478: Nicholas Eberstadt—The New Misery

Numbers don't lie—but they can obscure significant information. In this episode, Mike sits down with economist, demographer, and Harvard-educated brainiac Nicholas Eberstadt to explore a different kind of arithmetic—one that measures not just how many Americans we have, but how we're actually living. In his latest book, America's Human Arithmetic, Nick digs into three uncomfortable truths: first, the steady decline in prime-age labor force participation that persists even in strong economies. Second, the growing imbalance between those producing and those receiving—an economic equation increasingly tilted by entitlements and transfer payments. And third, a demographic slowdown marked by falling fertility and an aging population, reshaping the country's long-term trajectory in ways few are prepared for. Add those together and you get a new misery. This conversation is about the kind of math that doesn't stay on paper—the kind that shapes a nation's future whether we're paying attention or not.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:04Mike Rowe?

  Mike Rowe here with another episode of The Way I Heard It. And I'm excited to tell you today, and I don't want to overstate it Chuck, but I think today's guest might be, uh, he might be the smartest guy we've ever had on the podcast.

• 0:19Speaker 01

  Well, listen, if degrees mean anything, he's got more of them. I mean, it took you about 20 minutes to read through his accolades, or at least his education, I should say. There's a ton of them there.

• 0:29Mike Rowe?

  Yeah, he's been there and done it through the Ivy League, but you know something? It didn't spoil him.

• 0:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, right.

• 0:34Mike Rowe?

  It didn't wreck him.

• 0:35Speaker 01

  Despite that, he's still smart. Yeah.

• 0:38Mike Rowe?

  Yeah, his name is Nick Eberstadt. He has been with the American Enterprise Institute now for a while. He's kind of an economist, I mean, he is an economist. He usually introduces himself as a demographer, but he's also a public policy scholar. And he's kind of famous in that weird little world that guys like this live in for deep research into, you know, the kind of topics that you and your buddies no doubt discuss down at the corner bar. Population dynamics, economic and social performance, the health of American society and institutions. He's got all the awards and all of the initials behind his name that you would expect and

• 1:20Mike Rowe?

  hope to find in an expert, but more importantly, he just loves what he does and he's good at it. And I admire him a lot, in part because he was the first genuine expert to validate all my smack after all those years of Dirty Jobs talking about. I mean, because what do I know? I mean, anecdotally, I could see things happening and I heard lots of stories about how hard it was for people that owned trade-based businesses to recruit. And I heard so many of those stories that I started to think, look, this can't be... A coincidence, but I don't, you know, I don't have any real facts. I don't have any real research.

• 2:04Speaker 01

  And then Nick Everstack comes along and tells you that there are seven million men who are sitting on their doofuses just looking at screens.

• 2:11Mike Rowe?

  And so much more. Men Without Work was the book that I first read back in 2015. And we invited him on a podcast as soon as we had this interview format set up.

• 2:24Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:24Mike Rowe?

  The book was redone during the lockdowns because everything he prophesied in the original came true.

• 2:30Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:31Mike Rowe?

  So they republished it with a big fat foreword, bringing everybody up to date. And now he's written a new one. It's called America's Human Arithmetic, which is, you know, I don't know if they focus group the title of these things or not.

• 2:46Speaker 01

  Studies show that the word arithmetic.

• 2:48Mike Rowe?

  The books just fly off the shelves. But you have to take it in its context. Now, we're calling the episode, The New Misery, because that's the thread.

• 2:58Speaker 01

  Yes, right.

• 2:58Mike Rowe?

  That stitches all of these essays together. But I don't want to spoil it or tell you too much, but I, I will say that at the heart of his numerical analysis of all that ails us is the population collapse.

• 3:13Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 3:15Mike Rowe?

  Which is so interesting.

• 3:16Speaker 01

  Which is real and worldwide.

• 3:18Mike Rowe?

  It's real and it's worldwide, but it's also completely at odds with the narrative that you and I grew up with when we were teenagers.

• 3:26Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:27Mike Rowe?

  And Paul Ehrlich's book, The Population Bomb, was being quoted everywhere.

• 3:32Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 3:32Mike Rowe?

  That book was accepted as dogma.

• 3:36Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 3:36Mike Rowe?

  And really, like so many people, so many average people, but also so many informed intellectual academics took this book at face value and concluded that our planet would be overrun. With humans.

• 3:53Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:53Mike Rowe?

  Like completely overrun.

• 3:55Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:55Mike Rowe?

  Like in the same way, okay, you know, the climate's gonna completely cause our destruction in 12 years. It was an Armageddon type prediction.

• 4:06Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 4:07Mike Rowe?

  That was fatally flawed and dead wrong.

• 4:11Speaker 01

  And while people have come around, you know, like Bill Gates recently and the idea that it's not, you know, human caused climate change is not gonna be the end of the world for us.

• 4:22Mike Rowe?

  Not by any stretch.

• 4:23Speaker 01

  But there are still smart people like Bill Maher, who is a smart guy.

• 4:27Mike Rowe?

  Yeah, he's smart.

• 4:27Speaker 01

  Who is still clinging to this idea, there's just too many damn people on the planet.

• 4:32Mike Rowe?

  Yeah. Ehrlich's book infected a generation.

• 4:37Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 4:37Mike Rowe?

  And that infection, like a virus, spread into the next generation.

• 4:40Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 4:41Mike Rowe?

  And so today, when guys like Elon Musk, who are way more famous than Nick Eberstadt.

• 4:46Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 4:46Mike Rowe?

  Start talking about the greatest calamity facing the species.

• 4:50Speaker 01

  Right.

• 4:50Mike Rowe?

  Is a global population collapse, they go, oh, that Elon, he's so crazy. He's just crazy, you know? But of course, he's not. And neither is Nick Eberstadt.

• 5:00Speaker 01

  Right.

• 5:01Mike Rowe?

  These numbers are real. Your politics don't matter. Your opinions don't matter. And I'm sorry to say, your feelings don't matter to numbers. Math doesn't care. Arithmetic doesn't care. But Nick cares very much about humanity. That's the fun of Nick, right? He's a real caring human with four wonderful kids. And he's had a big life and he wants to help his species by setting us straight.

• 5:29Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 5:29Mike Rowe?

  And debunking a lot of BS. His book does it. Our conversation is fun, measured in the way you would expect a conversation with economists to be.

• 5:41Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 5:42Mike Rowe?

  But really, really enlightening. And in spite of the title, The New Misery, there's plenty of optimism in this. If you listen real close, which I hope you'll do right after this.

• 6:00Mike Rowe?

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• 6:42Mike Rowe?

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• 7:25Mike Rowe?

  So do you keep track of the number of books you've written at this point? No.

• 7:31Speaker 02

  I think the first digits are two. I mean, it depends what you call a book.

• 7:35Mike Rowe?

  Well, I'm calling America's Human Arithmetic a book, because, you know, it's got pages, it's got covers, it has a lot of end notes, it's got footnotes, it has many essays that are both thought-provoking and terrifying. In fact, Nick, I doubt your publisher would be on board with this, but I think you may have written a great American horror story.

• 8:00Speaker 02

  Whatever could you mean?

• 8:01Mike Rowe?

  Well, I'll just repeat the compliment I hope I paid you when you walked in here. I'm halfway through this one. I've read every word of Men Without Work. And my first thought upon finally meeting you in person is to say it's always gratifying to meet people who A. appear to be doing precisely what they were put on the planet to do, and B. appear to be loving doing it. Am I overstating things?

• 8:30Speaker 02

  Well, I love trying to seek truth in my own way, even if the truth is a little tawdry and slightly alarming or depressing every now and then.

• 8:43Mike Rowe?

  Tawdry, alarming, and depressing. Chuck, I think we have our title with Nick Everest that.

• 8:48Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 8:48Mike Rowe?

  You've got your guy. No, look, man, it's, um, I'll admit it. At a glance, the first time I saw you interviewed, the first time I looked over your curriculum via T A, you know, my eyes glazed a little bit. You kind of look like an economist. You kind of geek out.

• 9:04Speaker 02

  Wait a minute.

• 9:04Mike Rowe?

  I'm just, I'm just saying.

• 9:05Speaker 02

  You're on the other side of the table.

• 9:06Mike Rowe?

  Well, I, I mean, America's human arithmetic. Honey, get in here. He's written another one, okay? I mean, it doesn't, it's not, uh, nothing you've done feels as though it's been done for any purpose other than enlightenment. You just don't seem to give two shakes about the marketing, or the advertising, or the positioning. It's just the truth. It's just numbers. And the, the evidence you present not only demands a verdict, it, it just feels kind of undeniable. So, we can start wherever you, wherever you'd like, but I gotta tell you, man, this whole population thing, I mean.

• 9:49Speaker 02

  Start there.

• 9:50Mike Rowe?

  Let's start there. Because at base, you're a demographer, right?

• 9:54Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 9:55Mike Rowe?

  What does, what does that mean?

• 9:58Speaker 02

  That's a very good question. I guess it means that you kind of like, uh, go around with a clicker.

• 10:06Speaker 02

  Something like that. Yeah, I mean, it's an excuse for asking all sorts of questions that you want to ask about people and how they live and the patterns of life and how many of them there are and marriage, birth and death, all of that sort of stuff.

