the math goes like this every year five skilled trades people retire for every five who retire to replace them so we're we're seeing an incredible lack of interest and enthusiasm around these skilled trades I guess my answer is it's true inflation super bad the cost of college an enormous problem but the entrepreneur who took the time to master a skill that's in demand is crushing it in this economy and and nobody's talking about them on this episode of the Sunday special Mike Road joins us for a conversation about America's backbone the American Workforce best known as the dirtiest man on TV from the Emmy award-winning TV series dirty jobs Rose talent for storytelling and commitment to American labor are evident through his ongoing work to highlight hardworking citizens across the country the micro Works Foundation has awarded millions of dollars in work ethic scholarships which aim to close the skills Gap by funding training for jobs that are in demand on his podcast the way I heard it roow hosts conversations with guests on everything from history to Hollywood this summer rose latest project is an unapologetically patriotic feature film called something to stand for part historical reenactment and part documentary roow travels to our nation's capital to honor the patriots who built our country in today's episode we discuss what it means to be a patriot and Rose's best advice for a high school graduate in today's economy we also explored the implications of AI on white collar workers and forgotten institutions of community in American lives don't miss this inspiring conversation with Mike Row one of America's most prominent advocates for American labor [Music] hey Mike it's great to see you again it's been a while been a hot minute 2018 I want to say yeah now we were back in Los Angeles at the time a terrible place and now I'm over here Sodom in Florida Sodom in the springtime yes exactly exactly and now we're here in in Florida where it is hot and humid but free we all have pet alligators and it's awesome but a l a lot has happened for you in the meantime you have a brand new movie coming out called some to stand for let me start with that what what made you interested in doing this project what is the project well it's a project I've been doing for years I just didn't know it you know uh sort of the that's happened to me in a lot of things it happened with dirty jobs it happened with the foundation the headlines sometimes if you're lucky will like catch up to your smack and make you relevant in ways that you didn't fully uh plan or anticipate something to stand for is really a collection of of nine stories that I wrote on my podcast years ago that wound up getting adapted for the big screen specifically for Independence Day they're all it's not a u it's not a political movie I should be clear about that but it is very uh patriotic and unapologetically so so some people might be triggered if they're not careful I mean let's talk about that a little bit I mean the the fact that you know things that are just sort of Baseline patriotic now have become controversial I think that that that's incredibly bizarre because there is this giant divide between sort of the political chattering class and the vast majority of Americans vast majority of Americans are going to watch something like your movie and they're not going to feel the politics of it but the chattering class obviously is is going to what's happened to create that divide so much you know I mean the language is a very vulnerable uh Target in times like these and words stop meaning what we think they mean and it's well and good to have a of parties that disagree fundamentally on a bunch of things I've never had a problem with that but I do think the anti-americanism that's that's crept into the conversation is is a different thing and so I'm real clear in the movie and I'm real clear when I talk about it that you know I didn't write it for Republicans Or democrats or liberals or conservatives I wrote it for people who still see themselves first and foremost As Americans and it is unfortunate that there is a cohort today that fundamentally sees themsel as something else and so the the movie is not for them they're they're welcome to come uh but first and foremost I it was actually an article by Jim Lowry over at the uh National Review that inspired this when the when the statues were coming down and and and most recently when the statues were being dressed up with Hamas friendly Garb you know I was just like what are we what are we doing you know we're going to have this whole conversation again so the stories I write from my podcast are are based on that old Paul Harvey format it's a mystery essentially so you learn something you didn't know about somebody you do you get to try and figure it out along the way they're fun but I just Stitch these together with a uh a field trip of sorts to DC met some park rangers met some old men Ben there randomly on honor flights uh we connected at the World War II Memorial the the the Marines Memorial the Lincoln it was basically a love letter to the memorials and monuments that are such a big part of our story intercut with these weird tales about famous people that help build our country who you do know through the lens of something you didn't you know one of the things that that has really happened is that there used to be sort of a baseline just understanding that America was a fundamentally good place and that despite all of our flaws that constitutional principles are unique in world history that the story of America is trying to live up to those principles ever so often Joe Biden pays lip service to this idea but this used to be sort of a a commonly understood thing and I I think that that has fallen away and it's Fallen away in in sort of the most ignorant way which is nobody even realizes that there are other cultures on planet Earth andan to truly understand how amazing America is you really do have to understand history and that there is like an entire rest of the world out there and the rest of the world has an enormous number of truly crappy places like places you would never want to live live with awful values with people who believe precisely the opposite of what we believe and have been deeply inculcated in that belief system and you have to have the respect for those people to at least acknowledge that they have a different belief system they're not just fundamentally stupid that that belief system is fundamentally opposed to to your own and you know we're recording this right now on D-Day and what when I see how much of the online Twitter space about like were we fighting the wrong people during World War II how good really is America what kind of atrocities did America commit during World War II do you know how ignorant you have to be about Imperial Japan or about Nazi Germany or in the Cold War era about Soviet Soviet Russia in order to even make the moral comparison between the United States and its activities over the course of the 20th century and these other countries it's a really good point you have to be aggressively ignorant you have to be willfully ignorant in ways you didn't have to be 30 40 50 years ago because the very device that you just mentioned is your pathway into all of the known information in the history of the world so anybody with a modum of curiosity look you you might find experts who disagree in fact i' argue part of the reason