478: Nicholas Eberstadt—The New Misery

Summary

Podcast Summary: The Way I Heard It with Mike Rowe

Episode 478: Nicholas Eberstadt—The New Misery

Air Date: April 7, 2026
Guest: Nicholas Eberstadt, demographer, economist, Senior Fellow at AEI
Host: Mike Rowe (with Chuck)
Main Theme: Exploring America’s “new misery” through population trends, workforce challenges, and the shifting arithmetic of prosperity in a world of abundance

---

Episode Overview

This episode features a nuanced, enlightening conversation between Mike Rowe and Nicholas Eberstadt, delving into the heart of what Eberstadt calls "the new misery" in contemporary America. Eberstadt, a distinguished demographer and author of Men Without Work and the new book America’s Human Arithmetic, confronts the misconceptions about global overpopulation and instead lays out the profound demographic and social challenges facing the U.S. and the world: declining birthrates, men dropping out of the workforce, the paradox of abundance, loneliness, and the implications of these trends on national prosperity and social cohesion.

---

Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Introducing Nicholas Eberstadt & His Demographic Lens

• Eberstadt’s Credentials: Ivy League credentials, senior position at AEI, author focused on population dynamics, work, and societal health.
• Validation of Rowe’s Anecdotes: Eberstadt’s research empirically confirmed Mike’s long-suspected anecdotes about workforce troubles in trade jobs ([02:04]).

"I admire him a lot, in part because he was the first genuine expert to validate all my smack after all those years of dirty jobs..."
—Mike Rowe ([01:50])

---

2. Debunking Overpopulation Myths

• The “Population Bomb” Narrative: Refers to Paul Ehrlich’s influential yet inaccurate forecasts of catastrophic overpopulation.
• Global Trends Today: Contrary to that narrative, the pressing issue is population collapse, not explosion ([03:13]–[05:00]).
• Fertility Decline is Widespread: Most of the world is below replacement fertility, with Sub-Saharan Africa as a partial exception ([14:26]).

"We can, unlike the fruit flies or whatever Professor Ehrlich studied, we can change our lifespans, we can change the number of progeny we have."
—Nick Eberstadt ([12:26])

---

3. Root Causes of Fertility Decline: Choice, Modernity, and Self-Actualization

• Personal Choice & Modern Values: The trend is seen globally and can’t be explained by a single factor. Self-actualization and convenience, aided by technology and pervasive digital distraction, are major riders ([16:44], [20:57]).
• Societal Shifts: Discussion on whether loss of optimism or faith in the future plays a role, especially among affluent, well-educated young people who remain fearful or unwilling to commit to parenthood ([22:27], [23:40]).

"Half of them are scared of everything. I don't know why, but one of the things they're scared of is commitment, raising a family...there's so much loneliness and I think that that's somehow connected in there."
—Nick Eberstadt ([23:40])

---

4. The “New Misery” vs. Poverty: The Paradox of Abundance

• Happiness & Abundance: Despite immense societal wealth, misery persists—a move from the old misery of deprivation to a new, more spiritual or existential malaise ([24:49]).
• Changing Labor Metrics: Traditional unemployment figures now obscure a deeper trend: millions of prime-age men who have simply opted out of the labor force ([28:18]–[31:10]).
• Disengagement Is Growing: Significantly more men are not even looking for work vs. those technically “unemployed,” with broad social implications.

"We've cracked the abundance part. We just have to do the little trivial thing of figuring out how to enjoy it."
—Nick Eberstadt ([64:23])

---

5. The Role of Social Welfare, Disability, and Crime

• Welfare State Transformation: Since the 1960s, a rise in welfare programs, single-parent households, and especially the “archipelago” of disability programs have disconnected millions from work ([51:09]).
• Hidden Army of Ex-Cons: The U.S. has a vast, largely invisible population of adults with felony convictions, complicating workforce reentry and social healing.

---

6. AI & Future of Work: Skills, Opportunity, and Uncertainty

• Technological Acceleration: The discussion turns to how AI is reshuffling job markets—counterintuitively affecting coders before tradespeople ([58:06]–[62:23]).
• Adaptability as Key Skill: The most valuable abilities now are not technical, but meta-skills: adaptability, self-directed learning, and comfort with disequilibrium ([60:38]).

"Learning how to learn, learning how to pivot...is going to be absolutely essential in a world that's going to have new skills and new technologies."
—Nick Eberstadt ([60:38])

---

7. Optimism, America’s “Secret Sauce,” and Competitive Federalism

• American Exceptionalism & Opportunity: Eberstadt expresses optimism about the U.S.’s unique culture of complex cooperation, innovation, and resilience—traits rooted in its founding ethos ([46:48]).
• Competitive Federalism: States experiment with policies; some fail (like contemporary New York), others succeed, and this dynamism is fundamental to American renewal ([74:23]).

---

8. Education, Harvard, and the Skills Gap

• Harvard’s Decline: Eberstadt critiques Harvard’s insularity, arguing for root-and-branch reform of its leadership before brand restoration is possible([77:40]–[79:13]).
• Skills vs. Credentials: There’s encouragement for tech schools and trades as viable, respectable paths to prosperity and societal contribution ([83:44]).

---

9. How to Fix Work & Meaning

• Welfare Reform as a Model: Past welfare-to-work reforms succeeded, not in creating hardship but in restoring dignity and opportunity—Eberstadt sees room for similar action with today's “men without work” ([70:22]).
• Importance of Information: Transparency (tracking ex-cons, for example) would allow for effective, competitive policy responses.

---

10. Literary & Personal Asides

• Ogden Nash Legacy: Eberstadt is Nash’s grandson, and poetic playfulness runs through the family, influencing Eberstadt’s clarity and wit ([37:21]–[41:29]).
• Reflections on PJ O’Rourke: The late writer’s blend of humor and insight is lauded; the power of teaching by entertaining ([87:22]–[91:57]).

---

Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments (with Timestamps)

• On demography:

  "It's trying to understand the human condition, how to make the human condition more prosperous, more flourishing. What the constraints on freedom are."
  —Nick Eberstadt ([10:42])

• On the data-driven refutation of overpopulation panic:

  "More or less everything that he [Ehrlich] predicted was wrong...he was an expert on the population biology of insects. And if we were insects, this would have happened. It would have been a very, very bad 1970s and thereafter."
  —Nick Eberstadt ([11:34])

• On the shift from poverty to abundance:

  "We've cracked the abundance thing...and now the question is whether we want to live in it."
  —Nick Eberstadt ([13:10])

• On generational disengagement:

  "The fastest demographic for men, 25 to 54, since the 1960s has been the ones who are neither working nor looking for work."
  —Nick Eberstadt ([29:27])

• On the dangers of technocratic misdiagnosis:

  "What if our experts don't know where to look and don't know what's actually causing human suffering in our ranks? Then, Houston, we've got a little bit of a problem..."
  —Nick Eberstadt ([31:37])

• On optimism:

  "It's a dangerous thing to bet against the United States of America. It's been for the last 250 years, and I kind of think that may be true for the next."
  —Nick Eberstadt ([86:15])

---

Key Timestamps for Important Segments

• [03:13] — Population collapse vs. explosion
• [14:26] — Where global population is still growing (Sub-Saharan Africa)
• [24:49] — "The new misery" explained
• [28:18] — How labor force disengagement began
• [46:48] — American exceptionalism and "secret sauce"
• [51:09] — Statistics on men out of the workforce
• [60:38] — Skills for the age of AI: learning to adapt
• [62:23] — On industrial/tech shifts: predicting the unpredictable
• [74:23] — Explanation of "competitive federalism"
• [77:40] — Eberstadt’s critical take on Harvard’s evolution
• [83:44] — The future of work and skills-based education
• [85:17] — Self-correction and American optimism

---

Takeaways & Themes

• The central driver of America’s new misery is not scarcity, but disconnection—a disengagement from work, community, and meaning, despite prosperity.
• Old narratives (like the myth of catastrophic overpopulation) die hard and shape public policy, often counter to statistical realities.
• Social and educational institutions need both transparency and reform to reconnect citizens to purposeful and prosperous lives.
• The skills most in demand—and the greatest predictors of resilience—are no longer technical, but adaptive: the capacity to learn, pivot, and cope with change.
• Despite dire trends, America’s history of “self-correction” and competitive federalism offer hope that solutions can be found if the problems are candidly acknowledged.