• 10:25Mike Rowe?

  But to what end? I mean, surely your innate curiosity isn't enough to justify a life's work of just saying, "Yeah, what's under the rock?" Or, "How does that work?" There must be a point.

• 10:37Speaker 02

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

• 11:15Mike Rowe?

  Paul Ehrlich.

• 11:16Speaker 02

  Paul Ehrlich.

• 11:18Mike Rowe?

  I first saw him on The Tonight Show. Johnny Carson had him on like over a dozen times. He was a huge fan. And that was a big book.

• 11:29Speaker 02

  Yeah, it was. And he said that the race to feed humanity was over and then the 1970s, hundreds of millions of people would die, no matter what crash programs we started and so forth and so on. More or less, everything that he predicted was wrong. And the reason that more or less everything he predicted was wrong is that he was an expert in the wrong thing. He was an expert on the population biology of insects. And if we were insects, this would have happened. It would have been very, very bad 1970s and thereafter. But what makes demography so interesting to me is that we're the unique species.

• 12:13Speaker 02

  We're the unique adaptable species with this fantastic ingenuity.

• 12:19Mike Rowe?

  The sui generis.

• 12:20Speaker 02

  Yes, so we can, unlike the fruit flies or whatever Professor Erlich studied, we can change our lifespans, we can change the number of progeny we have, we can change the resource base that we live on. And even though the world has more than doubled the number of people since he wrote that book, poverty as a percentage of humanity has crashed. People are living longer than ever before. They're better educated than ever before. They're richer than ever before. The nutritional problem that the world faces now is overeating.

• 13:02Mike Rowe?

  So we got the abundance thing down.

• 13:04Speaker 02

  We cracked the abundance thing, yeah, exactly.

• 13:06Mike Rowe?

  But at what cost?

• 13:07Speaker 02

  Well, okay, so now we've made this, we figured out how to make a material garden of Eden. And now the question is whether we want to live in it, right? And part of the verdict that we seem to be seeing now is that there's a big flight from childbearing, flight from marriage, going on not just in rich countries, but it's happening in a lot of lower income countries as well. That was the really surprising part to me.

• 13:37Mike Rowe?

  This, I believe, this will be the great eye opener, I predict, in the next hour and a half or however long we talk. Because everybody who I've talked to your book about, I mean, you've always talked about this, but within the last year, you wrote an article that got passed around a lot. Who published that?

• 13:57Speaker 02

  In Foreign Affairs magazine, maybe?

• 13:58Mike Rowe?

  Foreign Affairs, right. And in it, we learn all sorts of things, not just about China, which is alarming, but Myanmar and India and places where I just assumed the population was continuing to explode. But you're saying it's really not exploding anywhere, really?

• 14:21Speaker 02

  It's still growing pretty briskly in Sub-Saharan Africa. But if you take Sub-Saharan Africa out of the picture, Mike, it looks like all of the rest of the world, and you're averaging in Bangladesh and Finland and Yemen and Sweden, all the rest of the world at the moment is about 10 or 15% below the level that you'd need to have a stable population over time.

• 14:49Mike Rowe?

  How much time?

• 14:51Speaker 02

  One generation to the next. So in other words, it may already be the case. Our numbers aren't good enough to, you know, we don't have enough clickers all around the world, but if we had all of these clickers going all around the world to count people well enough, the whole species, it's possible that we've already gone through the point into below-replacement fertility patterns. It may be that we've already crossed the threshold to where humanity isn't babying up enough to continue the total numbers that we have, to sustain the numbers that we have.

• 15:32Mike Rowe?

  Did you say babying up?

• 15:34Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 15:35Mike Rowe?

  That's a science term now?

• 15:36Speaker 02

  The term of art.

• 15:37Mike Rowe?

  I see, okay. I mean, well, it's like below-replacement theory.

• 15:41Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 15:43Mike Rowe?

  Is that something that can be fixed? I mean, it sounds awfully dire.

• 15:46Speaker 02

  Well, I mean...

• 15:49Speaker 02

  If people decide they want to have more children, they can have more children. If they decide they don't want to have more children, they won't have more children. I mean, it's not quite the same thing as life expectancy. I mean, I kind of always like life expectancy for my friends to be going up, but I don't think that I have the answer as to how many babies my friends should have. That's something that parents know a lot more about than outsiders or governments or anything like that.

• 16:16Mike Rowe?

  Of course. But I want to ask what's causing it, unless you've just answered it by simply saying "personal choice," but it just feels, I mean, is it like a hive mentality? Like, what would cause the populations of countries that are so disparate to plummet in such lockstep?

• 16:39Speaker 02

  It's a really interesting question. I mean, it may be the most important question today.

• 16:43Mike Rowe?

  Yeah, Chuck, make a note.

• 16:44Speaker 02

  And...

• 16:45Mike Rowe?

  Got it.

• 16:46Speaker 02

  Okay. So let's figure this out by the end of the show. But it's happening in so many different places that have such different histories and cultures and education and ways of looking at the world that if you... I don't have Einstein's unified field theory for this. But it's just going on in a lot of different places. And it seems like there may be a lot of different things that are moving the dial in different places. What we'd need to answer this question, I think, would be a better quality of, a better

• 17:31Speaker 02

  class of anthropologist than we have today, or maybe a better class of journalist, because part of the secret is hiding in plain sight. Be going out and going to 100 or 1,000 different places around the world and asking people, "What's up?" We do not have that, even with the most, maybe the most important question that might be answerable today.

• 17:55Mike Rowe?

  Being "what's up"?

• 17:56Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 18:02Mike Rowe?

  Here's a crazy idea. What if there was an academy out there that paid students to learn instead of the other way around? Specifically, men and women who want to work in the skilled trades. And what if this academy not only paid for your training, but also covered all the expenses associated with your training, like travel and food and lodging? And finally, what if this academy guaranteed you a job at the end of the training period? Well, that's exactly what's happening at America's Workforce Academy by Meta. This is a five-week, highly immersive, pre-apprenticeship program that gets you all the necessary certifications you'll need to start a career in the skilled trades immediately.

• 18:44Mike Rowe?

  I'm talking about AI-proof, six-figure jobs, helping to build out the new infrastructure that our economy is depending on. Electricians, plumbers, HVAC techs, welders, fiber optic technicians, these jobs, they are all in demand like never before. And again, every graduate of America's Workforce Academy is guaranteed a job on a Meta website. I first announced this program a few months ago, and I have been watching the response ever since. It's extraordinary. This is a nationwide, unprecedented fast track to a long-term career in a skilled trade. If you, or your spouse, or your kid, or your grandkid are looking for a straight path

• 19:27Mike Rowe?

  into a career with no cost at all, check out the opportunities for yourself at meta.com/america'sworkforceacademy. That's meta.com/america'sworkforceacademy. I mean, I like the way you distill it. I mean, it's pretty simple. Like, if I'm gonna go all the way to Bangladesh, I'm gonna hit 'em with... You might want to say it in Bengali there, but... At a glance, I mean, it seems like China's population was so out of control, they instituted this one-child policy, which I don't remember anybody criticizing at the time, other than, you know, for geopolitical reasons, it seemed awfully heavy-handed.

• 20:11Mike Rowe?

  But I don't remember anybody thinking, "Hold on a second there, that math is gonna come back to bite your ass," right? I don't remember hearing that. But at least I can understand, okay, they had to do something, seemingly...

• 20:26Mike Rowe?

  Sweeping. Meanwhile, over here, we've got the abundance thing going on. So maybe, you know, we're just getting more fluent and more selfish, leading more selfish lives, I guess, maybe. But none of it is, seems universally applicable. I'm still stuck on that.

• 20:41Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 20:42Mike Rowe?

  And it's odd.

• 20:44Speaker 02

  Part of it, I think, is that people all around the world, making this up. I can't prove it. I kind of guessed this maybe. They're realizing that they don't have to live the way their parents lived. Part of it is that this very contagious intellectual virus of self-actualization and convenience is almost irresistible any place that it comes. There are a lot of very wonderful things about children, but one of them isn't that they're convenient, right?

• 21:29Speaker 02

  So if you're moving towards a world where almost everybody has an iPhone, and I think that we are moving towards that world, and almost everybody is looking into that rather imperfect narcissist's mirror and thinking about the maybe better life, actually much inferior life, but the supposedly better life that's on the other side of this thing. There's not as much compelling reason, or maybe even purpose, to having the sorts of larger families, raising the sorts of larger families, that used to be just part of the

• 22:13Speaker 02

  natural way of things.

• 22:15Mike Rowe?

  Do you think people have lost a... I mean, I get the convenience thing, but like, have we lost a sense of optimism? Do we look around and see, as P.J. O'Rourke called it, all the trouble in the world? Right? Like, we see the iPhone, and we see the fact that, you know what? That's a lie. It's not really a phone. I mean, it is a phone, but as Jonathan Haidt has said, it's also an arcade and a casino and an endless repository of all the porn ever produced or imagined.

• 22:47Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 22:48Mike Rowe?

  It also fits in our pocket. We gave it to our kids, and we told them to take it to school, right? So, like, we see that.

