The Way I Heard It with Mike Rowe - 478: Nicholas Eberstadt—The New Misery

Episode Date: April 7, 2026

Numbers don't lie—but they can obscure significant information. In this episode, Mike sits down with economist, demographer, and Harvard-educated brainiac Nicholas Eberstadt to explore a different kind of arithmetic—one that measures not just how many Americans we have, but how we're actually living. In his latest book, America's Human Arithmetic, Nick digs into three uncomfortable truths: first, the steady decline in prime-age labor force participation that persists even in strong economies. Second, the growing imbalance between those producing and those receiving—an economic equation increasingly tilted by entitlements and transfer payments. And third, a demographic slowdown marked by falling fertility and an aging population, reshaping the country's long-term trajectory in ways few are prepared for. Add those together and you get a new misery. This conversation is about the kind of math that doesn't stay on paper—the kind that shapes a nation's future whether we're paying attention or not. Tip o' the hat to our excellent sponsors ZipRecruiter.com/Rowe to post a job for FREE. GoodRanchers.com Use code MIKE to get $25 off your first order and FREE meat for life. Pestie.com/Mike to get an extra 10% off your order. mikeroweWORKS.org/scholarship Apply for a work ethic scholarship today!

Mike Roe here was another episode of The Way I heard it. And I'm excited to tell you today. And I don't want to overstate it, Chuck. But I think today's guest might be the smartest guy we've ever had on the podcast. Well, listen, if degrees mean anything, he's got more of them. I mean, it took you about 20 minutes to read through his accolades, or at least his education, I should say. There's a ton of them there. Yeah, he's been there and done it through the Ivy League.

But you know something? It didn't spoil him. Yeah, right. It didn't wreck him. Despite that, he's still smart. Yeah. Yeah, his name is Nick Eberstadt. He has been with the American Enterprise Institute now for a while.

He's kind of an economist. I mean, he is an economist. He usually introduces himself as a demographer, but he's also a public policy scholar, and he's kind of famous in that weird little world that guys like this live in for deep research into you know the kind of topics that you and your buddies no doubt discussed down at the corner bar population dynamics economic and social performance the health of American society and institutions he's got all the awards and all of the initials behind his name that you would expect and hope to find it an expert but more importantly he just loves what he does and he's good at it and I admire him a lot

in part because he was the first genuine expert to validate all my smack after all those years of dirty jobs talking about. I mean, because what do I know? I mean, anecdotally, I could see things happening and I heard lots of stories about how hard it was for people that owned trade-based businesses to recruit. And I heard so many of those stories that I started to think, look, this can't be a coincidence. but I don't, you know, I don't have any real facts. I don't have any real research.

And then Nick Eberstadt comes along and tells you that there are seven million men who are sitting on their duffuses just looking at screens. And so much more. Men Without Work was the book that I first read back in 2015 and we invited him on a podcast as soon as we had this interview format set up. Yeah. The book was redone during the lockdowns because everything he prophesied in the original came true.

Yeah. So they republished it with a big fat forward, bringing everybody up to date. And now he's written a new one. It's called America's Human Arithmetic, which is, you know, I don't know if they focus group the title of these things or not. Studies show that the word arithmetic. The books just fly off the shelves. But you have to take it in its context.

Now, we're calling the episode the New Misery, because that's the thread that stitches all of these essays together. But I don't want to spoil it or tell you too much, but I will say that at the heart of his numerical analysis of all that ails us is the population collapse. Yes. Which is so interesting. Which is real and worldwide. It's real and it's worldwide, but it's also completely at odds with the narrative that you and I grow up with when we were teenagers. Yeah. And Paul Ehrlich's book, The Population, bomb was being quoted everywhere. Yep.

That book was accepted as dogma. And really, like so many people, so many average people, but also so many informed intellectual academics took this book at face value and concluded that our planet would be overrun with humans, like completely overrun. Like in the same way, okay, you know, the climate. it's going to completely cause our destruction in 12 years. It was an Armageddon-type prediction. Yeah.

That was fatally flawed and dead wrong. And while people have come around, you know, like Bill Gates recently, and the idea that it's not, you know, human-caused climate change is not going to be the end of the world for us. Not by any stretch. But there are still smart people like Bill Maher, who is a smart guy. Yeah, he's smart. who is still clinging to this idea. There's just too many damn people on the planet.

Yeah. Ehrlich's book infected a generation. And that infection, like a virus, spread into the next generation. Yeah. And so today, when guys like Elon Musk, who are way more famous than Nick Eberstadt, start talking about the greatest calamity facing the species is a global population collapse, they go, oh, that Elon, he's so crazy. He's just crazy, you know?

But of course he's not. And neither is Nick Eberstadt. Right. These numbers are real. Your politics don't matter. Your opinions don't matter. And I'm sorry to say your feelings don't matter to numbers. Math doesn't care.

Arithmetic doesn't care. But Nick cares very much about humanity. That's the fun of Nick. Right? He's a real caring human with four wonderful kids. And he's had a big life. And he wants to help his species. by setting us straight and debunking a lot of BS.

His book does it. Our conversation is fun, measured in the way you would expect a conversation with economists to be. But really, really enlightening. And in spite of the title, The New Misery, there's plenty of optimism in this. If you listen, real close. Which I hope you'll do right after this.

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Do what so many other business owners have already done. Post a job for free at ziprecruiter.com slash row and watch what happens. You have nothing to lose except the time you've been wasting. ZipRecruiter.com slash row. So do you keep track of the number of books you've written? at this point? No. I think the first digit is a two. I mean, it depends what you call a book.

Well, I'm calling America's human arithmetic a book because, you know, it's got pages, it's got covers, it has a lot of end notes, it's got footnotes, it has many essays that are both thought-provoking and terrifying. In fact, Nick,

I doubt your publisher would be on board with this, but I think you may have written a great American horror story. whatever could you mean? Well, I'll just repeat the compliment. I hope I paid you when you walked in here. I'm halfway through this one. I've read every word of men without work.

And my first thought upon finally meeting you in person is to say it's always gratifying to meet people who, A, appear to be doing precisely what they were put on the planet to do. And B, appear to be loving doing it. Am I overstating things? Well, I love trying to seek truth in my own way, even if the truth is a little tawdry and slightly alarming

or depressing every now and then. Tawdry, alarming, and depressing. Chuck, I think we have our title with Nick Evers that. Yeah, you've got your guy. No, look, man, I'll admit it, at a glance, the first time I saw you interviewed, the first time I looked over your curriculum via Tate, you know, my eyes glazed a little bit.

You kind of look like an economist. You kind of geek out. I'm just saying. You're on the other side of the table. Well, I mean, America's human arithmetic. Honey, get in here. He's written another one. Okay.

