431: David Bahnsen—Poor Smart and Desperate

David Bahnsen is the founder, managing partner, and chief investment officer of The Bahnsen Group, which manages over seven billion dollars in assets. He's also a podcaster, author, and Christian intellectual. His book, Full Time: Work and the Meaning of Life https://www.amazon.com/Full-Time-Meaning-David-L-Bahnsen/dp/B0CCMMFGJY/ref=sr_1_1?adgrpid=1341406560516458&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.zwyaAkKGC27_A29R2_mkiRXiKj3bZ_Nr5um6nFDyvI35s1g1qlMPl0ZqqKdnKOrRgCrbE9-jOefWVccqxMmzOgxbJ88SddNi7nc8m0i5mcCNb_Uf7FLYMNsABzd6TzUZheft6EJBzQZbtHvqjenN6OlZgKUitCxa3Sz_Q1ilFJ4G7j6CGK4sTTbHFEHEQOGdCk_Hcl_bCguSImUHCN4c1g.an9uC2uyrfYUbAlKaat-QrIObxFNwesn2jSCadnTDNo&dib_tag=se&hvadid=83838167033036&hvbmt=be&hvdev=c&hvlocphy=44862&hvnetw=o&hvqmt=e&hvtargid=kwd-83839013869358%3Aloc-190&hydadcr=22563_13494425&keywords=full-time+david+bahnsen&mcid=768670941ae63b7c9d55c60e88e51646&msclkid=f78e58fb325616d144873f08e4ac25b1&qid=1744033535&sr=8-1, is simpatico with Mike's S. W. E. A. T. pledge.

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

• 0:04Mike Rowe?

  David Bonson, who you're about to meet, is looking for people that are poor, smart, and desperate. A mission I appreciate so much. That's the title of this episode. I'm Mike, this is The Way I Heard It. How are you, Charlie?

• 0:18Speaker 01

  I'm living the dream, buddy, living the dream.

• 0:20Mike Rowe?

  That was a... 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.

• 0:28Speaker 01

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

• 0:39Mike Rowe?

  He's written such a great book. It's called Full-Time Work and the Meaning of Life. And I know that might sound a tad earnest. And you know what? It is. 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. But mostly, it's because you don't often hear the messages that you're about to hear from people who manage in excess of $7 billion of money.

• 1:10Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:12Mike Rowe?

  You know?

• 1:12Speaker 01

  That's exactly what he does for a living.

• 1:15Mike Rowe?

  Yeah, he's good at it. If his name is familiar, then his face might be as well. He pops up on the news now and then to weigh in on all sorts of things. But his real passion seems to be articulating the idea that work is not merely a means to an end. It's the end. Having lost sight of that, our country seems to have lost sight of a few other things as well, in his estimation. I just happen to agree with him. So, on the one hand, it's a conversation between two guys who are in violent agreement on any number of things. On the other hand, he manages $7 billion, and I don't.

• 1:56Speaker 01

  I can barely manage my, uh, my weekly, uh, allowance.

• 2:01Mike Rowe?

  You mean your paycheck from?

• 2:04Speaker 01

  I call it an allowance, so.

• 2:07Mike Rowe?

  All right, we'll talk about your future during the brief break that you're all about to experience right now, but, uh, when we come back, you're gonna want to focus your undivided attention on the undeniable wit and wisdom of David Bonson, who, as I may have mentioned, is all about poor, smart, and desperate, right after this.

• 2:32Mike Rowe?

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• 3:16Mike Rowe?

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• 4:03Mike Rowe?

  David, last checks. This is spelled right as far as you know. Chuck, put his banner up there again, just so we can make sure we got it right this time. David Bonson, author and founder of the Bonson Group.

• 4:19Mike Rowe?

  No, we were just talking. This is David Bonson. Thank you for your patience. Thank you for coming here.

• 4:25Speaker 02

  Thank you for having me.

• 4:26Mike Rowe?

  I can't wait to get into this book. I got a gajillion questions. I've seen you on the Fox News, talking to all the pundits, and they all seem to regard you with a, well, with, I won't say reverence, but they certainly respect what you have to say. And I wonder if, like me, some of them aren't a bit confused by the fact that you're managing over $7 billion and still talking often about real meaning and biblical principles and like old-fashioned type virtues. And it leads me to wonder, you know, how a nice guy like you turned into such a rapacious capitalist.

• 5:04Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think that there's a couple of things there. 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. And it probably seems somewhat freakish to them. It's a rarity. I'll take that as a compliment, but you know, in terms of just kind of how I came to be, the whole thing comes down to my dad. And so I get 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.

• 5:44Mike Rowe?

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

• 5:49Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 5:50Mike Rowe?

  And what others, who else sort of fills out that?

• 5:55Mike Rowe?

  That ledger.

• 5:56Speaker 02

  Yeah, so throughout history, you're John Calvin's in the early Reformation days and then the 19th century, Abraham Kuiper 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 this 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 see as Lewis died in 1963 and my dad was in high school and Francis Schaeffer became a bigger Christian intellectual into the seventies. But it's kind of rare. And then what's really rare is if you get

• 6:40Speaker 02

  a quote unquote, Christian intellectual, they're usually not orthodox. There's something off.

• 6:46Mike Rowe?

  Is McDowell in that group?

• 6:47Speaker 02

  Not as an intellectual.

• 6:48Mike Rowe?

  No?

• 6:49Speaker 02

  No. But he's definitely orthodox, though.

• 6:51Mike Rowe?

  Right.

• 6:51Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 6:52Mike Rowe?

  Evidence?

• 6:52Speaker 02

  Evidence that demands a verdict.

• 6:54Mike Rowe?

  Right. Yeah.

• 6:56Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 6:56Mike Rowe?

  Would you consider that like apologetics?

