431: David Bahnsen—Poor Smart and Desperate

Speaker 3 David Bonson, who you're about to meet, is looking for people that are poor, smart, and desperate.

Speaker 7 A mission I appreciate so much. That's the title of this episode.

Speaker 2 I'm Mike.

Speaker 8 This is the way I heard it.

Speaker 9 How are you, Charlie?

Speaker 10 I'm living the dream, buddy.

Speaker 11 Living the dream.

Speaker 14 That was, oh, this is such a stupid thing to say out loud, looking for blanket confirmation as I'm wont to do, but that was a really good conversation.

Speaker 11 It really was. And it's right up your your alley in the message of micro works, which is that work ethic is important.
And you don't even need the ethic in David Bonson's case.

Speaker 16 It's the work that's important.

Speaker 3 He's written such a great book. It's called Full-Time Work and the Meaning of Life.

Speaker 7 And I know that might sound a tad earnest.

Speaker 2 And you know what? It is.

Speaker 19 He pulls no punches with this book, and he makes a super reasonable case. But part of the reason I wanted to have him on is because we have some mutual friends that we'll discuss in a moment.

Speaker 8 But mostly, it's because

Speaker 17 you don't often hear the messages that you're about to hear from people who manage in excess of $7 billion of money.

Speaker 26 Right.

Speaker 11 You know?

Speaker 7 That's exactly what he does for a living.

Speaker 2 Yeah, he's good at it.

Speaker 8 If his name is familiar, then his face might be as well.

Speaker 1 He pops up on the news now and then to weigh in on all sorts of things.

Speaker 3 But his real passion seems to be articulating the idea that work is not merely a means to an end.

Speaker 27 It's the end.

Speaker 8 Having lost sight of that, our country seems to have lost sight of a few other things as well, in his estimation.

Speaker 14 I just happen to agree with him.

Speaker 9 So, on the one hand, it's a conversation between two guys who are in violent agreement on any number of things.

Speaker 24 On the other hand, he manages $7 billion,

Speaker 31 and I don't.

Speaker 11 I can barely manage my weekly allowance.

Speaker 2 You mean your paycheck?

Speaker 24 I call it an allowance.

Speaker 34 All right.

Speaker 2 We'll talk about your future during the brief break that you're all about to experience right now.

Speaker 14 But when we come back, you're going to want to focus your undivided attention on the undeniable wit and wisdom.

Speaker 8 of David Bonson, who, as I may have mentioned, is all about poor, smart, and desperate.

Speaker 20 Right after this,

Speaker 18 As you may have heard me say several thousand times before, we need to close the skills gap in this country and we need to do it stat.

Speaker 18 I hate to be an alarmist, but there are currently 7.6 million open jobs out there, most of which don't require a four-year degree.

Speaker 18 And currently, 250,000 of those jobs exist within the maritime industrial base. These are the folks who build and deliver three nuclear-powered submarines every year to to the U.S.
Navy.

Speaker 18 And there's a real concern now that a lack of skilled labor is going to keep us from building the subs that need to get built.

Speaker 18 On the positive side, there's a growing realization that these jobs are freaking awesome. I'm talking about incredibly stable, AI-proof careers, just waiting.

Speaker 18 for anybody who wants to learn a skill that's in demand and start a career with some actual purpose. Additive manufacturing, CNC machining, metrology, welding, pipe fitting, electrical.

Speaker 18 All of it is spelled out for you at buildsubmarines.com. That's where all the hiring is happening and you really need to see it to get a sense of just how much opportunity is out there.

Speaker 18 That's build submarines.com.

Speaker 32 Come on and build a submarine. Why don't you build a submarine?

Speaker 18 That buildsubmarines.com.

Speaker 9 David, last checks, this is spelled right as far as you know.

Speaker 2 Chuck, put his banner up there again, just so we can make sure we got it right this time.

Speaker 8 David Bonson, author and founder of the Banson Group.

Speaker 38 No, I don't know.

Speaker 3 No, we were just talking.

Speaker 7 This is David Bonson. Thank you for your patience.

Speaker 2 Thank you for coming here.

Speaker 33 Thank you for having me.

Speaker 21 I can't wait to get into this book.

Speaker 1 I got a gajillion questions.

Speaker 8 I've seen you on the Fox News talking to all the pundits, and they all seem to regard you with a,

Speaker 7 well, with, I won't say reverence, but they certainly respect what you have to say.

Speaker 2 And I wonder if, like me, some of them aren't a bit confused by the fact that you're managing over $7 billion

Speaker 8 and still talking often about real meaning and biblical principles and like old-fashioned type virtues.

Speaker 2 And it leads me to wonder.

Speaker 14 you know, how a nice guy like you turned into such a rapacious capitalist.

Speaker 33 Yeah, I think that there's a couple of things there.

Speaker 33 It does seem to me that some people are either confused or modestly respectful of this idea that someone could be a Wall Street guy who seems to not be afraid to talk about the Bible or talk about character or what have you.

Speaker 33 And it probably

Speaker 33 seems somewhat freakish to them. It's a rarity.
I'll take that as a compliment, but in terms of just kind of how I came to be, the whole thing comes down to my dad.

Speaker 33 And so I get to to give him the credit, not for the capitalist part, other than that he was pretty poor as a Christian intellectual. So I certainly was motivated to not be poor.

Speaker 17 It's impossible to say those two words grouped up anymore and not, for me anyway, to think of C.S.

Speaker 7 Lewis.

Speaker 2 And what others, who else sort of fills out that

Speaker 33 ledger? Yeah, so throughout history,

Speaker 33 John Calvin's in the early Reformation days, and then in the 19th century, Abraham Kuyper was a big influence where you had this guy who was the prime minister of Holland and ran the newspaper there and was this you know doctorate holding academic who's his great theologian and that was kind of like mainstream and then you got in the 20th century and there's no question Christianity embraced an anti-intellectualism and so guys like my dad who were well respected in the academy and you know C.S.

Speaker 33 Lewis died in 1963 and my dad was in high school and Francis Schaefer became a bigger Christian intellectual into the 70s. But it's kind of rare.

Speaker 33 And then what's really rare is if you get a quote-unquote Christian intellectual, they're usually not orthodox.

Speaker 33 There's something off.

Speaker 21 Is McDowell in that group?

Speaker 33 Not as an intellectual. No.
No. He's definitely Orthodox, though.

Speaker 34 Right. Yeah.

Speaker 7 Evidence.

Speaker 34 The evidence of Dan's verdict.

Speaker 24 The man's verdict, right.

Speaker 31 Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 20 Would you consider that like apologetics?

Speaker 33 Yeah. So that was sort of my dad's domain.
He was an apologetics professor and philosopher. He got his doctorate at USC and studied epistemology, theory, and knowledge.

Speaker 33 And McDowell had an evidentialist approach, you know, how you can go about using archaeological evidence and physical evidence to kind of prove truth claims of the Bible.

Speaker 33 My dad's was a bit more philosophical, more C.S. Lewis-like, you know,

Speaker 33 where things were self-evident in nature and the way the world works. And so, you know, Lewis had a famous line about,

Speaker 33 I don't believe in the sun because I see it. I believe in the sun because by it I see everything else.
That was sort of my dad's apologetical way of doing things.

Speaker 33 So I just sort of applied that to finance and economics and things like this. And that's sort of my story.

Speaker 25 Well, how does it apply if you look at these things that are fundamental?

Speaker 15 Whether you attribute them

Speaker 2 to a biblical precept or not, I think everybody agrees that ideas like work, other virtues as well,

Speaker 2 they have a universality to them.

Speaker 18 But

Speaker 24 how are they applicable in the public markets?

Speaker 7 And maybe as you contemplate that too, just give me just a quick background on

Speaker 2 what you actually do for money. Yeah.

Speaker 33 So my story is that I run a private wealth management firm. I was for many years a managing director at Morgan Stanley.
So that's more of a household name on Wall Street.

Speaker 33 Had been over 15 years at high-level big firms and left and started my own firm 10 years ago. And

Speaker 33 uh just purely for the entrepreneurialism of it uh morgan stamping was a great firm they're good to me i had done very well there but i was turning 40 and i said if i'm going to do this for decades to come then you know i want to do it on my own if i was going to stay at a big firm i would i was happy to stay there but it wasn't to go uh leave and get more money i wasn't smart enough to know when i did it uh how opportunistic it proved to be.

Speaker 33 What I knew was I could hire who I wanted and fire who I wanted and not deal with 61,000 other employees.