---

Final Thoughts

The conversation provides both a warning and a measure of hope: “the new misery” is real and rooted in demographic data, but it is not beyond America’s capacity for renewal. Eberstadt’s human arithmetic—his diagnosis of the real, sometimes invisible numbers shaping our future—invites both policymakers and ordinary citizens to see clearly, act wisely, and adapt courageously. The lasting message is one of cautious optimism: America has come through worse and reinvented itself before.

---

Transcript

[Mike Rowe]

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

[Chuck]

Well, listen, if degrees mean anything, he's

[Mike Rowe]

got more of them.

[Chuck]

I mean, it took you about 20 minutes to read through his accolades, or at least his education, I should say.

[Mike Rowe]

There's a ton of them there. Yeah, he's been there and done it through the Ivy League. But you know something? It didn't spoil him. Yeah, right. It didn't wreck him.

[Chuck]

Despite that, he's still smart. Yeah.

[Mike Rowe]

Yeah. His name is Nick Eberstadt. He has been with the American Enterprise Institute now for a while. He's kind of an economist. I mean, he is an economist. He usually introduces himself as a demographer, but he's also a public policy scholar. And he's kind of famous in that weird little world that guys like this live in for deep research into the kind of topics that you and your buddies no doubt discuss down at the corner bar. Population dynamics, economic and social performance, the health of American society and institutions. He's got all the awards and all of the initials behind his name that you would expect and hope to find in an expert. But more importantly, he just loves what he does and he's good at it. And I admire him a lot, in part because he was the first genuine expert to validate all my smack after all those years of dirty jobs talking about. I mean, because what do I know? I mean, anecdotally I could see things happening and I heard lots of stories about how hard it was for people that owned trade based businesses to recruit. And I heard so many of those stories that I started to think, look, this can't be a coincidence. But I don't, you know, I don't have any real facts. I don't have any real research.

[Chuck]

And then Nick Eberstadt comes along and tells you that there are 7 million men who are sitting on their doofuses

[Mike Rowe]

just looking at screens and so much more. Men Without Work was the book, the that I first read back in 2015, and we invited him on a podcast as soon as we had this interview format set up. The book was redone during the lockdowns because everything he prophesied in the original came true. So they republished it with a big fat forward, bringing everybody up to date. And now he's written a new one. It's called America's Human Arithmetic which is, you know, I don't know if they focus grouped the title. These Things are not.

[Chuck]

Studies show that the word arithmetic.

[Mike Rowe]

The books just fly off the shelves. But you have to take it in its context. Now, we're calling the episode the New Misery because that's the thread that stitches all of these essays together. But I don't want to spoil it or tell you too much, but I will say that at the heart of his numerical analysis of all that ails us is the population collapse.

[Chuck]

Yes.

[Mike Rowe]

Which is so interesting.

[Chuck]

Which is real and worldwide.

[Mike Rowe]

It's real and it's worldwide, but it's also completely at odds with the narrative that you and I grew up with when we were teenagers and Paul Ehrlich's book the Population Bomb was being quoted everywhere. That book was accepted as dogma. And really, like so many people, so many average people, but also so many informed, intellectual academics, took this book at face value and concluded that our planet would be overrun with humans. Like completely overrun. Like, in the same way, okay, you know, the climate's gonna completely cause our destruction in 12 years. It was an Armageddon type prediction.

[Chuck]

Yeah.

[Mike Rowe]

That was fatally flawed and dead wrong. And while people have come around, you

[Chuck]

know, like Bill Gates recently, and the idea that it's not, you know, human caused, climate change is not gonna be

[Mike Rowe]

the end of the world for us. Not by any stretch.

[Chuck]

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

[Mike Rowe]

Yeah, he's smart.

[Chuck]

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

[Mike Rowe]

Yeah, yeah. Ehrlich's book infected a generation. And that infection, like a virus, spread into the next generation. And so today, when guys like Elon Musk, who are way more famous than Nick Eberstad, start talking about the greatest calamity facing the species is a global population collapse, they go, oh, that Elon, he's so crazy. He's just crazy. You know, But. But of course he's not. And neither is Nick Eberstadt.

[Chuck]

Right?

[Mike Rowe]

These numbers are real. Your politics don't matter. Your opinions don't matter, and I'm sorry to say, your feelings don't matter to numbers. Math doesn't care. Arithmetic doesn't care. But Nick cares very much about humanity. That's the fun of Nick, right? He's a real caring human with four wonderful kids and he's had a big life and he wants to help his species by setting us straight and debunking a lot of bs. His book does it. Our conversation is fun, measured in the way you would expect a conversation with economists to be, but really, really enlightening. And in spite of the title, the New Misery, there's plenty of optimism in this if you listen real close, which I hope you'll do right after this. If buying a car that suited your needs and fit your budget required you to test drive 250 different vehicles, when would you find the time to buy a car? If buying a home that suited your needs and fit your budget required you to visit 250 open houses, when would you find the time to buy a home? Happily, those situations are hypothetical, but. But this one is not. Hiring the right person for the right job requires the average employer to plow through no less than 250 individual resumes and conduct God only knows how many interviews, begging the obvious question, where will you find the time to hire? The answer, of course, is ZipRecruiter. ZipRecruiter has proven themselves a million times over by helping countless employers get through the hiring process faster and more effectively than ever before. And now they have a new feature that instantly shows you the most interested, qualified candidates first. It's the difference between finding the right fit on the top of that enormous stack of resumes, or at the bottom, do what so many other business owners have already done. Post the job for [e-mail] row and watch what happens. You have nothing to lose except the time you've been wasting. Ziprecruiter.com RO the smartest way to Hire. So, do you keep track of the number of books you've written at this point? No.

[Nick Eberstadt]

I think the first digit's a 2. I mean, I guess it depends what you call a book.

[Mike Rowe]

Well, I'm calling America's Human Rithmetic a book because, you know, it's got pages, it's got covers, it has a lot of endnotes, it's got footnotes, it has many essays that are both thought provoking and terrifying. In fact, Nick, I doubt your publisher would be on board with this, but I think you may have written the Great American Horror Story.

[Nick Eberstadt]

Whatever could you mean?

[Mike Rowe]

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

[Nick Eberstadt]

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

[Mike Rowe]

Tawdry, alarming and depressing. Chuck, I think we have our title with. Remembers that. Yes.

[Nick Eberstadt]

Dave got your guy.

[Mike Rowe]

Now, look, man, it's. I'll admit it at a glance. The first time I saw you interviewed, the first time I looked over your curriculum vite, you know, my eyes glazed a little bit. You kind of look like an economist. You kind of geeked up.

[Nick Eberstadt]

Wait a minute.

[Mike Rowe]

I'm just. I'm just saying you're on the other

[Nick Eberstadt]

side of the table.

[Mike Rowe]

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

[Nick Eberstadt]

Yeah. Yeah.

[Mike Rowe]

What does.

[Nick Eberstadt]

What does that mean? That's a very good question. I guess it means that you kind of, like, go around with a clicker. Something like that. I mean, it's an excuse for asking all sorts of questions that you want to ask about people and how they live and the patterns of life and how many of them there are. Marriage, birth and death, all of that sort of stuff.