• 6:58Speaker 02

  Yeah. So that was sort of my dad's domain is he was an apologetics professor and philosopher. He got his doctorate at USC and studied epistemology, theory and knowledge. 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. My dad's was a bit more philosophical, more C.S. Lewis like, you know, where things were self evident in in nature and in the way the world works. And so Lewis had a famous line about, 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. So I just sort of applied that

• 7:41Speaker 02

  to finance and economics and and things like this. And that's sort of my story.

• 7:47Mike Rowe?

  Well, how does it apply if you look at these things that are fundamental? Whether you attribute them To a biblical precept or not, I think everybody agrees that ideas like work, other virtues as well, that they have a universality to them. But how, how are they applicable in the public markets? And maybe as you contemplate that too, just give me just a quick background on like, what you actually do for money?

• 8:17Speaker 02

  Yeah. 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. Had been over 15 years at a high level, you know, big firms and left and started my own firm 10 years ago.

• 8:35Mike Rowe?

  Why?

• 8:36Speaker 02

  Just purely for the entrepreneurialism of it. Morgan Stanley 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 leave and get more money. I wasn't smart enough to know when I did it, how opportunistic it proved to be. What I knew was I could hire who I wanted and fire who I wanted and, and not deal with 61,000 other employees. And I do believe the 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.

• 9:18Speaker 02

  And it bothered me, you know, it took too long to get things done. And I have a certain contempt for bureaucracy. And I thought, well, me and a few of other people around me, we can do things on our own, let's go give it a shot. And so over the last 10 years, we've grown. We, 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. And pretty much grow to about 30% every single year, not like 51 year and 10 another. But I mean, really stayed consistent and I wouldn't do anything different.

• 9:54Mike Rowe?

  Well, at what point do you look over your shoulder and say, you know, I've become the thing I left? I mean, how big do you get before you go, oh, wait?

• 10:02Speaker 02

  Great question. I have an answer.

• 10:04Mike Rowe?

  Huh?

• 10:05Speaker 02

  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 eighty, ninety, a hundred? I don't know. It's not three hundred. I can't make it there. So yeah, I don't have any vision to scale this to that large of a sort of institutional bureaucratic entity. I could probably handle a little more than seventy-five. I have a pretty good memory. We just had our team offsite recently. 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.

• 10:40Mike Rowe?

  That's interesting. Like, do you think, right, that duty of care you just described sort of radiates out to your employees, but what about your clients? And like, and how do you think about the client relationship when you're a part of a big entity versus a smaller one? And do you have the same thought process in terms of familiarity, intimacy, and so forth?

• 11:04Speaker 02

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

• 11:33Mike Rowe?

  Sure.

• 11:33Speaker 02

  For us, what we say is basically, we can keep growing, but not because advisors are taking on more clients, but because we'll have more advisors that fit, 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 that remember that nineteen ninety's movie Jerry Maguire, and he wrote that.

• 11:55Mike Rowe?

  Manifesto.

• 11:56Speaker 02

  Yeah, and that was all based on relationships and knowing your clients, all that. That's exactly how we view it. And we don't lose clients for that reason. I mean, we really value the intimacy of the relationship. I can't know fifteen hundred clients, but I can employ twenty-five advisors that each have fifty to seventy-five clients that they can all know. And then I can know all of my people. That's how we've kind of done it.

• 12:22Mike Rowe?

  Full disclosure, there's a A fair amount of triangulation here. Will Swaim, who sat where you're sitting, dear friend of yours. In fact, you guys are still doing, is it Radio Free California?

• 12:33Speaker 02

  Radio Free California.

• 12:34Mike Rowe?

  That's fascinating. You sit on the board over at the National Review. I've got many friends over there, too. So I suspect we're in violent agreement on all sorts of stuff. Before we jump into the book, the real reason you're here is because of the sign over my right shoulder. 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, I mean, you tell stories, so who's the villain in your story here? And my answer was, the villain is an idea that the reason we're all unhappy, to varying degrees it seems, is because of

• 13:15Mike Rowe?

  work. Work has become 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. 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. So much of this makes me feel like a smart guy. 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

• 13:58Mike Rowe?

  some ideas that I have been clinging to. So, having said that, I'm not alone, am I?

• 14:05Speaker 02

  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 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. And I think it was at different paces and different causation in different parts of the country. You know, there's a movement- That broadly, I think you're describing has sort of created this narrative that work is weighing on people. And I think a lot of it is embedded in us being victims of our own success as a society.

• 14:49Speaker 02

  Prosperity and a deeper mortality. People are living longer. I would think that's a good thing. 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. So we bite the hand that feeds us to some degree.

• 15:07Mike Rowe?

  Interesting, the idea that living longer. I I agree. The immediate thought is, well, that's nice. But, you know, it does add incredible pressure. Because the the last few years of one's life are certainly very different than the first few years. More expensive, for one thing. And you're just, you're still here at one hundred and four, right? You're like, what's next? How you, how you're gonna find meaning at that point in your life?

• 15:35Speaker 02

  And and I think that um, uh, four month old. It's difficult to define how they're finding meaning. But we believe babies have meaning, their may, their 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 they're kind of a pain.

• 15:50Mike Rowe?

  They think they're the center of their own universe.

• 15:52Speaker 02

  And they certainly have to be the center of the parent universe for the baby to survive. Hundred and four, 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. But where our mortality is extended is not just in the the right tail. The median level, you know, there were people who were dying at sixty forever. That had ten more productive years intellectually and physically that were not getting it. Now, most, again, at a median level, people are getting that, right, up to the late seventies. And were voluntarily saying, well, I'm gonna pretend I'm a hundred and four when I'm sixty five. Meaning voluntary removal from a productive place in society.

• 16:38Mike Rowe?

  Yeah.

• 16:38Speaker 02

  So a hundred and four, you're pretty limited physically and mentally most of the time. Sixty-five, usually not. So I think that there's been a voluntary decision to exit from a lot of this. Not things have been forced on people because of age and stage.