Speaker 33 And I do believe big, large companies like that, to no fault of their own, just the way the world works, have to manage to some degree to a lowest common denominator. And it bothered me.

Speaker 33 You know, it took too long to get things done.

Speaker 33 And I have a certain contempt for bureaucracy. And I thought, well, me and a few other people around me, we can do things on our own.
Let's go give it a shot.

Speaker 33 And so, over the last 10 years, we've grown. I left with eight people who worked for me at Morgan all joining me.
And now we have 75 people and nine offices and are managing $7 billion

Speaker 33 and pretty much growed about 30% every single year. Not like 50 one year and 10 another, but I mean, really stayed consistent.
And I wouldn't do anything different.

Speaker 1 Well, at what point do you look over your shoulder and say, you know, I've become the thing I left?

Speaker 3 I mean, how big do you get before you go, oh, wait.

Speaker 33 That's a great question. I have an answer.

Speaker 33 If there's ever a moment where I do not know every single employee's name, look at them, know their name, know their story, that's when we're too big. So is that at 80, 90, 100? I don't know.

Speaker 33 It's not 300. I can't make it there.
So yeah, I don't have any vision to scale this to that large of a

Speaker 33 sort of institutional bureaucratic entity. I could probably handle a little more than 75.
I have a pretty good memory. We just had our team off-site recently.

Speaker 33 We were out playing games and doing the dinners and events and lip-sync contests and all that fun stuff. And I know everybody in the company.

Speaker 27 That's interesting.

Speaker 35 Like, do you think, right, that duty of care you just described sort of radiates out to your employees, but what about your clients?

Speaker 2 And like, and how do you think about the client relationship when you're a part of a big entity versus a smaller one?

Speaker 7 And do you have the same thought process in terms of familiarity, intimacy, and so forth?

Speaker 33 I very much do. And if anything, the way I feel about this issue with clients is informed how I feel about it with employees, not vice versa.

Speaker 33 So there's a sort of proximity and intimacy that is at the core of the value proposition of the advice business.

Speaker 33 There's a lot of things that can't be commoditized, and there's a lot of things that can't be scaled. Relationships are at the top of that list.

Speaker 33 So at a very, very large organization, every client does become a number. I don't say that, though, as a moral judgment.
It's just a reality. Sure.

Speaker 33 For us, what we say is basically um we can keep growing but not because more advisors are taking on more clients but because we'll have more advisors that fit our that are aligned with our philosophy our belief system the entirety of it is based on a small number of clients per household so people remember that 1990s movie jerry maguire and he and he wrote that manifesto yeah and that it was all based on relationships and knowing your clients all that that that's exactly how we view it and we don't lose clients for that reason i mean we we really value the intimacy of the relationship.

Speaker 33 I can't know 1,500 clients, but I can employ 25 advisors that each have 50 to 75 clients that they can all know. And then I can know all of my people.
That's how we've kind of done it.

Speaker 17 Full disclosure, there's a fair amount of triangulation here.

Speaker 2 Will Swame, who sat where you're sitting.

Speaker 2 Dear friend of yours, in fact, you guys are still doing, is it Radio Free California?

Speaker 33 Radio Free California.

Speaker 13 That's fascinating.

Speaker 2 You sit on the board over at the National Review.

Speaker 14 I've got many friends over there, too.

Speaker 2 So I suspect we're in violent agreement on all sorts of stuff.

Speaker 27 Before we jump into the book, the real reason you're here is because of the sign over my right shoulder.

Speaker 2 I said that out loud, I guess it was 16 years ago, maybe 17, right when we were starting this foundation. And some reporter asked me, what's the,

Speaker 3 you know, you tell stories, so who's the villain in your story here?

Speaker 3 And my answer was the villain is an idea that the reason we're all unhappy to varying degrees it seems is because of work work has become the the punching bag it's the or something work adjacent my boss right it's there's just somehow or another and I don't know when but it became not just fashionable, but almost expected to make work into the proximate cause of your discontent.

Speaker 2 And I hadn't thought too much about it, but it was the big lesson from Dirty Jobs, and it was the premise upon which Microworks was launched.

Speaker 17 So much of this makes me feel like a smart guy.

Speaker 2 I always love it when I run into people who have some science and, you know, a bigger brain and the time to put some real thought behind some ideas that I have been clinging to.

Speaker 1 So, having said that,

Speaker 17 I'm not alone, am I?

Speaker 33 No, you're not. And it's not just that we have a general agreement.
I mean, there's an alignment in our respective views on this that is

Speaker 33 extraordinarily tight for a lot of the same reasons and with a lot of the same cultural observations. There was a moment where it shifted.
I have my own theories about what kind of caused some of it.

Speaker 33 And I think it was at different paces and different causation in different parts of the country.

Speaker 33 You know, there's a movement that broadly I think you're you're describing has sort of created this narrative that work is weighing on people.

Speaker 33 And I think a lot of it is embedded in us being victims of our own success as a society.

Speaker 33 Prosperity and deeper mortality. People are living longer.
I would think that's a good thing.

Speaker 33 We have more money. I would think that's a good thing.
Has somehow combined together to have a lower view of the things that enabled those two conditions.

Speaker 33 So we bite the hand that feeds us to some degree.

Speaker 2 Interesting, the idea that living longer,

Speaker 24 I agree.

Speaker 7 The immediate thought is, well, that's nice.

Speaker 12 But, you know, it does add incredible pressure because the last few years of one's life are certainly very different than the first few years.

Speaker 37 More expensive for one thing.

Speaker 14 And you're just...

Speaker 28 You're still here at 104, right?

Speaker 2 You're like, what's next?

Speaker 1 How are you going to find meaning at that point in your life?

Speaker 33 And I think that a four-month-old,

Speaker 33 it's difficult to define how they're finding meaning, but we believe babies have meaning.

Speaker 33 The sanctity of their own lives, and they're in this very developmental phase. They don't have a lot to contribute.
You know, they're kind of a pain.

Speaker 28 Do they think they're the center of their own universe?

Speaker 33 And they certainly have to be the center of the parent's universe for the baby to survive.

Speaker 33 104, you know, you're at the end of a cycle of life, and there's not a lot to contribute, and it requires a lot of attention from others.

Speaker 33 But where our mortality is extended is not just in the right tail,

Speaker 33 the median level. You know, there were people who were dying at 60 forever that had 10 more productive years intellectually and physically that were not getting it.

Speaker 33 Now, most, again, at a median level, people are getting that, right, up to the late 70s.

Speaker 33 and were voluntarily saying, well, I'm going to pretend I'm 104 when I'm 65,

Speaker 33 meaning voluntary removal from a productive place in society.

Speaker 36 Yeah.

Speaker 33 So 104, you're pretty limited physically and mentally most of the time. 65, usually not.

Speaker 33 So I think that there's been a voluntary decision to exit from a lot of this, not things that have been forced on people because of age and stage.

Speaker 8 You know Nick Eberstadt by any chance?

Speaker 33 Yes, I love him. You quote him heavily in the book.

Speaker 2 So he's another one of those guys who wrote a book that made me feel like, oh, that's what I meant to say.

Speaker 18 He talks about, I think, what you're saying.

Speaker 2 You've got 7 million able-bodied men in the prime of their working life who have affirmatively chosen to step away from work.

Speaker 10 So, what the heck does that mean?

Speaker 33 Well, and I decided to try to answer it as an economist. And it's my view, and this sort of overlaps with some of Nick's study.

Speaker 33 I believe the financial crisis, 2008, was a seminal moment of my adult life in the history books. So, right now, we're too fresh to it to be able to say this.

Speaker 33 They haven't updated the chapters in history books yet. So 30, 50, 70 years from now, the way that we would have studied the Great Depression, people will be studying 2008.

Speaker 33 And they won't study it as just a moment where, you know, Lehman went down or what did Congress do or whatnot. There'll be certain factual stuff to recall and that'll all be interesting.

Speaker 33 But it was the moment at which a kind of extremist socialist became a mainstream politician with Bernie Sanders. It was a moment that created a populist angst on the left and the right.

Speaker 33 You could argue it years later kind of created Donald Trump in a lot of ways, or at least fertilized the soil that produced the moment for Trump.

Speaker 33 But I think that we were children of the 80s and 90s where free markets were just presumed to be efficient and morally good. Everybody seemed to be doing better.

Speaker 33 And wealth inequality has never really historically been a concern when everyone's getting better together. Poor people don't mind rich people getting richer when poor people are getting richer.

Speaker 33 But when all of a sudden they feel that they're now getting poorer, then the divide becomes a bigger issue. And 08 just really hit us across the face with that.