we're living in such a fraught time is because it's tough to find experts who agree and it's difficult also to find historians who are all on the same page about everything it's why my podcast is called the way I heard it honestly I mean six years ago it it seemed pretty clear we were headed in this direction and as people are claiming to be the true true source of of knowledge I kind of wanted to inject a little bit of humility into that and step back and say look I'm not an expert but I do have the same unprecedented access to the past as you and I am curious about it and I don't mind reading things that are that are inconvenient or that challenge my worldview but your first point to me is is the best point you must get out of your ZIP code you must get out of your state you must get out of the country and when I say must I don't mean it it's imperative that you do but if you truly want to wrap yourself in a in a cloak of appreciation and gratitude for the incredibly good cards that we all have in this country then you you can't just be the blind man who grabs the Tusk on the elephant and says oh look I found a bunch of of of ivory or the tail and says oh I found this or the trunk or the legs it's a big world and the differences are wildly disperate and it's so true the best way to truly appreciate what happened in 1776 and on the 6th of June and on so many important dates including current dates is to have some sort of understanding from once we came and one of the ironies of the sort of anti-American perspective is that it really is a sort of America Centric Viewpoint as I say like in order to understand how amazing America is as we say you have to actually understand other cultures and then understand what America is in opposition to those other cultures because again it's a world filled with people but that never seems to take place it's the sort of America Centric view where the only place that matters on Earth is America and also America is the only country with agency so if somebody opposes the United States it's always blowback it's always because we must have done something to to piss them off and this is the whole anti-western point of view is that the West is Con responsible for the sins of everybody else that if there's a terror attack it must be because somebody made those terrorists super angry so if only we had done something better then the terrorists wouldn't be angry or if only we had been kinder to the Japanese during World War II then Pearl Harbor never happened or or if only we were less interventionists on the foreign policy front then we wouldn't see chaos all over the world as opposed to the idea that no actually pretty much everybody on Earth has Free Will and agency and they all get to make decisions for themselves and so then the question becomes who's making a good decision versus who's making a bad decision right and put on top of that the Trap of the binary I think a lot of what's happened today that has fostered all of the anti-American sentiment or at least a big chunk of it is this idea that if I stand for the flag if I sing the national anthem loudly if I put my hand on my heart and recite the pledge proudly then for some reason that gets processed as oh he thinks the country is perfect oh he thinks America's the best period beat it if you disagree the whole notion of nuance Ben you know the whole idea that you can love an idea love a notion and and come together and celebrate the intent of the founders along with the incredible sacrifice of every man and woman who's ever worn the uniform like if we're not allowed to do that without immediately saying but that's not to say that we haven't made a whole bunch of mistakes or but that's not to say that we of course we have a long way to go of course of course it's a work in progress of course we're not finished but that's the Nuance that's lost so to make the case for Jefferson to make the case for Washington to to talk about the the incredible Genius of those Minds people simply can't hear it because they can't see these men in their own time they have to see them now and they and and and they can't it seems think about what's really on the table I think maybe it's because judging is so much easier to do and so much more fun right so we've we've kind of abdicated the uh the thinking part of of the dialogue and replaced it with the judging part and then completely Arbitrage the whole notion of context out of it and so it's black or white it's blue collar or or white collar it's good or bad or right or wrong and so forth and so on and so bye-bye Nuance right one of the things that's so ironic about all that is the very same people who will you know go soft on terrorists because obviously those terrorists have motivations of their own we can't blame them for their activities they're the same exact people who are very very harsh on the founding fathers so they'll be very harsh on on George Washington for being a slaveholder which of course I mean slavery is bad we all get it but turns out that most of the world did not get that in approximately 1770 in fact most of the world was still holding slaves in in 1770 and so the the you know understanding that is completely Merit meritless for them those people have to be robbed of all Nuance but all Nuance must be provided to people in the Here and Now who are doing truly evil things those people require all of the context and Nuance that can be mustered for them but a historic figure whose principles you are living on the back of in the end what what this comes down to is an extraord level of narcissism and ingratitude for the past this belief that you sprang full-fledged into existence with this set of principles and so everything that you think that is good and true is because you reasoned your way to it yourself Robert George my my friend is the philosophy professor over at at Princeton he does a thought exercise with his students where he says okay let's say that you're living in 1861 Alabama you were brought up in 1861 Alabama how many of you are working with the Underground Railroad how many of you are are siding with the with the north as opposed to the Confederacy in the Civil War and every hand goes up and he says you're lying that's obviously not true that's obviously not true but you know we have this very flattering view of ourselves that we are the only Perfect People in history and and everybody else in history is a sinner even if those are the people who developed the principles that we stand on the back of if you think about Enlightenment as the corollary to woke like we couldn't call it enlightened again because we already went through that period so now it's this period and you know I didn't live through the enlightenment but but I do think that the enemies of of actual thought and understanding are are certainty and and arrogance and I see an awful lot of certainty today and a and a real conspicuous lack of of humility to your point you know your uh your professor could just as easily drag it Forward right and say think about the certainty you have today around that topic call it slavery all right we look back and we are so certain that we would have not made the same mistakes that were made then and by the way never mind there's more slavery on the planet today than there was in 1860 just out of sight out of mind for most Americans but that's a case and then drag yourself 160 years forward and you know what are our