• 16:52Mike Rowe?

  You know, Nick Eberstadt, by any chance?

• 16:55Speaker 02

  I do, love him. I quote him heavily in the book.

• 16:56Mike Rowe?

  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. He talks about, I think, what you're saying. You've got seven million able-bodied men in the prime of their working life who have affirmatively chosen to step away from work. So what the heck does that mean?

• 17:17Speaker 02

  Well, and I decided to try to answer it as an economist. And it's my view, this sort of overlaps with some of Nick's study. 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. They haven't updated the chapters in history books yet. So thirty, fifty, seventy years from now, the way that we would have studied the Great Depression, people will be studying 2008. 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. But it was the moment at which a kind of extremist socialist became a mainstream politician with Bernie Sanders.

• 18:02Speaker 02

  It was a moment that created a populist angst on the left and the right. You could argue, years later, kind of created Donald Trump in a lot of ways, or at least fertilized the soil that produced the moment for Trump. But I think that we were children of the eighties and nineties, where free markets were just presumed to be efficient and morally good. Everybody seemed to be doing better. 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. But when all of a sudden they feel that they're now getting poorer, then the divide becomes a bigger issue.

• 18:46Speaker 02

  And '08 just really hit us across the face with that. So then the labor participation force collapsed, and it didn't recover. And it's all men. Yeah, Eper Stat's written about this extensively. So then you say, okay, well boomers are retiring. And then you look at it and go, yeah, that's not really the data. I mean, it's true there, but it's not disproportionately true.

• 19:08Mike Rowe?

  Right.

• 19:09Speaker 02

  So what I do in the book is look at the 18 to 25 demographic and say, why are we tolerating this? 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? And for those who don't go off to college, that we don't have trade schools or various, you know, vocational endeavors. I don't think it's true that that demographics drop in employment is irrelevant. I think it matters a lot. 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. And so I was unable to answer

• 19:51Speaker 02

  it only as an economist. 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. 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 good life.

• 20:15Mike Rowe?

  So a self-fulfilling tautology, yeah.

• 20:22Mike Rowe?

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• 21:07Mike Rowe?

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• 21:46Mike Rowe?

  You also, I think, suggest that that which is symptomatic is in fact causal in a way. Right? So we've gotten it into our heads understandably that the purpose of work is to get us in a place where we can enjoy the things that we want to enjoy. Like it's a means to an end. And fundamentally, what you're saying, I think, is that it's the end. The work is the point. And it doesn't much matter what your business card says. But by all means, evolve, adapt, change things up.

• 22:29Mike Rowe?

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

• 22:36Speaker 02

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

• 22:54Mike Rowe?

  Yes, that's it.

• 22:56Speaker 02

  And, 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. They produced a lot of goods and services. Gross output in society was extremely positive. So they were working and producing. You didn't have those issues of the 26 year old living at mom's basement. And not wanting to get a job and you didn't have, you know, thirty two year olds asking their boss if they could go to yoga in the middle of the afternoon. 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 twenty five year vacation. And then messaged that down to Gen X and especially millennials.

• 23:42Speaker 02

  And all I think millennials did is run with it. 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, 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 basketball because I don't have the skills.

• 24:26Speaker 02

  But in the workforce, I can find things I love and that I'm good at more than NBA career. And bring those things together. 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. And I think we spiritually, economically, politically, culturally adopted a view that the essence of life is consumption. And lo and behold, doesn't seem to me to have made a lot of people very happy.

• 25:00Mike Rowe?

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

• 25:06Speaker 02

  As a headcount.

• 25:07Mike Rowe?

  Yes.

• 25:07Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 25:08Mike Rowe?

  Because all workers consume, but not all consumers work. 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, which are you? Are you contributing or are you not? And then their back goes up because. Well, wait a minute. What do you mean, am I contributing? You want me to stand there in the same spot and make little rocks out of big rocks? So I can pay sun, blah, blah, blah. And then all of a sudden, we're up to our neck in a polemic. And we can't get out of it. And now you have Reddit and a kajillion people who are just really, really, really angry at anybody in a blazer.

• 25:46Speaker 02

  You know, you used the word tautology earlier. This is just economics 101. There are more consumers than producers. But there is not more consumption than production. So by definition, somebody's getting richer than somebody else. Right? The headcount is uneven. But there can't be more consumption than production. Because what are they consuming if someone hasn't produced it?

• 26:15Mike Rowe?

  Right.

• 26:15Speaker 02

  So what that means is there are people sharing in a greater portion of the spoils, right? Now, traditionally, we would say that's an understandable thing. Some people are going to work harder. Some people are more ambitious. Some people are more skilled. You know, there's different elements to it. And sure, some people get luckier. Okay, whatever it is. 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? 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.

• 26:57Speaker 02

  And we celebrate consumption sans production, which is incoherent.

• 27:02Mike Rowe?

  Why do we do that?

• 27:03Speaker 02

  Oh, 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. The belief, it was a Marxian notion. When Bernie Sanders was pushing last year for this 32-hour work week program. I remember him saying, you know, we all just know that the economic man wants to be able to work less.

• 27:29Speaker 02

  And I remember thinking, well, I know people want to work less. That might be true. But I know I do not just know that.

• 27:34Mike Rowe?

  Right.

• 27:34Speaker 02

  I do not believe all people want to. And I actually know a lot of people, they get real excited to go do a week or two, a two week vacation. And on the third day, they're like, I gotta.

• 27:44Mike Rowe?

  Out of the walls.

• 27:45Speaker 02

  Gotta get out of here.

• 27:46Mike Rowe?

  Yeah.

• 27:46Speaker 02

  And everyone needs to recharge their batteries, enjoy a little time at the beach and look at a lake and, you know, walk on the sand with your wife, all that's good stuff. But no, I don't know, I don't agree 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, 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. And it would be one thing if we said, they're saying it's X and I don't think it's X. What they're saying is not merely that work is the problem. They're missing that I believe work is the solution.

