Mike Rowe

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Speaker 3 So the current debate over AI, artificial intelligence, is about whether the technology will become sentient and autonomous and enslave us all. And of course, that'll probably happen.

Speaker 3 But in the meantime, we thought it'd be interesting revisiting the original debate about AI, which is about how it affects work.

Speaker 3 What are the rest of us going to do for a living when machines can do it for us?

Speaker 3 And there's nobody who's thought more deeply about this and about work in general and its centrality to human dignity than Mike Rowe. And we are, as always, honored to have him in the studio.

Speaker 3 Mike, thank you for coming on. First of all, you win.
The desk?

Speaker 3 It's wood. Are you kidding? I mean,

Speaker 3 how old is this thing? I don't know. It's ironwood.
And it's actually, it's funny. The person who got this, I've asked him to go run it down because

Speaker 3 I'm like the only right-winger in the world who loved Julia Butterfly Hill,

Speaker 3 who lived in a redwood to keep. I just think trees are really important, and I think being surrounded by wood brings a resonance to your life.
What happened after the hurricane down here? Because

Speaker 3 I know that was a big deal, and I know you love trees, and I know that couldn't have been great. Yes, but most of the trees in Florida are fake trees, actually.
They're not real.

Speaker 3 I don't think a palm tree is actually a tree. I mean, a tree is a white pine.
A tree is a sequoia. A tree is, you know, all the various hardwoods.

Speaker 3 oak, beech, locust, locust, exactly.

Speaker 3 Cuts the locust this summer. Anyways,

Speaker 3 sorry. Chomp your own wood.
It'll warm you twice. Yes, that's exactly.
Three times could just stack it and then split it.

Speaker 3 So what the AI, so like seven years ago, I remember talking to you, I think it was about seven years ago, about what AI was going to do.

Speaker 3 to working class America, to truck drivers, the most common job for high school educated men.

Speaker 3 And you had a lot of thoughts about that, but the conversation has progressed so dramatically since then. Right.
And so has the technology.

Speaker 3 So where are you on thinking about that?

Speaker 3 So there was a time when the big conversation, at least in my lane anyway, was really more about robotics and tech, right?

Speaker 3 The robots are going to come and they're going to displace a lot of blue-collar jobs. And how do we stop that? How do we think about that?

Speaker 3 And I remember you and I talked about the Luddite Rebellion. Yes.
We talked about endorsing it, actually. Yes.
Right. And it's like, and

Speaker 3 the disruption theories and this idea that

Speaker 3 real replacement is going to happen. It almost never happens, as I understand it.
You know, I've seen it in our industry, too.

Speaker 3 You know, there's a lot of talk about, you know, what was going to happen when, what was going to happen to newspapers when film came along? What was going to happen to film when TV came along? Yes.

Speaker 3 What was going to happen to music and DVDs? And, I mean,

Speaker 3 none of it really goes away, but it all shifts. It's all impacted.

Speaker 3 So I was struck by the fact that all of a sudden we weren't talking about the impact of robots on blue collar jobs, but the impact of AI on white collar jobs. Right.
That's what interested me.

Speaker 3 Which I enjoyed.

Speaker 3 Well, I mean, sorry, I'm a bad person. But look,

Speaker 3 it is super creepy. I mean, I got a link from a buddy who said, hey, man, not for nothing, but I went on to one of these sites and I said,

Speaker 3 narrate for me in the style of Mike Rowe, these two paragraphs, right? And he sent me a link to this. And basically, it was two paragraphs from an old episode of Deadly's Catch.

Speaker 3 And I hit play and I listened to me. Now, had I not known it was not me, I would have thought, well, that's something I narrated, you know, four or five years ago.
Couldn't tell the difference.

Speaker 3 Couldn't tell. When I listened for it, I heard some things that made me go, ah, maybe, maybe not quite, but that was two months ago, which might as well be two years ago or 20 years ago.

Speaker 3 So the speed with which artificial intelligence, something about Moore's Law, something faster and faster and faster and faster. So I

Speaker 3 part of me wants to say, don't forget the lesson from the Luddites.

Speaker 3 It's not going to completely upend everything unless it does. And I don't know.
Because this does feel different.

Speaker 3 I don't know. I had a motorcycle once with a crack in the intake manifold that I didn't see, and it made it obviously run lean.

Speaker 3 And the bike ran so great, faster and faster and faster and faster until literally the spark plug burned a hole through the piston. I use it as a

Speaker 3 pen holder on my desk today. But there's something about speed and acceleration that has a natural limit, doesn't it? Well, I mean, Einstein said, right,

Speaker 3 you can stand this close to another person and then this close and half it and half it and half it and never ever stop halving it, which my brain doesn't understand because it seems like surely, surely you're going to collide and then be on the other side of each other.