[Mike Rowe]

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

[Nick Eberstadt]

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

[Mike Rowe]

Paul Ehrlich.

[Nick Eberstadt]

Paul Ehrlich.

[Mike Rowe]

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

[Nick Eberstadt]

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

[Mike Rowe]

The sui generis.

[Nick Eberstadt]

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

[Mike Rowe]

So we got the abundance thing now.

[Nick Eberstadt]

We cracked the abundance thing.

[Mike Rowe]

Yeah, exactly, but at what cost?

[Nick Eberstadt]

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

[Mike Rowe]

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

[Nick Eberstadt]

around a lot, who published that in Foreign affairs magazine.

[Mike Rowe]

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

[Nick Eberstadt]

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

[Mike Rowe]

How much time?

[Nick Eberstadt]

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

[Mike Rowe]

Did you say babying up? Yeah, that's a term of our. I see. Okay. I mean, well, it's like below replacement theory.

[Nick Eberstadt]

Yeah.

[Mike Rowe]

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

[Nick Eberstadt]

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

[Mike Rowe]

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

[Nick Eberstadt]

It's a really interesting question. It may be the most important question today.

[Mike Rowe]

Chuck, make a note.

[Nick Eberstadt]

Got it. Okay, so let's figure this out by the end of the show. But it's happening in so many different places that have such different histories and cultures, education and ways of looking at the world that if you. I don't have the. I don't have Einstein's unified field theory for this. It's just going on in a lot of different places. And it seems like there may be a lot of different things that are moving the dial in different places. What we'd need to answer this question, I think would be a better quality, better class of anthropologists than we have today, or maybe a better class of journalists. Because part of the secret is hiding in plain sight, going out and going to a hundred or a thousand different places around the world and asking people, what's up we do not have that. Even with maybe the most important question that might be answerable today being what's up? Yeah.

[Mike Rowe]

Do do do do do do do do do. I love stories where the hero turns out to be somebody. Completely unqualified. Challenges he faces, but triumphs nevertheless. That's Ben Spell. Seven years ago, Ben was a musician with zero interest in running a food company. He was annoyed, though, that so much imported meat in this country was being deceptively marketed as domestic and decided to fix the problem. The result was Good ranchers, a completely honest, totally transparent meat company that deals directly with American farms and ranches and promises to deliver high quality American made meat for a fair price today. That promise and Ben's determination to keep it has not only propelled good ranchers into the top tier of meat delivery companies, it's fueled enormous awareness among meat eaters like me that we have all been affirmatively deceived by policies that allow imported meat to be marketed as domestic. That's the reason I switched to Good Ranchers. But if I'm being totally honest, I would not have stayed had the quality not been so exceptional. Every single cut I've devoured from Good ranchers has been straight up delicious. Every morsel raised on American farms or ranches, give them a try. Subscriptions are affordable and flexible. In fact, drop my name, you'll get an additional 25 bucks off your first order and free meat for life with every order. That's code Mike. For an extra $25 off your first order and free meat for [e-mail]. 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. I mean, I like the way you distill it. I mean, it's pretty simple. Like if I'm gonna go all the way to Bangladesh, I'm gonna hit him with.

[Nick Eberstadt]

You might want to say it in Bengali there, but

[Mike Rowe]

at a glance, I mean, it seems like China's population was so out of control they instituted this one child policy, which I don't remember anybody criticizing at the time other than, you know, for geopolitical reasons. It seemed awfully heavy handed, but I don't remember anybody thinking, hold on a second there, that math is going to come back to bite you in the ass, right? I don't remember hearing that, but at least I can understand, okay, they had to do something seemingly sweeping. Meanwhile, over here we've got the abundance thing going on, so maybe, you know, we're just getting more fluent and More selfish, leading more selfish lives, I guess, maybe. And. But none of it is. Seems universally applicable. I'm still stuck on that. And it's. And it's odd.

[Nick Eberstadt]

Part of it, I think, is that people all around the world making this up. I can't prove it. I kind of guessed this. Maybe it they're realizing that they don't have to live the way their parents live. Part of it is that this very contagious intellectual virus of self actualization and convenience is almost irresistible any place that it comes. There are a lot of very wonderful things about children, but one of them isn't that they're convenient. Right? So if you're moving towards a world where almost everybody has an iPhone, and I think that we are moving towards that world and almost everybody is looking into that rather imperfect narcissus mirror and thinking about the maybe better life, actually much inferior life, but the supposedly better life that's on the other side of this thing. There's not as much compelling reason or maybe even purpose to having the sorts of larger families raising the sorts of larger families that used to be just part of the natural way of things.

[Mike Rowe]

Do you think people have lost a. I mean, I get the convenience thing, but like, have we lost a sense of optimism? Do we look around and see, as P.J. o' Rourke called it, all the trouble in the world?

[Nick Eberstadt]

Right?

[Mike Rowe]

Like we see the iPhone and we see the fact that, you know what, that's a lie. It's not really a phone. I mean, it is a phone, but as Jonathan Haidt has said, it's also an arcade and a casino and an endless repository of all the porn ever produced or imagined.

[Nick Eberstadt]

Yes.

[Mike Rowe]

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

[Nick Eberstadt]

Certainly that's true in some areas. I mean, I think we can see where some of that is happening in the world right around us. I'm not sure that's what's going on in Vietnam right now. I'm not sure that's what's going on in Tehran right now. All these places below with family size that's too small to sustain stable population over time. I mean, you've seen the same thing that I have. I think as you talk to younger people, younger Americans are the richest, best, educated, healthiest people who have ever been in this country. And half of them are scared of everything. I don't know why, but one of the things they're scared of is commitment, raising a family, all of the stuff that ends up being in my little kind of demographic purview. Connected to that is also there never been as many people in the United States as there are today. But it seems like there's so much loneliness and I think that that's somehow connected in there.

[Mike Rowe]

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

[Nick Eberstadt]

The new misery?

[Mike Rowe]

Yeah. I mean, not the same as the old misery. There's a new. Like what is new kid in town. Yeah. Meet the new misery. Same as the old misery.

[Nick Eberstadt]

Well, in the bad old days that we sometimes idealize, there was an enormous amount of grinding poverty and a lot of the misery of the 19th century, the depression, the Dust Bowl. Dust bowl was caused by lack of wherewithal. People didn't have enough work, they didn't have enough income, they didn't have enough food, they didn't have enough everything to kind of lead a decent life. We've cracked the formula for abundance. We, we're the richest society that's ever existed. We're sloshing in money and yet at the same time look all around and you see all of this unhappiness and all of this degradation that too many people are trapped in or caught up in. So it's like there's a difference between poverty and misery. And that would have been obvious maybe to a 12 year old kid in Charles Dickens London. But it's kind of eluded our technocrats and experts for too much of our time right now.

[Mike Rowe]

You used a phrase in Men Without Work that stuck with me. I quote it a lot. I think it was referring to unemployment numbers. And you talk about them as an artifact of the Great Depression. And if I took your meaning right, you were saying that there was a time when unemployment was the proximate cause of too few jobs and therefore the creation of jobs would inexorably lead to the elimination or at least the degradation of unemployment. It's a very simple equation that no longer applies at all. The number of available jobs has seemingly very little to do with the number of people who are unemployed. And in the same way that misery versus poverty thing, like the rules changed within a generation. It seemed like the rules for happiness or contentment or satisfaction or whatever the right expression is. But you know where I'm going with this? It's men without work. It's men who have become disconnected. Not just men, obviously, but whatever's going on on a generational scale seems to be happening because we didn't. The species didn't get the memo, you know, we didn't like the rules changed. And we're just still like trying to read through the instruction guide. If there are 200 features on my iPhone, I use three of them. If my Word, if Microsoft Word has, you know, 50 different panels, I use two. I'm not up to speed yet. I feel like most people aren't either. And we're just flailing around trying to find some humanity in it.