• 28:29Speaker 02

  That when we look at opioid epidemic, this is Nick Eberstadt's type stuff. The problems of despair, loneliness, alcohol abuse, drug abuse, people have less friends. People, you know, we, we say, oh, it's not good. People don't have the same level of friendships anymore. 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, no, it's just, this is the recipe for a good life. It's, it's just depressing.

• 29:02Mike Rowe?

  How do you articulate these ideas, knowing, as I'm sure you do, that in spite of your faith, nobody wants a sermon? And in spite of your certitude, nobody wants a lecture?

• 29:15Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 29:16Mike Rowe?

  Right? Especially the cohort to which you refer.

• 29:20Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 29:21Mike Rowe?

  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 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?

• 29:52Speaker 02

  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 you to do is just ask some questions. 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. Everyone seems, that's one consensus view we have

• 30:33Speaker 02

  that's bipartisan, is that there is less contentment and that there's a greater angst. And I think a lot of this intensified after that financial crisis moment. 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, they're, you know, they don't trust the system. I get all of that. But what I'm suggesting is, 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've found a fulfilling life out of it? So I'm asking them to at least be open-minded to the idea that the one-off is not the person who's

• 31:17Speaker 02

  found a lot of meaning in work, that that's the norm.

• 31:22Mike Rowe?

  How would you talk about 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. And there, I know some pretty hard-working entrepreneurial people who have made the case for it as well. Personally, I'm suspicious of it, but I don't know how to argue against it. Other than through a moral lens.

• 31:53Speaker 02

  Well, I don't either, and so I don't. What I won't do is what a lot of my friends on the on the political right will do is make the argument we can't afford it. I happen to agree we can't afford it, but it's a very bad argument. Thirty-six trillion of debt and we run one to two trillion of deficits more each year. 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. There's some limit at which this, you know, prolificate 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. 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, uh, believe about the human person.

• 32:36Speaker 02

  If I believed that half of us were supposed to be productive and half of us were merely to be consumptive, and that, uh, half of their people, 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. But my problem is, I don't believe that. I believe that God made all people with dignity, 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. 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. Bill Gates is in the universe.

• 33:21Speaker 02

  Elon Musk is in the universe. Does he get his eighteen-hundred a month minimum amount as well? 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. I believe we can create more things. In fact, I think all of us have just been doing that ever since we were born, and the world has gotten bigger in terms of the totality of wealth, the goods and services that enhance people's quality of life.

• 33:52Mike Rowe?

  So, man, there's a lot there, but if you're talking about meaningful work...

• 33:58Mike Rowe?

  Is there such a thing inherently as meaningful work? And also, since you brought it up, the, from a creationist standpoint, how important is creativity to meaning in work?

• 34:13Speaker 02

  So the second question is a tricky one. The first part is right up my alley. Let me start with the easy one, because the second one's harder. Is there such thing as inherent in work that is meaning?

• 34:25Mike Rowe?

  Yeah.

• 34:26Speaker 02

  Well, I believe that work has meaning inherently when a worker is doing it, and it is extended towards an object. 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, and that's where the meaning comes from, because the worker has dignity and purpose. But they're extending the work. 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. That object is another human being. So it's a human serving a human, and producing goods and services, and painting a house,

• 35:09Speaker 02

  and inventing an iPhone, and providing financial services, and creating a podcast, and...

• 35:15Mike Rowe?

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

• 35:21Speaker 02

  Carving it, building it, designing it, all those things. And so where the inherent meaning comes in is that work is a transitive activity where one person is meeting the needs of others. And in doing, 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. We have our needs met by meeting the needs of others.

• 35:45Mike Rowe?

  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?

• 35:53Speaker 02

  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.

• 36:02Mike Rowe?

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

• 36:06Speaker 02

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

• 36:10Mike Rowe?

  Okay. Well, then the second part of the question had to do with creativity. And I, I don't, I'm certainly not a scholar in any sense, much, especially biblical, but it, it seems like as a, as a creator...

• 36:25Mike Rowe?

  If we are in his image, then we are creators ourselves.

• 36:29Speaker 02

  Definitely.

• 36:30Mike Rowe?

  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, I'm just being asked to move things and hold things and turn things," 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. 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. Here's a crazy idea.

• 37:12Mike Rowe?

  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.

• 37:52Mike 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

• 38:36Mike 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.

• 38:49Speaker 02

  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. 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. I'm providing a service, but it's not creative." 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? 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?

• 39:34Speaker 02

  That's a possibility. Not always, some people get stuck. And that's where, those who are fearful of being stuck should be the biggest advocates of labor dynamism and a market economy and a growing economy of anyone. Because all that a growing economy does is open up doors and doors and doors exponentially for more opportunity. 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. 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." Because I said so. "But by the way, that guy called me and he wants me to be creative in the way I do it, so I'm gonna leave you and go work there."

• 40:18Speaker 02

  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. 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. But to your point about being made in the Imago 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. And all three of those things He invited us into. We don't get to create out of nothing. Only He could do that.

• 41:00Speaker 02

  But really, God's creativity was mostly a byproduct of creating raw materials to ask us to go do the really creative stuff. God didn't paint.

• 41:12Speaker 02

  But he sure gave us the ability to paint. The creative beauty of the world. For he had to give us the ability to see beauty and appreciate it and create it. But that's an amazing thing about what we have the capacity for.

• 41:28Mike Rowe?

  The capacity, right? Not the obligation. The choice.

• 41:33Speaker 02

  The choice.

• 41:35Mike Rowe?

  It's incumbent on us to choose.

• 41:36Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 41:37Mike Rowe?

  That's the free agency of the whole thing.

• 41:40Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 41:40Mike Rowe?

  Right? I can look at a rainbow and be breathless and just overwhelmed with gratitude. And somebody else can just go, yeah, colors.

