Producers’ Pick | Mike Rowe: Why more workers are “quietly quitting” their jobs

This hour we're going to be talking to all my guests. It's where I have it here.

It's somewhere. Oh, Micro. He's my only guest. You actually do this for a living. This is amazing. I don't get paid.

This is just all experience. There'll be no money. There'll be no money. I mean, and I reject when the money comes automatically into my... I get rid of it. I said, can you please get rid of it? Filthy lucre.

I've been hearing this. You don't get paid either, do you? No, nothing. No, just that warm clothes. Because you're wearing the same thing every time I see you.

I got two shirts, three pants. That's it. Fashion's done.

I've embraced the uniform. He's got this new thing, quietly quitting. You hear about this new thing, quietly quitting? Is that awesome? Yeah. I mean, it's like a monument to passive aggressiveness. Guys, just one second.

Allison, you blew my whole format already. You know that, right? We can skip it. You think I should skip the big three just because Mike Rose here? 100%.

And you think his instincts are better than mine? The big three. Why would you do the big three? You got the big one. Come on. Wow, there's the ego.

And that's why a lot of people don't book you, Mike, because it's the ego. No one can handle it. So let me just tell people what they missed. They missed me telling you that one of the big stories was the raid on Mar-a-Lago. The other big story was the primaries last night and the other big story was... What was the other big story?

It was so big, we don't know what it is. Signed into law. You know, the whole inflation reduction act? Yeah, yeah, yeah.

That really works effective. It turns out the only problem with the bill is the title has nothing to do with the bill. If you can't get the title right, how are we supposed to believe what the actual content is in it? Look, we were joking about this the other day on Fox and Friends, but it's so true.

It's the thing, nevermind the politics of it, the thing that is making people fundamentally crazy is that nothing is what it says it is, right? You're going to talk to my mom later. Her book's called Vacuuming in the Nude.

She doesn't really vacuum in the nude, but that's okay. It's a book. It's a metaphor.

It didn't cost $700 billion. What if we passed a law right now on your show that just said, listen, no more names for acts and bills. They get letters and they get numbers. That's just what it is. It's like a bingo game. It's not sexy, it's not glamorous, but guess what? You can't put your thumb on the scale of a thing that is just a couple letters in a random number.

People could look at it. It's the same thing happened with the pandemic, right? Is it the China virus? Is it the Wuhan virus? Is it the coronavirus? Is it COVID? Well, we spend so much time figuring out what to call a thing, we forget to look at what the thing is. Well, we could also just be accurate and say, of course, it's the Wuhan virus or it's the China virus. It's one or the other. Sorry, you took it personal. That's where it started.

MERS, same thing, came from the Middle East. Quick thing, we want to make sure everybody knows Mike Road Works Foundation is something you should contribute to. It's about rebuilding blue collar America.

Also, you have How America Works on Fox Business, Monday's at 8 o'clock. Back with the new season? Yeah, yeah. Season 3 will be up in September, it looks like.

Looks great. And Vacuuming the Nude and Other Ways to Get Attention is not out until August 21st, but you can get it now, right? It's out as it, Brian, we really have to have a talk offline, okay?

Because you got a lot of information in front of you, but I'm not sure how much of that's accurate. Vacuuming in the Nude and Other Ways to Get Attention hit the shelves yesterday. My mother's special, America's Grandmother, which is right here on Fox News, that premieres on the 21st of August at 10 p.m. My mother- Oh, yesterday, Tuesday, of course. Yeah, Tuesday books. Tuesday's big day for books. All right.

But it's a big day for mom. I stand corrected. I stand corrected. A lot of people would hesitate correcting the host. Yeah, a lot of people would. But you know what?

A lot of hosts would have stuck to their big three and marched right off the cliff and congratulated themselves for not being flexible. Right, lack of self-esteem on my part. You know what?

I think it's inertia. Here's the thing, all your items in the big three have one thing in common. Which is? They're all in the past.

This is happening right now. That's a good point. Thank you for minimizing the quality of my show and the content in which people hear. Thank you. I will say, I go out of my way to make sure you're not involved in politics, but I will say this. After doing a special of only 45 minutes, you did a whole series on oil and gas. I didn't know almost anything about the business, but I'm humbled enough to ask questions and go out with George P. Bush.

We go out to the fields of Midland, Texas, and we go out to an offshore oil rig. And then we go to the history of the oil museum and find out what the role of oil and gas has and how they've been diminished in our society by people who know nothing about it. They don't understand petroleum in our jeans, petroleum in our keyboards. They don't understand oil and gas, how we won World War II and what it means for our national security. And to tell a bunch of kids graduating college, don't major in that in high school, don't do what your families did. And to tell these great investment organizations that have all the success from Blackstone to JP Morgan, I don't want doing your mutual funds investing in something that will help turn a profit for them.