Speaker 33 So then the labor participation force collapsed and it didn't recover. And it's all men.

Speaker 33 Epistat's written about this extensively. So then you say, okay, well, boomers are retiring.
And then you look at it and you go, yeah, that's not really the data.

Speaker 33 I mean, it's true there, but it's not disproportionately true.

Speaker 33 So, what I do in the book is look at the 18 to 25 demographic and say, why are we tolerating this?

Speaker 33 Why do we think it's good that young adults are not entering the workforce and that we don't have part-time employment for teenagers? And we don't think college students need to work a job anymore.

Speaker 33 And for those who don't go off to college, that we don't have trade schools or various, you know, vocational endeavors.

Speaker 33 I don't think it's true that that demographic's drop in employment is irrelevant. I think it matters a lot.

Speaker 33 But then the one that no one can ignore is that 29, ages 29 to 54, because then you have the no excuse, able-bodied men, whatever, and no one seems to know where they've gone.

Speaker 33 And so I was unable to answer it only as an economist.

Speaker 33 I had to answer it partially out of my own moral and cultural assessment that I think it's a byproduct of a declining spirituality, a declining hope. And unfortunately, it's a negative feedback loop.

Speaker 33 It feeds on itself. People are less hopeful that they can achieve a good life, so they go about doing the things that ensure they can't have a

Speaker 25 self-fulfilling tautology. Yeah.

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Speaker 2 Well, spoiler alert, you also, I think,

Speaker 12 suggest that

Speaker 1 that which is symptomatic is, in fact, causal in a way.

Speaker 12 Right.

Speaker 7 So we've gotten it into our heads, understandably, that

Speaker 2 the purpose of work is to get us in a place where we can enjoy the things that we want to enjoy.

Speaker 1 Like it's a means to an end.

Speaker 22 And fundamentally, what you're saying, I think, is that it's the end.

Speaker 40 The work

Speaker 20 is the point.

Speaker 2 And it doesn't much matter what your business card says.

Speaker 5 By all means, evolve, adapt, change things up.

Speaker 2 But whatever it is you're doing at the moment, that's the point.

Speaker 33 You're literally like quoting from the book, basically. I mean, that's exactly what I'm saying.
And I will take the other side, make it even more not sarcastic, but hard-hitting.

Speaker 33 I believe the message of the baby boomer generation was work is something you do, so you won't have to do it anymore.

Speaker 37 Yes, that's it.

Speaker 33 And I believe that's the moment at which the societal view of work changed, but we didn't notice it because here's the compliment to baby boomers. They did work very hard.

Speaker 33 They produced a lot of goods and services. Gross output in society was extremely positive.
So they were working and producing.

Speaker 33 You didn't have those issues of the 26-year-old living at mom's basement and not wanting to get a job.

Speaker 33 And you didn't have, you know, 32-year-olds asking their boss if they could go to yoga in the middle of the afternoon.

Speaker 33 They weren't an entitled generation, but they did enter the workforce with an eye on retirement, and then they ended their time in the workforce with the ability to end their life with a 25-year vacation, and then messaged that down to Gen X and especially millennials.

Speaker 33 And all I think millennials did is run with it.

Speaker 33 If the purpose of work is to just do the bare minimum so that you can then go do the things you really want to do, and you're not capturing that T loss that you're talking about, that purpose, that work is the aim, that I'm not working transactionally, I'm not working instrumentally, that the work itself is the purpose, that I'm producing goods and services that meet the needs of humanity, and I might even be doing the things that achieve my hopes, dreams, and goals in life, my passions that meet my skills.

Speaker 33 You know, these are like the textbook things you dream of. And now, I can't go be an NBA basketball star, even if I love the basketball, because I don't have the skills.

Speaker 33 But in the workforce, I can find things I love and that I'm good at, more than an NBA career, and bring those things together.

Speaker 33 So the vision in a market economy with a rule of law and a free society is that work really is a venue to go do great things that are output focused. You're producing goods and services.

Speaker 33 And I think we spiritually, economically, politically, culturally adopted a view that the essence of life is consumption.

Speaker 33 And lo and behold, it doesn't seem to me to have made a lot of people very happy.

Speaker 2 Well, it's certainly true that there are more consumers in this country than there are workers.

Speaker 33 As a headcount. Yes.
Yes.

Speaker 39 Because all workers consume, but not all consumers work.

Speaker 2 And so that fundamental distinction, I think, is one of the early ways where you start to take up sides and people start to say, well, which are you?

Speaker 3 Are you contributing or are you not?

Speaker 20 And then their back goes up because, well, well, wait a minute.

Speaker 2 What do you mean by contributing?

Speaker 1 You want me to stand there in the same spot and make little rocks out of big rocks so I can pay some blah blah blah.

Speaker 2 And then all of a sudden we're up to our neck in a polemic and we can't get out of it.

Speaker 1 And now you have Reddit and a Kajillion people who are just really, really, really angry at anybody in a blazer.

Speaker 33 You know, you used the word tautology earlier. This is just Economics 101.

Speaker 33 There are more consumers than producers, but there is not more consumption than production.

Speaker 33 So by definition, somebody's getting richer than somebody else.

Speaker 33 Right? The head count is uneven, but there can't be more consumption than production, because what are they consuming if someone hasn't produced it?

Speaker 33 So what that means is they're people sharing in a greater portion of the spoils, right?

Speaker 33 Now, Traditionally, we would say that's an understandable thing. Some people are going to work harder.
Some people are more ambitious. some people have more skill.

Speaker 33 You know, there's different elements to it. And sure, some people get luckier.
Okay, whatever it is.

Speaker 33 But the point being, production and consumption can't be disconnected, but producers and consumers are. So then how do we remedy that if we're really worried about wealth inequality?

Speaker 33 Well, apparently it isn't by focusing on math because you would think the remedy to that is to create more producers. And we're not doing that.
We're demonizing producers.

Speaker 33 And we celebrate celebrate consumption, sans production, which is incoherent.

Speaker 39 Why do we do that?

Speaker 33 Well, I think that it comes from a covetousness. I think it comes from a godlessness.
And I think it comes ultimately from a lack of understanding of the human person.

Speaker 33 The belief, it was a Marxian notion. When Bernie Sanders was pushing last year for this 32-hour workweek program, I remember him saying, you know, we all just know

Speaker 33 that the economic man wants to be able to work less. And I remember thinking, well, I know people want to work less.
That might be true. But no, I do not just know that.

Speaker 33 I do not believe all people want to.

Speaker 33 And I actually know a lot of people, they get real excited to go do a week or two on a two-week vacation. And on the third day, they're like, I got to go to the walls.
I got to get out of here.

Speaker 33 And everyone needs to recharge their batteries, enjoy a little time at the beach, and look at a lake and walk on the sand with your wife, all that's good stuff. But no,

Speaker 33 I don't agree that that everybody is looking to just work less, that that's endemic to the human person. I think that we are most fulfilled when we're producing.
It generates self-worth.

Speaker 33 It generates self-esteem. And so, much like the frustration you were talking about 16 years ago, I look around and I just say, I think everyone's got this backwards.

Speaker 33 And it would be one thing if we said, they're saying it's X and I don't think it's X. Well, what they're saying is not merely that work is the problem.

Speaker 33 They're missing that I believe work is the solution.

Speaker 33 That when we look at opioid epidemic, this is Nick Eberstadt's type stuff: the problems of despair, loneliness, alcohol abuse, drug abuse, people who have less friends.

Speaker 33 We say, oh, it's not good.

Speaker 33 People don't have the same level of friendships anymore.

Speaker 33 And then they want to move everyone out of working in a public place and have them go, you know, all these 29-year-old guys working in an apartment by themselves, you know, no friends, no girlfriend.

Speaker 33 No, it's just, this is the recipe for a good life. It's just depressing.

Speaker 15 How do you

Speaker 14 articulate these ideas knowing, as I'm sure you do, that in spite of your faith, nobody wants a sermon.

Speaker 9 And in spite of your certitude, nobody wants a lecture.

Speaker 15 Yeah. Right?

Speaker 19 Especially the cohort to which you refer.