• 22:55Speaker 02

  What could go wrong?

• 22:55Mike Rowe?

  What could go wrong? We look at the immigration thing. We look at AI, and we look at what appears to be the gradual, talk about replacement theory, like, in real time. So, we see our own replacements coming at us, and robots, and new levels of intelligence. And it, to your earlier point, that's happening even faster than the collapse seems to be happening. So, are people just looking at all that and going, yeah, what am I bringing this kid into the world? What kind of world am I bringing this kid into?

• 23:28Speaker 02

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

• 24:12Speaker 02

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

• 24:37Mike Rowe?

  Throughout your book is this recurring leitmotif, I'll call it. It's the new misery.

• 24:44Speaker 02

  The new misery.

• 24:44Mike Rowe?

  Yeah. I mean, not the same as the old misery. There's a new, like, what is?

• 24:49Speaker 02

  New Gideon Town?

• 24:50Mike Rowe?

  Yeah. Meet the new misery. Same as the old misery.

• 24:54Speaker 02

  Well, in the bad old days that we sometimes idealize, there was an enormous amount of grinding poverty. And a lot of the misery of the 19th century, the depression.

• 25:12Mike Rowe?

  The Dust Bowl.

• 25:13Speaker 02

  Dust Bowl, was caused by lack of wherewithal. People didn't have enough work. They didn't have enough income. They didn't have enough food. They didn't have enough everything to kind of lead a decent life. We've cracked the formula for abundance. We're the richest society that's ever existed. We're sloshing in money. And yet, at the same time, you look all around and you see all of this unhappiness and all

• 25:51Speaker 02

  of this degradation that too many people are trapped in, are caught up in. And so it's like, there's a difference between poverty and misery. And that would have been obvious maybe to a 12-year-old kid in Charles Dickens's London, but it's kind of eluded our technocrats and experts for too much of our time right now.

• 26:21Mike Rowe?

  You used a phrase in Men Without Work that stuck with me. I quote it a lot. I think it was referring to unemployment numbers. And you talk about them as an artifact of the Great Depression. And if I took your meaning right, you were saying that there was a time when unemployment was the proximate cause of too few jobs. And therefore, the creation of jobs would inexorably lead to the elimination of, or at least the degradation of, unemployment. It is a very simple equation. That no longer applies at all. The number of available jobs has seemingly very little to do with the number of people who are unemployed.

• 27:06Mike Rowe?

  And in the same way, that misery versus poverty thing, like, the rules changed within a generation, it seemed. Like, the rules for happiness, or contentment, or satisfaction, or whatever the right expression is. But you know where I'm going with this. It's men without work. It's men who have become disconnected. Not just men, obviously, but whatever's going on on a generational scale seems to be happening because we didn't... The species didn't get the memo. You know, we didn't, like, the rules changed. And we're just still, like, trying to read through the instruction guide. If there are 200 features on my iPhone, I use three of them.

• 27:50Mike Rowe?

  If my Word, if Microsoft Word has, you know, 50 different panels, I use two. I'm not up to speed yet. I feel like most people aren't either. And we're just flailing around, trying to find some humanity in it.

• 28:05Speaker 02

  But I don't think that most of the misery is caused by failing to catch up with the technological availability. Much of it is that people are kind of dropping out. Men in particular are dropping out. And there are a lot of men who are dropping out who have higher education as well. It's not all happening with high school... People who don't have high school diplomas. I mean, what we've seen... Developing gradually. It started so quietly that nobody really noticed this back in the 1960s.

• 28:43Speaker 02

  As we've seen, larger and larger fractions of prime age guys, not my words. This is like, the government calls guys who are 25 to 54 prime age workers because they're like in the prime of life, right? Because they're also supposed to be, or at least were in the past, you know, setting up families, raising kids. It wasn't all dollars and cents.

• 29:11Mike Rowe?

  Well, in my industry, we call them the key demographic.

• 29:13Speaker 02

  The key demographic. Good. I like that.

• 29:15Mike Rowe?

  The advertiser coveted key demographic. Yeah.

• 29:20Speaker 02

  All right. There we have it. So what was slowly but inexorably happening was this dropout from the labor force by men in this heretofore working age group. And Uncle Sam wasn't following it. The Fed wasn't following it. Wall Street wasn't really following it because they had, as you mentioned, they had these jobs numbers, this matrix that was set up at the end of the Great Depression to track the Great Depression, when it would have seemed cuckoo to think that a guy who didn't have a job wasn't going to be looking for one.

• 30:04Speaker 02

  But so the fastest demographic for men 25 to 54 since the 1960s has been the ones who are neither working nor looking for work. And so when you look at the unemployment rate, you say, hey, we're at full employment. That's wonderful, except that there are three guys who aren't looking for work for every one guy who is.

• 30:27Mike Rowe?

  Because full employment is still a reflection of the number of people that are looking for work, finding it.

• 30:34Speaker 02

  And in the labor force. If you drop out of the labor force, you're out of the picture. And so if you're unemployed, you're in the labor force. If you're not in the labor force, neither working nor looking for work, but there are three times as many of you as unemployed guys, you're missing three quarters of the problem in the country.

• 30:58Mike Rowe?

  Is there a link between?

• 31:02Mike Rowe?

  All the smart people involved in this space, missing the obviousness of that problem, and a guy like Paul Ehrlich, missing the obviousness of extrapolating insect behavior and applying it to another species. Like, where's the fault in our stars? And why are we missing the forest for the trees, it seems?

• 31:25Speaker 02

  Would we call it an empathy gap? Would we call it something like, missing the humanity that's involved there? I mean, the neo-Malthusians, like Professor Ehrlich and the population controllers in China, they just didn't kind of understand what human beings were about, and how human beings can kind of solve their own problems. That's one thing. I'd say that in our country, we have a sort of a, we now have, a ameliorative state

• 32:01Speaker 02

  that is supposed to be tasking experts to helping address and solve our social problems. Well, what if our experts don't know where to look, and don't know what's actually causing human suffering in our ranks? Then, Houston, we've got a little bit of a problem in this formula.

• 32:28Mike Rowe?

  Well, it's the old joke, the guy loses his keys, right? He's looking under the light, but he lost him by the car, but the light's better here. He's looking in the wrong place.

• 32:42Mike Rowe?

  Couple of weeks ago, on this very podcast, I talked with Brooke Rollins, our Secretary of Agriculture, about the incredibly complicated business of delivering affordable beef to our citizens without disadvantaging American ranchers. We also discussed the very controversial decision to import 300,000 metric tons of ground beef from various foreign countries, and the maddening policy that allows meatpackers to label imported meat as a product of the USA. Well... Shortly after that conversation, one of my sponsors, Good Ranchers, reported an unusually high level of interest in their product. And this is not surprising. Given a choice, most people would prefer to buy their meat

• 33:26Mike Rowe?

  from American Ranchers. And Good Ranchers is the number one company in America that delivers 100% American meat straight to your door. They partner with over 100 local farmers and ranchers to deliver pasture-raised meat with no antibiotics and no added hormones. They've got 25,000 five-star reviews on TrustViolet. 25,000, including my own. This month, when you visit GoodRanchers.com/row, you'll get a free Angus ground beef bundle with your first order. Again, that's GoodRanchers.com/row for four bonus pounds of ground beef raised right here in these United States. And that's guaranteed.

• 34:08Mike Rowe?

  Support your local ranchers by insisting on American meat delivered at GoodRanchers.com/row.

• 34:16Speaker 03

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• 34:27Mike Rowe?

  Again, it just seems so obvious. And also, when you talk about Ehrlich, you know, the thing I remember, I still have the book around somewhere. I mean, everybody had that book.

• 34:36Speaker 02

  Sure. It was a great pamphlet. I mean, it was a very powerful polemical pamphlet.

• 34:41Mike Rowe?

  It was like a dogma.

• 34:43Speaker 02

  Yeah, it was a real page turn. It was short, powerful, and wrong.

• 34:49Mike Rowe?

  Short, powerful, and wrong. But the message was delivered with certainty, and it resonated.

• 34:55Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 34:56Mike Rowe?

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

• 35:36Mike Rowe?

  And virtually every interviewer, all of his interlocutors, look at him like a cow looking at a new gate. They're like, what do you mean? How can you even say that? But he's Elon Musk, so maybe he's on to something.

• 35:50Speaker 02

  He's a contrarian who has done really, really well. Looking at, looking at problems and solving them, or asking how come things that aren't being done, things that could be done aren't being done.

• 36:03Mike Rowe?

  Really, really well? That's what you're going with? He's got, he's worth 865 billion dollars.

• 36:08Speaker 02

  Okay, that's great.

• 36:10Speaker 02

  I think that's wonderful.

• 36:10Mike Rowe?

  He's had a good run.

• 36:11Speaker 02

  No, I think that's great.

• 36:12Mike Rowe?

  And he's got, what, like 12 kids or something?

• 36:14Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, but I mean, just between you and me, I have a higher yield per woman than Elon does.

• 36:22Mike Rowe?