I mean, it doesn't. It's not, nothing you've done feels as though it's been done for any purpose other than enlightenment. You just don't seem to give two shakes about. the marketing or the advertising or the positioning. It's just the truth. It's just numbers. And the evidence you present not only demands a verdict,

it just feels kind of undeniable. So we can start wherever you'd like, but I gotta tell you, man, this whole population thing. I mean, start there. Let's start there. Because at base, you're a demographer, right? Yeah, yeah. What does that mean?

That's a very good question. I guess it means that you kind of like go around with a clicker, something like that. I mean, it's an excuse for asking all sorts of questions that you want to ask about people and how they live and the patterns of life and how many of them there are. And marriage, birth and death, all of that sort of stuff. But to what end? I mean, surely your innate curiosity isn't enough to justify a life's work of just saying, yeah, what's under the rock or how does that work? There must be a point.

Sure. It's trying to understand the human condition, how to make the human condition more prosperous, more flourishing, what the constraints on freedom are, what the constraints on life of different, through different sorts of ways. And if you look at the long sweep, I got into this 50 years ago because we were then told that we were in the middle of a population explosion

that was going to ruin the future. Paul Ehrlich. I first saw him on The Tonight Show. Johnny Carson had him on like over a dozen times. He was a huge fan. And that was a big book. Yeah, it was. And he said that the race to feed humanity was over,

and then in the 1970s, hundreds of millions of people would die, no matter what crash programs we started and so forth and so on. More or less everything that he predicted was wrong. And the reason that more or less everything he predicted was wrong is that he was an expert in the wrong thing. He was an expert on the population biology of insects. And if we were insects, this would have happened. It would have been a very, very bad 1970s and thereafter.

But what makes demography so interesting to me is that we're the unique species. We're the unique adaptable species with this fantastic ingenuity. The sewer generis. Yes. So we can, unlike the fruit flies or whatever Professor Erlich studied,

We can change our lifespans. We can change the number of progeny we have. We can change the resource base that we live on. And even though the world has more than doubled the number of people since he wrote that book, poverty as a percentage of humanity has crashed. People are living longer than ever before. They're better educated than ever before. They're richer than ever before.

the nutritional problem that the world faces now is overeating. So we got the abundance thing down. We cracked the abundance thing. Yeah, exactly. But at what cost? Well, okay, so now we've made this, we figured out how to make a material garden of Eden. And now the question is whether we want to live in it, right? And part of the verdict that we seem to be seeing now is that there's a big flight from childbearing,

flight from marriage, going on not just in rich countries, but it's happening in a lot of lower-income countries as well. That was the really surprising part to me. This, I believe, this will be the great eye-opener, I predict, in the next hour and a half or however long we talk. Because everybody who I've talked to your book about, I mean, you've always talked about this, but within the last year you wrote an article

that got passed around a lot. Who published that? In Foreign Affairs magazine? Foreign Affairs. Right. And in it, we learn all sorts of things, not just about China, which is alarming, but, you know, Myanmar and India and places where I just assume

the population was continuing to explode. But you're saying it's really not exploding anywhere, really? It's still growing pretty briskly in sub-Saharan Africa. But if you take sub-Saharan Africa out of the picture, Mike, it looks like all of the rest of the world, you know, and you're averaging in Bangladesh and Finland and Yemen and Sweden, all the rest of the world at the moment is about 10 or 15% below the level that you'd need to have a stable population over time. How much time? One generation to the next. So in other words, it may already be the case. Our numbers aren't good enough to, you know, we know have enough clickers all around the world.

But if we had all of these clickers going all around the world to count people well enough, the whole species, it's possible that we've already gone through the point into below replacement fertility patterns. It may be that we've already crossed the threshold to where humanity isn't babying up enough to continue the total numbers that we have. Did you say babying up? Yeah. That's a science term now. I see. Okay.

I mean, well, it's like below replacement theory. Yeah. Is that something that can be fixed? I mean, it sounds awfully dire. Well, I mean, if people decide they, they're. want to have more children. They can have more children. If they decide they don't want to have more children, they won't have more children. I mean, it's not quite the same thing as life expectancy. I mean, I kind of always like life expectancy for my friends to be going up, but I don't think

that I have the answer as to how many babies my friends should have. That's something that parents know a lot more about than outsiders or governments or anything like that. Of course. But I want to ask what's causing it, unless you've just answered it by simply saying personal choice, but it just feels, I mean, is it like a hive mentality? What would cause the populations of countries that are so disparate to plummet in such lockstep? It's a really interesting question. It may be the most important question today. Chuck, make a note. Got it. Okay.

So let's figure this out by the end of the show. But it's happening in so many different places that have such different histories and cultures and education and ways of looking at the world that if you, I don't have the, I don't have Einstein's unified field theory for this. It's just going on in a lot of different places, and it seems like there may be a lot of different things that are moving the dial in different places. What we'd need to answer this question, I think, would be a better quality, a better class of anthropologist than we have today, or maybe a better class of journalist. Because part of the secret is hiding in plain sight. be going out and going to 100 or a thousand different places around the world and asking people,

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I mean, I like the way you distill it. I mean, that's pretty simple. Like, if I'm going to go all the way to Bangladesh, I'm going to hit him with him. You might want to say it in Bengali there, but you get it. At a glance, I mean, it seems like China's population was so out of control. They instituted this one-child policy. which I don't remember anybody criticizing at the time other than, you know, for geopolitical reasons, it seemed awfully heavy-handed.

But I don't remember anybody thinking, hold on a second there. That math is going to come back to bite you in the ass, right? I don't remember hearing that. But at least I can understand, okay, they had to do something seemingly sweeping. Meanwhile, over here, we've got the abundance thing going on. Maybe, you know, we're just getting more fluent and more selfish, leading more selfish lives, I guess, maybe. But none of it seems universally applicable. I'm still stuck on that.

And it's odd. Part of it, I think, is that people all around the world making this up. I can't prove it. I kind of guess this may be it. They're realizing that they don't have to live the way their parents live. Part of it is that this very contagious intellectual virus of self-actualization and convenience is almost irresistible any place that it comes. There are a lot of very wonderful things about children, but one of them isn't that they're convenient, right? So if you're moving towards a world where almost everybody has an iPhone, and I think that we are moving towards that world, and almost everybody is looking into that rather imperfect narcissus mirror, and thinking about the maybe better life, actually much inferior life, but the supposedly better life that's on the other side of this thing.