great great great grandchildren going to look back at us what what statues currently beloved in the Public Square are liable to be torn BN down a century and a half down the road how are we going to think about um oh I don't know meat eaters for instance or or the whole topic of abortion obviously a lightning rod but you know it it's the parallels are real right and and this idea that we're so quick to judge everything that came before us but no awareness that we're going to be judged the exact same way later that that to me can be explained by a simple a lack of curiosity and a lack of humility but look let me just add real quick too that at least as far as this movie goes and whenever I attempt to do something on the TV or the radio or whatever the first job is never to lecture it's never to scold no one wants a sermon unless it's Sunday morning and even then I'm not so sure um people want to be enter AED and you guys know that you've you've done amazing things but you know balancing all of this is is a conversation that I that I really want to have with you because it's it's so easy to go too far right it's so easy to turn it into a pmic when what people really need and what I think the best pathway into you know improving our understanding of history and and offering some kind of uh Olive Branch to the other side is to First entertain and when I think of tip O'Neal and Ronald Reagan you know going out for a stake after fighting trying to tear each other's throats out during the day that's different than the lip service you referred to earlier and that's what we somehow have to get back to I think we'll get some more on this in just one moment first let's say you had an employee like for example let's say that there's a judge who worked for you and that judge put together a bunch of specious charges then work the prosecutor to get somebody convicted unjustly you know I'm not referring to anybody in particular here but but let say that you want to get rid of that person you wanted somebody better zip recruiter might be a good place to go zip recruiter finds qualified candidates fast right now you can try it for free at ziprecruiter.com Daily wire zip recruiter's user-friendly technology guides you to finding top talent when you post your job zip recruiter's intuitive matching technology presents you with a list of qualified candidates once you reviewed your list of qualified candidates you can swiftly invite your top choices to apply this streamlined process encourages them to apply sooner which allows you to fill that role faster beat everybody else to the punch amp up your hring performance with zip recruiter find the best talent fast just go to ziprecruiter.com dailywire you can try it out for free again that's ziprecruiter.com dailywire we've been using it here at dailywire for literally years you can try it right now at ziprecruiter.com dailywire ZipRecruiter is the smartest way to hire so I I want to ask you because obviously you're a master Storyteller of of the stories that you telling something to stand for you have a personal favorite which what what's your favorite story that you talk about in the movie it's a great question and and a truly vexing one because if you know the old Paul Harvey form format the rest of the story they're all a surprise they're all a reveal you know and I don't want to wreck it for people but I'll tell you the greatest thing that happened filming the movie and by the way this entire all of the Recreations which are pretty elaborate were all shot in Oklahoma there are 300 actors in this thing they're all from Oklahoma the entire crew is from Oklahoma um we started talking about the advantages of of leaving Sodom and gomorah uh where I'm currently broadcasting from you're in Florida where it's hot and free and and in Nashville um you know I film in Georgia where the tax breaks are nice uh but they're even better in Oklahoma so for a whole lot of practical reasons you know I wanted to tell some stories from the heart and I wanted to do it from the Heartland so this mostly takes place in Oklahoma but to stitch it together I drove the old Bronco into DC on this field trip on steroids and while I was there Ben I went to Arlington I went to all the big memorials and their honor flights were everywhere old men 80s 90s met a couple guys in their hundreds wheelchairs there with their families there with volunteers going to these memorials going to these monuments going to these statues dude I mean I know you've seen it but but when you see tears streaming down the worn and Le leathered face of a man who risked his life to make yours better sitting there looking at that wall of stars at the World War II Memorial and and really seeing for the first time that Collective expression of gratitude built for him I'll tell you man I I I'm not overly Earnest but but the movie I hope will have an exponential impact and and and really magnify that little thing and again final thought on it it just goes to show part of the movie is very very scripted these stories are very deliberate you know I I tell them from an empty stage in an empty theater and then we bring them to life but it's the unscripted moments it's the people you run into and thank God there's a behind the scenes camera always rolling with me and you suddenly find a story you you didn't know you needed to hear from a guy you didn't know existed who was brought to a place by people who loved him to reconnect with the sacrifice he made once upon a time that is that kind of Storytelling uh does require a level of humility that demands you let go of your plan and point the camera at the most interesting thing that's going on so you know you've made a career out of doing exactly that is taking stories that may have been left behind and bringing those to light obviously that that's true of Dirty Jobs and and you know many of the blue collar jobs that seem to go neglected by the media so I want to switch over to that topic for a moment because one of the things that that's happening in election 2024 again without getting too political is the feelings about the economy are heavily divided obviously you have a group of people who've done quite well in the current inflationary economy the people have gotten absolutely clocked in the face is everybody in the middle class blue collar workers inflation has trashed them their wages have not kept up with the inflation they've seen their prices on everyday goods and services go up tremendously going to a restaurant at a cheap restaurant is now luxury being able to afford dinner is is very difficult all of the gas has gone up all these things have happened over the course of the past few years and then they're being told by the media that basically it's all a meth that that really there's nothing for them to to worry about so you know when when you are talking with folks who are working Blue Collar jobs what's the experience that you're getting from them on the ground right now it's largely that however there there is a line in the blue collar world that often gets conflated if not outright ignored and that's the line between blue collar workers both Union and non-union who who fit really the cohort you've just described and the entrepreneurs um my Foundation uh really tries to encourage a level of Entrepreneurship along with the Curiosity required to master a skill that's in demand the entrepreneurs that I've stayed in touch with and we've had about 