  That, I did not see that chapter. Just a quick sidebar. We should do something to establish your, your bona fides. I can read them quickly. Well, I mean, look, I'm only doing this because something really jumped out. Chuck went to the AI just to make sure we had everything accurate. A B magna cum laude in economics from Harvard. M, what's M S C?

• 36:47Speaker 02

  Masters of Science, maybe?

• 36:49Mike Rowe?

  Social planning for developing countries, London School of Economics.

• 36:52Speaker 02

  London School of Economics.

• 36:53Mike Rowe?

  Good career. I think Mick Jagger went there, actually.

• 36:56Speaker 02

  Not at the same time.

• 36:57Mike Rowe?

  No.

• 36:59Mike Rowe?

  M P A, Harvard Kennedy School, what's the P?

• 37:02Speaker 02

  I think public administration.

• 37:04Mike Rowe?

  P H D, we know that, political economy and government, also Harvard. Born in New York, to an intellectually distinguished family, this is my favorite part.

• 37:13Speaker 02

  Oh.

• 37:13Mike Rowe?

  Your maternal granddad was Ogden Nash?

• 37:17Speaker 02

  True story.

• 37:18Mike Rowe?

  Get out of here.

• 37:19Speaker 02

  What a great man he was. What a wonderful grandfather he was.

• 37:22Mike Rowe?

  Well, you know what? I, were you close?

• 37:25Speaker 02

  Yeah, I loved him.

• 37:27Mike Rowe?

  I'm sorry, I'm gonna totally hijack this in a different direction, but his, um, for people who don't know his work, and I'll, I'll let you sum it up, but my experience of it was just fun with the language.

• 37:40Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 37:41Mike Rowe?

  He had so much fun with the language. What, there was Joyce Kilmer's famous, I think that I shall never see a poem as lovely as a tree. He finishes it with, unless they, unless they take the billboards down.

• 37:53Speaker 02

  Unless the billboards fall, I'll never see the tree at all.

• 37:56Mike Rowe?

  I'll never see the tree at all, right?

• 37:57Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 37:58Mike Rowe?

  Yeah, so he was like a, well, I mean, like a gadfly poet?

• 38:03Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, I mean, he was, he was a college dropout, uh, couldn't finish college because he didn't have the money, who, you know, learned more about the English language than you and I and almost everybody else will ever know, and was just incredibly playful with it, and did all sorts of puns and funny poems. He was a humorist, and, and he was able to make a living off of writing humorous poems, you know, which is almost an imaginable thing nowadays to think of.

• 38:37Mike Rowe?

  I'm, it, it's not even a job anymore, demographically speaking.

• 38:41Speaker 02

  Demographically speaking.

• 38:41Mike Rowe?

  I mean, I've been through the want ads. I've looked for humorous poets. No openings.

• 38:46Speaker 02

  No, no, they've all been filled, I guess. That's why everything's so funny, right?

• 38:50Mike Rowe?

  Well, was he a fixture in your life growing up?

• 38:52Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah, yeah. We're a pretty close family on both my dad and my mom's side. And so, uh, spent summers with him and my grandmother, uh, up in, uh, up in like the 12 feet of Seacoast in New Hampshire. And, uh, he, he lived in Baltimore, and...

• 39:10Mike Rowe?

  That's kinda why I, that's where, that's where Chuck grew up too.

• 39:14Speaker 02

  And, and so, he's kind of an introvert. I mean, he was very friendly, but he was kind of an introvert. He'd sit at a table kinda like this one in the corner of the living room, and he'd be kind of like...

• 39:28Speaker 02

  It'd be all hell going on around him with all the grandkids raising noise and stuff, and he'd be just tuned out. And every, you know, so often he'd say, "I think I have one." And he'd, you know, he'd kind of like read us his drafts of his poetry. It was unbelievably cool. And we even knew that as little kids. We knew how cool that was.

• 39:48Mike Rowe?

  And how big was your family from a population standpoint?

• 39:52Speaker 02

  From a population standpoint? I had, um, I had five cousins. He had five grandchildren on his side of the family. On the other side of the family, I guess about a dozen grandkids. So I had a bunch of cousins.

• 40:10Mike Rowe?

  So the Eberstadt population is not collapsing?

• 40:14Speaker 02

  Well, um, you know, we, you always have to be vigilant.

• 40:19Mike Rowe?

  Practice, practice. Was there a favorite poem of Nash's that stuck with you?

• 40:24Speaker 02

  Um, there are a lot of different ones. You always have to mention the one, uh, you know, the, uh, the poem that he did.

• 40:31Mike Rowe?

  Candy is dandy, but liquor is quicker.

• 40:33Speaker 02

  Making friends is candy. It's, right. Um, he had some poems that he did that were actually not funny poems. They were kind of serious poems. And some of those I, I kind of like as well. But, you know, I, you go back over this stuff now. How did, how did he ever do that?

• 40:54Mike Rowe?

  He was an original.

• 40:55Speaker 02

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

• 41:18Speaker 02

  There was just a depth there that you wouldn't necessarily know because he just like playful with it. Wow.

• 41:25Mike Rowe?

  Sidebar to the OED, the writing of the Oxford English Dictionary. One of the great undertakings in all of literature. Did you read the book, The Professor and the Madman?

• 41:36Speaker 02

  Is that Simon Winchester?

• 41:37Mike Rowe?

  That's right.

• 41:38Speaker 02

  I know of it. I can quote the title. I haven't cracked it.

• 41:41Mike Rowe?

  You know, it's, I think it was James Murray and William Minor. And Murray had, was basically assigned by the Queen to write the definitive dictionary. And he essentially outsourced it. And, you know, intellectuals from all over the world would contribute to like, I did a lot of the letter B. Right? They would like, everybody would get assigned a letter or a partial letter. And, and, you know, Murray handled all of these submissions from intellectuals all over the planet. And one of the most prolific was a doctor who was in the Civil War named William, I want to say William Chester Minor.

• 42:25Mike Rowe?

  And he was just voluminous, his submissions, and they were excellent. And he and Murray became fast friends. I'm not giving anything away. This is all told in the preface. But the story begins when Murray finally shows up after a lifetime of correspondence with his friend to meet him and shake his hand and thank him for his extraordinary contribution. And he goes to the address from which Minor had been corresponding. And it's the Broadmoor home for the criminally insane.

• 42:55Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 42:56Mike Rowe?

  This guy that was going to write the hell out of his mind. And he had been an insane asylum most of his life and did most of his work from his cell. So the story begins with that, with that weird relationship. And I don't know if it's possible to make this tangent relevant, but I mean, has it occurred to you that your granddad's facility with the alphabet has some corollary to your own with numbers? Or arithmetic, to be specific?

• 43:26Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, for sure. I mean, he as, I mean, as a, you know, kind of a, you know, somebody I really looked up to.

• 43:39Speaker 02

  He, I think, was a great example of.

• 43:45Speaker 02

  Trying to think about how to use words in a way that matter, right?

• 43:51Mike Rowe?

  Sure.

• 43:51Speaker 02

  I mean, every word is an idea and so your sentences aren't going to be any better than the ideas that you're kind of like slopping around in them. And so watching him, watching him at his craft.

• 44:09Mike Rowe?

  Yes.

• 44:09Speaker 02

  I guess is kind of like, what kind of, I'd say like maybe appreciate that. My other grandfather was much more interested in finance. He did some stuff in World War Two with trying to help fix the war economy so that we'd like win rather than lose and stuff like that. So, so.

• 44:35Mike Rowe?

  I mean, I mean. That's a good goal right there. I mean, going back to the very first compliment I paid you, like to have a mission, to be working on a thing.

• 44:43Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 44:43Mike Rowe?

  That is relevant and important and for you fun. That's the consummation devoutly to be wished, right? And you had two grandfathers.

• 44:53Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 44:54Mike Rowe?

  One is dabbling in language in order to express an idea in a new and exciting way.

• 44:58Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 44:59Mike Rowe?

  That would move people. The other's trying to save the world through finance. Smash those two things together and it's not shocking that, you know, somewhere down the DNA chain there comes a demographer.

• 45:10Speaker 02

  Yeah. Well, so it's like trying to explain numbers maybe or trying to explain what the significance in some of the numbers and things that, you know, some of the things that are kind of hiding in plain sight.

• 45:24Mike Rowe?

  That seems to be, well, look, let me tell you what the AI said about you.

• 45:28Speaker 02

  Oh, no. Which AI?

• 45:31Mike Rowe?

  I don't know, Chuck. Which ones you use? Chat.

• 45:33Speaker 02

  Not chat.

• 45:34Mike Rowe?

  Not chat.

• 45:34Speaker 02

  Not chat. Ask Claude.

• 45:36Mike Rowe?

  Yeah, Claude.

• 45:37Speaker 02

  Claude likes me.

• 45:38Mike Rowe?

  How weird is it that they're different? Like now we're assigning, I mean Claude is different than what's the, well, that's anthropic, right? Grok. And Grok is like, Grok's kind of sassy. Overall thesis of the manuscript, America's Human Arithmetic argues that. Demographic realities, fertility, aging, labor force, participation, education, mortality, and immigration are hidden drivers of America's economic and political future. The United States retains advantages compared to Europe and East Asia, but those advantages are narrowing. If ignored, demographic decline will slow growth, weaken fiscal stability, and erode social cohesion.