• 41:49Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 41:50Mike Rowe?

  We choose.

• 41:51Speaker 02

  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. 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. 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. I think that someone could be very creative artistically, the painting and appreciating a rainbow and things. And then there's a lot of creativity in the way someone structures a business. A lot of creativity in the way someone, you know, creates a business strategy or does

• 42:35Speaker 02

  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. But that doesn't mean it's not creative.

• 42:45Mike Rowe?

  Right.

• 42:45Speaker 02

  It may not be aesthetic, but it is creative.

• 42:48Mike Rowe?

  Was it J.P. Morgan you were with?

• 42:50Speaker 02

  I was at Morgan Stanley.

• 42:52Mike Rowe?

  Morgan Stanley, okay. So, did they lose you because they failed to create an environment that allowed you to check the boxes? Or was it all of a piece? And was it just sort of a design? And I don't mean to juxtapose predestination with free agency and so forth, but, you know, did you leave them? Did they blow it? Would you have stayed? Had they presented a more intriguing palette for you?

• 43:19Speaker 02

  Like all of economics. It's marginal. There's always more on the margin you could do. 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. You're not going to be an entrepreneur as a W two 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. 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.

• 43:52Mike Rowe?

  But my point is, it's incumbent then upon the entrepreneur to leave. 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. Otherwise, everybody would leave and become entrepreneurs. And then that would be sort of self-defeating in a weird way. They didn't want to lose you. You have an enormous brain. People like you. You're on TV all the time. Right? I mean, they, so that was a loss when you left and you probably took some clients and maybe some fellow employees and now you're running seven billion dollars that they're not.

• 44:31Speaker 02

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

• 45:01Mike Rowe?

  So a win for society.

• 45:02Speaker 02

  And a loss for that company. So that company, what they ought to do is provide as much entrepreneurial freedom as they can without violating their own business model.

• 45:12Mike Rowe?

  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.

• 45:26Speaker 02

  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. And he went out and started their own firm.

• 45:37Mike Rowe?

  Yeah.

• 45:37Speaker 02

  But he got a piece of it.

• 45:38Mike Rowe?

  Yeah.

• 45:39Speaker 02

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

• 45:44Mike Rowe?

  What are the three things you mentioned again?

• 45:45Speaker 02

  The production, creativity, and innovation.

• 45:48Mike Rowe?

  Okay, and you used a Greek term earlier. Telos?

• 45:52Speaker 02

  Telos.

• 45:53Mike Rowe?

  Telos.

• 45:53Speaker 02

  Purpose.

• 45:54Mike Rowe?

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

• 45:58Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think that's a different thing. I think that, um, most certainly, uh, we all have a purpose. And I do believe that it's, uh, in our image-bearing status. Uh, but I guess what I'm suggesting is that the human purpose is embedded in work. That is the way God made the world. And that this goes against the kind of contemporary idea that the purpose of our existence is rather to enjoy a, a life of recreation or, uh, permanent leisure. I do not agree with that assessment.

• 46:33Mike Rowe?

  And in order to get to that state, we must endure a world of work from which we will eventually retire, the sooner the better.

• 46:45Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 46:45Mike Rowe?

  That's the premise.

• 46:46Speaker 02

  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.

• 46:55Mike Rowe?

  Me personally?

• 46:56Speaker 02

  When you were, yeah.

• 46:57Mike Rowe?

  I'm in here.

• 46:59Speaker 02

  Well, but the, no, the, the 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. 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 Eleven, I'm supposed to be rooting for bank robbers.

• 47:23Mike Rowe?

  Right, right.

• 47:24Speaker 02

  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.

• 47:49Mike Rowe?

  You've been watching Hallmark, dude.

• 47:51Speaker 02

  Well, it's funny, 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.

• 48:06Mike Rowe?

  Right, 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. And so Hollywood and Madison Avenue and virtually every relevant vertical in culture did get that memo. That's why I wrote that, and that's why I pushed my little boulder up my little hill.

• 48:31Speaker 01

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

• 48:35Mike Rowe?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Sorry, I forget sometimes that we're not making actual TV. 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, you know? It's hard to know what to think about a fella who takes his own quote and puts it in a frame and hangs it in his office.

• 48:56Speaker 02

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

• 49:00Mike Rowe?

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

• 49:03Speaker 02

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

• 49:30Mike Rowe?

  How many clients did you have?

• 49:31Speaker 02

  Oh, it was a hundred. I still know.

• 49:33Mike Rowe?

  That's impressive. If you said six.

• 49:36Speaker 02

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

• 49:39Mike Rowe?

  Sure.

• 49:40Speaker 02

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

• 49:44Mike Rowe?

  Siri called.

• 49:45Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. 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.

• 49:55Mike Rowe?

  Well, it spoke to me because my first job where I actually learned that just because you hate something doesn't mean you can't be good at it. And conversely, just because you love something doesn't mean you can't suck at it, was telemarketing. I sold magazines over the phone. I didn't find any inherent meaning in the work at all. And I didn't enjoy it on its face at all. But I had a low voice for a young kid. I sounded older than I was. I sounded good over the phone. And then, because I'm subversive by nature, I was given this script to follow.

• 50:36Mike Rowe?

  But my boss at the time gave me a lot of leeway and said, "Just say whatever you want to say." So there was creativity. Like, I had a chance to go off the script and look at this thing as an exercise. Can I sell six months of Time Magazine to Mrs. Johnson in Akron? And can I do it respectfully, like I played by the rules, but I used my own words off the script? A long way of saying, a lot of which you wrote about in here, I was like, "Oh, well, did I find meaning in that job by doing it in a way that made sense to my brain? Or did I simply endure the reality of what was being asked of me because I was making fifty dollars an hour

• 51:19Mike Rowe?

  in nineteen eighty-two?"

• 51:22Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 51:23Mike Rowe?

  I honestly don't know.