Speaker 3 Yes. He's like, no, no, that doesn't really work like that.
Or at least have a sexual encounter with the person. Look, here's how jacked up it is for me.

Speaker 3 My entire career is actually based on AI.

Speaker 3 Early on in Dirty Jobs, there was this big conversation at the network when they were like, look, this show is,

Speaker 3 it was a nightmare for them because it was rating really, really well, but it was off-brand.

Speaker 3 Dirty Jobs was not supposed to be the show that people went to Discovery to love. No.

Speaker 3 It was that, those were still the days of Attenborough and Jacques Cousteau and Jane Goodall, right? This was me, a smart aleck looking under rocks, making poop shows.

Speaker 3 That's not supposed to be that I'm going to show. So they're like, can you smarten it up a little bit? And I said, well, I've been looking at some science-type jobs.
And they're like, like what?

Speaker 3 I'm like, well, we. I'd like to take a deep dive into AI.
And they're like, that's great. That's great.
If you can find dirty jobs in AI,

Speaker 3 we're golden. Now, did they think I was talking about artificial insemination? Probably not.

Speaker 3 Probably not. Did you do that episode?

Speaker 3 Four days later, I was at the Circle X ranch somewhere outside of Houston with my arm up to my shoulder inside a couple of dozen cows taking instructions from a cowboy named Steve who was walking me through the process of artificially inseminating the cows.

Speaker 3 I also had a remarkable encounter with a bull called Hunsucker Commando and the process whereby the sperm is extracted from this minotaur, right, and then put back into these unsuspecting bovines, giving us, it's basically a Brahmin bull and an Angus cow gives you Brangus meat.

Speaker 3 The point is.

Speaker 3 Without getting specific, did you go through that entire process?

Speaker 3 Extraction, as we say? Oh, extraction. Oh, yeah.
No, I gathered. I had a styrofoam cup.
There were probes.

Speaker 3 There was insertion into the bowl. Light currents stimulated the prostate.
The white gold flew through the air. I captured as much of it as I could, and I put the whole thing on the air a week later.

Speaker 3 And I got called to the principal's office. You did.
And the question was, you promised us a show on artificial intelligence. And I said, did I?

Speaker 3 And then we had this big conversation about science. And the moral of the story is.

Speaker 3 There's more science in artificial insemination than there is in AI, or at least as much, and in a much deeper, much more meaningful way. We are so disconnected from our food.

Speaker 3 We're disconnected from our energy. And Dirty Jobs on the surface was just a romp.
It was exploding toilets and misadventures and artificial or animal husbandry or whatever it was.

Speaker 3 But in reality, it was a pretty thoughtful look at what keeps us connected. and what we've become disconnected from.
And so ultimately, the show stayed on the air.

Speaker 3 And that episode aired to ridiculous ratings, by the way, which is why I violated every other barnyard creature known to man. Ratings gold.
But the thing is, there's no McDonald's.

Speaker 3 There's no Carls Jr. There's no fast food.
There's no slow food. There's no meat industry as we understand it without the other AI.
Yes.

Speaker 3 So that's kind of a long way of saying I'm most interested to see how artificial intelligence and artificial insemination are going to somehow, hopefully, come together.

Speaker 3 But so, how does, no, that's such a smart point.

Speaker 3 How does it, how does this quantum increase in computing power, which is really what it artificial does, just master computation, how does that affect the real economy?

Speaker 3 Like the actual physical stuff that keeps us alive. Well, I don't know, but I do think that what's going on in the real economy and what's going on in the in the real country is this

Speaker 3 unraveling of connectivity. People,

Speaker 3 and I put myself in this, in this group, we've become really disconnected from some very primary things. Yes.
That's why I commented on your desk right away. It's primal.
It's fundamental.

Speaker 3 That's why I love it. It looks like what it is.
Yes. You know?

Speaker 3 And I don't know, it's to

Speaker 3 reconnect with basic things is to be around fundamental things.

Speaker 3 I like what you've done with the place. Oh, I like to sniff it.

Speaker 3 I do. If you're going to sell t-shirts, do me a favor and put put that on it.
The thing I don't like about the digital experience is it doesn't smell like anything because it's not real.

Speaker 3 It smells like enui. Yeah, it smells like enui and self-hatred.

Speaker 3 Yeah. You're right.
But anyway, so

Speaker 3 helping

Speaker 3 to be reconnected to where our food comes from, to where our energy comes from, to what our history is, and to do it with humor. That was the goal of that show.