I think it's criminal. Well, look, if you make fossil fuels the enemy, then you are going to reap a whirlwind of unintended consequences really, really, really quickly. I get that a lot of people are convinced the end of days is coming 12, 15, 20 years down the road. I get that.

But there's no proportionality and there's no context. And when you talk about flipping a switch and getting rid of oil and natural gas and even coal for that matter, you would hasten that Armageddon to an exponential factor. China and India alone are building a coal plant every week for the next 30 years.

That's not going to change. There are 30 billion people right now still burning wood and dung. If you want to bring them into the modern world, you're not going to do it with wind, you're not going to do it with solar, you're not going to do it with hydro. You might do it with nuclear, but we've got real problems with that, right?

France, 90% of their... We shouldn't have problems with that because we don't want to do it responsibly. Well, you have to do it responsibly and you have to deal with fossil fuels responsibly, but you can't just go, no, fossil fuels are the enemy, period. It's over.

That will hurt on every imaginable level. In my view, Alex Epstein wrote a great book. It's called Fossil Future. In it, he just says, look, let's have the conversation, but let's at least understand that fossil fuels have saved more lives over the last 100 years than anybody is really thinking about.

Fossil fuels have protected us from the climate, right? In so many ways, but it's hard to say that out loud today without it coming back over the net with so much topspin that somebody's going to call you a denier and then the conversation ends. So you know what's going to happen? And this is my... By the way, I actually don't mind doing it. I'm kind of used to it, but you're in the more of the real world than I am, but actually not.

I do travel a lot and do a lot of features. I should give myself some credit. You get out, yeah. Again, yeah, thank you.

I should really thank myself for giving myself a compliment. But Mike, it's to me, the best analogy is defund the police from two years ago. It was to defund the police. Yeah, let's reimagine police. And people say, I have a cop thing on my car. I'm not going to put that up there. And when it comes to Yankee Stadium and times to salute the first responders, let's not put cops out there.

It's just not popular. And guess what we have? Crime taking over every major city, small, big or small. I'm in Memphis doing a feature with on Elvis and Graceland. And I asked the police chief, the former police chief, what's the big deal? He goes, I've never seen crime like this. Same conversation.

On Elvis week. Same conversation in Baltimore last time I was there. I'll be there this afternoon as well, and I'm friendly with some cops and it's the same thing.

It doesn't matter where you go. You talk to a good cop, you're going to hear the same story. And I think, I think what we're talking about right now is the fact that we don't, we don't react anymore. We overreact to everything.

And what winds up coming out in the language is the perfect manifestation of that overreaction. We over, when we call a bill something it isn't, that's an overreaction. When we want to talk about reforming police, we don't talk about reforming them. We don't, we, we talk about defunding them, just tear it down. We're in a rush to tear everything down.

Fossil fuels can't be problematic. They have to be the enemy and they have to be ended now. But see, now we're experiencing a rise in crime and now they're saying, you know, I want to get more money to the cops.

I never said that. And the people like Corey Bush, they won't back off it. And we have this thing, we have VCRs now we're taping just about everything. Yep.

So we play it back. Having said that, now that crime's overrun, we like more cops. They're not coming. Yeah. We can't get a cop.

We can't get anyone to be a cop. Yep. All right. So you, you did that. You defamed them. You disparaged them. They're putting their lives on the line. They don't get paid a ton. There are some bad ones. There are some bad talk show hosts. There are some bad firefighters. There are some bad teachers.

Doesn't mean by a long stretch, they're all bad. But we wanted to put them in that one category. If we do this with fossil fuels, if we continue to make them the enemy by not, by vilifying people that work there and stopping companies from investing there, in two years we're going to look around and go, why does the whole country have rolling blackouts?

Why are we subservient to China? Correct. And then we're going to go, wait a second, let's reverse that. But it's going to be hard to get a generation to go back to the oil fields. It's going to be hard to get investment back into this industries. Right.

Look, it starts with our institutions and a level of trust or mistrust that we have in them. This is not headline news. People talk about this every day, but here the stakes are incredibly high. If the prognosticators of doom are correct, if the party's over in 12 years, well then of course that's going to completely reframe the conversation. You mean the earth ends?

The earth ends. Right. Look, serious people who hold serious elected office have looked seriously and earnestly into the lens of whatever camera's around and told us, lights out, right? We only have 12 years.