2,000 people go through microworks um it's one of the great unreported stories of our time a guy spends $88,000 and gets his welding certification and he begins to work and then he expands that certification maybe he's welding underwater maybe he's doing different kinds of Fairly esoteric uh Parts aspects of welding that most people don't know but more often than not what he does is he he buys a van and he hires a buddy who's a plumber and then he gets another guy who's an electrician and then they got some heating and air conditioning guys and before you know it you have a mechanical Contracting Company lean two three vans half a dozen guys killing it they're killing it they have more work than they can do Ben the today you want to talk about people are still talking about the shortages and the disconnects and the stigmas and stereotypes that might be preventing people from getting into the plumbing field I talk about that all the time because debunking that nonsense is important but the real conversation that's happening today isn't oh my God I didn't know you could make 150 Grand as a plumber or a welder or oh my God I had no idea that plumbers were in such demand here here and here the conversation today is oh my God you're telling me I have to wait four days for a plumber a week you're telling me I have to work work wait eight days for an electrician you know this is this is happening like everything you just said is true but underneath it is some some some really uh bad math or or troubling arithmetic as Lincoln called it with regard to uh the civil war deaths only here the math goes like this every year five skilled trades people retire for every five who retire to replace them now it's closer to one and a half and it's been like that for nearly 20 years so we're we're seeing an incredible lack of interest and enthusiasm around these skills trades the skills Gap still gets a fair amount of press but it's really a will Gap right and so I guess my answer is it's true inflation super bad the inflation credentialing something else we could talk about a real problem the cost of college an enormous problem the unintended consequences of forgiving student loans all all that stuff is is part and parcel of the madness that's happening right now but the entrepreneur who took the time to master a skill that's in demand is crushing it in this economy and they're setting their own schedule and nobody's talking about them and that's too bad because as examples go they're good ones we get some more mik row in a moment first are you still struggling with back taxes or unfiled Returns the IRS is escalating collections by adding 20,000 new agents and sending millions of demand letters handling this alone can be a huge mistake and cost you thousands of bucks in these challenging times your best offense is tax Network USA with over 14 years of experience the experts at tax tax Network USA have saved clients millions in back taxes regardless of the size of your tax issue their expertise is your advantage tax Network USA offers three key Services protection compliance and settlement upon signing up tax Network USA will immediately contact the IRS to secure a protection order ensuring aggressive collection activities such as garnishments levies or property seizures are halted if you haven't filed in a while need amended returns or you're missing records tax Network USA's expert tax preparers will update all your filings to eliminate the risk of IRS enforcement then they'll create a settlement strategy to reduce or eliminate your tax debt the IRS is the largest collection agency in the world now the tax season is over collection season has begun tax Network USA can even help with state tax issues for a complimentary consultation call today 1 800 245 6000 or visit their website TN usa.com Shapiro that's 1800 245 6000 or visit TN usa.com Shapiro today so let's talk about that fact that that our our economy has been geared toward the college graduate for 60 years at this point that basically for the last three generations there's been a huge push that every single person needs to go to college and I talked about this back in 2018 and and many of these people are not getting degrees in in anything productive it's not like they're going into a stem field where they're actually learning a skill set they're doing what I did and they're getting a polysi degree mainly so they can go to law school or if they can't go to law school they get a polys side degree and then hope to latch on at at some sort of white collar job doing desk work somewhere but a lot of those degrees are effectively worthless or or counterproductive given that they're now being put into serious so let's say that you have an 18-year-old and you're now thinking about college this actually become a big issue in my personal Community because obviously you've seen a wide increase in anti-Semitism in on a lot of these college campuses so I'm getting a lot of questions on a personal level from Orthodox Jews who are coming to me like I have an 18-year-old my my kid doesn't want to be a doctor doesn't want to be an engineer what do I do with my kid and what I've been saying to them is you might want to think very seriously about seeing if you can find an apprentice ship for your kid with a with a good business and and seeing if you can you know take all the money you're going to pour into college and then maybe give them a chestnut that they can use to build a business once they actually have a skill set what's the what's the case you'd make to an 18-year-old when is it good to go to college what is it bad to go to college what would you be telling an 18-year-old who isn't necessarily going to be a doctor yeah I mean it would have to be a very personal conversation one one of the things I become deeply uh skeptical of is Cookie Cutter advice bromides platitudes the the desire to paint with a broad brush is part of the reason we got into this problem right people started to say in an attempt to make a more persuasive case for higher education they started to say all sorts of great things about those outcomes but then as with all PR we went too far and we weren't content to Simply say look at all the great things that higher education give you we had to say if you don't do that you're going to wind up over here turning a wrench with some vocational consolation prize right we and this always happens we always always always go tooo far we're trying to make a case for a thing that needs some love but we do it at the expense of all the other things then you pull shop class out of high school contemporaneously with that and remove from view all Optical proof of these other vocations and Presto you got a whole generation of kids who don't even know these jobs exist right so we did that and that was super dumb and and and now you know parents are looking for advice we we are looking for a simple thing to say to an 18-year-old kid who's who's trying to you know weigh and measure the whole thing but it's tough for the reason you just brought up I always used to think look regarding my own liberal arts education I value it a great deal but it didn't cost a great deal you know I I went to a community college that happened to have some great teachers and then I went to a university for a couple years got my basic communications degree from from talson State and when I add it all up right the Community College couple years at the University