Speaker 3 Today, not to sound too high-minded, but it's one of the goals of my foundation. And, you know, I don't really have permission to talk about AI.
That's not really my lane.

Speaker 3 I don't really quite know what I'm doing. But on a personal level, when somebody sends you a link that sounds so much like you, you can't tell the difference,

Speaker 3 then

Speaker 3 you start to connect to it because it gets personal. So

Speaker 3 I think what's going to happen is this stuff is going to stop being being

Speaker 3 ephemeral, theoretical, and people are going to find real,

Speaker 3 real, real personal stuff with regard to AI.

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Speaker 3 When you go on Twitter and there's a video of you praising Hitler, it's not really you. Deep, deep fake.
Oh, man, come on, that's going to happen, right? That's going to happen. And

Speaker 3 porn. You know, porn is on the leading leading edge of every new tech all the time.

Speaker 3 And

Speaker 3 what does that mean for the next generation? Well, I notice it with its rise, never talk about

Speaker 3 intentional. That's what it was.
It was. Thank you.

Speaker 3 Fewer people have sex with human beings.

Speaker 3 And no one ever says that. And I don't even like doing topic stories on because it's too embarrassing, but it's true.
But here we are.

Speaker 3 Here we are. You make me very comfortable.
I just, look, I just confessed an encounter with a bull. You had your hand up a cow, but it does seem like...
That cow still calls me, by the way.

Speaker 3 Totally. When you're coming back, fancy man, with your opposable thumbs and whatnot.
2 a.m. booty calls.
Hey, what are you doing?

Speaker 3 Excuse me. Miss you so much.

Speaker 3 What are you wearing? So

Speaker 3 it does seem like the net effect of almost all digital or even maybe technological advance is to separate us from each other to a greater degree.

Speaker 3 So, do you remember Faith Popcorn? Yes, very well. So, the Popcorn Report was this thing that's published every couple of years.
It was a futurist, right? A trend spotter. Correct.

Speaker 3 And a relentless self-promoter. Relentless.
I think I had her on about 15 times in the next video. Did you really? Of course.
Come on. I worked at Cable News.
All right.

Speaker 3 No short-term recall.

Speaker 3 She talked about

Speaker 3 burrowing. Yes.
Right. This idea that as technology advances, we're going to have an easier time making our world smaller.
Yes.

Speaker 3 And we're going to burrow into our homes and eventually we're going to be able to see movies on very intelligent TVs and so forth. She kind of predicted all that.
And of course it all came true.

Speaker 3 And then she wrote about something called cocooning. So after you burrow, you just cocoon.
So it's deeper and deeper. And our homes become smarter and the tech becomes more omnipresent.

Speaker 3 and anything we want can be brought to us by a giant company that owns all of the vans and every

Speaker 3 so in a way we're more connected vis-a-vis fiber optics and relationships and so forth than we've ever been but on the other hand i think she was right we are we are so deeply burrowed into our space that um

Speaker 3 yeah

Speaker 3 AI is going to take us to whatever that next level is. And

Speaker 3 sex is going to be a topic we're probably going to have to talk about because

Speaker 3 I mean,

Speaker 3 I've read these studies that say young men in particular are not

Speaker 3 just not having sex the way they... What that means is they're not having deeper levels of human connection.

Speaker 3 I can't. I don't have any great insight to it.

Speaker 3 My personal belief is people are having as much sex as

Speaker 3 they've ever had, maybe more. They're just alone.
Yeah. Well, that's,

Speaker 3 but no one, I don't know why that's not like described as a tragedy. That seems like a tragedy to me.

Speaker 3 That's the whole point of life as you arrive alone and depart alone in the interim, you try to connect with other people. Yes, it's this.

Speaker 3 And we are slowly arbitraging the wood out of the desk. We are slowly getting rid of all the human

Speaker 3 this. Yes.
It's just, you can feel it happening. My favorite author, actually, you probably know him, very famous

Speaker 3 in South Florida, John D. McDonald.
Yes. Wrote the Travis McGee Mysteries, the best pulp fiction ever written.
And that stuff today reads like a prophecy.

Speaker 3 McGee talked all of the time about this slow unraveling, and he was so wary of

Speaker 3 so much of what he predicted was coming and of course it it did he lived off the grid on a houseboat called the busted flush that he wanted a poker game he solved crimes essentially he helped people recover that which was taking so he's not the only the only one and i'm not even gonna there are some very controversial very bad people actually but who lived very isolated lives

Speaker 3 who were able maybe therefore to see the future more clearly. Why is it that solitude, silence,

Speaker 3 removal from the bustle of human society allows some people this extraordinary vision into the future? You wouldn't think that. Yeah, but it's sort of the virtue of boredom.