• 51:24Speaker 02

  Or maybe it's both. 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, you know, being very fulfilling.

• 51:39Mike Rowe?

  Please tell me about the chapter entitled "The Movie Usher."

• 51:44Speaker 02

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

• 52:07Mike Rowe?

  They dropped a lot of things on the floor.

• 52:09Speaker 02

  Well, yeah.

• 52:10Mike Rowe?

  Many, many things.

• 52:11Speaker 02

  There were some things that were, uh, you earned your paycheck. Yes.

• 52:15Mike Rowe?

  That you can't pick up with a broom.

• 52:17Speaker 02

  But no, the, um, 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. And their first job was working in an office on Sixth Avenue and you know, what have you. My journey's been different and it's sometimes very sensitive to write 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

• 52:57Speaker 02

  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 and never going to college and just working my tail off.

• 53:12Mike Rowe?

  You never went to college?

• 53:13Speaker 02

  Never been in a college classroom.

• 53:16Mike Rowe?

  You're running $7 billion?

• 53:17Speaker 02

  Yes, sir.

• 53:20Speaker 02

  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.

• 53:30Mike Rowe?

  So.

• 53:31Speaker 02

  With no money.

• 53:33Mike Rowe?

  Character.

• 53:34Speaker 02

  Character and purpose.

• 53:37Speaker 02

  Because I think that you lose your best friend, you lose your, your sort of vision of where you're going to go in your life. At that age, it's vulnerable. You can get some bad habits, do bad things, make bad decisions.

• 53:48Mike Rowe?

  Your dad was your best friend?

• 53:49Speaker 02

  Oh, absolutely.

• 53:50Mike Rowe?

  Tell me about him.

• 53:52Speaker 02

  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. He was brilliant. He was extremely attentive father. You know, he died at 47. And so, you know, he had had, uh, it's funny, we were, when, when I turned, when I 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. And so, um, he had us younger and so forth. 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

• 54:35Speaker 02

  sports, about the Beatles. 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 loved Chinese food and everything. And then, and all the hopes and dreams of what I wanted to do in my life. And then he was gone. And so I've always said, when people ask what my journey was in life and they want to do the things I did to get here, I always say, you know, I'm, 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. I mean, it was not the way you necessarily want to go about it.

• 55:09Mike Rowe?

  Right.

• 55:10Speaker 02

  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. But then the thing I write about in the work at a very personal and biographical level is 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, you're avoiding things in life with work. And I say, yeah, that sounds right. 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. 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. It was therapeutic.

• 55:58Mike 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.

• 56:39Mike Rowe?

  Given a choice, most people would prefer to buy their meat 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 TrustPilot. 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

• 57:21Mike Rowe?

  here in these United States, and that's guaranteed. Support your local ranchers by insisting on American meat delivered at GoodRanchers.com/row. If you could eat a steer, if you could eat a cow, don't take a chance on a foreign ranch, get Good Ranchers now. Hey, Hal! Was finance even on the wheel of possibilities at that point?

• 57:49Speaker 02

  Well, before he died, I mean, I went on Halloween, it's up on our company website, picture me dressed as Alex P. 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. It just sounded like I could be intellectual and successful. My dad was intellectual but didn't have a lot of money. You know, Christian intellectuals, they may be rare, but a wealthy one is really rare.

• 58:15Mike Rowe?

  That's a unicorn.

• 58:16Speaker 02

  And so I wanted to try to be smart, but I wanted to be successful. And then he's gone, Canford College, and I just think everything's over. I thought this path is done. I gotta go sweat it out, figure something out. And so I just began working, working, 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. Um, but I had earned it. I had just convinced myself I could do whatever I needed to.

• 58:49Mike Rowe?

  So did you get an internship?

• 58:51Speaker 02

  Uh, no, well, so after dad died, I had friends in musical bands. And I was working at these jobs like a Togo's sandwich shop. And I started managing their bands, helping them raise money and get concerts and things like that. And I said, you know, I want to turn this into a business. And I turned it into a multimillion dollar business, but it took years. 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. I had really kind of made it. And I was comfortable talking to adults.

• 59:27Mike Rowe?

  Yeah.

• 59:28Speaker 02

  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. And they took me seriously. And the CEO of Payne Weber at the time, a guy named Joe Grano, never went to college. So they did not have a policy that they required a college degree.

• 59:45Mike Rowe?

  Do you think somehow today that the college path has become antithetical to a lot of the precepts that you're writing about here?

• 59:57Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 59:58Mike Rowe?

  How did that happen? Because it surely wasn't the case 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'd they lose their way?

• 1:00:16Speaker 02

  Uh, it's complicated. I think some people are differing opinions on this. My view is pretty much in line with where a lot of things, that's it. Look at this.

• 1:00:24Mike Rowe?

  That's you, Alex Keaton?

• 1:00:25Speaker 02

  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.

• 1:00:33Mike Rowe?

  Well, you were either utterly brave or totally indifferent.

• 1:00:37Speaker 02

  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.

• 1:00:43Mike Rowe?

  Right, right, right, right.

• 1:00:45Speaker 02

  The colleges stopped being a place to teach people how to live well. 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. That's what they are. 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. So it isn't really impressing me very much.

• 1:01:16Mike Rowe?

  Even if they were good at it, you're not that impressed?

• 1:01:18Speaker 02

  And again, they must have survived it and maybe didn't get arrested and so forth.

• 1:01:22Mike Rowe?

  That's something.

• 1:01:22Speaker 02

  Yeah, I don't generally assume it gave them a leg up versus others. 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, a lot of listeners probably don't know, but there's only two types. There's people like Steve Cohen owns 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, that there's a lot of hedge funders like him. Then there's the guys whose dad went Harvard MBA, their grandpa went Harvard MBA, they were private school all throughout, and then they're brilliant, but now they're kind of falling in that footsteps. So three generations of Upper East Side, you know.