Now, if that's true, then we're going to have one sort of conversation. But is it, I mean, I don't have a crystal ball. Do you have Al Gore's documentary? That was a crystal ball and we've already survived it.

And I think 85% of what he put in it does not come true. Yeah. Well, I just think that if you want to have an honest conversation, the minute somebody calls you a denier, the minute somebody says you're not following the science, then we've just evolved into this place where the conversation is truly over. And now we have to be left with the fact. How would you like your Armageddon today, sir? In 12 years, we've served up this particular variety, but I'm here to tell you, you turn off oil, natural gas and coal right now, today, then you don't have to wait 12 years. You'll get it in two months. You'll get it with empty shelves. You'll get it with gas prices that no one can afford. You'll get it with the bottom will fall out of the textile market, the clothes you're wearing, the computer you're on, the electricity that powers your Tesla.

Yeah. Guess what? There's a turbine spinning somewhere up the food chain. You know what's powering that?

That would be natural gas. And a lot of the people that you know better than me are the so-called celebrities who are flying around in their jets like Leonardo DiCaprio and telling everybody, how dare you do it? How dare you do this?

The world's going to be ending. John Kerry is probably the worst offender. You even have Bill Gates, evidently was the one to persuade Joe Manchin to vote for this monstrosity. The thing is, man, it's like you have to, I don't, I hate to pick on people personally, but I would say to all the people you just mentioned, are you asking yourself, am I persuasive?

Right? I mean, it's a fair question and it's one that I try and ask myself that all the time. I know I'm not always, but to go out with a message that is as elevated as it could be, the end of the world is coming. The truth is inconvenient. If you're going to sound the alarm, blow the klaxon or whatever that is, right?

You'd better be walking the walk. You know, I'll give Ed Begley credit. Last time I heard him talk about this stuff, he was still living in a tree, right?

And riding a bike. Right. So, okay. Okay.

But to deliver a message that dire and not live it, to deliver a message that dire and then buy a home on the coast. President Obama. Right. Well, listen, but what is with you calling people out? Fine, fine.

That was a voice in your head. Who's ever, if you're going to say a thing, walk the walk. And if you can't do it, well, then maybe say less. Why don't you, if you want to take a break, why don't you tell Mike? Cause you, you actually going with everything he said. Alison just said in my ear, take a break. All right. Well, I make an eye contact with her through the smoky glass and it looks like a break right now would be the only logical thing to do.

Back with more of the Brian Kilmeade show after whatever this is. Vacuuming in the nude. I mean, come on. You should try it sometime when you're home alone. Take your clothes off, fire up the vacuum cleaner, tidy up the place. It's free.

Precise, personal, powerful. It's America's weather team in the Palm of your hands. Get Fox weather updates throughout your busy day, every day.

Subscribe and listen now at foxnewspodcasts.com or wherever you get your podcasts. More money, not working at all. And so guess what they chose not to work and it's been, they've been reluctant to come back to work.

It's sort of, um, they got used to it. Micro with us, micro works. Uh, you got his foundation, you got, uh, micro, uh, how America works on Fox business, uh, Mondays at eight o'clock brand new season. And that was hopeful CEO talking about something that's passionate too with you is about work. John Mackey, one of the most successful executives in the country can't get people to work. And it said since the pandemic, he can't get his mind around what's going on.

Yeah. He's not alone. And he's in a tough spot because he needs workers. He can't get a robot to do that. He needs workers, but he's in a tough spot because he occupies a certain real estate in the conversation and the fans of whole foods, the people by and large, if you're going to try and drill down into their politics, that's not a message they want to hear from a guy like that. But it, what choice does he have? I, I don't know of any employer and I know a lot of employers, Brian, especially in the, in the construction world who couldn't hire a dozen people right now.

Anywhere it goes. My only question I ask everybody, how many are you hiring? Yeah. How many could you hire? It's amazing. We've, we've got 7.5 million open positions, 5.8 million people purportedly in the market looking for work. Even if all those people got hooked up with some of these jobs and it's unlikely cause the mismatch of skills is egregious, but even if they did, you'd still be looking at 6 million unfilled opportunities and somebody somewhere at some point needs to ask this question real loud. What does all of that opportunity, all of that unfilled opportunity say about the country?

We listen to our conversations, how it's changed. It wouldn't be like, why don't we get more people into technical colleges to fill up some of these, uh, blue collar positions? And now we say, why can't we get anyone to work? So what happened? We went from get them to, we have overstaffed in one place.