graduated 1984 the whole the whole thing was $12,200 today the same course load same schools it's like $94,000 and so my thing was always look you you you can't say a thing is valuable at any cost without having a rational conversation about debt so I always kind of stayed in in that lane and in that lane I've been able to say look I got this device here you know like we said earlier I'm I'm tapped into 99% of the known information in in the history of time I just watched the lecture on my device over at MIT for free okay so you know the access to all of that information is wildly different than it was when I graduated in in the mid 80s from school and and the fact that the price has increased at the rate it has I mean nothing Ben and nothing in the history of Western Civilization has become more expensive than a 4-year degree over the last 40 years not energy not real estate not health care not not nothing right and yet it's still there so I I still make that point a lot but to your point the IDE a that not only is it too expensive but it's damn dangerous that too many of these schools are aggressively and willfully ignoring our past if not changing our past I hate to say indoctrination centers because you know it's that's turning into a platitude as well and I don't want to paint with too broad a brush but I'll tell you this never I've been doing this 16 years raising money for work ethic scholarships and giving a couple million bucks away every year never before not since Labor Day of 2008 anyway has higher ed made my job easier never before have the headlines sent more people with Deep Pockets to microworks to say you know something I'm simply not going to reward Harvard and with respect I know you graduated there but come on man 51 billion in endowment and we are now forgiving the loans from some Harvard grads what is what are we doing I mean I tell me if I'm wrong I think I got this right though in the in the late 1950s the uh the average GPA for a Harvard graduate was something like 2.6 2.7 today it's 3.9 talk about inflation what's happening in Harvard what's happening at Brown what's happening at Dartmouth and Yale and so forth is is extraordinary both on the the front that you mentioned the protests the plagiarism tearing through the administration all all all of that stuff is making parents and donors nervous in ways that are totally different from the mere outrageousness of the cost so what do I tell an 18-year-old in light of all all of that I say put every single option on the table and I mean from apprenticeships all of the scholarships the IV League community colleges every single thing and don't forget about the magic box that gives you access to the best liberal arts degree you could ever have at an affordable price don't don't forget that but weigh it and measure it and make your decision and know that in the words of Leed Zeppelin they'll still be time to change the roads you're on yeah there's so many bubbles that are associated with higher education there's the price bubble where obviously the demand has outstripped the supply largely because of subsidies from the government because you can get easy cheap money from the government to go to college and and so everything the government subsidizes become more expensive and then you have the ideological bubble that has expanded and expanded and expanded and I think separated off the normal American from the universities in a particularly perverse way I I I really think that I've said this for a long time there's been a lot of attempts to explain the phenomen of Donald Trump or the blue collar love for Donald Trump as a sort of reflection of economic concerns what I've always said is that that's wrong it's a cultural concern it's the fact that Donald Trump took these people seriously as opposed to all the college graduates who were Staffing up the Obama Administration really kind of looked down on people who work blueco collar jobs and and who saw those people as having bitter Clinger values that that Donald Trump has always represented a cultural challenge to an endemic hegemony of of the left more than he has an economic challenge per se and so there's that bubble this ideological bubble that exists on campus and then there's this third bubble that I think is really going to burst pretty quickly and that's something we talked about back in 2018 but with regard to blueco collar jobs and as it turns out it's actually more of a threat to White Collar jobs and that is AI so there's a lot of talk about how AI was going to put a bunch of bluecollar workers out of work circuit 2018 and here there was a lot of talk specifically about say truck drivers and that was a concern it remains a concern we are close to self-driving technology which is going to lower the cost on a lot of goods and services obviously because shipping costs are very large when you're talking about Supply chains however the vast majority of jobs that are set to just get destroyed by AI are all in the white collar domain a huge number of lawyers are going to lose their jobs because of AI a huge number of journalists are going to lose their jobs because of AI if you have a college degree in the liberal arts your job just became way more Expendable if you have an art degree AI is going to be able to outdo you very quickly and I I don't know whether that's because it was made by people who had those kinds of degrees or whether it's simply that it's easier to synthesize information in in these sorts of verbal or artistic forms than it is to actually work in the real world one of the and you've seen this with machines machines are are are very good at performing simple tasks but they can't like clean your room for you because that involves a bunch of different tasks put together so it looks like there's going to be Resurgence in the blue collar market and there's going to be a downturn into some of the white collar market look if you're a fan of irony it's it's it's delicious and I say that with great respect to anybody who's going to be adversely impacted but I spent a lot of time 2016 17 18 every every Symposium I was invited to every talk I gave every think tank that welcomed me you know it it always came back not to AI but to Tech in general and Robotics and the displacement impact that that was going to have on the jobs that my Foundation typically focuses on and I spent a lot of time you know trying to thread that needle I talked a lot about the Lite Revolution I talked about the fact that look it's not it's not going to be as clear as you think it is there will be an impact and there are some uh robotic welding situations happening now that that are mind-bogglingly efficient and effective and it and it did have an impact but it didn't have the impact that anyone thought not nearly to the degree in fact if you want job security right now it is Plumbing steam fitting electric it's the skilled trades it's all that stuff it's never been more secure than it is right now but wow dude the AI thing I don't even somebody sent me a link the other day and said you just got to click on this Mike I asked the program to narrate a couple of paragraphs of this this thing I'm working on in the style of Mike Row narrating Deadliest Catch and I clicked on it and I listened to it and had he not told me what it was I would have simply assumed yeah that's something I did five or six years ago I I don't remember it but it's me well it's not you know and