Speaker 9 They're sitting home and maybe they've taken a break from scrolling left or right or whatever and they've flicked around and they've found this and they're listening to like what are they going to hear from the likes of you and me that would challenge the idea that all they're doing by showing up at their dead end job is

Speaker 33 perpetuating this whole enrichment that they're so opposed to anyway on behalf of the upper classes or whatever it is how how do you persuade Well, I think for one thing, I don't want the pressure on myself that I have to avoid being accused of being preachy i try not to be preachy but if someone says hey you know you have a bible verse in here or you're giving a faith-based exhortation i'll live with it but i will say i'm not doing it for the purpose of proselytizing i'm doing it because i think there's a truth in the message i want to share but the one thing i'm asking people to do is just ask some questions

Speaker 33 Do you believe that some of the choices people have made, macro, the whole society, not picking on one person, that it's people seem happier because no one seems to believe that.

Speaker 33 Everyone seems, that's one consensus view we have that's bipartisan, is that there is less contentment and that there's a greater angst.

Speaker 33 And I think a lot of this intensified after that financial crisis moment.

Speaker 33 Now, I'm totally open to the idea that some of it is house prices are too high, student debt's too high, that people feel a little misled,

Speaker 33 they don't trust the system. I get all of that.
But what I'm suggesting is,

Speaker 33 would you be willing to listen to the stories of those that have focused on their own vocational endeavors, their own journey, ups and downs, and believe that they found a fulfilling life out of it?

Speaker 33 So I'm asking them to at least be open-minded to the idea that the one-off is not the person who's found a lot of meaning in work, that that's the norm.

Speaker 17 How

Speaker 14 would you talk about

Speaker 1 universal basic income to, again, that there are many in that cohort, I think, that look at that idea and say, yeah, that makes perfect sense.

Speaker 20 And I know some pretty hardworking entrepreneurial people who have made the case for it as well.

Speaker 1 Personally, I'm suspicious of it, but I don't know how to argue against it other than

Speaker 35 through a moral lens.

Speaker 33 Well, I don't either. And so I don't.
What I won't do is what a lot of my friends on the political right will do is make the argument we can't afford it.

Speaker 33 I happen to agree we can't afford it, but it's a very bad argument. 36 trillion of debt and we run one to 2 trillion of deficits more each year.

Speaker 33 Why not throw a few trillion more at something if it was really a good plan? Nobody believes that that limit is coming in the next trillion or the trillion after that.

Speaker 33 There's some limit at which this prolific fiscal deficit spending might come to an end, but that's not the argument that's going to be persuasive, that we can't afford it.

Speaker 33 The better argument that has more staying power is the moral argument. And for me, the moral argument has to be connected to what I view, believe about the human person.

Speaker 33 If I believed that half of us were supposed to be productive and half of us were merely to be consumptive, and that half of the people in the world, their meaning comes from what the other half of us do, then I would not be opposed to universal basic income.

Speaker 33 But my problem is I don't believe that. I believe that God made all people with dignity.

Speaker 33 And my argument against universal basic income is that it's dehumanizing because it is suggesting that there is a group of people that need to live off the largesse of others as opposed to produce.

Speaker 33 This has nothing to do with social safety net. And one of the ironies about a universal basic income is that last I checked with the word universal, they're not even talking about a social safety net.

Speaker 33 Bill Gates is in the universe. Elon Musk is in the universe.
Does he get his $1,800 a month minimum amount as well?

Speaker 33 I mean, it's really, to me, a question about distributing resources instead of producing. And so we're not just talking about the efficiency of it.
I don't accept a zero-sum view of the universe.

Speaker 33 I believe we can create more things. In fact, I think all of us have just been doing that ever since we were born.

Speaker 33 And the world has gotten bigger in terms of the totality of wealth, the goods and services that enhance people's quality of life.

Speaker 33 So,

Speaker 1 man, there's a lot there.

Speaker 9 But if you're talking about meaningful work,

Speaker 37 is there such a thing inherently as meaningful work?

Speaker 1 And also, since you brought it up, from a creationist standpoint, how important is creativity to meaning in work?

Speaker 33 So the second question is a tricky one. The first part is right on my alley.
Let me start with the easy one because the second one's harder. Is there such thing as

Speaker 33 inerrant in work that is meaning?

Speaker 31 Yeah.

Speaker 33 Well, I believe that work has meaning inherently when a worker is doing it and it is extended towards an object.

Speaker 33 So what I mean by this is Pope John Paul II had a wonderful encyclical about work in 1981 where he referred to it as a transitive activity. The subject of work is the worker.

Speaker 33 And that's where the meaning comes from because the worker has dignity and purpose, but they're extending the work.

Speaker 33 If I'm just sitting here dropping rocks on the ground and picking them up, I'm not creating any value for anyone. So the work is when I'm extending my effort towards an object.

Speaker 33 That object is another human being.

Speaker 33 So it's a human serving a human and producing goods and services and painting a house and inventing an iPhone and providing financial services and creating a podcast.

Speaker 17 Picking up the rock, but rather than merely dropping it, arranging it in such a way that a wall begins to emerge.

Speaker 33 Carving it, building it, designing it, all those things. And so where the inerrant meaning comes in is that work is a transitive activity where one person is meeting the needs of others.
And

Speaker 33 in so doing, has their needs met. That's the economic miracle of work, that we have our needs met.
This is the great contribution of classical economics.

Speaker 33 We have our needs met by meeting the needs of others.

Speaker 2 So does the worker have to acknowledge the meaning he or she feels from doing the work in order for the underlying job to be inherently meaningful?

Speaker 33 They do not, but it sure does help. I do not think about every breath I take every day, but when I think about oxygen, I'm even more appreciative of the life I live.

Speaker 28 Yeah, and when I can't breathe, I sure do remember all those 12 times when I could.

Speaker 33 That's right. Yeah, nobody appreciates work more than an unemployed person.

Speaker 18 Okay.

Speaker 19 Well, then the second part of the question had to do with creativity.

Speaker 2 And I don't, I'm certainly not a scholar in any sense, much, especially biblical, but it seems like as

Speaker 2 a creator,

Speaker 13 if we are in his image,

Speaker 28 then we are creators ourselves.

Speaker 33 Definitely.

Speaker 8 And so, as a creator in training, you know, am I looking at my job through the lens of meaning and saying, well, I'm not being asked to create anything.

Speaker 8 I'm just being asked to move things and hold things and turn things.

Speaker 20 Or maybe my role in some supply chain or mass assemblage is so codified that I can't get a good look at the actual thing that's being created.

Speaker 2 And so I feel disconnected from a larger effort, therefore disenfranchised, therefore, screw it, I quit, and you can pay me to sit home and play Call of Duty.

Speaker 2 Vince Romano used to make boots for a number of well-known boot companies.

Speaker 3 He got really good at it.

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Speaker 18 Vince cultivated a loyal following, made a name for himself with these lifestyle boots, but after learning how few work boots that claimed to be made in the USA were in reality only assembled here, Vince Romano turned his attention to making the best, completely American-made work boot possible.

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Speaker 31 That's TrumanBoot.com.

Speaker 33 What I encourage people to do with this issue is see a bigger picture where we are not limited to a point in time in the way we answer this. A cog in the machine concern is a real one.

Speaker 33 But I wonder, if someone says, I want to add to the creativity of the process, but I'm just in the assembly line and I'm not really doing anything creative.

Speaker 33 I'm providing a service, but it's not creative.

Speaker 33 But if they perform at a high level in the assembly line, do they at some point get invited in to the discussions on how to improve the process, how more innovation, more creativity?

Speaker 33 Is it, in other words, a situation that is somewhat eschatological? Like at a point in time, you're paying dues so you have more creative input later. That's a possibility.
Not always.

Speaker 33 Some people get stuck. And that's where those that are fearful of being stuck should be the biggest advocates of labor dynamism and a market economy and a growing economy of anyone.

Speaker 33 Because all that a growing economy does is open up doors and doors and doors exponentially for more opportunity.

Speaker 33 Where people have been most stuck in a factory dead-end job without creative input is where there's been the least amount of economic opportunity.

Speaker 33 And you need dynamism and mobility because the boss says, I don't want your creative input. Put the darn thing in the box and be quiet.
Right. Say, okay, I'm doing that.

Speaker 33 But by the way, that guy called me and he wants me to be creative in the way I do it. So I'm going to leave you and go work there.

Speaker 33 Any society that makes it hard to quit a job, hard to take a new job, hard to fire someone, hard to hire someone, they're hurting the cause of creativity.

Speaker 33 The ability to do creative work is often a byproduct of you have the ability to leave one job for another, but of course there's a process, dues paying, you know, earning that credibility and so forth.

Speaker 33 But to your point about being made in the imigo dei, image of God, I use three words throughout the book all the time. God was a producer, God was an innovator, and God was a creator.

Speaker 33 And all three of those things he invited us into.