There's not as much compelling reason or maybe even purpose to having the sorts of larger families, raising the sorts of larger families that used to be just part of the natural way of things. Do you think people have lost a – I mean, I get the convenience thing, but like have we lost a sense of optimism. Do we look around and see, as PJ O'Rourke called it, all the trouble in the world? Right? Like we see the iPhone and we see the fact that you know what that's a lie. It's not really a phone. I mean, it is a phone. But as Jonathan Haid has said, it's also an arcade and a casino and an endless repository of all the porn ever produced or imagined. It also fits in our pocket. We gave it to our kids. And we told them to take it to school. Right. So like we see that. What could go wrong? We look at the immigration thing. We look at. AI and we look at what appears to be the gradual talk about replacement theory like in real time so we see our own replacements coming at us and robots and new levels of intelligence and it to your earlier point that's happening even faster than the collapse seems to be happening so are people just looking at all that and going

yeah what am I bringing this kid into the world what kind of world am I bringing this kid into. Certainly that's true in some areas. I mean, I think we can see where some of that is happening in the world right around us. I'm not sure that's what's going on in Vietnam right now. I'm not sure that's what's going on in Tehran right now, all these places below, you know, family size that's too small to sustain, you know, stable families, stable population over time. I mean, You've seen the same thing that I have, I think, because I talk to younger people. Younger Americans are the richest, best educated, healthiest people who have ever been in this country. And half of them are scared of everything.

I don't know why. But one of the things they're scared of is commitment, raising a family, all of the stuff that ends up. being in my little kind of demographic purview. Connected to that is also, there've never been as many people in the United States as there are today, but it seems like there's so much loneliness. And I think that that's somehow connected in there. Throughout your book is this recurring light motif, I'll call it.

It's the new misery. New misery. Yeah. I mean, not the same as the old misery? There's a new, like, what is... You're getting down? Yeah. Meet the new misery, same as the old misery.

Well, in the bad old days that we sometimes idealize, there was an enormous amount of grinding poverty. And a lot of the misery of the 19th century, the Depression. The dust bowl. Dustball was caused by lack of wherewithal. People didn't have enough work. They didn't have enough income. They didn't have enough food.

They didn't have enough everything to kind of lead a decent life. We've cracked the formula for abundance. We're the richest society that's ever existed. We're sloshing in money. And yet at the same time, look all around and you see all of this unhappiness and all of this degradation that too many people are trapped in or caught up in. And so it's like there's a difference between poverty and misery and that would have been obvious maybe to a 12-year-old kid in Charles Dickens's London, but it's kind of alluded

our technocrats and experts for too much of our time right now. You used to a phrase in Men Without Work that stuck with me. I quoted a lot. I think it was referring to unemployment numbers, and you talk about them as an artifact of the Great Depression. And if I took your meaning right, you were saying that there was a time when unemployment was the proximate cause of too few jobs,

and therefore the creation of jobs, would inexorably lead to the elimination of, or at least the degradation of unemployment? It's a very simple equation. That no longer applies at all. The number of available jobs has seemingly very little to do with the number of people who are unemployed. And in the same way, that misery versus poverty thing,

like the rules changed within a generation, it seemed, or like the rules for happiness or contentment, or satisfaction or whatever, the right expression is, but you know where I'm going with this. It's men without work. It's men who have become disconnected, not just men, obviously, but whatever's going on on a generational scale seems to be happening because we didn't, the species didn't get the memo.

You know, like the rules changed, and we're just still like trying to read through the instruction guide. If there are 200 features on my iPhone, I use three of them. If my Word, if Microsoft Word has 50 different panels, I use two, I'm not up to speed yet. I feel like most people aren't either, and we're just flailing around trying to find some humanity in it. I don't think that most of the misery is caused by failing to catch up with the technological availability. Much of it is that people are kind of dropping out. Men in particular are dropping out.

And there are a lot of men who are dropping out who have higher education as well. It's not all happening with high school, people who don't have high school diplomas. I mean, what we've seen developing gradually, it started so quietly that nobody really noticed this back in the 1960s, is we've seen larger and larger fractions of prime age guys.

Not my words. This is like the government calls guys who are 25 to 54 prime age workers because they're like in the prime of life, right? Because they're also supposed to be, at least we were in the past, setting up families, raising kids. It wasn't all dollars and cents. Well, in my industry, we call them the key demographic. The key demographic.

I like that. The advertiser coveted key demography. Yeah. All right. There we have it. So what was slowly but inexorably happening was this dropout from the labor force by men in this heretofore working age group. And Uncle Sam wasn't following it. The Fed wasn't following it.

Wall Street wasn't really following it because they had, as you mentioned, they had these jobs numbers, this matrix that was set up at the end of the Great Depression to track the Great Depression when it would have seemed cuckoo to think that a guy who didn't have a job wasn't going to be looking for one. But so the fastest demographic for men 25 to 54 since the 1960s has been the ones who are neither working nor looking for work. And so when you look at the unemployment rate, you say, hey, we're at full employment. That's wonderful, except that there are three guys who aren't looking for work for every one guy who is. Because full employment is still a reflection of the number of people that are looking for work, finding. it. And in the labor force. If you drop out of the labor force, you're out of the picture. And so if you're unemployed, you're in the labor force. If you're not in the labor force, neither working or looking for work, but there are three times as many of you as unemployed guys,

you're missing three quarters of the problem in a country. Is there a link between all the smart people involved in this space missing the obviousness of that problem and a guy like Paul Ehrlich missing the obviousness of extrapolating insect behavior and applying it to another species. Like, where's the fault in our stars and why are we missing the forest for the trees, it seems? Would we call it an empathy gap? Would we call it something like missing the missing the humanity that's involved there. I mean, the neo-Malthusians, like Professor Erlich and the population controllers in China, they just didn't kind of understand what human beings were about and how human beings can kind of solve their own problems.

That's one thing. I'd say that in our country, we have a sort of a, we now have a mellurative state that is, supposed to be tasking experts to helping address and solve our social problems. Well, what if our experts don't know where to look and don't know what's actually causing human suffering in our ranks? Then, Houston, we've got a little bit of a problem in this formula. Well, it's the old joke, the guy loses his keys, right? He's looking under the light, but he lost him by the car, but the light's better here.

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the thing I remember, I still have the book around somewhere. I mean, everybody had that book. Sure. It was a great pamphlet. I mean, it was very powerful. polemical pamphlet. It was like a dogma. Yeah. It was a real page turn. It was short, powerful, and wrong. Short, powerful, and wrong. But the message was delivered with certainty, and it resonated. Yes. And even to the point today where, with respect, I mean, I hear Bill

Marr all the time talking about, there's just too many people on the planet. There's just too many people on the planet. He sounds very certain, too. And then you come along, you know, You're less bombastic. You write a book and you let the evidence kind of speak for it. And then Elon Musk comes along. Now, he, you know, what's it feel like to be in violent agreement with Elon Musk? He's the first guy in recent memory that I saw sit down and say, no, no, no, you got it all wrong. The biggest threat facing this species is the population collapse and virtually every interviewer, all of his interlocutors.

look at him like a cow looking at a new gate. They're like, what do you mean? How can you even say that? But he's Elon Musk, so maybe he's on to something. He's a contrarian who has done really, really well, looking at problems and solving them or asking how come things that aren't being done, things that could be done aren't being done.

Really, really well, that's what you're going with? He's worth $865 billion. Okay, that's great. I mean, that's wonderful. He's had a good run. No, I think that's great. And he's got, what, like 12 kids or something? Yeah, I mean, but I mean, just between you and me, I have a higher yield per woman than Elon does.

