driving down trust and confidence. Almost everything. No, look, I mean, when you talk about Substack and you talk about the guys we mentioned and the women, reason is an organ. It's an opportunity because people are going to look, I think,

for something that feels, I don't know, if it's honest or authentic, but tribes need to hear the truth from their own tribesmen. And that's what I meant before. Here we are, here I am encouraging a more skeptical worldview at a time when experts are telling me, don't be skeptical, just still take our word for it. That is a recipe for some kind of collision. Yeah. You know, this is also a whole other galaxy to talk about, but you know, we're living in an age of forced transparency. Yeah. Where the truth is going to come out, whether you like it or not, you might as well get ahead of it and just kind of admit what you know and what you don't know, what you're not certainly sure about, et cetera, and get on with figuring out how to live a better, more

interesting life. Hey, after 20 years in the business, These guys look like they're about to run out of tape. I can swap. No, no, don't swap it. I just want to tell you about Steve Forbes. Yes, please. Who's outside. Okay.

So, like 10 years ago. Don't give him any cash. He just spends it on booze. Well, I'll tell you what else he did. He says he wants to buy a hot dog, but he doesn't. Ten years ago, I really showed my slip and wrote some invective about the madness of ranking the top universities year after year again and again and again. It's like what a ridiculous bit of kabuki this is,

but if we're going to do it, how come nobody ever rates the best trade schools? Well, Forbes magazine printed a lot of what I spewed up and said, Mike Rowe has a point, and ever since they've been ranking the top 30 trade schools. And that's a hopeful note to end on. In my world, that's part of what has to happen. Although he always still puts Princeton at the top because that's where he went.

You know what? Some of my favorite welders came out of Princeton. Talented women. Thank you so much, Mike. Really fun. Appreciate it. The ocean moves us, whether that's surfing a wave or taking in an inspiring view. The ocean feeds us. Sustainable seafood practices bring the ocean's bounty to our plates. The ocean teaches us how our everyday choices, big and small,

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