Speaker 33 We don't get to create out of nothing. Only he could do that.
But really, God's creativity was mostly a byproduct of creating raw materials to ask us to go do the really creative stuff.

Speaker 33 God didn't paint,

Speaker 33 but he sure gave us the ability to paint. The creative beauty of the world.

Speaker 33 He had to give us the ability to see beauty

Speaker 33 and appreciate it and to create it.

Speaker 33 But that's an amazing thing about what we have the capacity for.

Speaker 7 The capacity, right?

Speaker 2 Not the obligation.

Speaker 33 The choice. The choice.

Speaker 8 It's incumbent on us to choose.

Speaker 20 That's the free agentry of the whole thing.

Speaker 15 That's right.

Speaker 3 Right?

Speaker 37 I can look at a rainbow and be breathless and just overwhelm with gratitude.

Speaker 13 And somebody else can just go, yeah, colors.

Speaker 29 We choose.

Speaker 33 And there is also a sense in the individuality of human people that not only our skills, but our passions, you know, there's all these, what, Enneagram things and personality tests and all this stuff.

Speaker 33 And, you know, I'm sure some of them are good, some of them maybe not so much. But there's a real kind of universal understanding that we're all wired differently.

Speaker 33 I mean, that's not exactly rocket science. And I think that when we talk about the word creative, it can mean very different things to different people.

Speaker 33 I think that someone could be very creative artistically, the painting and seeing appreciating a rainbow and things.

Speaker 33 And then there's a lot of creativity in the way someone structures a business, a lot of creativity in the way someone

Speaker 33 creates a business strategy or does a financial structure. When I talk about capital markets, artist types are going to be bored out of their mind hearing me talk about it.

Speaker 33 But that doesn't mean it's not creative. Right.
It may not be aesthetic, but it is creative.

Speaker 15 Was it JP Morgan you were with?

Speaker 33 I was at Morgan Stanley. Morgan Stanley.

Speaker 3 Okay.

Speaker 1 So did they lose you because they failed to create an environment that allowed you to check the boxes?

Speaker 16 Or was it all of a piece?

Speaker 14 And was it just sort of a design?

Speaker 2 And I don't mean to juxtapose predestination with free agentry and so forth.

Speaker 15 But, you know, did you leave them?

Speaker 3 Did they blow it?

Speaker 15 Would you have stayed?

Speaker 2 Had they presented a more intriguing palette for you?

Speaker 33 Like all of economics, it's marginal. There's always more on the margin you could do.

Speaker 33 But structurally, if I was predestined to be an entrepreneur, there's only so much additional freedom they can give you when you're not an entrepreneur.

Speaker 33 You're not going to be an entrepreneur as a W-2 employee at a big company. And so I don't think they did anything wrong per se.
It's just that the model was wrong for me.

Speaker 33 You know, I didn't need someone else buying the furniture. I didn't need an HR department.
I wanted to run my own deal.

Speaker 8 But my point is, it's incumbent then upon the entrepreneur to leave.

Speaker 8 And so the default has to be, like, we're not building organizations, and these big companies are not evolving the way they evolve in order to encourage entrepreneurship.

Speaker 3 Otherwise, everybody would leave and become entrepreneurs.

Speaker 20 And then that would be sort of self-defeating in a weird way.

Speaker 8 They didn't want to lose you.

Speaker 21 You have an enormous brain. People like you.
You're on TV all the time.

Speaker 24 Right? I mean,

Speaker 22 so that was a loss when you left. And you probably took some clients and maybe some fellow employees.

Speaker 2 And now you're running $7 billion that they're not. Yeah.

Speaker 33 Yeah, it's a big loss to them. And there's plenty of other corner office guys like me that have done it.
And it isn't just in financial services. People lose

Speaker 33 employee talent to go an entrepreneurial route all the time. I would argue in the society case, that's a net gain.

Speaker 33 And in the case of that company, it's a net loss right they're losing something and yet that person is now going to be something greater than they would have been inside the confines of that structure so a win for society and a loss for that company what it so that company what they ought to do is provide as much entrepreneurial freedom as they can without violating their own business model god it's i mean what a nightmare to encourage your best people to leave if that's what they want to do, to encourage them to stay because you don't want to lose your best people, to do both of them honestly and transparently.

Speaker 33 This doesn't translate well to finance, but how do they do it in tech? You know, I think almost every VC person that Pete Thiel has backed used to work for him.

Speaker 33 They went out and started their own firm.

Speaker 6 Yeah.

Speaker 33 But he got a piece of it.

Speaker 36 Yeah.

Speaker 33 So there's ways that everyone could win out of that, but it'd be tougher at a Morgan Staley.

Speaker 2 What are the three things you mentioned again?

Speaker 33 Production, creativity, and innovation.

Speaker 8 Okay.

Speaker 9 And you used a Greek term earlier.

Speaker 22 Telos?

Speaker 33 Telos. Telos.
Purpose.

Speaker 2 Okay, so that's a fourth thing, or that's a different thing.

Speaker 33 Yeah, I think it's a different thing. I think that

Speaker 33 most certainly we all have a purpose. And I do believe that it's in our image-bearing status.

Speaker 33 But I guess what I'm suggesting is that the human purpose is embedded in work. That is the way God made the world.

Speaker 33 And that this goes against the kind of contemporary idea that the purpose of our existence is rather to enjoy a life of recreation or permanent leisure. I do not agree with that assessment.

Speaker 12 And in order to get to that state, we must endure a world of work

Speaker 3 from which we will eventually retire.

Speaker 27 The sooner the better.

Speaker 25 That's right. That's the premise.

Speaker 33 And then to the early part of our conversation, you talk about where you were 16 years ago, things you're observing. This is something I talk about in the introduction of the book.

Speaker 31 Me personally?

Speaker 33 When you were, yeah, I mean, what you mean?

Speaker 33 Well, but no, the

Speaker 33 way in which Hollywood reinforced this idea that work was drudgery. Where something happened that when we watch a movie, we're supposed to take for granted.

Speaker 33 You know how you watch a movie sometimes and you realize like, wait a second, this guy's supposed to be the good guy. And so like, I'm watching Ocean's 11.

Speaker 33 i'm supposed to be rooting for bank robbers right like it's but it's you know you they sort of trick you into doing that almost every movie anyone's ever seen about work almost every one the embedded assumption is that your job is at odds with your peace of mind that careerism is the enemy of the good life and that there is something else like going back to the small town you're from or your ex-girlfriend in high school or some sort of you've been watching hallmark dude well it's funny.

Speaker 33 Hallmark now, it almost seems like a caricature of what Hollywood's been saying for years because the bad guy in the Hollywood movie is always the person at the office working, and the good guy is always the person who has some anti-work view.

Speaker 2 Right. And the plumber is always 300 pounds with a giant butt crack, and Schneider was the brunt of every joke on one day at a time.

Speaker 3 And so Hollywood and Madison Avenue and virtually every relevant vertical in culture did get that memo.

Speaker 1 That's why I wrote that and that's why I pushed my little boulder up my little hill.

Speaker 4 And by that you mean work is not the enemy. That's the thing over your shoulder.

Speaker 14 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 9 Sorry, I forget sometimes that we're not making actual TV.

Speaker 8 But yeah, there's a plaque and I didn't make that. Somebody I spoke at somewhere heard me say it and gave that to me, which means a lot more.

Speaker 7 You know, it's hard to know what to think about a fellow who takes his own quote and puts it in a frame and hangs it in his eye.

Speaker 33 If it's worth framing, then frame it. But I mean, it's golden.

Speaker 7 Why is there a telephone on the front of your book?

Speaker 33 The idea was a subtle call-out of calling, that work is our calling.

Speaker 33 And then, because I'm a 50-year-old Gen Xer, I wanted a little shout-out to the old days of when we actually held a phone and called customers and called people, and there was a wire connected to it.

Speaker 33 And I knew every, it's funny, I know every single client's phone number by heart that I had before the iPhone came out.

Speaker 9 How many clients did you have?

Speaker 33 Oh,

Speaker 33 it was 100. I still know.
I have a,

Speaker 29 if you said six, I know.

Speaker 33 I have a crazy memory, but I used to dial their number.

Speaker 29 Sure.

Speaker 33 And now I don't know anybody's phone number because I've never dialed it once.

Speaker 14 You hit their Siri call.

Speaker 33 And so I just thought it was sort of an old school call out. But then the little artistic deal, my wife was the designer, by the way.
It was meant to be a work as our calling. That was the idea.

Speaker 16 Well, it spoke to me because my first job, where I actually learned that

Speaker 14 just because you hate something doesn't mean you can't be good at it,

Speaker 13 and conversely, just because you love something doesn't mean you can't suck at it, was telemarketing.