You know, you can't fit into acting in, in the arts. You can't really, it's hard to work in a wall street, but man, if you were a plumber, we're desperate for you. We'll get trained and we'll send you to school. That used to be our conversation, but our new conversation is where's the workforce? Yeah. Well, it's not really new, but it is coming back around. The wheel is spinning and that's the thing that's going to land squarely on our, on our doorstep, work ethic, delayed gratification, a decent attitude, personal responsibility, all the stuff that makes me sound like an angry white boomer on the porch, screaming at the kids to get off his lawn. I'm sorry, but that's the stuff that's for sale right now.

And it's the stuff my foundation has always tried to magnify. It's the stuff no one wants to hear about it because nobody wants a lecture. Brian, nobody wants to be scolded. Nobody wants to be told they're lazy, but at some point when you look around and you look at policies that are encouraging people not to work, then go back to our last break, right? When we were talking about what's the, what happens if you make the police, the enemy, what happens if you make fossil fuels the enemy, what happens if you make work the enemy? This is what happens.

Right. And this is what you need a leader to be, whether it's a governor in for your state or the president of your country or the leader of your family. You tell people the value and the value of work and you sense stuff that was used to be innate.

Man, I worked all day and I feel great about myself. You get that from your family, you get that from your leaders, you get that from your peers. We don't get that now. No, we don't. And we, we can change that, but I didn't think we'd have to consciously have to change that. But somehow through this pandemic, things got terrible and everyone says the same thing.

How did we get here? We're the workers, more micro in a second. He was telling my father as a dad, you just don't understand our generation.

And I feel like I've become my father. I don't understand the younger generation. They, they don't seem to want to work. And I couldn't, I couldn't wait to work, work for me. I started working as soon as I was able to, because that's how I could get money to spend things I wanted.

Do you think it's, they don't want to work because they don't have to, whether it's their parents or government kind of feathering them out. And that is more from John Mackey, just talking about, he's just exasperated. He doesn't figure where the work ethic went because he was doing, we don't know how we got it.

But to me, I remember getting my papers thinking 12, 13, one more year, I can officially work. Mike Rowe here, talking about his new series, his series is back on Monday nights. So Mike, what is your take on what John Mackey is asking the question, not rhetorically, he wants an answer.

What happened? Well, we have associated drudgery with work, all work. It's not fulfilling. We've made work the proximate cause of our collective unhappiness. We believe today that job satisfaction has something to do with the job. And it really doesn't. If it, if it weren't that case, well, guys like Booker T. Washington wouldn't have written what they wrote. If, if, if it were the case, the job satisfaction is all about the job, then all garbage men would be equally miserable. All Wall Street types would be equally optimistic. It's laughable.

All talk show hosts would be equally engaged. You know, job satisfaction has something to do with the job, but a whole lot more to do with the person. And if you, if you start to look at work like this thing that's separate and apart from the man or the woman, then, then, then you sort of arbitrage the fun out of it and, and, and you just reduce it to action and activity. Why do you think this whole working from home thing is so sensitive right now?

It's so, it's so fraught, right? Because a lot of people who really favor it, I think, feel as though, okay, finally, now I'm in control. Now I have a measure of control that I didn't have over what I wear or how I sit or how long my break is or so forth and so on. So what's missing?

So it sounds good. I control when I'm working. I control what I do. I decide what I can wear. I make my house an office.

Yep. It, it, it all tracks right up to the point where you're not an entrepreneur. If you want to be an entrepreneur, if you want to assume the risk that comes with creating a business, if you want to set your own hours, that's all well and good. But if you're going to accept a paycheck, then, then you've made it a bargain. You've made a different kind of deal with yourself and with your employer. You know, you don't have to stick with that deal for the rest of your life, but you've made that deal.

Mike Rowe, I want you to hear this. I think it was, is it from TikTok? Was I right?

This is from TikTok. This is 20 something talking about this new term, quietly quitting. I'm hearing people talk about the term quiet quitting. What that means is people are not going above and beyond anymore. They're not chasing hustle culture at work. They're just doing the required minimum. Essentially they're doing what they're getting paid to do.

Why does quiet quitting have such a negative connotation though? Sure sounds a lot to me like creating work-life balance for yourself. Look, a C plus, a C, you know, it's a passing grade, right? I mean, it's, if you work hard, look, when I went to school and probably you too, we, we got two grades. We, we got a grade for our accomplishment and our aptitude, and we got a grade for our effort. I got attitude. It's attitude with us.

Well, it was one to five, I remember. Right, right. So all that stuff really matters. What is your attitude? What is your philosophy? What is, have you taken the time to think about your relationship with work, right?