[Nick Eberstadt]

I don't think that most of the misery is caused by failing to catch up with the technological availability. Much of it is that people are kind of dropping out. Men in particular are dropping out out. And there are a lot of men who are dropping out who have higher education as well. It's not all happening with high school people who don't have high school diplomas. I mean, what we've seen developing gradually, it started so quietly that nobody really noticed this back in the 1960s, is we've seen larger and larger frequency fractions of prime age guys. Not my words. This is like the government calls guys who are 25 to 54 prime age workers because they're like in the prime of life. Right. Because they're also supposed to be, at least were in the past, setting up families, raising kids. It wasn't all dollars and cents.

[Mike Rowe]

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

[Nick Eberstadt]

The key demographic. I like that.

[Mike Rowe]

The advertiser coveted key demography. Yeah.

[Nick Eberstadt]

All right, there we have it. So what was slowly but inexorably happening was this dropout from the labor force by men in this heretofore working age group. And Uncle Sam wasn't following it. The Fed wasn't following it. Wall street wasn't really following it because they had, as you mentioned, they had these jobs numbers, this matrix that was set up at the end of the Great Depression to track the Great Depression, when it would have seemed cuckoo to think that a guy who didn't have a job wasn't going to be looking for one. So the fastest demographic for men, 25 to 54. So since the 1960s has been the ones who are neither working nor looking for work. And so when you look at the unemployment rate, you say, hey, we're at full employment. That's wonderful. Except that there are three guys who aren't looking for work for every one guy who is.

[Mike Rowe]

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

[Nick Eberstadt]

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

[Mike Rowe]

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

[Nick Eberstadt]

Would we call it an empathy gap? Would we call it something like, you're missing the humanity that's involved there? I mean, the Neo Malthusians, like Professor Ehrlich and the population controllers in China, they just didn't kind of understand what human beings were about and how human beings can kind of solve their own problems. That's one thing. I'd say that in our country, we have a sort of a. We now have ameliorative state that is supposed to be tasking experts to helping address and solve our social problems. Well, what if our experts don't know where to look and don't know what. What's actually causing human suffering in our ranks? Then, Houston, we've got a little bit of a problem in this formula.

[Mike Rowe]

It's the old joke, the guy loses his keys, right? He's looking under the light, but he lost him by the car. But the light's better here. He's looking in the wrong place. A couple years ago, I was the victim of a home invasion. Not the kind of invasion that makes the headlines happily, but the kind that introduced me to a company called Pesty. For me, the intruders were ants, Argentine ants. They showed up in the millions and completely took over my pantry. You know the feeling, or maybe you don't. But if you do, it's unlike anything else. You know, you open up the cupboard and everything's moving. It's kind of sickening. Anyway, Pesti was the perfect solution for me. They offer pro grade Treatment at a fraction of the cost. Customized for my location and the types of pest I was dealing with, including spiders, by the way, where I live at, spiders and ants, they all want in the house. Well, with pesta, you can create an outdoor barrier around the house in 10 minutes. Protects your home from over 100 different types of bugs. That's important because situation in Florida very different from the situation out here in California. This is kid friendly, it's pet friendly. You can get started for 35 bucks a treatment with a customized plan for your location, your bugs, your climate. This is used in schools, by the way, and hospitals all over the country. 100% money back guarantee. If the bugs don't go away, you get a full refund. Each kit comes with a sprayer, mixing bag, pesticide gloves, instructions, everything you need to set up that barrier in less than 10 minutes. Keep the bugs away. With pesti, go to pesti.com Mike get an extra 10% off your order. That's P E S T I E.com Mike. P E S T I E pesdi.com Again, it just seems so obvious. And also when you talk about Ehrlich, you know, the thing I remember, I still have the book around somewhere. I mean, everybody had that book.

[Nick Eberstadt]

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

[Mike Rowe]

It was like a dogma.

[Nick Eberstadt]

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

[Mike Rowe]

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

[Nick Eberstadt]

Yes.

[Mike Rowe]

And even to the point today where, with respect, I mean, I hear Bill Maher all the time talking about there's just too many people on the planet. There's just too many people on the planet. He sounds very certain, too. And then you come along, you know, you're less bombastic. You write a book and you let the evidence kind of speak for it. And then Elon Musk comes along. Now he, you know, what's it feel like to be in violent agreement with Elon Musk? He's the first guy in recent memory that I saw sit down and say, no, no, no, you got it all wrong. The biggest threat facing this species is the population collapse. And virtually every interviewer, all of his interlocutors, look at him like a cow looking at a new gate. Like, what do you mean? How can you even say that? But he's Elon Musk, so maybe he's onto something.

[Nick Eberstadt]

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

[Mike Rowe]

Really? Really. Well. That's what you're going with? He's worth $865 billion.

[Nick Eberstadt]

Okay, that's great. I think that's wonderful.

[Mike Rowe]

He's had a good run.

[Nick Eberstadt]

No, I think that's great.

[Mike Rowe]

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

[Nick Eberstadt]

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

[Mike Rowe]

that. I did not see that chapter. Just a quick sidebar. We should do something to establish your bona fides. I can read them.

[Nick Eberstadt]

Quick, please.

[Mike Rowe]

Well, I mean, look, I'm only doing this because something really jumped out. Chuck went to the AI just to make sure we had everything accurate. A.B. magna cum laude in economics from Harvard. M. What's. Msc. Masters of science, maybe Social Planning for Developing Countries. London School of Economics.

[Nick Eberstadt]

London School of Economics.

[Mike Rowe]

Good grief. I think Mick Jagger went there.

[Nick Eberstadt]

Actually, not at the same time, no.

[Mike Rowe]

Mpa, Harvard Kennedy School.

[Nick Eberstadt]

What's the P. I think public administration.

[Mike Rowe]

PhD. We know that. Political Economy and government. Also Harvard. Born in New York to an intellectually distinguished family. This is my favorite part. Your maternal granddad was Ogden Nash.

[Nick Eberstadt]

True story.

[Mike Rowe]

Get out of here.

[Nick Eberstadt]

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

[Mike Rowe]

Well, you know what? I. Were you close?

[Nick Eberstadt]

Yeah. I loved him.

[Mike Rowe]

I'm sorry, I'm gonna totally hijack this. Different direction, but his. For people who don't know his work. And I'll. I'll let you sum it up. But my experience of it was just fun with the language. Yes, he had so much fun with the language. What? There was Joyce, Kilmer's famous. I think that I shall never see a poem as lovely as a tree. He finishes it with. Unless they take the billboards down.

[Nick Eberstadt]

Unless the billboards fall. I'll never see the tree.

[Mike Rowe]

I'll never see the tree at all. Right. Yeah. So he was like a. I mean, like a gadfly poet.

[Nick Eberstadt]

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

[Mike Rowe]

It's not even a job anymore. Demographically speaking.

[Nick Eberstadt]

Demographically speaking.

[Mike Rowe]

I Mean, I've been through the One ads I've looked for humorous poets. No openings?

[Nick Eberstadt]

No, no. They've all been filled. I guess that's why everything's so funny. Right.

[Mike Rowe]

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

[Nick Eberstadt]

Yeah. We have pretty close family on both my dad and my mom's side and so spent summers with him and my grandmother up in, like, the 12ft of seacoast in New Hampshire, and he lived in Baltimore.

[Mike Rowe]

That's kind of why I. That's where.

[Nick Eberstadt]

That's why.

[Mike Rowe]

That's where Chuck grew up, too. Yeah.