Speaker 8 I sold magazines over the phone.

Speaker 24 I didn't find any inherent meaning in the work at all,

Speaker 13 and I didn't enjoy it on its face at all.

Speaker 31 But

Speaker 16 I had a low voice for a young kid.

Speaker 25 I sounded older than I was.

Speaker 8 I sounded good over the phone. And then, because I'm subversive by nature, I was given this script to follow.

Speaker 2 But my boss at the time gave me a lot of leeway and said, just say whatever you want to say.

Speaker 19 So there was creativity.

Speaker 20 Like, I had a chance to go off the script and look at this thing as an exercise.

Speaker 7 Can I sell six months of Time Magazine to Mrs.

Speaker 35 Johnson in Akron?

Speaker 14 And can I do it respectfully?

Speaker 2 Like I played by the rules, but I use my own words off the script.

Speaker 9 Long way of saying a lot of what you wrote about in here, I was like, oh, well,

Speaker 14 did I find meaning in that job by doing it in a way that made sense to my brain?

Speaker 8 Or did I simply endure the reality of what was being asked of me because I was making $50 an hour in 1982?

Speaker 8 I honestly don't know.

Speaker 33 Or maybe it's both.

Speaker 33 Maybe, in other words, the things we come up with to endure a job that has moments of drudgery and boredom end up creating some of that creative opportunity that ends up being very fulfilling.

Speaker 2 Please tell me about the chapter entitled The Movie Usher.

Speaker 33 Yeah, well, so what I do, each chapter of the book is start off with a job that I worked throughout my journey. And it was

Speaker 33 the movie Usher job was one of my favorite ones I ever had. It paid $4.25 an hour.
So you were doing much better in telemarketing than I was doing sweeping up popcorn.

Speaker 33 But, you know, people dropped cash on the floor a lot. So you could supplement income with folks that were leaving behind.

Speaker 35 They dropped a lot of things on the floor.

Speaker 43 Well, you know,

Speaker 33 many, many things. There were some things that were, you earned your paycheck, yes.

Speaker 27 That you can't pick up with a broom.

Speaker 33 But no,

Speaker 33 the intent of that was to just sort of show that there's a lot of people on Wall Street that are making the kind of money I make and have had a rewarding career in a white-collar role, corner office, New York, all that stuff.

Speaker 33 And their first job was working in an office on 6th Avenue and, you know, what have you. My journey has been different.

Speaker 33 And it's something that's very sensitive to right in the book that if I were somebody feeling that dead-end job, that cog in the machine thing, and I was reading this book and saying, the socioeconomic strata this guy's in is not something I can relate to I don't want to hear what he has to say I get it there's not much I can do about it but I did want them to know I started off handing out fruit shake samplers at the mall and then being an usher and then working at Sizzler and then working at Togo's and then my dad dying when I was 20 never going to college and just working my tail off you never went to college never been in a college classroom You're running $7 billion.

Speaker 20 Yes, sir.

Speaker 33 It was the worst thing that ever happened, but it became the best thing because of work. And that was having to be a 20-year-old orphan.

Speaker 33 So. With no money.

Speaker 33 Character. Character and purpose.

Speaker 33 Because I think that you lose your best friend, you lose your sort of vision of where you're going to go in your life. At that age, it's vulnerable.

Speaker 33 You can get some bad habits, do bad things, make bad decisions.

Speaker 2 Your dad was your best friend?

Speaker 31 Oh, absolutely.

Speaker 36 Tell me about him.

Speaker 33 Well, he, you know, my mom was already gone. And so I went, I go through high school, you know, with my dad and I.
He was a single parent at that point.

Speaker 33 He was brilliant. He was an extremely attentive father.
You know, he died at 47. And so, you know, he had had,

Speaker 33 it's funny. We were,

Speaker 33 when I turned, when I had my 30th birthday party, my wife was pregnant with our firstborn and we didn't know she was. I was at my dad's 30th birthday party walking around talking to people, you know.

Speaker 33 And so he had us younger and so forth.

Speaker 33 And so by the time he was in his 40s, I was a teenager, I had spent a couple hours a day, almost every day of my life, talking to him about God, about life, about girls, about sports, about the Beatles.

Speaker 33 Then I became a huge U2 fan and we had to fight all the time about who was better, U2 or the Beatles. And we love Chinese food and everything.

Speaker 33 And then, and all the hopes and dreams of what I wanted to do in my life. And then he was gone.

Speaker 33 And so I've always said when people ask what my journey was into life and they want to do the things I did to get here, I always say, you know, I don't take from the fact that I've had a great life and I'm really blessed where I am right now, but I don't wish that journey on anyone.

Speaker 33 I mean, it was not the way you would necessarily want to go about it.

Speaker 34 Right.

Speaker 33 But it was pure survival to go have to just work real hard to make it. Didn't have money, didn't have parents, didn't have structure.

Speaker 33 But then the thing I write about in the work at a very personal and biographical level is

Speaker 33 I quickly realized that work was therapeutic and that that was a good thing. So when people say this term workaholism is a pejorative like you're avoiding things in life with work.

Speaker 33 And I say, yeah, that sounds right.

Speaker 33 I recommend more people do it. You know, treat your trauma with work.
It's not all that bad. It's better than what most people are treating their trauma with.

Speaker 33 And so my experience was that out of the trauma of losing dad, that work became something that God used to really give me purpose?

Speaker 33 It was therapeutic.

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Speaker 1 Was finance even

Speaker 20 on the wheel of possibilities at that point?

Speaker 33 Well, before he died, I mean, I went on Halloween. It's up on our company website, a picture of me dressed as Alex P.

Speaker 33 Keaton for Halloween when I was eight years old with the briefcase and the sweater vest with the tie. And I didn't know what Wall Street was.
I just knew I wanted to do that when I was a little kid.

Speaker 33 It just sounded like I could be intellectual and successful. My dad was intellectual but didn't have a lot of money.

Speaker 33 You know, Christian intellectuals, they may be rare, but a wealthy one is really rare.

Speaker 31 That's a unicorn.

Speaker 33 And so I wanted to be smart, but I wanted to be successful. And then he's gone, can't afford college, and I just think everything's over.
I thought this path is done.

Speaker 33 I got to go sweat it out, figure something out. And so I just began working, working.

Speaker 33 And when the doors opened for me to go get into a training program at a Wall Street firm, by that point, I had, I was 27 then, I had a self-confidence that was totally, completely unwarranted,

Speaker 33 but I had earned it. I just convinced myself I could do whatever I needed to.

Speaker 13 So did you get an internship?

Speaker 33 No, well, so after dad died, I had friends that were in musical bands, and I was working at these jobs like a Togo sandwich shop.

Speaker 33 And I started managing their bands, helping them raise money and get concerts and things like that. And I said, you know, I'm going to turn this into a business.

Speaker 33 And I turned it into a multi-million dollar dollar business, but it took years.

Speaker 33 But I worked 18 hours a day for years and years and years until I could not stand the idea of ever working with another musician again. But by that point, I had money in the stock market.

Speaker 33 I had really kind of made it, and I was comfortable talking to adults. And that's what you need to be able to do.
So I could go interview and say, I want to be a financial advisor at Payne Weber.

Speaker 33 And they took me seriously. And the CEO of Payne Weber at the time, a guy named Joe Grando,

Speaker 33 never went to college. So they did not have a policy that they required a college degree.

Speaker 2 Do you think somehow today that the college path has become

Speaker 14 antithetical to a lot of the precepts that you're writing about here?

Speaker 35 Yes.

Speaker 21 How did that happen?

Speaker 2 Because it surely wasn't the case.

Speaker 2 From the beginning, when you look at the greatest schools in the country and go back to their founding charters, there's so much of the virtue that's in this book is espoused in those documents, how they lose their way.

Speaker 33 It's complicated. I think some people have differing opinions on this.
My view is pretty much in line with where a lot of things are.

Speaker 36 That's it. Look at this.

Speaker 28 That's you, Alex Keaton.

Speaker 33 Alex P. Keaton.
And I would say, by the way, that the tie and the sweater choice even then were really spot-on. I think it still works today.

Speaker 3 Well, you were either utterly brave or totally indifferent.

Speaker 33 Well, what it was is I was made fun of by my friends, but I didn't know I was. You know, I didn't realize that they were, I was not in on the joke.
Right. Right, right, right.