• 46:22Mike Rowe?

  Hence, my earlier comment about the horror story you've written. If addressed wisely, however, America can remain demographically resilient, but only, only if it understands its own arithmetic. What is our own, unique, American arithmetic?

• 46:44Speaker 02

  We've got a secret sauce that nobody else has, I think. And I plead guilty to being an American exceptionalist. But I think that from our founding documents and the sorts of ideas that made us into kind of like the first new nation, then on to the sorts of people that were attracted, you know, it's a pretty motley bunch, but the people who were attracted to this country. You don't have to idealize it because there's plenty of dirt under the fingernails in this

• 47:23Speaker 02

  story, but it made for a, it made for a remarkable explosion of creativity and prosperity and freedom that, you know, that's ours to lose.

• 47:49Mike Rowe?

  Ever since Chapter started advertising on this podcast, I've been getting letters and emails from satisfied customers all over the country. Last week, I got one from Joseph, a retired veterinarian in Texas, who just learned his Medicare plan was shutting down. I can't tell you Joseph's last name because his medical history is complicated and personal, but his situation is not uncommon at all. Given his medical history, Joseph was unable to find a local provider that would include the doctors he'd come to rely on. Happily, Joseph listens to this podcast, and Joseph heard me talking about Chapter just last week. And Chapter exists for one reason:

• 48:31Mike Rowe?

  to help people on Medicare find the plan that's right for them. It's a free service. Anyhow, Joseph called Chapter. He connected with an advisor named Heidi. And Heidi caught something that most people miss, because his current plan was about to close. Joseph had a limited window to continue with his current coverage through a new plan without any additional medical underwriting. In other words, Heidi found a way to get Joseph the coverage he needed with the doctors he preferred. Then she found great coverage for his wife, too. Moral of the story? Medicare plans are constantly evolving. You are too. Call Chapter. Make sure you're on the best plan for you.

• 49:15Mike Rowe?

  Also, people who switch plans after calling Chapter save an average of $1,100 a year. 804-Chapter. That's the number. Call it today, it's free. Whole thing takes about 20 minutes. 804-Chapter. Well, now you're back to the scary part. How not to lose it? Aside from just more wanton procreation and more children, if so fasto, how should we be thinking about work? Immigration?

• 49:48Mike Rowe?

  Technology, AI. How do we know what the enemy is and isn't? And what can the arithmetic tell us about those things?

• 49:57Speaker 02

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

• 50:40Speaker 02

  experiment in complex cooperation. I mean, that's the way that I'd look at the work thing, right? Is that it's a voluntary experiment in complex cooperation in which you kind of, you can do things that were impossible before, that had never been done before. You generate more wealth and more opportunities and more demand for other people to do well than you could in the past. What kind of is, I think, part of what's causing this really unsettling rise of new misery

• 51:22Speaker 02

  is when different parts of that previous code have been kind of failing or the people have been falling off of it. I mean, think about, think about what's happened since the, since the 1960s, which is we think about like the men dropping out of work. What are the, it's a big historical thing. It's been going on for, what's that now? You know, it's been going on for two, almost three generations.

• 51:49Mike Rowe?

  Where's the arithmetic now? Like, how many men, able-bodied?

• 51:53Speaker 02

  Say a tenth, a little more than a tenth, seven million round number of the, the lesson, 70 million who would, you know, who'd be the, you know, be there to be this kind of like. Backbone or bulwark in the in the labor force in the economy. This thing's been going on since the mid sixties. What else has happened since the mid sixties? We've seen this erosion of the previous family model, you know, with a breakup of the two, two parent home. Lot of kids growing up in single homes, a lot of people not growing up with parents

• 52:38Speaker 02

  at all. We've seen the the rise of the American welfare state. We had social security before that, but that wasn't really a social welfare program. That's a social insurance program. You paid it. It was like an insurance program. But we started our war against poverty, which was basically money to redress poverty. And we've ended up with an awful lot of America now accepting money that you're supposed to get basically only if you're poor. You want to talk about something that's going to kill a middle class mentality? How about applying for poverty benefits?

• 53:23Speaker 02

  And getting it. And getting it, right? And so we had that. We had the explosion in crime. You can't forget that. The explosion in crime was followed by an explosion in punishment. One of the things that's hiding in plain sight is the 25 million, maybe, maybe more. We don't count it exactly. Adult Americans who've got a felony conviction in their background now. Probably one out of seven guys has a felony conviction in his background. So we talk about the, you know, we talk about mass incarceration, but for every person who's in prison, there are 10 people with felony convictions who are in society as

• 54:07Speaker 02

  a whole. You keep on going through these different trends, and all of these are intertwined with this with this male fail that you and I are talking about. And since this is a historical problem that's evolved over the course of over 60 years, I don't think we're going to be able to fix it real fast, but I think we can fix it. I think we can fix all of this stuff.

• 54:35Mike Rowe?

  This is a bit of a left turn, but do you think it feels like there's been a rise in conspiracy theories? It feels like there's been a rise in certainly just the UFO thing and the, you know, existential things. Could that be somehow linked? Are we looking more to the unexplained or the supernatural or some sort of, you know, what do they call it the Greeks, the desec machina, right? You know, the machine of the gods to somehow explain all of this instead of the arithmetic, which, let's face it, I mean, a lot of people didn't do great in arithmetic.

• 55:17Speaker 02

  Well, you know, we've got plenty of conspiracy theory stuff around and of course it's always fun to do the UFOs, you know, why not? They're always great. But you also have to remember, Mike, that, I mean, that guy, Richard Hofstadter, the historian way back when, the paranoid style in American politics. I mean, that's part of what makes Americans great is we've always had this paranoid style.

• 55:46Mike Rowe?

  Now, see, that's Granddad Nash coming out right there. Yeah, I try and find that too. Like I, part of how I think about AI in light of all the trouble in your book is that, you know, AI was a real part of Star Trek. It was a real part of 2001.

• 56:11Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 56:12Mike Rowe?

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

• 56:47Speaker 02

  Or robotic girlfriend?

• 56:48Mike Rowe?

  I mean, look, honestly, how long until you can order a dead ringer for Scarlett Johansson? Who will clean the house, look after you and do whatever else you need? I mean, how, you know, and how much? Through easy payments? How are we gonna work this?

• 57:04Speaker 02

  You gotta write that sci-fi story fast before it's overtaken by events.

• 57:10Mike Rowe?

  Somebody did. I think it was, was it Phoenix, Joaquin Phoenix? It was called.

• 57:15Speaker 02

  Her. Yeah. Actually, that was ahead of its time, wasn't it? That's like 12 years ago or something.

• 57:20Mike Rowe?

  Yep. Yeah, a guy basically falls in love with Siri.

• 57:23Speaker 02

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

• 58:05Speaker 02

  And it's like, you're gonna need to get like the training and skills and all if you're gonna hold the lantern. And if you hold the lantern, you're gonna do very well. But if you don't have the training, you're not gonna be able to hold the lantern and you're gonna be displaced. So the take home to me is that under any circumstances, we want our people to have good training and good skills and good education. But if you've got something coming down the pike like what AI may be, that's a double time, big time argument for going in on training and skills and education for our country.

• 58:46Mike Rowe?

  That's the biggest thing that's changed since you and I spoke last. I got a series of questions over the years. Like I told you, I was so delighted to read your book because I, I'm just a dilettante mouthing off anecdotally. You had science that seemed to confirm a lot of the stuff that I was. Sort of guessing at. But now, the question I get most often isn't, gosh, I didn't know you could make six figures working with your hands, or wow, I had no idea that, you know, a career in the trades could lead to a small business so, so directly and so quickly.

• 59:21Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 59:22Mike Rowe?

  Now, it's like, wait a second, man. The AI is, it's coming for the coders. It's not coming for the welders, at least not yet. Not until we get that Scarlett Johansson robot worked out, maybe then. But it seems like in the short term, we got it precisely wrong. It seems like in the short term, we made the Ehrlich mistake. We conflated, like, well, this job will lead to that job. But in fact, something else comes in and it, it, it just upends the whole thing. And now suddenly, I'm talking to electricians, Nick, in data centers.

• 59:59Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:00:00Mike Rowe?

  Who are under 20, sorry, under 30, say 26, 27 years old, making 250, 260,000 dollars a year with no debt. And the crazy thing is, they've been poached, like, three times in the preceding 18 months.

• 1:00:15Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 1:00:16Mike Rowe?

  They're basically setting their own schedule.

• 1:00:17Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 1:00:18Mike Rowe?

  They're making a quarter million dollars a year. And that just wouldn't have seemed at all possible two years ago. And now it's happening. And demographically, it's like the people who are calling me are, you know, they're not running companies with giant factories and big, blue collar workforces. They're bankers. And they're people running big hedge funds who are looking at their portfolios and realizing, good grief, man. I've talked to like, the biggest companies in the world, who are freaking out over the very things that you talk about.

• 1:00:50Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 1:00:51Mike Rowe?