That, I did not see that chapter. Just a quick sidebar. We should do something to establish your bonafides. I can read them quickly. Well, I mean, look, I'm only doing this because something really jumped out. Chuck went to the AI just to make sure we had everything accurate here. A.B. Magnacum Lottie and economics from Harvard. What's MSC?

Masters of Science, maybe. Social planning for developing countries. London School of Economics. London School of Economics. Good grief. I think Mick Jagger went there, actually. Not at the same time. No.

MPA, Harvard Kennedy School. What's the P? I think public administration. PhD, we know that. Political economy and government. Also Harvard. Born in New York. to an intellectually distinguished family.

This is my favorite part. Your maternal granddad was Ogden Nash? True story. Get out of here. What a great man he was. What a wonderful grandfather he was. Well, you know what? Were you close?

Yeah, I loved him. I'm sorry, I'm going to totally hijack this in a different direction. But for people who don't know his work, and I'll let you sum it up, but my experience of it was just fun. with the language. Yes. He had so much fun with the language.

There was Joyce Kilmer's famous, I think that I shall ever see a poem as lovely as a tree. He finishes it with, unless they take the billboards down. You know, that's the billboards fall. I'll never see the tree at all. I'll never see the tree at all.

Right. Yeah, so he was like a, I mean, like a gadfly poet. Yeah, yeah. I mean, he was a college dropout. I couldn't finish college because he didn't have the money, who learned more about the English language than you and I and almost everybody else will ever know, and was just incredibly playful with it and did all sorts of

puns and funny poems. He was a humorist. And he was able to make a living off of writing humorous poems, which is almost an unimaginable thing nowadays to think of. It's not even a job. It's not even a job. anymore, demographically speaking. Demographically speaking. I mean, I've been through the one ads. I've looked for humorous poets. No openings. No, no.

They've all been filled, I guess. That's why everything's so funny, right? Well, was he a fixture in your life growing up? Oh, yeah, yeah. We have pretty close family on both my dad and my mom's side. And so I spend summers with him and my grandmother up in, like the 12 feet of sea coast in New Hampshire. And he lived in my mom.

And he lived in Baltimore. That's kind of why I, that's where Chuck grew up too. And so he's kind of an introvert. I mean, he was very friendly, but he was kind of an introvert. He'd sit at a table kind of like this one in the corner of the living room and he'd be kind of like, there'd be all hell going on around him with all the grandkids raising noise and stuff and he'd be just tuned out. And every, you know, so often he'd say.

I think I have one. He'd kind of like read us his drafts of his poetry. It was unbelievably cool. And we even knew that as little kids. We knew how cool that was. And how big was your family from a population standpoint? From a population standpoint? I had five cousins.

He had five grandchildren on his side of the family. And on the other side of the family, I guess about a dozen. grandkids. So a bunch of cousins. So the Eberstadt population is not collapsing. Well, you know, you always have to be vigilant. Practice, practice. Was there a favorite poem of Nash's that stuck with you? There are a lot of different ones. You always have to mention the one, you know, the poem that he did. Candy is dandy, but liquor is quicker. Making friends is candy. Right. He had some poems. that he did that were actually

not funny poems that were kind of serious poems. And some of those I kind of like as well. But, you know, you go back over this stuff now. How did how did he ever do that? He was an original.

Yeah, I mean, but the reason he could play with all of these words is that he had a knowledge of the English language that, you know, kind of like it was rivaling the OED, It was just phenomenal. And we'd play like word games, you know, around the table and stuff and around, you know, the living room and things.

And there was just a depth there that you wouldn't necessarily know because he'd just like playful with it. But wow. Sidebar to the OED, the writing of the Oxford English Dictionary, one of the great undertakings in all of literature. Did you read the book? The Professor and the Madman. Is that Simon Winchester? That's right. I know of it.

I can quote the title. I haven't cracked it. You know, it's, I think it was James Murray and William Minor. And Murray had, was basically assigned by the queen to write the definitive dictionary. And he essentially outsourced it. And, you know, intellectuals from all over the world would contribute to like, I did a lot of the letter B. Right. Right?

They would like, everybody would get assigned the letter or a partial. of a letter. And, you know, Murray handled all of these submissions from intellectuals all over the planet. And one of the most prolific was a doctor who was in the Civil War named William, I want to say William Chester Minor. And he was just voluminous, his submissions. And they were excellent. And he and Murray became fast friends. I'm not giving anything away. This is all told in the preface, but the story begins when Murray finally shows up after a lifetime of correspondence with his friend to meet him and shake his hand to thank him for his extraordinary contribution. And he goes to the address from which minor had been corresponding. And it's the Broadmoor home

for the criminally insane. This guy that was going to write the hell out of his mind. And he had been an insane asylum most of his life and did most of his work from his cell. So the story begins with that, with that weird relationship. And I don't know if it's possible to make this tangent relevant, but I mean, has it occurred to you that your granddad's facility with the alphabet has some corollary to your own with numbers or arithmetic to be specific? Yeah, well, for sure. I mean, he as, I mean, as a, you know, kind of a, you know, Somebody I really looked up to, he, I think, was a great example of trying to think about how to use words in a way that matter. Sure.

I mean, every word is an idea, and so your sentences aren't going to be any better than the ideas that they're kind of like slopping around in them. And so watching him at his craft, I guess it's kind of like what I'd say like maybe appreciate that. My other grandfather was much more interested in finance. He did some stuff in World War II with trying to help fix the war economy so that we'd like win rather than. and lose and stuff like that. So, I mean, wait a good goal right there. I mean, going back to the very first compliment, I paid you, like to have a mission, to be working on a thing

that is relevant and important and for you fun, that's the consummation devoutly to be wished, right? And you had two grandfathers. One is dabbling in language in order to express an idea in a new and exciting way that would move people. The other is trying to save the world. through finance, smash those two things together.

And it's not shocking that, you know, somewhere down the DNA chain there comes a demographer. Yeah. Well, so it's like trying to explain numbers maybe or trying to explain what the significance in some of the numbers and things that, you know, some of the things that are kind of hiding in plain sight. That seems to be, well, look, let me tell you what the AI said about you.

Oh, no. Which AI? I don't know, Chuck. Which ones you use? Chat. Not chat. Not chat. Not chat.

Ask Claude. Yeah, Claude likes me. How weird is it that they're different. Like, now we're assigning, I mean, Claude is different than what's the, well, that's Anthropic, right? Grock. Yeah, and Grock is like a grok's kind of sassy. Overall thesis of the manuscript, America's human arithmetic argues that demographic realities,

fertility, aging, labor force, participation, education, mortality, mortality, and, and immigration are hidden drivers of America's economic and political future. The United States retains advantages compared to Europe and East Asia, but those advantages are narrowing. If ignored, demographic decline will slow growth, weaken fiscal stability, and erode social cohesion. Hence my earlier comment about the horror story you've written. If addressed wisely, however, America can remain demographically resilient, but only, only if it understands its own arithmetic. What is our own unique American arithmetic? We've got a secret sauce that nobody else has, I think.