Speaker 33 The colleges stopped being a place to teach people how to live well

Speaker 33 and became sources of indoctrination. And then ultimately, if people are just being very realistic and honest, they're a place for people to go party.

Speaker 33 That's what they are.

Speaker 33 So when I get someone who comes and says, here's the college degree, I start off with the precept of what they're putting in front of me is proof that they went and drank a lot for four years.

Speaker 33 So it isn't really impressing me very much.

Speaker 31 Even if they were good at it, you're not that impressed.

Speaker 33 And again, they must have survived it and maybe didn't get arrested and so forth. That's something.
Yeah, I don't generally assume it gave them a leg up versus others.

Speaker 33 But this is a big Wall Street thing, too. There's sort of an aristocratic side of Wall Street, and then there's a real hustler side, like the hedge fund community.

Speaker 33 A lot of listeners, I don't know, but there's only two types.

Speaker 33 There's people like Steve Cohen owns the the New York Mets now, grew up dirt poor Brooklyn, just chip on his shoulder, resentful guy, one of the most brilliant traders who ever lived.

Speaker 33 There's a lot of hedge funders like him.

Speaker 33 Then there's the guys whose dad went Harvard MBA, the grandpa went Harvard MBA. They were private school all throughout.

Speaker 33 And then they're brilliant, but now they're kind of following in that footsteps of three generations of Upper East Side.

Speaker 33 I don't have a judgment on either one of them, but it's two different socio-economic stratas. And they can both lead, you can be very competitive and successful and whatnot.

Speaker 27 Well, where did college lose its way?

Speaker 33 I think that

Speaker 33 with the student loan programs, it became something where they took literally everybody ought to go and anything that is for everyone is no longer as special as it was supposed to previously be.

Speaker 33 Right.

Speaker 33 But then what they did by subsidizing is they gave free reign to college administrators to charge whatever the hell they wanted. And so there's no delineation anymore.

Speaker 33 How does Oregon State compete with Washington State when they can both get away with charging $60,000 a year?

Speaker 33 And I'm not saying anything negative about the school, but nobody believes it's Harvard, either name-brand or academic rigor.

Speaker 33 So they compete over who has a bigger hot tub in the dormitories and things like this.

Speaker 33 Where previously a certain professor of a certain gravitas, they say, oh, Princeton has this new new guy who is a research professor.

Speaker 33 It was really based on what you wanted to study and who you wanted to be. And it was very

Speaker 33 meritocratic. That whole meritocracy notion went out the window.
But I don't think this happened quickly. I think it happened over a few decades.

Speaker 2 Do you think business perpetuated it, enabled it?

Speaker 33 I do, but out of laziness. Because it became a filtering mechanism.

Speaker 33 If Morgan Stanley needs to hire six new investment bankers and they get 2,000 applicants, they can either hire someone to go through and really filter and do due diligence on 2,000 people, 1,994 of which are not going to get hired, or they can just say throw out all the piles that don't say Harvard, Columbia, Morton, which is basically what they do.

Speaker 33 They just use it as a filtering mechanism. So it's lazy.

Speaker 35 How do you filter?

Speaker 33 Who are you looking for? We want PSDs.

Speaker 33 It's the most important degree anyone can have.

Speaker 36 Tell me.

Speaker 33 Poor, smart, and desperate.

Speaker 16 Jack sat down, Chuck.

Speaker 33 If they come in already comfortable, they're not hungry. They don't mind if a client loses.
They can treat a client badly because if they lose a client, they don't care.

Speaker 33 You want people who are skin in the game. And, you know, the poor part, you don't want to stay poor, but you want people to appreciate a dollar, appreciate ambition and aspiration.

Speaker 33 They got to be smart. You need to have aptitude.
But then desperate, like it's part of the human condition.

Speaker 18 Do you really?

Speaker 5 I mean,

Speaker 37 that's such a great turn of phrase.

Speaker 14 I would put it on a card or a t-shirt or a hat or something. You could sell PSD hats all day long.

Speaker 15 But if you had to choose between

Speaker 37 desperation and initiative, what would you favor?

Speaker 33 Well, I would favor initiative, but it's more my observation that oftentimes initiative comes from desperation.

Speaker 36 Well, that's a good answer.

Speaker 33 And that was the case for me. And so we tend to do projection when we hire.
You tend to hire people that you think are going to be like you a little bit.

Speaker 9 What's the difference between

Speaker 14 initiative and ambition?

Speaker 33 Well, I think ambition is the desire to achieve something. Initiative is the action you'll take to go about achieving it.

Speaker 29 Excellent answer.

Speaker 2 Are you familiar with Albert Hubbard?

Speaker 33 Albert Hubbard is...

Speaker 2 Elbert, E-L-B-E-R-T. He was a

Speaker 1 kind of a hippie back in the late 1890s living in New England. He had a furniture company.

Speaker 8 He wrote an essay that

Speaker 2 for a time was more widely distributed than the Bible.

Speaker 7 It was massively popular over 100 years ago.

Speaker 14 It was called A Message to Garcia.

Speaker 42 Does this ring any bells?

Speaker 41 Well, you can thank me later.

Speaker 2 But when you read it,

Speaker 27 it's a rant

Speaker 8 on the erosion of work ethic and initiative and a kind of shameless plea at the time for some sympathy for the entrepreneur and the small businessman.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 16 it was awfully controversial, not nearly as controversial as it is today.

Speaker 1 But Garcia was a commander living in the hills of Cuba in the Spanish-American War, and McKinley was desperate to get a message to Garcia involving U.S.

Speaker 20 involvement.

Speaker 5 And so he gave the message to a lieutenant called Rowan.

Speaker 1 The whole essay is about what Rowan doesn't do.

Speaker 10 He takes the message and he puts it in his oilskin leather jacket and says, all right.

Speaker 14 And six weeks later, the message is delivered.

Speaker 8 The story is not about

Speaker 2 hiking through this incredible wilderness to get there and the treacherous sea voyage to get there and all of the fighting that happened along the way.

Speaker 8 It's about the fact that Rowan didn't say to McKinley, where is he?

Speaker 17 Well, how am I going to do it?

Speaker 2 Will you get me a boat?

Speaker 1 How much time do I have?

Speaker 20 What's the pay like?

Speaker 5 It just took the message and got it to Garcia.

Speaker 39 So, this old essay that I know you're going to love, Will will love it too, give him my regards.

Speaker 2 But it's really a rumination on your book.

Speaker 3 What happens if that level of initiative in a good soldier, a good worker, a good employer

Speaker 18 evaporates?

Speaker 2 What are we left with? And the answer, tragically, is something that our friend Nick has written about and something you've quoted.

Speaker 33 Well, and it's something that I think even those who are employed now, employers are dealing with oftentimes a heavily involved.

Speaker 33 We still have about a 96% employment rate as defined, those who have jobs divided by the people who want them.

Speaker 33 So it's a very high employment rate, but there is a lot of people within that labor pool that don't have that initiative.

Speaker 33 They will go do the things you tell them that you spell out all the way through. But in terms of problem solvers,

Speaker 33 the sort of

Speaker 33 yes, I can attitude people, that's not at 96%.

Speaker 33 Right. It's at a much smaller percentage.
And that's interesting when people talk about the impact AI will will have on the workforce. And I'm a huge contrarian on this subject.

Speaker 33 I simply do not accept the idea that AI is going to wreak havoc on humanity and our ability to employ people. And one of the reasons is this very subject.

Speaker 33 I believe that there's a premium employers will pay for problem solvers. Or yeah, people of virtue, but also people with initiative.
And that ability, there's a personality type.

Speaker 33 You hire two capable people, but one of them needs you to spell out what to do. And they need to ask ask 18 questions along their way to doing it.

Speaker 33 And then there's someone who just says, I might even make a mistake. I'm going to run with this.
That's what people want. No computer.
You're not going to get that.

Speaker 33 Never going to get that from a robot.

Speaker 25 Never going to happen.

Speaker 2 How are we going to reintroduce it? I mean, if I'm on a mission to reinvigorate the trades, you seem to be on a mission to reinvigorate work ethic and initiative.

Speaker 1 I mean...

Speaker 33 These are one and the same causes.

Speaker 14 How do we do it tangibly?

Speaker 33 Well, I would argue that a lot of the stuff I'm doing, the focus of my book doesn't get into we need more people in the trades and it doesn't get into we need more people on Wall Street.

Speaker 33 It gets into we need more people to love work and appreciate work and want to pursue the good life that comes from work.

Speaker 33 And so I'm pretty agnostic about their career path, but it has just as much utility in blue collar as it does white collar.