  I think in this book, and I, it's beyond my pay grade, but I, I refer your book all of the time, but I don't know where the solution is in it. That's the scary thing. I, I understand most of the problems and what led to so many disaffected men, but right now, things have happened so fast and the, and the problem seems so dire and the skills gap seems so wide. So say something optimistic when you have a second.

• 1:01:18Speaker 02

  Yeah, sure. One of the skills that you need to get, and it may be the most valuable skill of all. And they don't exactly teach this to you in school, but sometimes by accident you learn it, is the ability to deal with disequilibrium, the ability to deal with with change and unexpected change, which is to say, you know, memorizing the book of coding or whatever will only get you so far, but learning how to learn, learning how to pivot, you know,

• 1:02:01Speaker 02

  learning how to do something new, all of that is going to be absolutely essential in a world that's going to be, you know, have new skills and new technologies, whether or not we're in an AI world, I mean, whether or not we're in a world where AI is the sort of driver that maybe some people think it's going to be. So it's like, what do you do differently? I don't think you do that much differently. You know, I think this is going to be the way that you learn how to deal with the unexpected in the future. And there's going to be, what we don't see in this is there's going to be a lot of opportunity,

• 1:02:46Speaker 02

  you know. If we went back, you know, 200 years or even 100 years, and say, OMG, OMG, you know, we're not going to be on the farms, not going to be on the farms, whatever, what are we going to do?

• 1:03:02Mike Rowe?

  Right.

• 1:03:03Speaker 02

  We did.

• 1:03:04Mike Rowe?

  Well, that's, you, it's, that's the hell of it, man. You, you can pose that question and have all of the fear that comes with not knowing the answer, and at the same time be certain the answer will, like, we couldn't see the industrial revolution any more than we could see the financial revolution, or the digital revolution, and now the AI resolution. We don't know what's on the other side of it. But we can look back, and we can sort of handicap the unintended consequences, right? So I'm going to talk to a guy tomorrow who runs a franchise of auto repair. It's called Crash Champion. It's got like 600 locations. And he's desperate for guys.

• 1:03:45Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:03:45Mike Rowe?

  They're hiring. But if Elon's right.

• 1:03:50Mike Rowe?

  Who, by the way, I just saw a thing today. He says there'll be more optimist robots performing surgery in three to four years than there will be surgeons of the human variety. Like, in three and four years. He's also talking even faster of autonomous vehicles being quick. It's gonna feel like slow, slow, slow, and then they're gonna be everywhere. That's often, often the way that it is. Right, it's gonna hockey stick. Yeah. And when it does, well, what's going to happen to auto insurance? Because accident rates are gonna plummet to about 5%. What's Allstate gonna do? What's State Farm gonna do? What's my friend Matt gonna do with 600 locations? Like, all of that, like, they're...

• 1:04:33Mike Rowe?

  In a world where there are no more accidents, what happens to auto body repair? What happens to the underwriters? So... The poor trauma surgeon? The poor tra... Right, my favorite thoracic surgeon. What are they gonna... So, you know, all that stuff is like scary because I don't know the answer. But I think the hopeful thing that you're saying is, it's gonna be okay. Just because you don't know the answer doesn't mean a solution won't rise. Yeah, I mean...

• 1:05:08Mike Rowe?

  I'd like to talk about initiative, if I could, for just a moment. Here at MicroWorks, we value it a great deal. In fact, it's the most important quality we look for in our work ethic scholarship applicants. But everybody wants it. I'm talking about the quality in a Lyft driver that inspires him or her to carry your bags to the door without even asking. Or the grocery clerk who shows you where an item is on the shelves. Or a doctor who personally calls you to explain your test results. If you're hiring, you want to encourage initiative because it's invaluable. And ZipRecruiter has a way to allow a candidate to tell you, in their own words, why they're interested in your job. Not just why they're qualified, but why they're interested.

• 1:05:53Mike Rowe?

  This is a way that allows the best candidates to distinguish themselves from the competition. And a great way for you to separate the wheat from the chaff, as it were. Right now, you can try it for free at ziprecruiter.com/row. ZipRecruiter is the number one hiring site, in large part because of this new initiative that shows you the most interested, qualified candidates first. So you meet the right people faster. Four out of five employers who post on ZipRecruiter get a quality candidate within one day. Try it for free. ZipRecruiter.com/row. Meet your match on ZipRecruiter.

• 1:06:30Speaker 03

  Build your team. Build it sooner. Meet your match at ZipRecruiter. Try it free.

• 1:06:41Speaker 02

  It's a huge potential opportunity for multiplying productivity. And the reason that we're able to sit here today rather than, you know, around a little fire in a cave is because we've magnified the productivity of human beings, you know, by 10 times and then 10 times again. And if we're lucky, it's not going to stop. I mean, we've cracked the abundance part. We just have to do the little trivial thing of figuring out how to enjoy it.

• 1:07:21Mike Rowe?

  Do you worry that the output will become so voluminous that the intake? Like, are we going to choke on it? Your book is excellent. I'm going to put it in a stack of 30 other excellent books I'm dying to finish. Right? What happens when we become so efficient that we'll have 300 books, 3,000 books? And, I mean, we have 300 shows to watch. There are also good 5 million podcasts, Nick. Happily, the one you're on is in the top 200, I'm pleased to say, out of 5 million, which is solid, but still, who listens to 200 podcasts?

• 1:07:58Speaker 02

  Yeah. Well, fortunately, the human condition has moved in a way where, you know, we're not going to, you know, plunder the earth. We're not going to drain the natural resources. We're not going to run out of energy because the real wealth of nations is in human beings. So we're going to have this increasingly human-centered, knowledge-centered, talent and skill-centered world that we're going to be entering into if we don't do something, you know, naughty like blow ourselves up or whatever.

• 1:08:40Speaker 02

  But as long as this goes on, and we're not going to be able to know. I mean... As we are now, if we just stay human beings, if we don't decide to do something that I don't have the imagination exactly to describe, but if we don't go the enhancement route, then I'm afraid we're not going to see every movie and we're not going to read every book. But that was also true 100 years ago or 200 years ago.

• 1:09:11Mike Rowe?

  Did you learn anything from the lockdowns about the arithmetic of humanity?

• 1:09:20Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, in retrospect, I think it's pretty clear that we engaged in a terrible experimental mistake with the broad and indiscriminate lockdowns in the United States for kind of everybody, and especially for schoolchildren. There are people who have tried to calculate the economic impact of the learning loss that took place,

• 1:10:03Speaker 02

  or that did not take place, the gap that came because of those edicts. And the best numbers I've seen is that it's a multi-trillion-dollar loss for our country alone. I mean, it's something that's going to go with us for generations, it's scarred people. We made a huge mistake by the sort of fatal conceit that we could kind of regulate and plan this in a way that basically only had one variable.

• 1:10:43Speaker 02

  And the variable, you know, it's a little bit like the Chinese one-shot, you know, family policy, where that variable was we're going to minimize death rates. Well, A, it's not clear that we minimize death rates by it, and B, all of the unintended consequences of doing this are exactly what you would have expected.

• 1:11:06Mike Rowe?

  Sure.

• 1:11:07Speaker 02

  I mean, it's the Dirish East's typical, you know, kind of fiasco.

• 1:11:13Mike Rowe?

  Did Lincoln's quote about the terrible arithmetic inform your title at all? Are you familiar?

• 1:11:20Speaker 02

  No, I'm ignorant of that. Tell me.

• 1:11:21Mike Rowe?

  Well, he was looking for a general, you know, before he found Grant, who understood the terrible arithmetic of the North seeing the trains coming back with the dead.

• 1:11:35Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:11:36Mike Rowe?

  And when we began to bury them, you know, we needed to see the manifestation of the war in order to get our dog fully in the fight. That became Arlington, right? And when Lincoln talks about that terrible arithmetic, whether it was Shiloh or Gettysburg or any of it, I don't know, reading your book, I was struck, it's like, well, it's the same kind of challenge to make something inhuman relatable to a human. They have to see it. Numbers are not really inherently relatable. You have to somehow grab the country by the lapel and shake them. And, you know, in Lincoln's case, he needed for the population to see the trains filled

• 1:12:20Mike Rowe?

  with the dead. What do we need to see in clarifying terms? What can the numbers show us that will make us sit up and pay attention? I get the declining population, sort of, you know? I'm not done with that yet, but like, as it applies to these other things.

• 1:12:40Speaker 02

  Yeah. Well, I think we need to see, I mean, this would have, I think, resonated maybe a little bit with President Lincoln. We need to see a little bit of success in dealing with some of these problems, right? So, take the men without work. I, you know, you say, I said it's like this big historical thing, and when you say that, it's like, oh, you can't do anything about it. That's not what I mean at all. Let's say that I'm right in here and that over half of the dropout guys are...