And I plead guilty to being an American exceptionalist. but I think that from our founding documents and the sorts of ideas that made us into kind of like the first new nation, then on to the sorts of people that were attracted, you know, it's a pretty motley bunch, but the people who were attracted to this country, you don't have to idealize it because there's plenty of dirt under the fingernails in this story. But it made for a remarkable explosion of creativity and prosperity and freedom that's ours to lose. Shameless plug. This is not a commercial for the way I heard it with Mike Rowe, the award-winning podcast. now entering its 10th year and available wherever podcasts are listened to. No, this is a commercial for Micro's Foundation,

which is just set aside $10 million to help train the next generation of skilled workers. That money is available right now at microworks.org. It's waiting for anyone who wants to learn a skill that doesn't require a four-year degree. Electricians, plumbers, linemen, welders, shipbuilders, HVAC techs. America is desperate for men and women with skills they don't teach in universities. And the MicroWorks Foundation is committed to, to helping train America's workforce for hundreds of thousands of AI-proof six-figure jobs just waiting to be filled. Apply today for a work ethic scholarship at microworks.org or support our efforts with a donation of any size.

We're closing America's skills gap one job at a time, and we could use your help at microworks.org, m-I-K-E-R-W-E-W-W-E-W-W-R-G. Well, now you're back to the scary part. How not to lose it. Aside from just more wanton procreation and more children, if so fasto, how should we be thinking about work, immigration, technology, AI? How do we know what the enemy is and isn't?

And what can the arithmetic tell us about those things? Well, I mean, the arithmetic is kind of like, you know, what you see on the ground. It's like the results. It doesn't tell you about what's in the black box. And part of what's been the amazing engine for America's national success are the different ideas and codes, including codes of honor, that have allowed us to, engage in this really remarkable sort of experiment in

complex cooperation. I mean, that's the way that I'd look at the work thing, right? It's a voluntary experiment in complex cooperation in which you kind of you can do things that were impossible before, that had never been done before.

You generate more wealth and more opportunities and more demand for other people to do well than you could in the past. What kind of is, I think part of what's causing this really unsettling rise of new misery is when different parts of that previous code have been kind of failing or people have been falling off of it. I mean, think about what's happened since the 1960s, which has we think about like the men dropping out of work. It's a big historical thing. It's been going on for, what's that now?

You know, it's been going on for two, almost three generations. Where's the arithmetic now? Like how many men, able-bodied? Say a tenth, a little more than a tenth of seven million round number of the lessen, 70 million who would be there to be this kind of like backbone or bulwark in the labor force and the economy. This thing's been going on since the mid-60s. What else has happened since the mid-60s? We've seen this erosion of the previous family model with breakup of the two-parent homes.

A lot of kids growing up in single homes, a lot of people not growing up with parents at all. We've seen the rise of the American welfare state. We had Social Security before that, but that wasn't really a social welfare program. There's a social insurance program. It was like an insurance program. But we started our war against poverty, which was basically in a month. to redress poverty. And we've ended up with an awful lot of America now accepting money that you're supposed to get basically only if you're poor. You want to talk about something that's going to kill a middle class mentality. How about applying for poverty benefits? And getting it. And getting it, right? And so we had that. We had the explosion in crime. You can't forget. that. The explosion in crime was followed by an explosion in punishment. One of the things that's

hiding in plain sight is the 25 million maybe, maybe more. We don't count it exactly. Adult Americans who've got a felony conviction in their background now, probably one out of seven guys has a felony conviction in this background. So we talk about the, you know, we talk about mass incarceration, but for every person who's in prison, there are 10 people with felony convictions who are in society as a whole. You keep on going through these different trends, and all of these are intertwined with this male fail that you and I are talking about. And since this is a historical problem that's evolved over the course of over 60 years, I don't think we're going to be able to fix it real fast.

But I think we can fix it. I think we can fix all of this stuff. This is a bit of a left turn, but do you think it feels like there's been a rise in conspiracy theories? It feels like there's been a rise in certainly just the UFO thing and the, you know, existential things. Could that be somehow linked? are we looking more to the unexplained or the supernatural

or some sort of, you know, what do they call it, the Greeks, the Dezach machina, right? You know, the machine of the gods to somehow explain all of this instead of the arithmetic, which, you know, let's face it, I mean, a lot of people didn't do great in arithmetic. Well, you know, we've got plenty of conspiracy theory stuff around, and of course it's always fun to do the U.S.

Fos, you know, why not? They're always great. But you also have to remember, Mike, that I mean, that guy, Richard Hofstadter, the historian way back when, the paranoid style in American politics. I mean, that's part of what makes Americans great, as we've always had this paranoid style. Now, see, that's Granddad Nash coming out right there.

Yeah, I try and find that, too. Like I, part of how I think about AI in light of all the trouble in your book is that, you know, AI was a real part of Star Trek. Yeah. It was a real part of 2001. Yes. And so it's like, well, wait a minute. Talk about an artifact of science fiction. An artifact of something existential.

Well, that's now clear and present. And, you know, there was a guy in here yesterday who said, look, We don't understand AI. Don't let anybody tell you otherwise. We can explain some of it, but deep down, this thing is asking us questions that we're not asking it to pose. We're not quite sure. And that feels, I don't know, if I'm a guy looking for meaning or maybe looking for an excuse to throw his hands up and just sit home. A robotic girlfriend?

I mean, look, honestly, how long until you can order a dead ringer for Scarlett Johansson? who will clean the house, look after you, and do whatever else you need. I mean, how, you know, and how much? Three easy payments? How are we going to work this? You've got to write that sci-fi story fast before it. It's overtaken by events. Somebody did.

I think it was, was it, Phoenix, Yacquine Phoenix. Her? Yeah. Actually, that was ahead of its time, wasn't it? It was like 12 years ago or something. Yep. Yeah. Yeah, the guy basically falls in love with Siri.

Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Yep. Well, so I'm out of my depth on AI, and I think that almost anybody who, I mean, maybe if you're like Jack Clark at Anthropic, you're not out of your depth. But I think pretty much most of us are out of our depth. So I struggle, I look for historical analogies. And the historical analogies may not work on this one, but it's the best I can do. And so if you look for historical analogies, there's been this. race between education and skills, not just in the United States, but I think in all of the countries that have, you know, become modern affluent societies. And it's like you're going to need to get like the training and skills and all if you're going to hold the lantern. And if you hold the lantern, you're going to do very well. But if you don't have the training, you're not going to be able to hold the lantern and you're going to be displaced.