Speaker 33 And it even suggests that, you know, you're talking about the telemarketing job. In New York City, I meet people who have made it in Broadway.
They say, what was the happiest time of their life?

Speaker 33 And they talk about when they were a bus boy at the diner, but they didn't feel that way at the time, but they feel it now.

Speaker 33 So, I think there's a sort of journey to this whole thing that we have to get people to better appreciate. It also gives you a lot of hope in those low periods.

Speaker 33 If you think, like, this is what I face tomorrow, it seems kind of you know, dead end.

Speaker 33 But if you look at it from a longer timeline, it gives you this hope that you're gonna be on the other side of something.

Speaker 33 But I would argue that what you're working towards so tirelessly and successfully in reinvigorating the trades, it does require a point of view that

Speaker 33 we first have to appreciate work itself as a source of dignity and value and purpose.

Speaker 2 I've told the story before on here, so I won't tell it now, but I spoke at a place called the Grove years ago in the woods with a lot of very, very powerful, famous men in attendance.

Speaker 2 And I'll never forget.

Speaker 2 The most unforgettable part of the whole thing wasn't my speech, which I thought was better than average, and the fact that they appeared to be hanging on every word, which is gratifying.

Speaker 4 It was the fact that they stuck around to tell me about their first job.

Speaker 2 Usher in a theater, telemarketer, landscaping, down the list.

Speaker 19 And

Speaker 3 these are governors.

Speaker 22 These are captains of industry, real industrialists, many of whom were in their 80s.

Speaker 2 And they all just wanted a moment to tell me

Speaker 2 about the time that you just described before they made it on Broadway and how those moments loomed ever larger in their lives with every passing day. And that's what makes me think you're right.

Speaker 33 The very first speaking event I did for the book when it came out

Speaker 33 was a national review event in New York City. And Andy Puzner, who had been the CEO at Carls Jr.
and was Trump's nominee for labor secretary, there was a Treasury Department economist.

Speaker 33 And anyways, there were three muckety-mucks on stage that were accomplished, educated, successful, wealthy. All three, their first job was an ice cream shop in high school.

Speaker 33 And I remember thinking, like, okay, well, this sounds like a pretty good way to start things off then.

Speaker 33 I mean, that's a, if it's one out of three, that's one thing, but three out of three of these luminaries and they were at Baskin-Robbins. But it was the same thing.

Speaker 33 Even now, you know, 50 isn't that old, but I didn't have to like go back and check the scrapbooks to remember what I had done at age 12, 15, 16, 18.

Speaker 33 All those jobs I had had, kind of, I remember them like they were yesterday. I remember the manager's names.
I remember the hourly wage. And I remember saying, why do I got to listen to this boss?

Speaker 33 He doesn't know what he's talking about. And the lesson I learned from sometimes in life, you have to listen to a supervisor that you think you know more than.
And getting along with a coworker.

Speaker 33 And what it was like when you came on time and someone else didn't and you both got paid the same. And how do you deal with the seeming unfairnesses of life?

Speaker 33 Those are lessons that I was going to learn with more zeros and commas attached to them 20 years later, but I learned them first.

Speaker 31 Same lesson.

Speaker 33 I had to learn them first at the movie theater.

Speaker 36 Yeah.

Speaker 5 Yeah, the lessons don't change, only the stakes.

Speaker 41 It's funny, Chuck, we were...

Speaker 2 Do you remember what your paycheck was at United Artists? I think mine was $2.70.

Speaker 4 It was minimum wage in 1980.

Speaker 2 Before it was telemarketing, we were ushers, too, which is why that chapter jumped out.

Speaker 33 Yeah, I got $4.25 an hour for opening night of Pretty Woman and Die Hard 2 and Dick Tracy. And so

Speaker 33 it looks like the wage inflation was pretty good from when you started off to what I came in.

Speaker 3 Well, we were Raiders of the Lost Ark, Prince of the City.

Speaker 11 The Shining. The Shining.

Speaker 33 You had better movies than I did, though.

Speaker 25 We did have better movies.

Speaker 22 But you know what else we had, man?

Speaker 1 It was a, and this is another thing about jobs. And I'll land the plane now.
I know you got to go.

Speaker 3 But it's just this idea that were you really a movie usher

Speaker 37 or were you an ambassador for whatever that brand was?

Speaker 20 Who were you working for?

Speaker 33 It was Edwards. Edwards.
Big down in Orange King. Big.

Speaker 7 So you probably had a blazer.

Speaker 28 You probably had the Edwards logo on.

Speaker 31 Oh, yeah.

Speaker 22 So you're an emissary, you know.

Speaker 2 For us, it was United Artists.

Speaker 21 And then when you weren't an usher, maybe you were a cashier.

Speaker 13 Or maybe you're working concessions.

Speaker 2 Or maybe you got called up to the big show and learned how to run the projectors.

Speaker 14 And like all of these other attachments, right, this whole way leads on to way thing, it's so important.

Speaker 2 It's so connected. And I think it's another reason why work gets a bad rap is that we might just go, oh, telemarketer, oh, usher, oh, welder, steam.

Speaker 18 It's like, that's not how it works at all, is it?

Speaker 31 It's all just part of a quilt.

Speaker 33 Part of an overall ecosystem. And

Speaker 33 a market economy does a terrible job at promoting itself.

Speaker 33 But what you're describing is the sort of invisible hand idea, a bunch of things working together to make social cooperation possible, to make a prosperous life possible.

Speaker 33 And yet, we can just focus on one element of it and think it's dead end, but not see the whole kilt. And when you look at it in that bigger picture, yeah, at a job, you generally get a chance to see.

Speaker 33 It's funny, I never did do the projector, but I remember getting to go upstairs and see the guys. And what we knew is they were union and they made more.

Speaker 33 And it's funny is I remember thinking like that guy is just a stud. Yeah.
You know, like, I'm sure he made something seven, eight times what we did.

Speaker 33 And he was older and they had good-looking girls around and stuff. And then you were just like, this is incredible.
But it was like a whole different like. side of the business.

Speaker 33 And then there's the concessions and different things. But you got a chance to see a whole kind of microcosm of human activity in the marketplace.

Speaker 24 Adam Smith or Henry Hazlitt?

Speaker 33 Well, both. You know, you can't get to Hazlitt without Smith.
So you have to build. You got to stand on the shoulders of giants.

Speaker 2 So for my listeners, somebody who just really didn't realize until the end of the year.

Speaker 33 They're not going to read Smith.

Speaker 33 Hazlitt's so easy to read.

Speaker 31 He's so wonderful.

Speaker 1 Economics in One Lesson.

Speaker 33 Economics in One Lesson. Yeah.
Greatest popularization of market principles ever written.

Speaker 28 That's where I think I first read the broken windows.

Speaker 33 Yeah. And so most people now will say Hazlitt's broken window fallacy because they don't know Frederick Bastiat

Speaker 33 wrote it over 100 years earlier because Hazlitt was so good at popularizing it. Yeah.
Yeah.

Speaker 35 Well, look, I mean, with time,

Speaker 21 maybe full-time work and the meaning of life will be right on top of Econ 101.

Speaker 28 We'll see.

Speaker 10 It's important, and I so appreciate the fact that you wrote it and squeezed me in between all your many appearances over there on Fox Business.

Speaker 33 I really appreciate you having me. I love the conversation.

Speaker 7 Where do people go to get it? Is it the obvious stuff?

Speaker 33 Yeah, obvious, obviously, Amazon and all that. But we have a website for the book, fulltimebook.com.
Fulltimebook.com. It's got video clips and articles and reviews and things.

Speaker 33 And then they can click through to Amazon or Barnes Noble there.

Speaker 21 Fantastic. Fulltimebook.com.
Pick up a copy.

Speaker 25 It's awesome.

Speaker 41 And so are you. Thanks for the time.

Speaker 13 Thanks so much.

Speaker 27 This episode is over now.

Speaker 27 I hope it was worthwhile.

Speaker 26 Sorry it went on so long, but if it made you smile,

Speaker 38 then share your satisfaction in the way that people do

Speaker 38 take some time

Speaker 32 to go all alive

Speaker 32 and leave a

Speaker 32 review

Speaker 26 I hate to ask, I hate to beg, I hate to be a nudge. But in this world, the advertisers really like to judge.
You don't need to write a bunch, just a line or two.

Speaker 26 All you've got to do is leave a quick five-star review.

Speaker 38 Number four.

Speaker 26 All you've got to do is leave a quick five-star review.

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All you've got to do is leave a quick

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Speaker 32 video.

Speaker 38 Thank you.

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