[Nick Eberstadt]

And so he's kind of an introvert. I mean, he was very friendly, but he was kind of introvert. He'd sit at a table, kind of like this one in the corner of the living room, and he'd be kind of like. There'd be all hell going on around him with all the grandkids raising noise and stuff, and he'd be just tuned out. And every, you know, so often he'd say, I think I have one, and he'd kind of, like, read us his drafts of his poetry. It was unbelievably cool. And we even knew that as little kids, we knew how cool that was.

[Mike Rowe]

And how big was your family from a population standpoint?

[Nick Eberstadt]

From a population standpoint, I had five cousins, he had five grandchildren on his side of the family, and on the other side of the family, I guess about a dozen grandkids, a bunch of cousins.

[Mike Rowe]

So the Eberstadt population is not collapsing.

[Nick Eberstadt]

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

[Mike Rowe]

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

[Nick Eberstadt]

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

[Chuck]

Candy is Dandy, but Liquor is Quicker.

[Nick Eberstadt]

Making Friends is candy. Right. He had some poems that he did that were actually not funny, poems that were kind of serious poems, and some of those I kind of like as well. But you go back over this stuff now, how did he ever do that?

[Mike Rowe]

He was an original.

[Nick Eberstadt]

Yeah. I mean, but the reason he could play with all of these words is that he had a knowledge of the English language that, you know, kind of, like, was rivaling the oed. It was just phenomenal. And we'd play, like, word games, you know, around the table and stuff, and around, you know, the living room and things. And there was just a depth there that you wouldn't necessarily know because he just, like, playful with it, but wow.

[Mike Rowe]

Sidebar to the oed. The writing of the Oxford English Dictionary, one of the great undertakings in all of literature. Did you read the book the professor and the Madman?

[Nick Eberstadt]

Said Simon Winchester.

[Mike Rowe]

That's right.

[Nick Eberstadt]

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

[Mike Rowe]

You know, it's. I think it was James Murray and William Miner. And Murray had. Was basically assigned by the Queen to write the definitive dictionary, and he essentially outsourced it. And, you know, intellectuals from all over the world would contribute to, like I did, a lot of the letter B. Right. They would, like. Everybody would get assigned a letter or a partial letter. And, you know, Murray handled all of these submissions from intellectuals all over the planet. And one of the most prolific was a doctor who was in the Civil War named William. I want to say William Chester Miner. And he was just voluminous his submissions, and they were excellent. And he and Murray became fast friends. I'm not giving anything away. This is all told in the preface. But the story begins when Murray finally shows up after a lifetime of correspondence with his friend, to meet him and shake his hand and thank him for his extraordinary contribution. And he goes to the address from which Minor had been corresponding, and it's the Broadmoor Home for the Criminally Insane. This guy right the hell out of his mind. And he had been in insane asylum most of his life and did most of his work from his cell. So the story begins with that. With that weird relationship. And I don't know if it's possible to make this tangent relevant, but, I mean, has it occurred to you that your granddad's facility with the Alphabet has some corollary to your own with numbers or arithmetic, to be specific?

[Nick Eberstadt]

Yeah, well, for sure. I mean, he as. I mean, it's a, you know, kind of a somebody I really looked up to. He, I think, was a great example of trying to think about how to use words in a way that matter. Right.

[Mike Rowe]

Sure.

[Nick Eberstadt]

I mean, every word is an idea. And so your sentences aren't going to be any better than the ideas that are kind of like, flopping around in them. And so watching him. Watching him at his craft. Yes, I guess, is kind of like, what kind of. I'd say, like, made me appreciate that my other grandfather was much more interested in finance. He did some stuff in

[Mike Rowe]

World War

[Nick Eberstadt]

II with trying to help fix the war economy so that we'd, like, win rather than lose and stuff like.

[Mike Rowe]

That's a good goal right there. I mean, going back to the very first compliment I paid you, like to have a mission to be working on a thing that is relevant and important and for you, fun. That's the consummation devoutly to be wished.

[Nick Eberstadt]

Right.

[Mike Rowe]

And you had two grandfathers. One is dabbling in language in order to express an idea in a new and exciting way that would move people. The other's trying to save the world through finance. Smash those two things together. And it's not shocking that, you know, somewhere down the DNA chain there comes a demographer.

[Nick Eberstadt]

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

[Mike Rowe]

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

[Nick Eberstadt]

Oh, no. Which AI?

[Mike Rowe]

I don't know, Chuck. Which one did you use?

[Chuck]

Chat.

[Nick Eberstadt]

Not chat.

[Mike Rowe]

Not chat.

[Nick Eberstadt]

Not chat.

[Mike Rowe]

Ask Claude. Yeah, Claude.

[Nick Eberstadt]

Claude likes me.

[Mike Rowe]

How weird is it that they're different? Like now we're assigning. I mean, Claude is different than what's the. Well, that's anthropic, right?

[Chuck]

Grok.

[Mike Rowe]

And Grok is like Grok's kind of sassy. Overall thesis of the manuscript, America's Human Arithmetic, argues that demographic realities, fertility, aging, labor force participation, education, mortality and immigration are hidden drivers of America's economic and political future. The United States retains advantages compared to Europe and East Asia, but those advantages are narrowing. If ignored, demographic decline will slow growth, weaken fiscal stability, and erode social cohesion. Hence my earlier comment about the horror story you've written. If addressed wisely, however, America can remain demographically resilient, but only, only if it understands its own arithmetic. What is our own unique American arithmetic?

[Nick Eberstadt]

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

[Mike Rowe]

Shameless plug. This is not a commercial for the Way I Heard it with Mike Rowe, the award winning podcast now entering its 10th year and available wherever podcast or listened to. No, this is a commercial for Mike Rowe's foundation, which has just set aside $10 million to help train the next generation of skilled workers. That money is available right [e-mail] it's waiting for anyone who wants to learn a skill that doesn't require a four year degree. Electricians, plumbers, linemen, welders, shipbuilders, H vac techs. America is desperate for men and women with skills they don't teach in universities. And the Microworks foundation is committed to helping train America's workforce for hundreds of thousands of AI proof skills six figure jobs just waiting to be filled. Apply today for a work ethic [e-mail] or support our efforts with a donation of any size. We're closing America's skills gap one job at a time. And we could use your [e-mail] m I k e r o w eworks.org well, now you're back to the scary part. How not to lose it. Aside from just more wanton procreation and more children, Ipso fasto, how should we be thinking about work, Immigration, technology, AI? How do we know what the enemy is and isn't? And what can the arithmetic tell us about those things?

[Nick Eberstadt]

Well, I mean, the arithmetic is kind of like, you know, what you see, what you see on the ground. It's like the results. It doesn't tell you about what's in the black box. And part of what's been the amazing engine for America's national success are the different ideas and codes, including codes of honor, that have allowed us to engage in this really remarkable sort of experiment in complex cooperation. I mean, that's the way that I'd look at the work thing, right, is that it's a voluntary experiment in complex cooperation in which you kind of, you can do things that were impossible before, that never been done before. You generate more wealth and more opportunities and more demand for other people to do well than you could in the past. What kind of is. I think part of what's causing this really unsettling rise of new misery is when different parts of that previous code have been kind of failing or people have been falling off of it. I mean, think about what's happened since the 1960s. Just we think about like the men dropping out of work. It's a big historical thing. It's been going on for. What's that now? You know, it's been going on for almost three generations.