So the take home to me is that under any sort of, you're going to be able to hold the lantern. circumstances, we want our people to have good training and good skills and good education. But if you've got something coming down the pike like what AI may be, that's a double-time, big-time argument for going in on training and skills and education for our country. That's the biggest thing that's changed since you and I spoke last. I got a series of questions over the years. like I told you, I was so delighted to read your book because I'm just a dilettante mouthing off anecdotally.

You had science that seemed to confirm a lot of the stuff that I was sort of guessing at. But now the question I get most often isn't, gosh, I didn't know you could make six figures working with your hands. Or, wow, I had no idea that, you know, a career in the trades could lead to a small business. So directly and so quickly. Yeah. Now it's like, wait a second, man. The AI is, it's coming for the coders. It's not coming for the welders. At least not yet. Not until we get that Scarlet Johansson robot worked out. Maybe then. But it seems like in the short term, we got it precisely wrong. It seems like in the short term we made the Erlich mistake. We conflated. Like, well, this job will lead to that job. But in fact, something else comes in and it just up and it just up and.

ends the whole thing. And now suddenly, I'm talking to electricians, Nick, in data centers who are under 20, sorry, under 30, say 26, 27 years old, making $250, $260,000 a year with no debt. And a crazy thing is they've been poached like three times in the preceding 18 months. They're basically setting their own schedule. They're making a quarter million dollars a year. And that just wouldn't have seemed at all possible two years ago. And now it's happening. And demographically, it's like the people who are calling me are, you know, they're not running companies with giant factories and big blue-collar workforces.

They're bankers. And there are people write big hedge funds who are looking at their portfolios and realizing, good grief, man. I've talked like the biggest companies in the world who are freaking out over the very things that you talk about. I think in this book, and it's beyond my pay grade, but I refer your book all of the time, but I don't know where the solution is in it. That's the scary thing.

I understand most of the problems and what led to so many disaffected men. But right now, things have happened so fast, and the problem seems so dire, and the skills gap seems so wide. So say something optimistic when you have a second. Yeah, sure. One of the skills that you need to get, and maybe the most valuable skill of all, and they don't exactly teach this to you in school, but sometimes by accident you learn it, is the ability to deal with disequilibrium, the ability to deal with change and unexpected change, which is to say, you know, memorizing the book of coding. whatever, will only get you so far. But learning how to learn, learning how to pivot,

learning how to do something new, all of that is going to be absolutely essential in a world that's going to be, you know, have new skills and new technologies. whether or not we're in an AI world. I mean, whether or not we're in a world where AI is the sort of driver that maybe some people think it's going to be.

So what do you do differently? I don't think you do that much differently. I think this is going to be the way that you learn how to deal with the unexpected in the future. There's going to be... What we don't see in this is there's going to be a lot of opportunity.

If we... We went back 200 years or even 100 years and say, OMG, we're not going to be on the farms. We're not going to be on the farms. What are we going to do? We did. Well, that's the hell of it, man. You can pose that question and have all of the fear that comes with not knowing the answer. and at the same time be certain the answer will.

Like, we couldn't see the industrial revolution any more than we could see the financial revolution or the digital revolution. And now the AI resolution. We don't know what's on the other side of it. But we can look back and we can sort of handicap the unintended consequences, right? So I'm going to talk to a guy tomorrow

who runs a franchise of auto repair. It's called Crash Champion. It's got like 600 locations. And he's desperate for guys. They're hiring. But if Elon's right, who by the way, I just saw a thing today, he says there'll be more optimist robots performing surgery in three to four years than there will be surgeons of the human variety. In three and four years, he's also talking even faster of autonomous vehicles being quick. It's going to feel like slow, slow, slow, and then they're going to be everywhere.

That's often. Often in the way that it is. Right. It's going to hockey. stick. And when it does, well, what's going to happen to auto insurance? Because accident rates are going to plummet to about 5%. What's all state going to do? What's state farm going to do? What's my friend Matt going to do with 600 locations? All of that, like in a world where there are no more accidents, what happens to auto body repair? What happens to the underwriters? So the poor trauma

surgeon. The poor drug. Right. My favorite thoracic surgeon. What are they going to? So, you know, all that stuff is like scary because I don't know the answer. But I think the hopeful thing that you're saying is that it's going to be okay. Just because you don't know the answer doesn't mean a solution won't rise.

Yeah. I mean, it's a huge potential opportunity for multiplying productivity. And the reason that we're able to sit here today rather than, you know, around a little fire in a cave, is because we've magnified the productivity of human beings, you know, by 10 times and then 10 times again. And if we're lucky, it's not going to stop. Mm-hmm.

I mean, we've cracked the abundance part. We just have to do the little trivial thing of figuring out how to enjoy it. Do you worry that the output will become so voluminous that the intake, like are we going to choke on it? Your book is excellent. I'm going to put it in a stack of 30 other excellent books I'm dying to finish, right? What happens when we become so efficient that we'll have 300 books and 3,000 books? I mean, 300 shows to watch. They're also good. Five million podcasts, Nick. Happily, the one you're on is in the top 200, I'm pleased to say, out of five million, which is solid, but still, who listens to 200 podcasts?

Yeah. Well, fortunately, the human condition has moved in a way where, you know, we're not going to, you know, plunder the earth. We're not going to drain the natural resource. resources, we're not going to run out of energy because the real wealth of nations is in human beings. So we're going to have this increasingly human-centered, knowledge-centered, talent and skill-centered world that we're going to be entering into if we don't do something naughty like blow ourselves up or whatever. As long as this goes on, and we're not going to be able to know, I mean, As we are now, if we just stay human beings, if we don't decide to do something that I don't have the imagination exactly to describe, but if we don't go the enhancement route, then I'm afraid we're not going to see every movie and we're not going to read every book. But that was also true 100 years ago or 200 years ago.

Did you learn anything from the lockdowns about the arithmetic of humanity? Yeah, I mean, in retrospect, I think it's pretty clear that we engaged in a terrible experimental mistake with the, you know, broad and indiscriminate lockdowns in the United States for kind of everybody and especially for schoolchildren. There are people who have tried to calculate the economic impact of the learning loss that took place or that did not take place, the gap that came because of those edicts. And the best numbers I've seen is that it's a multi-trillion dollar loss for our country alone. I mean, it's something that's going to go with us for generations that scarred people. We made a huge mistake by the sort of fatal conceit that we could kind of regulate and plan this in a way that basically only had one variable.

And the variable, you know, it's a little bit like the Chinese one-shot, you know, family policy where that variable was we're going to minimize death rates. Well, A, it's not clear that we minimize death rates by it. And B, all of the unintended consequences of doing this are exactly what you would have expected. Sure. I mean, it's the Dierish East's typical, you know, kind of fiasco. Did Lincoln's quote about the terrible arithmetic inform your title at all? Are you familiar?