so you're right I I believe the impact on all the fields you mentioned is going to be real but you mentioned art too and I'd love to Riff on that with you for a minute because when you take the art out of a thing whatever the thing is that's that's almost always the beginning of the end of the thing and it's true of shop class it's true of the skilled trades you know I'm old enough to remember when I was in high school that stuff was called The Vocational arts and then they took out the art and it became votek once you hyphenate something you know forget the end is near votek turns into an a bunch of squishy other acronyms I don't even remember and then we just settled on shop right shop and then we walked it behind the barn and shot it and that's how we got shop class out of high school right we started by retweeting the language and removing the art when I think of AI and when I think of the possibility I mean what are you going to do when the machine with the help of AI can create a Picasso or a man or a mon or a or a renois or a da Vinci that that is virtually indistinguishable even with the greatest authenticators and the greatest umpires coming in and when when they can't tell the difference between a beetle song that was just discovered that nobody ever heard and the fake that was just discovered that nobody ever heard right what's going to happen to the way we think about creativity and originality and ownership and money how are we going to assign a value to a fake that's better than the original what is scarcity going to mean in all of these places it's going to it's going to not just change the way people get paid to do stuff it's going to fundamentally Jack with our with our whole value system and the and and the way we assign gratitude to a thing right if a difficult thing is now made with such ease how are we to think about that too final point I'm involved a minor legal matter at the moment and I I asked chat GPT a legal question and what came back in 15 seconds were six perfectly worded chronologically sensible paragraphs that analyzed this fairly complicated legal matter in a way that took my actual attorney 3 weeks and I don't even want to say how much money right right so all of this is true and it's all happening and Nvidia is now worth 3 trillion plus dollar and it's happening right in front of us Ben right in front of us and you know back to the very very beginning of our conversation part of what is happening we don't have time to process this we don't have time to process the history 250 years ago it seems we don't have time I think we still have Collective PSD from the lockdowns we don't have time to read the real Anthony fouchy although you should it's pretty great we don't there's so many important things that we don't have time to process that I think that too goes into this whole bullia base of that which has left us breathless and disconnected and fearful and yet weirdly certain in all of our unfounded opinions I mean I I think that people even now are underestimating what AI is is going to do I remember I I was first shown in exhibition of chat GPT one like the original version must have been two and a half years ago and during this exhibition I remember they said the person who was showing it to me said that they had given it this prompt and the prompt was a basic political question like can liberal democracy survive and it it turned out five paragraphs of pretty well-written Pros about the conflicts in liberalism and democracy and all this kind of stuff and I remember my wife was there too we looked at each other like that can't be real and of course not only was it real it was you know a very early iteration and then we came back to a similar seminar a year later and I I was noting to somebody well you know I've been playing with chat GPT a little bit online and I can see these errors I've made videos about oh we're like three versions beyond that like what what what you're what you're seeing publicly we are way beyond that what I'm being told by people who work in this industry is that we're 3 to 5 years away from artificial general intelligence which is a completely different thing than what we're talking about now artificial intelligence is you enter a prompt and then the AI answers you by giving you the best answer it can we're getting to the point with artificial general intelligence where it prompts itself where it basically decides what questions it wants to ask and then it pursues those answers faster than any human brain or network of human brains can and and that's going to Boggle everybody's mind I mean it's going to destroy the way everything works and so I think that ironically what you're actually going to see is a reversion to many of the things that we have abandoned in favor of the tech world so we abandoned getting together in person in favor of the tech world we abandoned you know Church in favor of the tech World in favor of sort of pseudosocial interaction but it turns out that the way that we're going to end up finding human connection is going to not we're not going to be able to mediate that via technology anymore we're actually going to have to like get together in person we're going to have to go to events again we're going to have to see people face to face and that's going to receive enormous priority because everything else as you say can be done unbelievably cheaply if I want to have a conversation with Mike row two years from now I'm just going to be able to type in speak to me as Mike Row and have a conversation with you but it's not going to be the same as if you and I got together over a cup of coffee that's right remember the old song I think it's so groovy now that people are finally getting together think it's wonderful I think you're right I think there's going to be a giant reversion to something fundamental back to my question how long you want to wait for a plumber you know AI is not going to change the answer to that the answer is going to be I don't want to wait I want him now right so some things that have been out of favor are going to become wildly wildly in favor and so much of what we've been told is aspirational and what we've aspired to is it's going to freak us out and yeah I I I I don't even know how to how to think about it other than to say it it it it is all going I think things are going to get so basic I posted something yesterday Riley Gaines was on my podcast I mean brave brave brave kid 24 years old you know and and I I said to her on the podcast and I just wrote this and I might live to regret it I don't know but I said you know Riley you are you're the U you're the kid in The Emperor's New Clothes you're you're the only one surrounded by all those talents people who who pointed and said a thing that everybody was pretending not to see and uh I only bring that up because I think in some way our whole conversation is informed by people who are willing to say the thing that they that they clearly see to be true those who disagree but the majority of people in Hans Christian's Anderson's story were the towns people and they were the ones who had to figure out whether or not to open their mouth and most of them didn't and then they had to figure out whether or not to open their mouth after the kids said what was self-evident and some of them still didn't right but but many did and and that Dynamic is at work with everything we've talked about it's at work with AI it's at