[Mike Rowe]

Where's the arithmetic now? How many men, able bodied, say a

[Nick Eberstadt]

tenth, a little more than a tenth of 7 million round number of the little less than 70 million who would be there to be this kind of backbone or bulwark in the labor force? In the economy. This thing's been going on since the mid-60s. What else has happened since the mid-60s? We've seen this erosion of the previous family model with breakup of the two parent home, A lot of kids growing up in single homes, a lot of people not growing up with parents at all. We've seen the rise of the American welfare state. We had Social Security before that, but that wasn't really a social welfare program. That was a social insurance program. You paid. It was like an insurance program. But we started our war against poverty, which was basically money to redress poverty. And we've ended up with an awful lot of America now accepting money that you're supposed to get basically only if you're poor. You want to talk about something that's going to kill middle class mentality? How about applying for poverty benefits and getting it and getting it right? And so we had that. We had the explosion in crime. You could, you can't forget that the explosion in crime was followed by an explosion in punishment. One of the things that's hiding in plain sight is the 25 million. Maybe, maybe more. We don't count it exactly. Adult Americans who've got a felony conviction in their background now probably one out of seven guys has a felony conviction in his background. So we talk about the, we talk about mass incarceration, but for every person who's in prison, there are 10 people with felony convictions who are in society as a whole. You keep on going through these different trends and all of these are intertwined with this male fail that you and I are talking about. And since this is a historical problem that's evolved over the course of over 60 years, I don't think we're going to be able to fix it real fast. But I think we can fix it. I think we can fix all of this stuff.

[Mike Rowe]

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

[Nick Eberstadt]

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

[Mike Rowe]

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

[Nick Eberstadt]

Yes.

[Mike Rowe]

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

[Nick Eberstadt]

for a robotic girlfriend.

[Mike Rowe]

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

[Nick Eberstadt]

You gotta write that sci fi story fast. Before it was overtaken by events.

[Mike Rowe]

Somebody did. I think it was. Was it Phoenix? Joachim? Phoenix. It was called Her. Her?

[Nick Eberstadt]

Yeah, her. Actually, that was ahead of its time, wasn't it? It was like 12 years ago or something. Yeah, yeah.

[Mike Rowe]

A guy basically falls in love with Ciri.

[Nick Eberstadt]

Yeah, well, so I'm out of my depth on AI, and I. I think that almost anybody who. I mean, maybe if you're like Jack Clark at Anthropic, you're not out of your depth, but I think pretty much most of us are out of our depth. So I struggle, I look for historical analogies, and the historical analogies may not work on this one, but it's the best I can do. And so if you look for historical analogies, there's been this race between education and skills, not just in the United States, but I think in all of the countries that have become modern, affluent societies. And it's like you're going to need to get the training and skills and all if you're going to hold the lantern and if you hold the lantern, you're going to do very well. But if you don't have the training, you're not going to be able to hold the lantern and you're going to be displaced. So the take home to me is that under any circumstances, we want our people to have good training and good skills and good education. But if you've got something coming down the pike, like what AI may be, that's a double time, big time argument for going in on training and skills and education for our country.

[Mike Rowe]

That's the biggest thing that's changed since you and I spoke last. I got a series of questions over the years. Like I told you, I was so delighted to read your book because I'm just a dilettante mouthing off anecdotally, you had science that seemed to confirm a lot of the stuff that I was sort of guessing at. But now the question I get most often isn't, gosh, I didn't know you could make six figures working with your hands or, wow, I had no idea that, you know, a career in the trades could lead to a small business so directly and so quickly. Now it's like, wait a second, man, the AI is, it's coming for the coders. It's not coming for the welders. At least not yet. Not until we get that Scarlett Johansson robot worked out. Maybe then. But it seems like in the short term we got it precisely wrong. It seems like in the short term, we made the Ehrlich mistake. We conflated like, well, this job will lead to that job, but in fact, something else comes in and it just upends the whole thing. And now suddenly I'm talking to electricians, Nick, in data centers who are under 20, sorry, under 30. Say 26, 27 years old, making 250, $260,000 a year with no debt. And the crazy thing is, they've been poached like three times in the preceding 18 months. They're basically setting their own schedule. They're making a quarter million dollars a year. And that just wouldn't have seemed at all possible two years ago. And now it's happening. And demographically, it's like the people who are calling me are, you know, they're not running companies with giant factories and big blue collar workforces. There are bankers and there are people running big hedge funds who are looking at their portfolios and realizing, good grief, man, I'm talking like the biggest companies in the world who are freaking out over the very things that you talk about. I think in this book, and it's beyond my pay grade, but I refer your book all of the time. But I don't know where the solution is, is in it. That's the scary thing. I understand most of the problems and what led to so many disaffected men, but right now, things have happened so fast and the problem seems so dire and the skills gap seems so wide. So say something optimistic when you have a second.

[Nick Eberstadt]

Yeah, sure. One of the skills that you need to get and may be the most valuable skill of all, and they don't exactly teach this to you in school, but sometimes by accident you learn it, is the ability to deal with disequilibrium, the ability to deal with change and unexpected change, which is to say, memorizing the book of coding or whatever will only get you so far. But learning how to learn, learning how to pivot, learning how to do something new, all of that is going to be absolutely essential in a world that's going to have new skills and new technologies. Whether or not we're in an AI world. I mean, we. Whether or not we're in a world where AI is the sort of driver that maybe some people think it's going to be. So what do you do differently? I don't think you do that much differently. I think this is going to be the way that you learn how to deal with the unexpected in the future. There's going to be. What we don't see in this is there's going to be a lot of opportunity. Opportunity. If we went back 200 years or even 100 years and say, OMG, OMG. We're not going to be on the farms. Not going to be on the farms. What are we going to do?

[Mike Rowe]

We did well, that's the hell of it, man. You can pose that question and have all of the fear that comes with not knowing the answer and at the same time be certain the answer will. Like we couldn't see the Industrial revolution any more than we could see the financial revolution or the digital revolution. And now the AI resolution. We don't know what's on the other side of it, but we can look back and we can sort of handicap the unintended consequences. Right. So I'm going to talk to a guy tomorrow who runs a franchise of auto repair. It's called Crash Champion. It's got like 600 locations and he's desperate for guys. Yes, they're hiring. But if Elon's right, who, by the way, I just saw a thing today. He says there'll be more Optimus robots performing surgery in three to four years than there will be surgeons of the human variety. And like in three and four years he's also talking even faster of autonomous vehicles being quick. It's going to feel like slow, slow, slow. And then they're going to be everybody.

[Nick Eberstadt]

That's often, often the way that is.

[Mike Rowe]

Right. It's going to hockey stick. And when it does, well, what's going to happen to auto insurance? Because accident rates are going to plummet to about 5%. What's Allstate going to do? What's State Farm going to do? What's my friend Matt going to do with 600 locations? Like all of that? Like in a world where there are no more accidents, what happens to auto body repair? What happens to the underwriters?

[Nick Eberstadt]

The poor trauma surgeon.

[Mike Rowe]

The poor trauma. Right. My favorite thoracic surgeon. What are they gonna. So, you know, all that stuff is like scary because I don't know the answer, but I think the hopeful thing that you're saying is it's gonna be okay. Just cause you don't know the answer doesn't mean a solution won't rise.

[Nick Eberstadt]

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

[Mike Rowe]

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

[Nick Eberstadt]

Yeah, well, fortunately the human condition has moved in a way where we're not going to plunder the earth, we're not going to drain the natural resources, we're not going to run out of energy because the real wealth of nations is in human beings. So we're going to have this increasingly human centered knowledge, centered talent and Skills centered world that we're going to be entering into if we don't do something naughty like blow ourselves up or whatever, as long as this goes on. And we're not going to be able to know, I mean as we are now, if we just stay human beings, if we don't decide to do something that I don't have the imagination exactly to describe, but if we don't go the enhancement route, then I'm afraid we're not going to see every movie and we're not going to read every book. But that was also true 100 years ago or 200 years ago.