Speaker 3 Michael Easter writes about this, a book called The Comfort Crisis that I liked a lot, where

Speaker 3 we've identified boredom as a great enemy. And we're surrounded by things to make sure we're never bored.
It's why we can do this. That's why we can do this.

Speaker 3 And it's why our attention spans get smaller and smaller and smaller because we've waged a war against boredom. But

Speaker 3 it's the process of not doing anything, putting all the devices down and being alone with yourself that lets your brain wander.

Speaker 3 And pretty soon you'll just forest gump your way through a bunch of things you didn't even know you were going to think about. And then you arrive at conclusions you

Speaker 3 didn't know you wanted to arrive at,

Speaker 3 but you're glad you did. It's where ideas come from.
Exactly.

Speaker 3 If you're never bored, if you're always stimulated, then

Speaker 3 you've made a trade, you've made a bargain,

Speaker 3 and it's probably a bad one, fraught with unintended consequences. And for a guy who does artificial insemination shows, it's pretty deep and spot on, I would say.
I did it very well.

Speaker 3 So let me, the other, I want to put up a clip from former President Barack Obama talking about the other AI, the digital AI,

Speaker 3 and his idea for how this can bring us together or solve our economic crises, et cetera. Here he is.

Speaker 3 If you are interested in helping to shape all these amazing questions that are going to be coming up, go to AI.gov and see if there are opportunities for you, fresh out of school, or you might be an experienced

Speaker 3 tech coder who's

Speaker 3 done fine,

Speaker 3 bought the house, got everything set up, and says, you know what, I want to

Speaker 3 do something for the common good.

Speaker 3 Sign up.

Speaker 3 So here we have a former president saying the government is going to harness AI for, quote, the common good.

Speaker 3 You know, I don't want to be skeptical or cynical at all, but that does sort of make me wonder what's going on here. Any idea?

Speaker 3 Again, it's a bit outside my lane. I think

Speaker 3 I'm sure there's some validity in

Speaker 3 the message, and there's probably real opportunity

Speaker 3 in the vertical, as they say.

Speaker 3 But we have 11 million open jobs right now that we're struggling to fill. None of them involve or require an understanding of AI.
You have 11 million?

Speaker 3 Well, 10.8 was the last number I saw, according to the publication. And what are they exactly? Well,

Speaker 3 speaking broadly,

Speaker 3 most of them don't require a four-year degree. They require training.

Speaker 3 Most of them require a willingness to roll up your sleeves and sometimes get your hands dirty.

Speaker 3 Welders, plumbers, steam fitters, pipe fitters, electricians, heating, air conditioning, so forth.

Speaker 3 For the last 20 years or so, for every five who retire over the course of a year, two replace them. It's troubling math.
Terrible arithmetic, as Lincoln

Speaker 3 would have said. And so the skills gap is a real thing.
And that part of our workforce has been

Speaker 3 woefully neglected, beginning really around the time we took shop class out of high school. And we've had our thumb on the scale of education in a very specific way for a long time.

Speaker 3 We've made a very persuasive case for higher ed, and the former president's making a pretty persuasive case for careers in artificial intelligence.

Speaker 3 And fine, we can all do two things at the same time, I hope. But this thing's right in front of us.

Speaker 3 But if we changed the emphasis on higher education, I mean, it's entirely possible we could run out of sociologists at some point and then what? There's something to think about.

Speaker 3 So, I mean, you've been saying this for a long time,

Speaker 3 pretty much a lone voice, but I've never heard anybody disagree with you.

Speaker 3 Because you like, on what grounds could someone disagree with you? I'll give you a list. No, but I mean, in a substantive way.

Speaker 3 Well, what people disagree with is the idea that you can promote one thing without tearing down another. That's the trap that we're in.
That's what happened to us.

Speaker 3 Higher ed needed better PR.

Speaker 3 And in the 70s and 80s, we got it. And thank God, we needed more engineers.
We needed more scientists. Don't know about sociologists, but the higher education needed a shot in the arm.

Speaker 3 Unfortunately, we weren't content to simply make the case for higher ed. We had to do it at the expense of everything else.
And so trade schools took it in the neck.

Speaker 3 Community colleges were relegated to something your kid did if they couldn't

Speaker 3 put it here.

Speaker 3 But of course, those forms of education are also attached to a big chunk of our workforce. And so we kind of waged a war on

Speaker 3 alternative education or call it lower education if you want, because if it's higher over here, it by definition has to be lower over here.

Speaker 3 So we drew a real clear line and we told people that if you don't get the most expensive degree that you can, if you don't take the most expensive path there is, you're going to wind up doing something subordinate.