work with politics it's at work with our history we maybe it's because we have so much information at our disposal coming at us from so many different directions that we can that we can find something to automatically gainsay whatever it is the other side says they see but we are entering this this Brave New World you know where we're all seeing the same thing but concluding different things as a result and I don't even know what to make of that except to quote hux who said in Brave New World I think that the uh greatest threat to democracy was total Anarchy but the second greatest threat was total efficiency and what will we do when efficiency has so completely eclipsed Effectiveness that all we're left with is this calculus of of time and ver similitude and final thought you you said what came back was some pretty good Pros you know and that was my feeling too with my with my legal experience but back to the art look we this is the first batter in the first inning of a very long game you and I are going to live to see what comes back is some pretty good poetry and that's when I get that's when I'm not sure what to it's wildly improved I mean I I remember just even a couple of years ago it couldn't make a joke like it had no sense of humor there was no way that it could it could mimic a human sense of humor and now you could use it as a joke writer I mean it's it's it's gotten it's gotten that much better that quickly I don't know if you've seen some of the some of the artistic renderings that have been done by I think it's called som the the the video AI where you insert a prompt like man walking through rainstorm with trees in the background casting Shadows on his face and he has a downcast look on his face and it and it turns out something that looks like an actor doing that in you know a few minutes it's going to it's going to yeah know what that will program for is people who can write scripts obviously and who can be descriptive in their language for the prompts but you know it's it's it's going to transform everything and and where are you Ben on I'm like what do you think I mean I heard Tucker Carlson say the other day something about look I mean if if we see it coming what's the argument for not blowing up the data centers right and and my my my argument for for not blowing up the data centers and I had this exact argument with Tucker back in I think 2018 about self-driving trucks he was making the argument that you should basically blow them up then so that people can continue to drive trucks and my answer to that was that that's not a real solution because AI is being developed by a multiplicity of countries right now and so you can either be the leader in that or you can get your ass kicked in it those are basically your two choices there's no choice where you just get rid of all of these efficiency based develop ments and then you don't get overtaken by other countries with significantly worse values I mean what I what I think that is going to emerge is as always the market ends up you know creating new jobs in new ways that none of us have ever thought of I mean many of us I have a job that didn't it literally didn't exist 30 years ago it existed in like a weirdly other form in sort of terrestrial radio maybe um and if you go back 100 years it existed in the form of giving lectures on circuit maybe but it like running a podcasting company it's the medium didn't didn't exist right I mean a giant Media company that that does the kind of stuff that we do so is it's going to generate jobs in ways that we have not really thought of and in some ways it's going to democratize those jobs uh in in the sense that if you look at the various revolutions that have taken place over time the Agricultural Revolution basically democratizes the use of of animal power the the Industrial Revolution IND it democratizes the use of machine power the information Revolution democratizes access to information which used to be The Preserve of of just the very wealthy and what we're getting now with the AI Revolution is democratization of intelligence itself which is a shockingly different thing right if what people are worried about is that the meritocracy is geared on behalf of the intelligent what happens when intelligence is available to literally everyone where you don't have to be you know a a trained writer from Oberlin in order to pen a novel you can just say okay here's my ideas for the novel and I'd like it in the style of X and suddenly that intelligence is available to you in a way that it simply wasn't before and so you could see outgrowths of skill sets that are it's in the same way that steroids you know can make a baseball player hit the ball further AI is going to make people able to do things that they weren't able to do before in intelligent ways that they didn't originally have the capacity to do probably but back to appreciation what what's the impact on the town's people right I mean it's it's it's always easier to default to the truck driver or the artist or the you know the person who's about to be displaced from the thing but how will a I uh improve or or Foster a greater level of of gratitude or emotional intelligence or or anything with with the town's people and I only ask because you know the audience always gets left behind in these in these kinds of conversations you know we we tend to default to you know the the the performer whether it's a comedian or a musician or you know somebody's in front of a bunch of people making sounds doing something right take the town's people out of it take them away and and suddenly we're left with a kind of well I mean it's the ultimate uh it's the ultimate arrogance we're just building little monuments to ourselves little prototypes just you know doing things in front of no one so I think about the towns people in that story all of the time now because I think the audience by and large has has been relegated to something that's that's less important than the performer itself if that makes I mean no I think that's true I mean listen any any anything right now it used to be that the distance between a luxury good and a common good was 10 20 years right that that something that a very rich person had was something a very rich person had you know for 20 years and then eventually the price would lower through competition and eventually it would be a common place item that that we all enjoy I remember a time you remember a time when cell phones you know the big clunky things those were only for rich people that's something that rich people had this is like the late 80s and then now everybody has that including very poor people the the distance from luxury item to Common item is now incredibly quick I mean we're talking about like months the access that that the rich people have to AI is effectively the same as the access that poor people have to AI which could actually create a certain leveling effect that that could be good on the other hand as you say you know what is the impact going to be on the common man it's going to have two impacts in my view One impact is going to be the same as every other market-based Advance has had things are going to become better and they're going to become cheaper so your access to goods and services are going to become more efficient because that's always what happens when you develop new products and services that are incredibly efficient on the other hand I think when people say