No, I'm ignorant of that. Tell me. Well, he was looking for a general, you know, before he found Grant, who understood the terrible arithmetic of the North seeing the trains coming back with the dead. Yes. And when we began to bury them, you know, we needed to see the manifestation of the war in order to get our dog fully in the fight. That became Arlington, right? And when Lincoln talks about that terrible arithmetic, whether it was Shiloh or Gettysburg

or any of it, I don't know. Reading your book, I was struck, it's like, well, it's the same kind of challenge to make something inhuman relatable to a human. human. They have to see it. Numbers are not really inherently relatable. You have to somehow grab the country by the lapel and shake them. And, you know, in Lincoln's case, he needed for the population to see the trains filled with the dead. What do we need to see in clarifying terms? What can the numbers show us that will make us sit up and pay attention? I get the declining population, sort of.

I'm not done with that yet, but as it applies to these other things. Yeah. Well, I think we need to see, I mean, this would have, I think, resonated maybe a little bit with President Lincoln. We need to see a little bit of success in dealing with some of these problems, right? So take the men without work. You know, you say, I said it's like this big historical thing. And when you say that, it's like, oh, you can't do anything about it.

That's not what I mean at all. Let's say that I'm right in here and that over half of the dropout guys are effectively immobilized by participating in one or more disability program that was originally intended to protect people who couldn't work and have ended up as a sort of like an alternative universe to the workforce. We're both old enough to remember when there was a successful welfare reform in the United States back in the 1990s.

Many people won't remember there was a time that you could do bipartisan stuff in America, but it was a bipartisan reform, which was to get single mothers who were longtime recipients of these benefit programs back in the workforce. And there were a lot of people who said that this was going to end as a social catastrophe,

but it ended as a great success. And millions and millions of American women ended up in a better position, not just with more money in their pocket, but with a lot less degradation in their lives. It was a very positive thing. Guys on the couch strike me as a, as a lot less compelling constituency for endless public resources than mothers with little children. Less sympathetic figures.

So my guess is that if we had a reform of our very badly broken archipelago of disability programs, we might be able to get, you tell me, the 7 million over half, I think, are in this archipelago. If we got half of that half back in the workforce, back in the game, there'd be a lot of good things that would happen in our country. And I think it would redound positively. If we're heading into a world of shrinking, working, workforce, shrinking working age population, as we may be. We're going to need to cherish and husband every bit of human resources that we can in America.

We're going to have to figure out what we can do to make the path back from felony into, you know, regaining your employment reputation a lot more feasible. For reasons, Mike, that I don't understand, the U.S. government is completely and totally allergic to providing any information on the 20 plus million ex-cons in the United States, where they are, how they're working, what their health is, how their incomes. If we had information, and this is just an information thing, if we had information around the country about our invisible vast army of ex-cons, then it would be possible to have a kind of like an experiment in competitive federalism

and see who's doing better and who's doing worse with reentry and stuff. As long as we don't even have that information, we can't have the success from that. Explain competitive federalism. Oh, okay. So, you know, we've got this system with 50 states and, you know, in the District of Columbia. And we're, you know, we're the United States of America. and states have a lot of prerogatives of their own. They can make their own legislation,

and even localities within states can have a certain amount of latitude. You can do a lot of experimentation at the local level, a lot of experimentation at the state level, and you can kind of see what looks like it's working and what looks like it's not working. And if people want to learn, they can learn. So when you talk about competitive federalism, can we talk about what's happening in California versus Texas? Can we talk about New York?

Did you see Farid Zakaria's thing yesterday? No. Oh, boy, you're going to love this. It's a six-minute analysis of Mamdani's first six weeks in office. And the 19 people who froze to death in the last, you know, the last meteorological calamity and the hundred and five was it 47 billion dollar budget bigger than Greece bigger than Thailand of the 5% of people in Manhattan who have left the tax base and now they need another 10 billion dollars from a much smaller cohort and he's basically just saying look this isn't

worried this experiment isn't working this competition we've lost right I mean, and so it's one thing for you to say it, or me to mouth off and say it, but Fri Zakaria is saying it. And so that, to me, I didn't think of it in these terms, but watching that, and I encourage people to find that clip and look at it, that's a result of competitive federalism. Exactly. Exactly. Not all experiments in competitive federalism are destined to succeed. That's why they're experiments. Right.

Although one state's failure or loss could be another state's game. For sure. For sure. And that's how our framers must have thought about it. Absolutely. And it's also the way that, you know, kind of like much more broadly speaking, it's the way that markets work. It's the way that competition under fair conditions works.

You kind of like you can't have great in markets, you know, you can't have great successes unless. you're reallocating stuff from things that aren't doing quite as well. Right. Can I ask you about your alma mater? Sure. No, I know right now you're going, which one? I've matriculated from so many fine institutions.

No, not the London school. No, Harvard. Yeah. How do you think about Harvard today? What was it like when you were there? Any advice for the provost, et cetera? How do you think of them as a brand? and what is their role right now with a $52 billion endowment?

It's agonizing to watch. I got a fantastic education there. I met people who've been friends all my life. I had amazing professors who opened my eyes and stuff, and were very, very generous with their time. Did you know when it was happening? I think I was probably too much of a little snout. to appreciate exactly how, you know.

But, I mean, now as a full-grown snot, you can look back through the fullness of time and say, man. Yeah. And it was, I mean, just the altruism that I was treated to. I don't think I was at all grateful about that, or not nearly as grateful as I should have been at the time. I mean, one of the things, if you, you know, gratitude is a thing that you kind of maybe get to learn of,

over a while if you're lucky enough to do so but not but I've I had a wonderful education there it's awful to see what's happened to Harvard and again like this men without work thing it didn't just happen all of a sudden it was a it was a gradual process of hubris and pomposity and self-congratulation and insulation from a lot of the rest of America, but also a lot of the rest of the world. Frog in the boiling water. I think the problems there are very, very, very deep.

And I'd like to tell you that they can be solved by having a new president of the university, but, I mean, I don't know the president now myself. I hear he's a very good man. He's got a very good reputation. But he can't fix what needs to be fixed. Harvard University has, you know, the very best sort of corporate structure from the 1600s is what they have been left with.

And within Harvard University, there's a very small group called the corporation. Originally seven people, now I think maybe a dozen. It's a self-perpetuating group a little bit like the, you know, the Politburo. And it is so fundamentally and badly misguided. It is, I think, basically responsible for maybe not wool, but for so much of the rot that you see at Harvard today. I think the way to solve the Harvard problem over time is to get a better class of people in the Harvard Corporation, because then you'll get better president of Harvard, or this one's perfectly fine,

but then you get better deans, you get better assistant deans, you get better administrators. And without going through that sort of branch and root reform, I don't think that the Harvard brand is going to be able to stay where it was. I mean, it isn't where it was now because it's been such an embarrassment about what's happened at the place. And is a 50-plus billion dollar endowment enough of a moat to prevent a siege by people who want to reform it? I guess we're going to find out about that. I mean, this is beyond, you know, beyond my bailiwick, but I've read accounts saying that although there's an awful lot of money in the Harvard Endowment, most of it is very illiquid.