Speaker 3 The result is this idea that all these great jobs are essentially vocational consolation prizes. Meanwhile, the opportunities that exist, Tucker, I mean, look, I appreciate the kind words.

Speaker 3 I have been beating the drum for 15 years. Foundation turned 15 on Labor Day.
We've helped about 2,000 people get trained in these areas.

Speaker 3 And I'm telling you, most of my soapbox stuff in the early days was anecdotal. It was what I thought and it was what I saw on Dirty Jobs.

Speaker 3 And it was this feeling that we were affirmatively neglecting a whole lot of opportunity. Now,

Speaker 3 now the stats have bolstered that. The headlines have caught up to my own smack.
But most importantly, the people we've helped five, six years ago are sitting down with me today

Speaker 3 and answering questions like,

Speaker 3 well, how's it going? I'll say. And they'll say, I'll tell you how it's going.
You helped me get a welding degree six years ago. Today, I own three vans, a mechanical contracting company.

Speaker 3 I've got a plumber and I've got an electrician to work with me every day.

Speaker 3 We're all making six figures a year. We work when we want.
And I hear these stories day after day after day after day. And I look around and

Speaker 3 I'm not asking the feds to do anything. I did.
I went to Congress three times over the years and I said, guys,

Speaker 3 we need a better PR campaign for this chunk of the workforce. The math is awful.
And we're not going to be having a conversation about, oh, my gosh, you mean a plumber can really make that much?

Speaker 3 We're going to be having a conversation about, what do you mean I have to wait four days? for a plumber. And that's what's happening now.

Speaker 3 So with great respect to Barack Obama, fine, make the case for opportunities at AI, but who the hell is making the case for the opportunity to make this table?

Speaker 3 Totally right. Who's

Speaker 3 where is the passion for the prosperity that will surely follow if you take the time to learn a skill that's in demand and work your ass off? That's still for sale. It's still real.

Speaker 3 And I can't find anybody.

Speaker 3 And I've looked

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Speaker 3 You make such a rational, logical, fact-based case that, as you suggested, has become indisputable with time.

Speaker 3 Arguing it at this point.

Speaker 3 But there's also something that I'm having trouble describing, but there is something morally or spiritually different and elevated about making things over rearranging things or being a parasite in the real economy.

Speaker 3 In other words, it's better for you as a person to run a sawmill than it is to be, say, a high-speed trader.

Speaker 3 You know?

Speaker 3 I just think that, I mean, am I being crazy? And I don't think I'm just being like stupid populist. Oh, the working man is always better.
No, the working man is sometimes drunk.

Speaker 3 Okay, in the morning, I get it. Yep.
But I just think the nature of the work matters. If I'm a pornographer, it's probably not good for me.

Speaker 3 But if I'm, you know, a really skilled drywall hanger, maybe it is.

Speaker 3 Of course. Yes.
But I would only say that it's the, it's the trap of the binary again.

Speaker 3 Fair. That's the trap.

Speaker 3 Do you remember? I guess it was 2016. Republican debates.
All 17 are up there, right? Errol.

Speaker 3 27, something like that. Amazing.

Speaker 3 I forget the exact question, but Marco Rubio's answer was, let me tell you, what we need in this country

Speaker 3 are fewer philosophers and more welders. So the crowd claps, big applause line.
There was a lot of truth. Your comment about sociologists earlier is it, it's fine.
I get it.

Speaker 3 But what was interesting was like my social channels blew up with people going, hey,

Speaker 3 this guy's really singing your song. I said, actually, no, no, that's not my point.
My point would be what our country needs are

Speaker 3 more

Speaker 3 welders who can talk intelligently about Nietzsche or

Speaker 3 Kierkegaard. And we need more philosophers who can run an even bead.
Okay? Yes. It's this idea that a welder is somehow consigned.

Speaker 3 Look, I don't know where my cell phone is now. There's yours.

Speaker 3 You and I, with this internet connection, we've got access to something we didn't when we were in school, which is 98% of the known information on the plan.

Speaker 3 So in my foundation, I try and make the point to the people who apply for our work ethics scholarships. I say, look, this is learn the skill.
Be great at it.

Speaker 3 But for God's sakes, go get your liberal arts education. Not at Brown.
You don't have to borrow all that money to do that. Just be interested.
Be curious.

Speaker 3 I watched a lecture four nights ago from MIT on my phone for free, for free. Now, I'm not saying it's the same experience, but it's the same information.
It's all available.

Speaker 3 And if that doesn't like fire you up

Speaker 3 as a curious person to not be completely engaged by the undeniable fact that most of the known information on the planet is in your pocket and accessible, right?