two cheers for the free market instead of three cheers I've always had sort of an objection to that in the sense that I think when people say that what they're trying to say is that the market is not everything and my my response is always who said the market was everything mean like like like that's like saying two cheers for a hammer because it's not a screwdriver well right but it's a hammer so like the market is very good at being a market it's not very good at being a virtue generator it's not very good at being a a meaning generator the market doesn't generate meaning the market channels your feelings of meaning into a pricing system that's a what generates the original feelings of meaning that's a very different thing that's why I think that the the Dual effect of a very highly technocratic Society and a very highly secular society that's really dangerous because when you don't have any centralizing set of values and you combine that with the ability to do literally anything then you're looking at kind of a Noah generation right you're looking at the preah flood generation you can do anything you want and you have the capacity to do anything you want and you're incredibly rich and that's going to lead to the kind of arrogance that you're talking about but what what leads to a reversion away from that arrogance are those social sensors I was talking about and predominantly here I mean people need to go back to church I mean it's really just that simple it sounds it sounds really you know basic but it's true if you go back to you the the richest people of all time in the early 20th century about like Rockefeller so Rockefeller was very famous for being a churchgoing person he went to church and the idea was that he went to the same church as the poor guy right now in American society those institutions don't exist anymore what is the thing that the very rich people go to that the poor people also go to even if you go to a common event now that's not the way that it works if you're very rich you got the Luxury Box and if you're a common person in the bleachers right like that that that income gap is really large but if you go to my SCH right if you go to my synagogue then there are people of all different income strata who are not only should yeah exactly I mean they're all they're all sitting they're going to each other's houses for lunch you we'll go to people's apartments that are tiny we'll go to people's big giant houses like that the if that's used I think America used to habitually be that I mean this is what the toille talks about is sort of this idea that that America was a giant Town Square and people used to associate we've taken away all the association activities and when you get rid of that it's it's going to be nearly impossible for technological development not to end in complete isolation from one another I I'm I'm I'm in such violent agreement with that you know the country still needs the Boy Scouts in its in my view in its original form sorry to be a stickler about that but you know I I'm an eagle scout I sent out 50,000 congratulatory letters i i largely forgot about the impact that organization had on my life until I was in my 40s and was able to look back at it and see that's it it it's the connective tissue you're talking about skills USA uh the 4 club and then as you get older the the JC's the the Lions Club the rotarians where I mean know bush bush got a lot of crap for talking about the U the thousand points of light but but that's what all of the these things are you know they're the they're the grout in the giant wall of tile that that holds everything together and we have waged a weird kind of War on those entities and look in my Foundation I've got this thing called a sweat pledge and I get all kinds of grief you know for this because it it's a pledge you have to take now I can't enforce it but because we award work ethic scholarship ship we we try and put some semblance of sides on that and there are various Hoops people have to jump through but this sweat pledge skill and work ethic aren't taboo terribly clever acronym that came to me after half a bottle of bourbon and uh but but it's it's not only out there Ben it's now a curriculum and we're getting it into high schools and the and the first the very first tenant on this 12 point pledge says I believe I have hit the greatest Lottery of all time I live in America I walk the Earth above all things I'm grateful so if you and I can't agree on the importance of gratitude in the scheme of things then my Foundation can't help you and this particular pile of free money is simply not for you right and this thing goes down the list and it I said earlier nobody wants a lecture they don't nobody wants a sermon they don't but sometimes they kind of need both and this idea that that these old virtues still matter not to the benefit of rapacious capitalists like Rockefeller who did in fact benefit from people's work ethic they also benefit the people themselves these are these virtues are truly egalitarian and I've never met anybody who suffered because they had a decent attitude and a healthy understanding of delayed gratification and some measure of personal responsibility shot through with a commitment to work ethic nobody's ever been hurt by that so I sorry for the tangent but when you combine a code a CREDO with you know slogans and motto these things are easy to make fun of and I've made fun of them many times in many different circles but they matter and when you ask a kid or even an adult to hold up your hand damn it and read these things out loud and tell me we're on the same page or beat it that that needs to happen it needs to happen in schools and it needs to happen in churches what else is a church but a bunch of like-minded people who came together around a shared understanding or belief system on some basic things none of which have any to do anything to do with your with your tax return to your point so yeah man that that that intangible stuff that grout between the tiles that is the very stuff that we're talking about it's it's why I made the movie I did it's why I run the foundation I do it's why I try to tell the kinds of stories I can and it's why you know I talk to people about all of this this discourse man this is the Public Square we're doing it right now Ben I'm I'm glad you had me back by the way I was happy to help launch your little Sunday program how all those years years ago you're welcome well the movie is something to stand for micro it's a it's I can't wait to see it myself Mike really appreciate the time and of course it's great to be with you likewise let's do it again in I don't know five years five months or we'll get our avatars and our ciphers together and we'll just hit the proper keys and nobody will know the difference mro I really appreciate it [Music] the Ben Shapiro Sunday special is produced by Savannah Morris and Matt Kemp associate producers are Jake Pollock and John Crick production intern is Sarah steel editing is by Jeff tomblin and Austin Davenport audio is mixed by Mike Corina camera and lighting is by Zach ginta hair makeup and wardrobe by Fabiola Christina title Graphics are by Cynthia Angulo executive assistant Kelly carvalo executive in charge of production is David wormis executive producer Justin seagull executive producer Jeremy boring the Ben Shapiro show Sunday special is a daily wire production copyright daily wire 2024 [Music]