Like to really think about it. Have you made it the enemy? Have you suggested perhaps that it's the proximate cause of whatever unhappiness you have in your life?

Most people have. So the idea of quietly quitting, I'm sure is very appealing to a lot of people because they don't have to step up and do it publicly. You don't have to risk being ostracized or shamed, right? You just quietly fade away.

And yeah, that's what I'm going to do now. But I, I actually really do. Hearing you talk, I actually related to sports. One way not to lose is not to play.

And, and if you're afraid to lose to the point where you don't play, you blame the refs, you quit early, you do things like that, or you don't engage at all. So I can go compete. I'm going to go in Wall Street. I'm going to wear that suit.

I'm going to try to make a way up, but if I fail, I don't want to feel like a failure. So I'm not going to engage. Those people are obsessed. These capitalists are obsessed with winning and losing, making money. There's more to life than that.

Sure. But that gives you a purpose and to competing, it gives you a vigor. And if you have approached you with the right way to test yourself, that takes effort and that takes risk. And the way not to have that is to say those people are terrible and misguided.

I'm out. And the way to give them the experiment is to give them a two-year break from working, pay them not to work, and then take care of their apartments. We have forgiveness.

You don't have to pay. And guess who gets hurt by that? Everybody else and landlords who didn't get any rent for two years.

And you can't kick them out. And student loan payments that are not made. You're reading my mind.

We've, we've just asked millions and millions and millions of people who have worked really, really hard from the moment they got out of high school, who have built businesses, who, who, who create jobs. We're asking those people to write the check for $1.7 trillion in outstanding student loans from people who went another way, who made another choice. You want to talk about forgiveness. Fine. I forgive you, but I'm not going to forget. And I'm certainly not going to pay it off.

You got to do the deal. Look, it took me 13 years to pay back my student loans with a deferment, which I had to go to the, I had to go to the bank and say, listen, I couldn't afford $126 a month. So they say you have 18 months.

So when I came back, it was $225. And I, they send that to, I took loans out every year till I was 35. I was just thinking about this this morning because I hear that Joe Biden's about to forgive everybody's loan. I got two dozen friends with big fat car payments and truck payments who run construction sites. They need their Ford 350. They, they need the big Dodge.

They have to have it. They bought it. They're paying it off. They're building your house.

They're building our roads. Is anybody talking about paying off the debt of that truck? Not that I know of.

Let me look it up. Nope. Nope, of course not. And by the way, nor should we, but the, all you need to know about where the line is drawn is about what tools we value people on dirty jobs. They don't quit quietly when they quit, they quit and they move on to the next thing and they keep going. They don't do anything quietly.

They do everything proudly and they do it all the way up. Like Ernest Hemingway said, there's only one way to live all the way up. Doing it quietly, doing something, the more important the thing is, the more proudly you ought to do it.

Well, quitting quietly is just another way of saying whatever it is I've been doing doesn't matter. The other thing I did is special on Hemingway. I can't say that I'm an expert on him, but doing a special on him, he would write for three or four hours at a certain time, certain day.

People say, well, he was always crazy. He was on the scene. No, there was, there was a time to write.

There was time to work and there was a time to live life and then write about what you live. That's right. And that's what he did. But he was disciplined. He was sitting at the same typewriter every day in the same room and people knew not to bother him. So even those people were freelancing out there, you got to set up a discipline. Seinfeld is the best example.

Seinfeld writes a certain amount, a certain amount of time. He keeps records meticulously and he lives a life in which he make, calls his own shots and he does it better than anybody else. But I would tell you the talent aside, it's the work. It's the discipline. Look, this, this is why working from home is also scary. Most people don't have Hemingway's force of will.

When you're home, like how, it's very, very difficult for people to do what you just described. Hemingway, by the way, I loved what he said about athletics since you brought that up. He said they're only, they're only three sports.

There's boxing, there's race car driving and there's mountain climbing. Everything else is a game. Really? I gotta call the ESPN. Is there a covering, wait, they're covering all the wrong stuff.

They're covering all the wrong stuff. Absolutely. Hey listen, when we come back, a special guest. Obviously the most talented row in the family, Peggy Rowe, the mom of Mike Rowe. A brand new book out yesterday.

I knew that. Vacuuming in the nude and other ways to get attention, a special on Sunday. This is the Brian Kilmeade show when Mike Rowe lets me lock out. Learning something new every day on the Brian Kilmeade show. Put the power of over 100 meteorologists and the worldwide resources of Fox in your hands with the Fox weather podcast.

Precise, personal, powerful. Subscribe and listen now at foxnewspodcasts.com or wherever you get your podcasts.