Speaker 3 That's a very liberal arts kind of thing to say. But I'm not saying it to your basic liberal arts student.

Speaker 3 I'm saying it to the welders and the steam fitters and the pipe fitters and the mechanics that have come through our foundation because the most interesting people on the planet, and I know I'm preaching to the choir,

Speaker 3 do you know the person who made this desk?

Speaker 3 I don't. I wish I did.
I do too, because I guarantee you they got a story. One of my best friends runs a sawmill.
You know, no,

Speaker 3 I'm all about sawmills. It's the, I'm all about sawmills too, but I'm all about the

Speaker 3 well-rounded proprietor.

Speaker 3 I really think that the thing that's most missing today

Speaker 3 is that balance. Do you ever read Wendell Berry? Yeah.

Speaker 3 Philosopher

Speaker 3 from North Carolina. Well, there's a

Speaker 3 truth bomb. Yeah.
One after the next, as the next. Sure.

Speaker 3 So do you see any evidence that I know people are listening to you, and I again would argue, I haven't seen anyone kind of refute what you're saying, but do you have any sense that

Speaker 3 it's changing, that it's moving? I do.

Speaker 3 Yeah, so there's this guy, runs a think tank, populous. His name is Todd Rose.
He's become a friend of mine. In fact, I had him on my podcast not long ago.
And they do

Speaker 3 really, really important research that has to do primarily with collective illusions. In fact, he has a book called Collective Illusions.

Speaker 3 And one of the things that personally really struck me was that 80% of the information on Twitter is created by 10%,

Speaker 3 the people on Twitter. And so it's really easy to

Speaker 3 look at that platform and many others too, and assume a consensus.

Speaker 3 And so once we, as humans, realize that there is a consensus or a majority who believe a certain thing,

Speaker 3 then we'll by and large fall in line, many times supporting things that we personally don't really support. Like, for instance, right now, there is a...
I've seen this my whole life. Well,

Speaker 3 and if you look for it, you'll see it everywhere. It's mind-boggling.
So, and this was kind of a wake-up call for me because

Speaker 3 for 15 years, I've been talking about this deeply held belief that parents and guidance counselors

Speaker 3 truly believe that the best path for their kids is this most expensive path. But the latest research, when you really sit people down and take a deep, deep dive,

Speaker 3 Gen Z right now

Speaker 3 is ranking the importance of a college education out of 50 different things

Speaker 3 at 47.

Speaker 3 That seems high.

Speaker 3 Well, it used to be three, right?

Speaker 3 But in the course of the last five or six years, like a lot of people, it made me wonder, has something shifted in that generation that I just haven't seen? And I'm hopeful that it has.

Speaker 3 People are starting to get the message. that just because you've got $200,000 in debt and a nice diploma doesn't mean the world's going to be the pathway to your door.

Speaker 3 It doesn't mean you're going to get hired in your chosen field. It doesn't mean you're well educated.
It doesn't mean anything at all, except for the fact that you owe $200,000.

Speaker 3 That's what it means. That diploma is a receipt

Speaker 3 as surely as it is anything else, right? And

Speaker 3 the information you got in exchange for it, well, that's a tool. And how you use it is none of my business.
And people are starting, I think, I think, to realize, at least this research indicates

Speaker 3 that

Speaker 3 our fascination with the golden ticket that's always been a college diploma is starting to wane. And honestly, I think that's a good thing.

Speaker 3 Yeah, one of our many post-war assumptions that probably should be updated after 80 years. Yeah.
How is, what's the state of our vocational education in the United States?

Speaker 3 Like, is, I think our engineering programs are still really good. Yeah.

Speaker 3 But like welding, plumbing, electrical, and then some of the higher, you know, electrical engineering, et cetera, are we still leading the world in that stuff?

Speaker 3 I don't know of any company in this country who doesn't have some sort of internal training program to try and get those skills taught.

Speaker 3 Certainly nobody's coming out of high school with those skills. People are coming out of trade schools with the basics, but the actual finishing almost always happens within the company.

Speaker 3 So a lot of that work is being done

Speaker 3 privately. It's back to shop class again.
You know, it starts with interest.

Speaker 3 It starts like if you're, if you're a 14-year-old kid with no real clear idea of what you want to do and you're walking down the corridor of your high school and you stick your head in the wood shop, and you stick your head in the metal shop, and you stick your head in any number of vocational shops, you can at least

Speaker 3 optically see what the work looks like

Speaker 3 or might look like. And for a lot of people who got into the trades, that's where it began.
They saw something that resonated with them and a switch flip.