• 1:13:14Speaker 02

  Effectively immobilized by participating in one or more disability program that was originally intended to protect people who couldn't work and have ended up as a sort of like an alternative universe to the workforce. We're both old enough to remember when there was a successful welfare reform in the United States back in the 1990s. That was maybe, many people won't remember, there was a time that you could do bipartisan stuff in America, but it was a bipartisan reform, which was to get mothers, single

• 1:13:57Speaker 02

  mothers, who were longtime recipients of these benefit programs, back in the workforce. And there were a lot of people who said that this was going to end as a social catastrophe, but it ended as a great success, and millions and millions of American women ended up in a better position, not just with more money in their pocket, but with a lot less degradation in their lives. It was a very positive thing. Guys on the couch strike me as a, you know, as a lot less compelling constituency for

• 1:14:37Speaker 02

  endless public resources than mothers with little children, and Less sympathetic figures. So, my guess is that if we had a reform of our very badly broken archipelago of disability programs, we might be able to get, you tell me, the seven million, over half, I think, are in this archipelago. If we got half of that half back in the, back in the workforce, back in the game, there'd be a lot of good things that would happen in our country, and I think it would redound positively, you know.

• 1:15:19Speaker 02

  If we're heading into a, if we're heading into a world of, you know,

• 1:15:26Speaker 02

  Shrinking workforce, shrinking working age population as we may be. We're gonna need to cherish and husband every bit of human resources that we can in America. We're gonna have to figure out what we can do to make the path back from felony into, you know, regaining your employment, reputation, a lot more feasible. For reasons, Mike, that I don't understand. The US government is completely and totally allergic to providing any information on the 20-plus million ex-cons in the United States, where they are, how they're working,

• 1:16:08Speaker 02

  what their health is, how their incomes. If we had information, and this is just an information thing, if we had information around the country about our invisible, vast army of ex-cons, then it would be possible to have a kind of like an experiment in competitive federalism and see who's doing better and who's doing worse with re-entry and stuff. As long as they don't even have that information, we can't have the success from that. Explain competitive federalism. Oh, okay. So, you know, we've got this system with 50 states and, you know, the District of Columbia,

• 1:16:49Speaker 02

  and we're, you know, we're the United States of America, and states have a lot of prerogatives of their own. They can make their own legislation, and even localities within states can, you know, have a certain amount of latitude. You can do a lot of experimentation at the local level, a lot of experimentation at the state level, and you can kind of see what looks like it's working and what looks like it's not working. And if people want to learn... They can learn.

• 1:17:24Mike Rowe?

  So when you talk about competitive federalism, can we talk about what's happening in California versus Texas? Can we talk about New York? Did you see Fareed Zakaria's thing yesterday?

• 1:17:34Speaker 02

  No.

• 1:17:35Mike Rowe?

  Oh, boy, you're gonna love this.

• 1:17:36Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:17:38Mike Rowe?

  It's a six-minute analysis of Mamdani's first six weeks in office. And the nineteen people who froze to death in the last, you know, the last meteorological calamity and the hundred and, what is it, forty-seven billion-dollar budget? Bigger than Greece? Bigger than Thailand? Of the five percent of people in Manhattan who have left the tax base, and now they need another ten billion dollars from a much smaller cohort. And he's basically just saying, look, this isn't working, this experiment isn't working. This competition, we've lost. Right?

• 1:18:23Mike Rowe?

  I mean, and so it's one thing for you to say it, or me to mouth off and say it, but Fareed Zakaria is saying it. And so that, to me, I didn't think of it in these terms, but watching that, and I encourage people to find that clip and look at it, that's a result of competitive federalism.

• 1:18:40Speaker 02

  Exactly. Exactly. Not all experiments in competitive federalism are destined to succeed.

• 1:18:47Mike Rowe?

  That's why they're experiments. Right. Although one state's failure or loss could be another state's gain.

• 1:18:56Speaker 02

  For sure. For sure.

• 1:18:58Mike Rowe?

  And that's how our framers must have thought about it.

• 1:19:02Speaker 02

  Absolutely. Absolutely. And it's also the way that, you know, kind of like, much more broadly speaking, it's the way that markets work, it's the way that competition under fair conditions works. You kind of like, you can't have great, in markets, you know, you can't have great successes unless you're reallocating stuff from things that aren't doing quite as well.

• 1:19:24Mike Rowe?

  Right.

• 1:19:26Mike Rowe?

  Can I ask you about your alma mater?

• 1:19:28Speaker 02

  Oh, sure.

• 1:19:29Mike Rowe?

  No, I know right now you're going, which one? I've matriculated from so many fine institutions. Uh, no, not the London School. No, Harvard.

• 1:19:37Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:19:37Mike Rowe?

  How do you think about Harvard today? What was it like when you were there? Any advice for the provost, et cetera? How do you think of them as a brand? And what is their role right now with a $52 billion endowment?

• 1:19:55Speaker 02

  It's agonizing to watch. I got a fantastic education there. I met people who've been friends all my life. I had amazing professors, uh, who opened my eyes and stuff and were very, very generous with their time.

• 1:20:12Mike Rowe?

  Did you know when it was happening?

• 1:20:15Speaker 02

  I think I was probably too much of a little snot to appreciate exactly how, you know.

• 1:20:22Mike Rowe?

  But I mean, now as a full grown snot.

• 1:20:24Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:20:24Mike Rowe?

  You can look back through the fullness of time and say, man.

• 1:20:32Mike Rowe?

  So some of you may have heard, I went to Congress, uh, 16 years ago to testify before a House Subcommittee. And then again, a year later, to testify before a Senate Subcommittee about the need to reinvigorate the skilled trades with some kind of national effort that would make a more persuasive case for a lot of good jobs out there that didn't require a four-year degree. Well, 15 years later, I finally heard back from the government and I am delighted to tell you about a program called BuildFreedom.us. This is the national PR campaign that MicroWorks has been talking about for a decade and a half now.

• 1:21:16Mike Rowe?

  And it's focused on 300,000 or 400,000 excellent jobs in the defense industrial base. These are the electricians and the plumbers and the steam fillers and the pipe fitters and the CNC operators and the shipbuilders and so forth. But in this case, all of those trades are focused on building out our national. ...infrastructure through the defense industrial base. So people who are building our autonomous weapons, our planes, our ships. It's only a matter of national security and it's a very big deal. And on a personal level, it's really been very gratifying. Build Freedom donated $10 million to MicroWorks. The money's available right now for you if you want to pursue a skill that's in demand and work in the defense industrial base.

• 1:22:01Mike Rowe?

  I think it's an opportunity of a lifetime. Go to buildfreedom.us, see what's available and then apply for a scholarship from MicroWorks. The money's there, burning a hole in my pocket. Go get some. BuildFreedom.us.

• 1:22:15Speaker 02

  Yeah, and it was, I mean, just the altruism that I was treated to. I don't think I was at all grateful about that or not nearly as grateful as I should have been at the time. I mean, one of the things, if you, gratitude is a thing that you kind of maybe get to learn over, over a while if you, if you're lucky enough to do so. But, but I've, I had a wonderful education there. It's awful to see what's happened to Harvard. And again, like this men without work thing, it didn't just happen all of a sudden.

• 1:22:54Speaker 02

  It was a, it was a gradual process of hubris and pomposity and self-congratulation and insulation from, from a lot of the rest of America, but also a lot of the rest of the world.

• 1:23:19Mike Rowe?

  Frog in the boiling water.

• 1:23:20Speaker 02

  I think the problems there are very, very, very deep. And I'd like to tell you that they can be solved by having a new president of the university. But, I mean, I don't know the, the president now myself. I hear he's a very good man. He's got a very good reputation, but he can't fix what needs to be fixed.

• 1:23:46Speaker 02

  Harvard University has, you know, the very best sort of corporate structure from the 1600s is what they have been left with. And within Harvard University, there is a very small group called the Corporation. Originally seven people, now I think maybe a dozen. It's a self-perpetuating group, a little bit like the, you know, the Politburo. And it is so fundamentally and badly misguided. It is, I think, basically responsible for, maybe not all, but for so much of the rot

• 1:24:30Speaker 02

  that you see at Harvard today. I think the way to solve the Harvard problem over time is to get a better class of people in the Harvard Corporation, because then you'll get better president of Harvard, oh, this one's perfectly fine, but then you've got better deans, you've got better assistant deans, you've got better administrators. And without, you know, going through that sort of branch and root reform, I don't think that the Harvard brand is going to be able to stay where it was. I mean, it isn't where it was now, because it's been such an embarrassment about what's happened at the place.

• 1:25:12Speaker 02

  And is a 50-plus-billion-dollar endowment enough of a moat to prevent a siege by people who want to reform it? I guess we're going to find out about that. I mean, this is beyond, you know, beyond my bailiwick, but I've read accounts saying that although there's an awful lot of money in the Harvard Endowment, most of it is very illiquid. And if you're illiquid and you suddenly hit hard times, sometimes you have to sell your assets at a discount. So I don't know if that's where it is, I don't know if that's where it's gonna go, but...

• 1:25:54Speaker 02

  The intention of the Harvard Corporation not to reform, I think, is pretty obvious at the moment. And will anything short of calamity impel the corporation to bring reform there? I don't know.

• 1:26:08Mike Rowe?

  What I do know is that you're probably not going to get invited to the alumni dinner this year. And it seems like you're going to be okay with that.

• 1:26:18Speaker 02

  I know, it's my 50th anniversary, what a bummer.

• 1:26:20Mike Rowe?