• 1:02:04Mike Rowe?

  Right.

• 1:02:05Speaker 02

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

• 1:02:14Mike Rowe?

  Well, where did college lose its way?

• 1:02:17Speaker 02

  I think that 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.

• 1:02:33Mike Rowe?

  Right.

• 1:02:34Speaker 02

  But then what they did by subsidizing is they gave free rein to college administrators to charge whatever the hell they wanted. And so there's no delineation anymore. How does Oregon State compete with Washington State when they can both get away with charging $60,000 a year? And I'm not saying anything negative about the school, but nobody believes it's Harvard, either name brand or academic rigor. So they compete over who has a bigger hot tub in the dormitories and things like this. Where previously, a certain professor of a certain gravitas, they say, oh, Princeton has this new guy who is a research professor. It was really based on what you wanted to study and who you wanted to be. And it was very meritocratic.

• 1:03:19Speaker 02

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

• 1:03:25Mike Rowe?

  Do you think business perpetuated it, enabled it?

• 1:03:30Speaker 02

  I do, but out of laziness. Because it became a filtering mechanism. 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 throughout all the piles that don't say Harvard, Columbia, Morton. Which is basically what they do. They just use it as a filtering mechanism. So it's lazy.

• 1:03:59Mike Rowe?

  How do you filter? Who are you looking for?

• 1:04:01Speaker 02

  We want PSDs. It's in most important degree anyone can have.

• 1:04:06Mike Rowe?

  Tell me.

• 1:04:07Speaker 02

  Poor, smart, and desperate.

• 1:04:15Mike Rowe?

  Jot that down, Chuck.

• 1:04:16Speaker 02

  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. You want people of 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. They gotta be smart, you need to have aptitude. But then desperate, like it's part of the human condition.

• 1:04:40Mike Rowe?

  Do you really? I mean, that's such a great turn of phrase. I would put it on a card, or a T-shirt, or a hat, or something. You could sell PSD hats all day long. But if you had to choose between desperation and initiative, what would you favor?

• 1:04:57Speaker 02

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

• 1:05:04Mike Rowe?

  That's a good answer.

• 1:05:06Speaker 02

  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.

• 1:05:13Mike Rowe?

  What's the difference between initiative and ambition?

• 1:05:19Speaker 02

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

• 1:05:26Mike Rowe?

  Excellent answer. Are you familiar with Albert Hubbard? Albert Hubbard is Elbert, E L B E R T. He was a, ah, kind of a hippie back in the late 1890s, living in New England. He had a furniture company. He wrote an essay that, for a time, was more widely distributed than the Bible. It was massively popular over 100 years ago. It was called A Message to Garcia. Does this ring any bells? No. Well, you can thank me later. Yeah. But when you read it, it's a, it's a rant on the erosion of work ethic and initiative,

• 1:06:07Mike Rowe?

  and a kind of shameless plea at the time for some sympathy for the entrepreneur and the small businessman. And it was awfully controversial, not nearly as controversial as it is today. 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 US involvement. And so he gave the message to a lieutenant called Rowan. The whole essay is about what Rowan doesn't do.

• 1:06:49Mike Rowe?

  He takes the message and he puts it in his oil-skin leather jacket and says, "All right." And six weeks later, the message is delivered. The story's not about 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. It's about the fact that Rowan didn't say to McKinley, "Where is he? Well, how am I gonna do it? Will you get me a boat? How much time do I have? What's the pay like?" He just took the message and got it to Garcia. So, this old essay that I know you're gonna love, Will will love it too, given my regards.

• 1:07:33Mike Rowe?

  But it's really a rumination on your book. What happens if that level of initiative in a good soldier, a good worker, a good employer...

• 1:07:46Mike Rowe?

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

• 1:07:57Speaker 02

  Well, and it's something that I think even those who are employed now, employers are dealing with oftentimes a heavily, we still have about a 96% employment rate as defined those who have jobs divided by the people who want them. 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. That they will go do the things you tell them that you spell out all the way through. But in terms of problem solvers, the sort of yes, I can attitude people. That's not at 96%.

• 1:08:35Mike Rowe?

  Right.

• 1:08:35Speaker 02

  It's at a much smaller percentage. And that's interesting when people talk about the impact AI will have on the workforce. And I'm a huge contrarian on this subject. I simply do not accept the idea that AI is going to wreck havoc on humanity and our ability to employ people. And one of the reasons is this very subject. I believe that there's a premium employers will pay for problem solvers. Where, yeah, people of virtue, but also people with initiative. And that ability, there's a personality type. You hire two capable people, but one of them needs you to spell out what to do. And they need to ask 18 questions along their way to doing it. And then there's someone who just says, I might even make a mistake. But I'm going to run with this. That's what people want.

• 1:09:19Speaker 02

  No computer, you're not going to get that. Never going to get that from a robot. Never gonna happen.

• 1:09:25Mike Rowe?

  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. I mean.

• 1:09:36Speaker 02

  These are one in the same causes.

• 1:09:38Mike Rowe?

  How do we do it tangibly?

• 1:09:39Speaker 02

  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. It gets into we need more people to love work and appreciate work and want to pursue the good life that comes from work. 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. 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? And they talk about when they were a busboy at the diner. But they didn't feel that way at the time, but they feel it now. 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.

• 1:10:24Speaker 02

  If you think like this is what I face tomorrow, it seems kind of, you know, dead end. But if you look at it from a longer timeline, it gives you this hope that you're going to be on the other side of something. 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 we first have to appreciate work itself as a source of dignity and value and purpose.

• 1:10:53Mike Rowe?

  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. And I'll never forget 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. It was the fact that they stuck around to tell me about their first job.

• 1:11:21Mike Rowe?

  Usher in a theater, telemarketer, landscaping, down the list. And these, these are governors, these are captains of industry, real industrialists, many of whom were in their eighties.

• 1:11:36Mike Rowe?