Speaker 3 Today,

Speaker 3 you don't see it. I mean, what more persuasive thing could you say to a kid regarding the skilled trades than

Speaker 3 don't even look at them. We're just going to remove all proof of their existence from sight.
That's what we did when we took shop class out of high school.

Speaker 3 And it's not a coincidence that, I mean, I think I can draw a pretty straight line to that event

Speaker 3 and $1.7 trillion of outstanding student loans, 10.8 million open jobs, and maybe even 7.2 million able-bodied men in the prime of their life, according to Nicholas Eberstadt in a book called Men Without Work.

Speaker 3 Great book. Who are sitting home, not only not working, but affirmatively not looking for work, spending in excess of 2,000 hours a year

Speaker 3 wiping and looking at screens. That's never happened before, not in peacetime, anyway.
In fact, we are in peacetime.

Speaker 3 All of that stuff together, I can walk back and albeit a fairly circuitous route, but we took shop class out of high schools and we didn't didn't think anything was going to happen as a result.

Speaker 3 Everything happened. Everything happened.
That's great. People lost their dignity.
So you, I got to ask you, you were an opera singer. Well, I sang in the opera.

Speaker 3 I've also skied down mountains, but very few people say, oh, it's Mike Rowe, the skier.

Speaker 3 I've skied down many mountains. I've never sung opera.
But do you, I mean, is there ever a time when you do it still? Oh, yeah. Weddings, funerals.
For real?

Speaker 3 I sing all the on my podcast i write unauthorized jingles for all the sponsors and sing them in four-part harmony because it amuses me do you ever sing in italian still

Speaker 3 so the first thing i learned i got to the opera when i was 22 because

Speaker 3 i couldn't get an agent and i couldn't get an agent because i couldn't get my sag card so i couldn't audition for commercials and roles and tv which is what i wanted to do and so it's this weird circle you can't get your sag card unless you've done union work, can't get an agent unless you have a SAG card, and you can't get a

Speaker 3 anyhow, if you got in the opera,

Speaker 3 you become a member of the American Guild of Musical Artists. And as such, you can buy a SAG card.
You pay your dues because they're all sister unions. Of course.
Loophole.

Speaker 3 So anyway, I'm 22 years old and I can't get in the Screen Actors Guild, but I had a buddy.

Speaker 3 Told me about this loophole who sang in the opera. And the opera had these open auditions every Thursday, last Thursday of the month.

Speaker 3 So I went to the library and I asked the librarian for the shortest Italian aria ever written if she knew of such a thing. And she said, Oh, you want the coat aria from Puccini's Lavo M.

Speaker 3 All right. So I took home, it was a record, and I recorded it on a tape, and I walked around with these things called Walkman.

Speaker 3 It's just his name from 82, I guess. And so I listened to Sam Raimi sing the coat aria for for like a month in Baltimore.
Didn't know what the words meant.

Speaker 3 I just wanted to get the sounds in my head and memorize the tune. And I did.
And so I went to the Lyric Opera House on a Thursday and I sang it for the chorus master and a couple of swells.

Speaker 3 Do you still remember it?

Speaker 3 It goes on.

Speaker 3 Basically, I think it's Rodolfo

Speaker 3 saying goodbye to his coat. It's very cold, and Mimi, of course, is dying of tuberculosis

Speaker 3 consumption.

Speaker 3 As everybody did at one point. As they do.

Speaker 3 And he gives her his coat.

Speaker 3 So she can live a little longer.

Speaker 3 And he loved his coat because it kept him warm and the pockets held his poetry and he was a true bohemian. So he sings a love song to his coat and then gives it to the girl with tuberculosis.

Speaker 3 It's an opera. And what, does she die? Sure.
Yeah, they all die.

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Speaker 3 But here's the crazy:

Speaker 3 here's a moral of the story. Not that there has to be one, but

Speaker 3 I stayed in for eight years,

Speaker 3 right? I got my union card,

Speaker 3 They let me in.

Speaker 3 And

Speaker 3 the music was amazing.

Speaker 3 I'd never heard a world-class orchestra play, and I couldn't believe I was given access just to be around this level of

Speaker 3 talent. It was mind-boggling.
And the girls. Yeah.
What are the leads of opera like? Well, I'll tell you something, Tucker. Probably a little high-strung, I would think.
I'm 22.

Speaker 3 I'm dressed as a Viking pirate.

Speaker 3 I'm singing real loud in languages I don't really understand.

Speaker 3 There are 80 people in the rep company. 45 of them are women.
Yeah. 35 are men.

Speaker 3 30 of the men have zero interest in 100% of the women. For sure.

Speaker 3 The remaining five guys, three of them are married. The only other single straight guy.
Basically, you're the straight hairdresser.