And if you're illiquid and you suddenly hit hard times, sometimes you have to sell your assets at a discount. So I don't know if that's where it is. I don't know if that's where it's going to go. But the intention of the Harvard Corporation not to reform, I think is pretty obvious at the moment. And will anything short of calamity impel the corporation to bring reform there? I don't know. What I do know is that you're probably not going to get invited to the alumni dinner this year.

And it seems like you're going to be okay with that. It's my 50th anniversary. What a bummer. What do you think about this? I've been in touch. The guy that runs Carnegie Mellon I met. Farnham is his name.

They're like the original trade school. You know? I mean, Carnegie Mellon was a trade university. And MIT. They're paying attention of what we've been doing here. I can't speak for them yet because we haven't had in-depth conversations,

but we're talking. And I'm getting the sense that maybe the Ivy League is starting. You know, I don't want to paint with too broad a brush, but, you know, why, like, why isn't there a trade association with any of those brands? What does a trade education look like under a Carnegie Mellon imprimatur or an MIT? Yeah. Right? And why not?

Like, what, and I wonder if maybe one of the silver linings of this. thing that's incredible evolution that's happening in the workforce. Maybe it's the diminishment of the color of collars. Right? Maybe our future workforce and maybe some of these seven million men who have just been sitting there scrolling left, scrolling right, you know, absorbed. I don't know. Maybe academia can make a more persuasive case for a new kind of work, skills-based. Yeah. And well, I mean, we've got all of the tech universities that should be helpful, whether it's Carnegie Mellon or Caltech or Georgia or MIT. We've got all of the original A&M schools that still, I think, are pretty involved in some of this. There's a place for people who want to get a kind of like liberal arts education, but it's not everywhere.

And by the way, you know, I mean, college isn't for everybody either. I mean, everybody should have a skill. Everybody ought to have the skills so that they can make a living and, you know, have a home and, you know, start a family if they want to. But one of the problems I see at, you know, my alma mater today is when they look out of the parapet, it's kind of like, why can't you be more like us? That's not the right question to ask. Right. Insects. Homosafian?

Wow. All right. So we're going to be 250 this year. Right? Yeah. You know, as we start to land the plane here, whether it's in your book or not, what's the, what can we be hopeful about? Because I was only just kind of yanking your chain an hour and a half ago. It's not a horror story.

But it is a cautionary tale. We're going through a bad patch in the United States right now. I mean, I don't think that's a news flash. But it's not like the first bad patch that we've gone through in our 250-year history. And every time we've done the self-correct and we've come out on the other end better and stronger, more prosperous, more capable. The self-correct hasn't been pretty in most of these cases, but it has been a self-correct. So if I are betting, I'd say that's where we're going right now.

We are in an unusually long, difficult patch where people have less confidence and trust in a country and in their future. than as usual in the United States, since we're kind of a country of an inveterate, you know, kind of crackpot optimists. But it's a dangerous thing to bet against the United States of America. It's been for the last 250 years, and I kind of think that may be true for the next. I have a few more questions,

but I'm not going to ask them because that's the proper way to end a good conversation. I really appreciate it, man. I was, I, what a treat for me. Well, I just, I just, I just, I just, I just, I just, I just, I just love that you got a little Ogden Nash flown through your, oh, you know, I just, I mean, it actually explains something that I couldn't explain. I mean, don't take this the wrong way. I like you.

I like you, I like you instinctively. I liked you when I read your book, not just because it confirmed a bunch of my smack, but because there's something underneath that big geeky, wonky brain that is of the language. You said something that I was going to ask you about, but I didn't, never met you before. PJ O'Rourke. Yeah. You read his stuff. Oh, yeah.

Eat the Rich. You meet him? I met him once. PJ is one of my best friends. He is, you remind me of PJ. Oh, don't. Look, that'll make me cry, man. I was visiting my parents in Florida.

I was visiting my brother, and they were visiting my brother, and we were all there together. And my mother said, what do you want to do? And Scott said, we could go to the library. This is my brother. Okay, that sounds great. Let's go to the library. So you go to the library, and I check out a book he had written that I had never read before. Yeah.

Called All the Trouble in the World. Sure. And it was really just a collection of cautionary, tales like on I mean any topic like he was such a contrarian but he was freaking funny man and he I mean he could

really write oh my god is he was the godfather for our youngest by the way we're still recording because this is the good stuff so good so good so no PJ was the godfather for our youngest and what a wonderful man he was and he was

I don't want to make too many assumptions, but let me just tell you about PJ. He was a hardest working guy I ever met, and he made it look very light. He made it look. He worked so hard to make it look easy. Yeah. And he was a teacher. He seemed to be a humorist, but he was really a teacher because he go to his house and it's like a library. I mean, he's got, and he read so much. And he's got, and he read so much in so many different things, so many different areas. And he put all of that to work in his humor because it was basically trying to teach people about like what's right, what's wrong, and what's really stupid to do.

The thing that, you know, he knew that nobody wanted a lecture. Yep. Nobody wanted a sermon. Yes. But if you can entertain him first, then. then you get permission Yep Right exactly

Exactly What a treat man You buried the lead I that's that's he was the godfather to To our youngest To our We went four kids To our youngest

Daughter Who now is In a PhD program In AI Somebody's got to feed the family In the future Yeah So we lived in an apartment building

In Washington in D.C. on the same floor as he did. And we got to know each other. We had friends in common, but we wouldn't have got to know each other if we hadn't been on the same floor. And he and his wife and us guys and another very close friend of ours named Andrew Ferguson, Andy Ferguson, who's a writer for the Atlantic. I think beautiful style is a great writer.

We were all in the building at the same time, and we were basically the only people under like 80 years old there because they hadn't done the post for general. It's like the Paris Review. It's everybody with George Clinton. Anyhow, it was great. And that was how I got to know him. And we were lifetime friends. But there is a, I saw the same thing.

Let's hit foot it that way. I saw the same thing. Wow. Well, I was a fan back when, God, remember when he was working for Jan. Yeah. You were writing for the Rolling Stone. Yes, yes.

That's where almost all of those pieces first appeared. And I remember my wife was a speechwriter for the Secretary of State back in the Reagan administration. And everybody in the State Department was cracking up because PJ had just written a piece in Rolling Stone called Terror of the Euroweenies. And if you don't remember that one, even 40 years later, I think it'll make. You burst in laughter. See, I weep for a generation that can't pick up the Rolling Stone and read O'Rourke and Hunter Thompson in the same issue. And not, I want to say to be richer, but at least be, yeah, richer, richer for it. We're complete.

We're complete. America's human arithmetic, exceptional essays from Nicholas Eversat. No, essential. But you know what? They're exceptional too. Thanks, Nick. Thank you so much. It's a blast for me. Good. When you leave a review, which we hope that you'll do, tell us who you are.

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