[Mike Rowe]

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

[Nick Eberstadt]

Yeah, I mean in retrospect I think it's pretty clear that we engaged in a terrible experimental mistake with the. Broad and indiscriminate lockdowns in the United States for kind of everybody and especially for school children. There are people who have tried to calculate the economic impact of the learning loss that took place or that did not take place, the gap that came because of those edicts and the best numbers I've seen is that it's a multi trillion dollar loss for our country alone. I mean it's something that's going to go with us for generations. It scarred people. We made a huge mistake by the sort of fatal conceit that we could kind of regulate and plan this in a way that basically only had one variable. And the variable, you know, it's a little bit like the Chinese one shot family policy where that variable was we're going to minimize death rates. Well, A, it's not clear that we minimize death rates by it and B, all of the unintended consequences of doing this are exactly what you would have expected.

[Mike Rowe]

Sure.

[Nick Eberstadt]

I mean it's the dear issue's typical, you know, kind of fiasco.

[Mike Rowe]

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

[Nick Eberstadt]

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

[Mike Rowe]

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

[Nick Eberstadt]

Yes.

[Mike Rowe]

And when we began to bury them, you know, we needed to see the manifestation of the war in order to get our dog fully in the fight that became Arlington. Right. And when Lincoln talks about that terrible arithmetic, whether it was Shiloh or Gettysburg or any of it, I don't know. Reading your book, I was struck. It's like, well, it's the same kind of challenge to make something inhuman relatable to A human. They have to see it. Numbers are not really inherently relatable. You have to somehow grab the country by the lapel and shake them. And, you know, in Lincoln's case, he needed for the population to see the trains filled with the dead. What do we need to see? In clarifying terms, what can the numbers show us that will make us sit up and pay attention? I get the declining population sort of, you know, I'm not done with that yet. But like, as it applies to these other things.

[Nick Eberstadt]

Yeah, well, I think we need to see. I mean, this would have, I think, resonated maybe a little bit with President Lincoln. We need to see a little bit of success in dealing with some of these problems. Right. So take the men without work. You know, you say, I said it's like this big historical thing and when you say that, it's like, oh, you can't do anything about it. That's not what I mean at all. Let's say that I'm right in here and that over half of the dropout guys are effectively immobilized by participating in one or more disability program that was originally intended to protect people who couldn't work and have ended up as a sort of like an alternative universe to the workforce. We're both old enough to remember when there was a successful welfare reform in the United States back in the 1990s. Many people won't remember there was a time that you could do bipartisan stuff in America, but it was a bipartisan reform which was to get mothers, single mothers who were longtime recipients of these benefit programs back in the workforce. And there were a lot of people who said that this was going to end as a social catastrophe, but it ended as a great success. And millions and millions of American women ended up in a better position, not just with more money in their pocket, but with a lot less degradation in their lives. It was a very positive thing. Guys on the couch strike me as a lot less compelling constituency for endless public resources than mothers with little children, less sympathetic figures. So my guess is that if we had a reform of our very badly broken archipelago of disability programs, we might be able to get. You tell me, the 7 million over half I think are in this archipelago. If we got half of that half back in the workforce, back in the game, there'd be a lot of good things that would happen in our country. And I think it would redound positively. If we're heading into a world of shrinking workforce or shrinking working age population as we may be, we're going to need to cherish and husband every bit of human resources that we can in America. We're going to have to figure out what we can do to make the path back from felony into regaining your employment reputation a lot more feasible. For reasons, Mike, that I don't understand, the US government is completely and totally allergic to providing any information on the 20/8 million ex cons in the United States and where they are, how they're working, what their health is, incomes. If we had information, this is just an information thing. If we had information around the country about our invisible vast army of ex cons, then it would be possible to have a kind of like an experiment in competitive federalism and see who's doing better and who's doing worse with reentry and stuff. As long as they don't even have that information, we can't have the success from that.

[Mike Rowe]

Explain competitive federalism.

[Nick Eberstadt]

Okay, so we've got this system with 50 states and the District of Columbia and we're the United States of America. And states have a lot of prerogatives of their own. They can make their own legislation. And even localities within states can have a certain amount of latitude. You can do a lot of experimentation at the local level, a lot of experimentation at the state level. And you can kind of see what looks like it's working and what looks like it's not working. And if people want to learn, they can learn.

[Mike Rowe]

So when you talk about competitive federalism, can we talk about what's happening in California versus Texas?

[Nick Eberstadt]

Sure.

[Mike Rowe]

Can we talk about New York? Did you see Fareed Zakaria's thing yesterday? No. Oh boy, you're gonna love this. Yeah, it's a six minute analysis of Mamdani's first six weeks in office and the 19 people who froze to death in the last, you know, the last meteorological calamity and the hundred and, what is it, 47 billion dollar budget. Bigger than Greece, bigger than Thailand, of the 5% of people in Manhattan who have left the tax space and now they need another $10 billion from a much smaller cohort. And he's basically just saying, look, this isn't wor. This experiment isn't working. This competition we've lost. Right? I mean, and so it's one thing for you to say it or me to mouth off and say it, but Faree Zakaria is saying it. And so that to me, I didn't think of it in these terms, but watching that, and I encourage people to find that clip and look at it. That's a result of competitive Federalism.

[Nick Eberstadt]

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

[Mike Rowe]

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

[Nick Eberstadt]

For sure. For sure.

[Mike Rowe]

And that's how our framers must have.

[Nick Eberstadt]

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

[Mike Rowe]

Right. Can I ask you about your alma mater?

[Nick Eberstadt]

Sure.

[Mike Rowe]

No, I know right now you're going, which one? I've matriculated from so many fine institutions. No, not the London School. No. Harvard. How do you think about Harvard today? What was it like when you were there? Any advice for the provost, et cetera? How do you think of them as a brand and what is their role right now? With a $52 billion endowment, it's agonizing to watch.

[Nick Eberstadt]

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

[Mike Rowe]

Did you know when it was happening?

[Nick Eberstadt]

I think I was probably too much of a little snot to appreciate exactly

[Mike Rowe]

how, you know, But I mean, now as a full grown snot, you can look back through the fullness of time and say, man, yeah.

[Nick Eberstadt]

And it was, I mean, just the altruism that I was treated to. I don't think I was at all grateful about that or not nearly as grateful as I should have been at that the time. One of the things if you. Gratitude is a thing that you kind of maybe get to learn over a while if you're lucky enough to do so. But I had a wonderful education there. It's awful to see what's happened to Harvard. And again, like this men without work thing, it didn't just happen all of a sudden. It was a gradual process of hubris and pomposity and self congratulation and insulation from a lot of the rest of America, but also a lot of the rest of the world.

[Mike Rowe]

Frog and the boiling water.

[Nick Eberstadt]

I think the problems there are very, very, very deep. And I'd like to tell you that they can be solved by having a new president of the university. But I mean, I don't know the president now myself, I hear he's a very good man. He's got a Very good reputation, but he can't fix what needs to be fixed. Harvard University has the very best sort of corporate structure from the 1600s is what they have been left with. And within Harvard University there's a very small group called the Corporation. Originally seven people, now I think maybe a dozen. It's a self perpetuating group, a little bit like the, the Politburo. And it is so fundamentally and badly misguided. It is I think basically responsible for maybe not all, but for so much of the rot that you see at Harvard today. I think the way to solve the Harvard problem over time is to get a better class of people in the Harvard Corporation. Because then you'll get better president of Harvard, although this one's perfectly fine. But then you get better deans, you get better assistant deans, you get better administrators. And without going through that sort of branch and root reform, I don't think that the Harvard brand is going to be able to stay where it was. I mean, it isn't where it was now because it's been such an embarrassment about what's happened at the place. And is a 50 plus billion dollar endowment enough of a moat to prevent a siege by people who want to reform it? I guess we're going to find out about that. This is beyond my bailiwick, but I've read accounts saying that although there's an awful lot of money in the Harvard endowment, most of it is very illiquid. And if you're illiquid and you suddenly hit hard times, sometimes you have to sell your assets at a discount. So I don't know if that's where it is. I don't know if that's where it's gonna go. But the intention of the Harvard Corporation not to reform I think is pretty obvious at the moment. And will anything short of calamity impel the corporation to bring reform there? I don't know.