Speaker 3 It's just unfair. It was me and one of the guy, and he had a mole on his eyelid, the size of my thumb, with thick black hair.

Speaker 3 I'm 22, dressed as a pirate.

Speaker 3 And the girls are all dressed up like French courtesans, plunging necklines.

Speaker 3 I stayed for eight years.

Speaker 3 That's unbelievable.

Speaker 3 Is anyone who is in that company still there? No, the opera company folded. The Baltimore opera folded about six years ago.
I was invited back,

Speaker 3 you know, because dirty jobs had been a thing, and the list of people who sang opera and crawled through a sewer apparently is pretty short.

Speaker 3 The union set pretty small. Yeah, so I went back for a fundraiser or two.

Speaker 3 Couldn't save it. You know, there's a lot in Baltimore that's tough to save right now.
But

Speaker 3 I did go back and I did a one-man show in Baltimore. called The Dirty Truth and sold tickets and sold out the opera house and stood on stage for about two hours in my hometown

Speaker 3 telling stories about dirty jobs and answering questions and telling the story I just told you. And it was one of those moments where I was like, you know what?

Speaker 3 I don't know if it's full circle, but man, it was super strange and fun and gratifying to go back and do that because for me,

Speaker 3 you know, and this is just the cognitive dissonance and one of the things that people always ask me.

Speaker 3 They're always surprised by the opera because they saw 20 years of dirty jobs and violating barnyard animals and crawling through sewers.

Speaker 3 And those two things aren't supposed to exist in the same person. No, they're not.

Speaker 3 Except they are. The guy who made this table is supposed to be able to quote Robert Frost.
That's right.

Speaker 3 And the guy who writes poetry is supposed to be able to,

Speaker 3 right? And so I didn't really give it much thought until later in life.

Speaker 3 But my time in the opera, my time on the QVC cable shopping channel in the middle of the night, trying to figure out how to talk about product that I could neither explain nor justify for eight minutes on live TV,

Speaker 3 those are the best times of my life.

Speaker 3 And the training, you know, I mean, I didn't realize I was getting the second best education of my life. The best education started with episode one of Dirty Jobs and went on for 20 years.

Speaker 3 And the third best was the community college that I attended out of high school, which changed everything for me.

Speaker 3 So today,

Speaker 3 yeah, if I mouth off a lot

Speaker 3 about this, it's because I really do believe

Speaker 3 that when I get criticized for being anti-college or being anti-education,

Speaker 3 I really only think it's because people must think if I'm going to try and make a persuasive case for this kind of work, I must be against this kind of work. I'm not, all right? I like the opera.

Speaker 3 I like to sing. I crawl through sewers for a living.
I run a foundation that is completely

Speaker 3 committed to making a more persuasive case for the opportunities that exist in this country and to aggressively but good humoredly, hopefully, debunk the stigmas, stereotypes, myths, and misperceptions that are keeping millions of kids from exploring real opportunities that are just sitting right in front of us.

Speaker 3 I wish the former president all the luck in the world

Speaker 3 in his pitch to bring more people into the fascinating future of artificial intelligence. I really do.

Speaker 3 And with that,

Speaker 3 I got to ask you about the sheep castration story because

Speaker 3 now that we've...

Speaker 3 You've

Speaker 3 a deep dive, haven't you? We've done a very deep dive. We do.

Speaker 3 So, sheep castration, yeah, that was a biggie.

Speaker 3 You set the table for us, though. Like, what role does sheep castration play in agriculture? Like, why would one be castrating sheep?

Speaker 3 You don't basically adhere to the essential rules of animal husbandry.

Speaker 3 Your herd's out of control, the flock is out of control, everything's out of control. This is in virtually every species,

Speaker 3 the males,

Speaker 3 need to be controlled in this way.

Speaker 3 Like, I was at a hatchery one time, Murray McMurray up in,

Speaker 3 I think it was Iowa.

Speaker 3 You know, they ship like 100,000 little chicks out every day in the U.S. mail.

Speaker 3 People get, people order, you can order chickens through the mail. Oh, yeah.
They do this all the time.

Speaker 3 If it's a girl chick, if it's a boy chicken, well,

Speaker 3 you're,

Speaker 3 and that's called fertilizer. They're ground up.
Really? Oh, yeah. Yeah.
I mean, that's why, how many roosters do you see in the barnyard? There's usually like one or two. Yeah.

Speaker 3 And there's like a bunch of hens. Of course.
Yeah. Well, okay.
So for that reason, you know, if you're not castrating them, you're getting rid of them somehow or another.

Speaker 3 What happened in 2008 actually turned into a TED talk.

Speaker 3 But it didn't start that way. It started with me trying