  What do you think about this? I've been in touch. The guy that runs Carnegie Mellon, I met. Farnham is his name. They're like the original trade school, you know? I mean, Carnegie Mellon was a trade university. And MIT, they're paying attention to what we've been doing here. I can't speak for them yet because we haven't had in-depth conversations, but we're talking. And I'm getting the sense that maybe the Ivy League is starting, you know, I don't want to paint with too broad a brush, but, you know, why isn't there a trade association

• 1:27:05Mike Rowe?

  with any of those brands? What does a trade education look like under a Carnegie Mellon imprimatur or an MIT?

• 1:27:13Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:27:14Mike Rowe?

  Right? And why not? And I wonder if maybe one of the silver linings of this thing, that's incredible evolution that's happening in the workforce, maybe it's the diminishment of the color of collars.

• 1:27:30Speaker 02

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:27:31Mike Rowe?

  Right?

• 1:27:32Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 1:27:33Mike Rowe?

  Maybe our future workforce and maybe some of these 7 million men who have just been sitting there scrolling left, scrolling right.

• 1:27:39Speaker 02

  Yep, yep.

• 1:27:40Mike Rowe?

  You know, absorbed. I don't know, you know, maybe academia can make a more persuasive case for a new kind of work. Skills-based.

• 1:27:49Speaker 02

  Yeah, and well, I mean, we've got all the, all of the tech universities that should be helpful, whether it's Carnegie Mellon, or Caltech, or Georgia, or MIT. We've got all of the original A and M schools that, I mean, still, I think, are pretty involved in some of this. There's a place for people who, you know, want to get a, you know, kind of like a liberal arts education, but it's not everywhere. And by the way, you know, I mean, college isn't for everybody either. I mean, everybody should have a skill. Everybody ought to have the skills so that they can make a living and, you know, have

• 1:28:31Speaker 02

  a home and, you know, start a family if they want to. But one of the problems I see at, you know, my alma mater today is when they look out of the, out of the parapet, it's kind of like, why can't you be more like us? That's, that's not the right question to ask.

• 1:28:51Mike Rowe?

  Right. Insects. Homo sapiens. Wow. All right, so we're going to be 250 this year, right?

• 1:29:03Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:29:04Mike Rowe?

  You know, as we start to land the plane here, whether it's in your book or not, what's the, what can we be hopeful about? Because I was only just kind of yanking your chain an hour and a half ago. It's, it's not a horror story, but it is a cautionary tale.

• 1:29:20Speaker 02

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

• 1:30:04Speaker 02

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

• 1:30:40Mike Rowe?

  I have a few more questions, but I'm not going to ask them because that's the proper way to end a good conversation. I really appreciate it, man.

• 1:30:49Speaker 02

  What a treat for me.

• 1:30:50Mike Rowe?

  Well, I just.

• 1:30:51Speaker 02

  It's been cool for me, you know?

• 1:30:53Mike Rowe?

  I just love that you got a little Ogden Nash flowing through your.

• 1:30:56Speaker 02

  Oh, you know.

• 1:30:57Mike Rowe?

  I just, I mean, it actually explains something that I couldn't explain before. I mean, don't take this the wrong way. I like you. I like you instinctively. I liked you when I read your book, not just because it confirmed a bunch of my smack, but because there's something underneath that big geeky, wonky brain that is of the language.

• 1:31:19Speaker 02

  You said something that I was going to ask you about, but I didn't, I never met you before. P J O'Rourke.

• 1:31:27Mike Rowe?

  Yeah.

• 1:31:28Speaker 02

  You read his stuff.

• 1:31:30Mike Rowe?

  Oh, yeah. Eat the Rich.

• 1:31:33Speaker 02

  You meet him?

• 1:31:34Mike Rowe?

  I met him once.

• 1:31:35Speaker 02

  P J is one of my best friends. He is, you remind me of P J.

• 1:31:42Mike Rowe?

  Oh, don't eat, look, that'll make me cry, man. I was visiting my parents in Florida. I was visiting my brother, and they were visiting my brother, and we were all there together. And my mother said, what do you want to do? And Scott said. We could go to the library. This is my brother, okay. Like, oh, that sounds great.

• 1:32:01Speaker 02

  You have to love your brother.

• 1:32:02Mike Rowe?

  Let's go to the library. So you go to the library.

• 1:32:04Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:32:05Mike Rowe?

  And I check out a book he had written that I had never read before.

• 1:32:11Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:32:11Mike Rowe?

  Called All the Trouble in the World.

• 1:32:13Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 1:32:14Mike Rowe?

  And it was really just a collection of cautionary tales. Like, on, uh, I mean, any topic. Like, he was such a contrarian, but he was frickin' funny, man. And he, I mean, he could really write.

• 1:32:28Speaker 02

  Oh, my God, is he right. He is, uh, the, he was the godfather for our youngest.

• 1:32:33Mike Rowe?

  By the way, we're still recording, because this is the good stuff.

• 1:32:35Speaker 02

  Yeah, okay.

• 1:32:35Mike Rowe?

  So go ahead and get that mic on.

• 1:32:36Speaker 02

  So, no, PJ was the godfather for, uh, for our youngest. Uh, and what a wonderful man he was. And he was, um, I don't want to, uh, make too many assumptions, but let me just tell you about PJ. He was the hardest working guy I ever met. And he made it look very light. He made it look, he worked so hard to make it look easy.

• 1:33:01Mike Rowe?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:02Speaker 02

  And he was a teacher. He seemed to be a humorist, but he was really a teacher. Because he, uh, you go to his house, and it's like a library. I mean, he's got, and he read so much and so many different things. So many different areas.

• 1:33:21Mike Rowe?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:22Speaker 02

  And he put all of that to work in his humor. Because it was basically trying to teach people about, like, uh, what's right, what's wrong, and what's really stupid to do.

• 1:33:37Mike Rowe?

  The thing that, you know, he knew that nobody wanted a lecture.

• 1:33:42Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 1:33:42Mike Rowe?

  Nobody wanted a sermon.

• 1:33:43Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:33:44Mike Rowe?

  But if you can entertain them first, then you get permission.

• 1:33:48Speaker 02

  Yep. Exactly, exactly.

• 1:33:51Mike Rowe?

  What a treat, Matt. You buried the lead. So he was the godfather to?

• 1:33:57Speaker 02

  To our youngest, to our, we have four kids, to our youngest daughter, who now is in a PhD program in AI. Somebody's got to feed the family in the future. So, we lived in an apartment building in Washington DC on the same floor as he did. And we got to know each other. We had friends in common, but we wouldn't have got to know each other if we hadn't been on the same floor. And he and his wife and us guys and another very close friend of ours named Andrew Ferguson, Andy Ferguson, who's a writer for The Atlantic and I think beautiful stylist, great writer.

• 1:34:41Speaker 02

  We were all in the building at the same time and we were basically the only people under like 80 years old there because they hadn't done the post-war.

• 1:34:48Mike Rowe?

  It's like the Paris Review. It's everybody but George Clinton.

• 1:34:52Speaker 02

  Anyhow, it was, it was great. And that was how I got to know him and we were lifetime friends. But there is a, I saw the same thing. Let's put it that way. I saw the same thing.

• 1:35:06Mike Rowe?

  Wow. Well, I was a fan back when, God, I remember when he was working for Jan.

• 1:35:11Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:35:12Mike Rowe?

  Writing for the Rolling Stone.

• 1:35:14Speaker 02

  Yes, yes. That's where, where almost all of those pieces first appeared. And the, I remember my wife was a speechwriter for the Secretary of State back in the Reagan administration. And everybody in the State Department was cracking up because PJ had just written a piece in Rolling Stone called Terror of the Euro Weenies. And if you don't remember that one, even 40 years later, I think it'll make you burst into laughter.

• 1:35:46Mike Rowe?

  See, I weep for a generation that can't pick up The Rolling Stone and read O'Rourke and Hunter Thompson in the same issue. And not, I wouldn't say be richer, but at least be, yeah, richer, richer for it.

• 1:36:04Speaker 02

  We're complete. We're complete.

• 1:36:07Mike Rowe?

  America's Human Arithmetic: Exceptional Essays From Nicholas Everstadd. No, essential. But you know what? They're exceptional, too. Thanks, Nick.

• 1:36:19Speaker 02

  Thank you so much. It's a blast for me.

• 1:36:21Mike Rowe?

  Good.

• 1:36:22Speaker 03

  When you leave a review, which we hope that you'll do, tell us who you are.

• 1:36:30Speaker 03

  And before you go,

• 1:36:36Speaker 03

  won't you leave five stars? Five lousy little stars.

• 1:37:00Speaker 04

  This is Jason Timp from Hoops Tonight with Jason Timp. Buy smart, drive for less, and trade for more. That's Toyota affordability. And it starts with a great deal on an off-road-ready Tacoma or half-ton Tundra, two of Toyota's longest-lasting trucks, combining power for work, tech for adventures, and style in between. Built on a reputation for quality and reliability, Toyota trucks are known for holding their value, which can mean big savings when it's time for your next Toyota. So get a great deal today and great value tomorrow. Shop toyota.com for more. Toyota, let's go places.

• 1:37:31Speaker 05

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