[Mike Rowe]

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

[Nick Eberstadt]

I know. It's my 50th anniversary. What a bummer.

[Mike Rowe]

What do you think about this? I've been in touch. The guy that runs Carnegie Mellon I met, Farnham is his name. They're like the original trade school, you know. I mean Carnegie Mellon was a trade university and mit, they're paying attention to what we've been doing here. I can't speak for them yet because we haven't had in depth conversations, but we're talking about and I'm getting the sense that maybe the Ivy League is starting. I don't want to paint with too broad a brush, but why isn't there a trade association with any of those brands? What does a trade education look like under a Carnegie Mellon and Promoteur or an mit? Right. And why not? And I wonder if maybe one of the silver linings of this thing that's incredible evolution that's happening in the workforce, maybe it's the diminishment of the, the color of collars. Right? I mean, maybe our, maybe our future workforce and maybe some of these 7 million men who have just been sitting there scrolling left, scrolling right. You know, absorbed and I don't know, you know, maybe, maybe academia can make a more persuasive case for a new kind of work skills based.

[Nick Eberstadt]

Yeah. And well, I mean we've got all the, all of the tech universities that should be helpful, whether it's Carnegie Mellon or Caltech or Georgia or mit. We've got all of the original A and M schools that still I think are pretty involved in some of this. There's a place for people who want to get kind of like a liberal arts education, but it's not everywhere. And by the way, college isn't for everybody either. I mean, everybody should have a skill. Everybody ought to have the skill so that they can make a living and have a home and start a family if they want to. But one of the problems I see at, you know, my alma mater today is when they look out of the parapet, it's kind of like, why can't you be more like us? That's not the right question to ask.

[Mike Rowe]

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

[Nick Eberstadt]

Yeah.

[Mike Rowe]

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

[Nick Eberstadt]

We're going through a bad patch in the United States right now. I mean, I don't, I don't think that's a news flash, but it's not like the first bad patch that we've gone through in our 250 year history. And every time we've done the self correct and we've come out on the other end better and stronger, more prosperous, more capable. The self correct hasn't been pretty in most of these cases, but it has been A self correct. So if I were betting, I'd say that's where we're going right now. We are in an unusually long, difficult patch where people have less confidence and trust in the country and in their future than is usual in the United States, since we're kind of a country of inveterate, you know, kind of crackpot optimists. But it's a dangerous thing to bet against the United States of America. It's been for the last 250 years, and I kind of think that may be true for the next.

[Mike Rowe]

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

[Nick Eberstadt]

What a treat. For me.

[Mike Rowe]

Well, I just. For me, you know, I just love that you got a little Ogden Nash flown through your. Oh, you know, I just. I mean, it actually explains something that I couldn't explain. I mean, don't take this the wrong way. I like you. I like you instinctively. I liked you when I read your book, not just because it confirmed a bunch of my smack, but because there's something underneath that big, geeky, wonky brain that is of the language.

[Nick Eberstadt]

You said something that I was going to ask you about, but I didn't. Never met you before. PJ o'. Rourke.

[Mike Rowe]

Yeah.

[Nick Eberstadt]

You read his stuff?

[Mike Rowe]

Oh, yeah. Eat the Rich.

[Nick Eberstadt]

You meet him?

[Mike Rowe]

I met him once.

[Nick Eberstadt]

PJ is one of my best friends. He is. You remind me of pj.

[Mike Rowe]

Oh, don't look. That'll make me cry, man. I was visiting my parents in Florida. I was visiting my brother, and they were visiting my brother, and we were all there together. And my mother said, what do you want to do? And Scott said, we could go to the library. This is my brother. Okay, that sounds great. Let's go to the library. So we go to the library, and I check out a book he had written that I had never read before.

[Nick Eberstadt]

Yeah.

[Mike Rowe]

Called all the Trouble in the World. Sure. And it was really just a collection of cautionary tales, like, on. I mean, any topic. Like, he was such a contrarian, but he was freaking funny, man. And he. I mean, he could really write.

[Nick Eberstadt]

Oh, my God. Is he right? He is the. He was the godfather for our youngest, by the way.

[Mike Rowe]

We're still recording because this is the good stuff. Yeah, so go ahead and get that mic.

[Nick Eberstadt]

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

[Mike Rowe]

you

[Nick Eberstadt]

go to his house and it's like a library, and he read so much in so many different things, so many different areas. And he put all of that to work in his humor because it was basically trying to teach people about, like, what's right, what's wrong, and what's really

[Mike Rowe]

stupid to do the thing that, you know. He knew that nobody wanted a lecture.

[Nick Eberstadt]

Yep.

[Mike Rowe]

Nobody wanted a sermon.

[Nick Eberstadt]

Yes.

[Mike Rowe]

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

[Nick Eberstadt]

Yep.

[Mike Rowe]

Right.

[Nick Eberstadt]

Exactly. Exactly.

[Mike Rowe]

What a treat, man. You buried the lead. So he was the godfather to our youngest.

[Nick Eberstadt]

We've got four kids. To our youngest daughter, who now is in PhD program in AI. Somebody's gotta feed the family in the future. So we lived in an apartment building in Washington, D.C. on the same floor as he did. And we got to know each other. We had friends in common, but we wouldn't have got to know each other if we hadn't been on the same floor. And he and his wife and us guys. And another very close friend of ours named Andrew Ferguson, Andy Ferguson, who's a writer for the Atlantic and I think, beautiful stylist, great writer. We were all in the building at the same time, and we were basically the only people under, like, 80 years old there because they hadn't done the Post Paris Review.

[Mike Rowe]

It's everybody but George Clinton.

[Nick Eberstadt]

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

[Mike Rowe]

Wow. Well, I was a fan back when. God. Remember when he was working for Jan. Yeah. You're writing for the Rolling Stone.

[Nick Eberstadt]

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

[Mike Rowe]

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

[Nick Eberstadt]

Richer for it more complete. More complete.

[Mike Rowe]

America's Human Arithmetic. Exceptional essays from Nicholas Eberstadt. No essential. But you know what? They're exceptional, too. Thanks, Nick.

[Nick Eberstadt]

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

[Mike Rowe]

Good. When you leave a review, which we hope that you'll do, Tell us who you are. Tell us who you are. And before you go, whoa, whoa, won't you leave.

[Nick Eberstadt]

Five

[Mike Rowe]

star five lousy little

[Chuck]

star. We have the tech to get food delivered in 15 minutes, but we all have horror stories about buying tickets. The GameTime app gives fans the advantage. Get amazing tickets in just a few taps. Fees are included, so what you see is what you pay. And the gametime guarantee means authentic tickets at the best price every time. Take the guesswork out of buying tickets to concerts, sports, comedy, and more with GameTime. Download the GameTime app and create an account for $20 off your first purchase. Terms apply. Marketing is hard, but I'll tell you a little secret. It doesn't have to be. Let me point something out. You're listening to a podcast right now and it's great. You love the host. You seek it out and download it. You listen to it while driving, working out, cooking, even going to the bathroom. Podcasts are a pretty close companion. And this is a podcast ad. Did I get your attention? You can reach great listeners like yourself with podcast advertising from Libsyn Ads. Choose from hundreds of top podcasts offering host endorsements or or run a pre produced ad like this one across thousands of shows. To reach your target audience in their favorite podcasts with Libsyn Ads, go to Libsyn ads.com that's L I B S Y N ads.com today.