  And they all just wanted a moment to tell me 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.

• 1:11:57Speaker 02

  The very first speaking event I did for the book when it came out was a National Review event in New York City and Andy Puzder, who'd been the CEO at Carl's Jr. and was, you know, Trump's nominee for Labor Secretary. There was a Treasury Department Economist. 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. And I remember thinking like, well, okay, well, this sounds like a pretty good way to start things off then. 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. Even now, you know, 50 isn't that old, but I didn't have to like go back and check the scrapbooks

• 1:12:41Speaker 02

  to remember what I had done at age 12, 15, 16, 18. All those jobs I had had kind of, I remember them like they were yesterday. I remember the managers' names. I remember the hourly wage. And I remember saying, why do I got to listen to this boss? He doesn't know what he's talking about. And the lesson I learned from some times in life, you have to listen to supervisor that you think you know more than and getting along with a coworker. 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? 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.

• 1:13:21Mike Rowe?

  Same lesson.

• 1:13:22Speaker 02

  I had to learn them first at the movie theater.

• 1:13:24Mike Rowe?

  Yeah. Yeah. The lessons don't change, only the stakes.

• 1:13:27Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:13:28Mike Rowe?

  It's funny, Chuck, we were, do you remember what your paycheck was at United Artists? I think mine was $2.70. It was minimum wage in 1980. Before it was telemarketing, we were ushers too, which is why that Chapter jumped out.

• 1:13:45Speaker 02

  Yeah, I got four twenty five an hour for opening night of Pretty Woman and Die Hard Two and Dick Tracy. And so it looks like the wage inflation was pretty good from when you started off to when I came in.

• 1:13:58Mike Rowe?

  I got. We were Raiders of the Lost Ark, Prince of the City.

• 1:14:02Speaker 02

  The Shining.

• 1:14:03Mike Rowe?

  The Shining.

• 1:14:04Speaker 02

  You had better movies than I did.

• 1:14:05Mike Rowe?

  We did have better movies, but you know what else we had, man? It was a, and this is another thing about jobs and I'll, I'll land the plane now. I know you gotta go. But it's just this idea that were you really a movie usher? Or were you an ambassador for whatever that brand was? Who were you working for?

• 1:14:22Speaker 02

  It was Edwards.

• 1:14:23Mike Rowe?

  Edwards.

• 1:14:23Speaker 02

  Big down in Orange County.

• 1:14:25Mike Rowe?

  Big, so you probably had a blazer. You probably had the Edwards logo on it.

• 1:14:28Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:14:28Mike Rowe?

  So you're an emissary, you know? For us, it was United Artists and then when you weren't an usher, maybe you were a cashier. Or maybe you're working concessions. Or maybe you got called up to the big show and learned how to run the projectors. And like all of these other attachments, right? This whole way leads on to way thing. It's so important. 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, steamer. It's like, that's not how it works at all, is it? It's all just part of a quilt.

• 1:15:05Speaker 02

  Part of a overall ecosystem and a market economy does a terrible job at promoting itself.

• 1:15:13Speaker 02

  But what you're describing is the sort of invisible hand idea. Bunch of things working together to make social cooperation possible, to make a prosperous life possible. 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. 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 a union and they made more. And it's funny is I remember thinking like, that guy is just a stud. You know, like I'm sure he made something seven, eight times what we did 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.

• 1:15:58Speaker 02

  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.

• 1:16:08Mike Rowe?

  Adam Smith or Henry Haslett?

• 1:16:11Speaker 02

  Uh, well, both. You know, you can't get to Haslett without Smith, so you have to build. You gotta stand on the shoulders of giants.

• 1:16:17Mike Rowe?

  So for my listeners, somebody who's just really didn't realize until they listen.

• 1:16:21Speaker 02

  They're not gonna, they're not gonna read Smith.

• 1:16:23Mike Rowe?

  They're not gonna read-

• 1:16:23Speaker 02

  Haslett's so easy to read. He's so wonderful to read.

• 1:16:26Mike Rowe?

  Economics in one lesson.

• 1:16:27Speaker 02

  Economics in one lesson.

• 1:16:28Mike Rowe?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:29Speaker 02

  Greatest popularization of market principles ever written.

• 1:16:33Mike Rowe?

  That's where I think I first read Broken Windows.

• 1:16:36Speaker 02

  Yeah, and so most people now will say Haslett's broken window fallacy because they don't know Fred Astaire read it, uh, wrote it over 100 years earlier because Haslett was so good at popularizing it.

• 1:16:48Mike Rowe?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:48Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:16:49Mike Rowe?

  Well, look, I mean, with time, maybe Full Time Work and the Meaning of Life will be right on top of Econ 101.

• 1:16:57Speaker 02

  We'll see.

• 1:16:57Mike Rowe?

  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.

• 1:17:06Speaker 02

  I really appreciate you having me. I loved the conversation.

• 1:17:08Mike Rowe?

  Uh, where do people go to get it? Is it the obvious stuff?

• 1:17:11Speaker 02

  Yeah, obvious, obviously, Amazon and all that, but we have a website for the book, uh, fulltimebook.com, fulltimebook.com. It's got video clips and articles and reviews and things, and then they can click through to Amazon or Barnes & Noble there.

• 1:17:24Mike Rowe?

  Fantastic. Fulltimebook.com. Pick up a copy. It's awesome, and so are you. Thanks for the time.

• 1:17:28Speaker 02

  Thanks so much.

• 1:17:58Mike Rowe?

  And leave us a review.

• 1:18:06Mike Rowe?

  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. All you've got to do is leave a quick five star review. Not four. All you've got to do is leave a quick five star review. And not three. All you've got to do is leave a quick five star review. Definitely not two. All you've got to do is leave a quick five star review. We need five. All you've got to do is leave a quick. Even if you hate it. Five star review. Thank you.

• 1:18:41Speaker 03

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