Producers' Pick | Mike Rowe on work ethic, border towns and bourbon

Hey, welcome to the latest moments of the Brian Kilmeade Show. Mike Rowe is here. If you're smart enough to get Fox Nation, you are watching them right now and it was not a surprise to you.

If you're not, you really have to go get it. Although it's great to listen on your local affiliate. Coming up this hour, Mike Rowe is here. Mike, you are the whole hour. You're kidding me. Well, I mean, I didn't book anybody else.

Now, not that I can't handle the show, but that means we're going to take calls. It's with strangers, people we haven't met yet. I have no idea.

Some might be detractors. Who agreed to this? Your people.

When do I, since when do I have people? Oh, you did. All right.

I'm in. Good. What else would I do? Where else would I go? Everywhere.

You got like nine shows and you got a foundation. Come on. Yeah, it's busy.

It's busy. It's great. How America's back is back. How America works is back. I can't, I don't even know what my own shows are called anymore.

I got five of them. You'll ask me over the course of the hour and I'll be amusing. You'll see. I have a question to ask. Would you like to hear the big three?

I kind of live for it. The big three are in my top three. Now with the stories you need to know, it's Brian's big three. Number three, the Chinese leader Xi Jinping tightened his grip on power with a third five-year term in office. The event was highly choreographed, but there was one unusual moment with the country's former president, Hu Jintao, unexpectedly escorted out of the closing ceremony. Wouldn't that be bad? Around the world, as you just heard, there are a lot of questions about President Xi's plans for China's future. Russia was claiming Ukraine is preparing to launch a dirty bomb while losing land, including another major city in Kirsan, and Northern South Korea exchanged warning shots near their border amid tensions.

I'll bring you the details and so will Mike. Number two. It's also a real condemnation of the teacher's union and their commitment to radical values rather than to effective education. That's going to be a big issue virtually everywhere in the country. Not surprising, it's still shocking. The results are in and students of all ages suffered significant declines during the pandemic.

Remote learning as predicted, not too effective. Minorities as projected really had it worse than others. We'll talk about who's to blame and how to fix it.

Number one. Back and forth with them ahead, us ahead, them ahead, back and forth. And the polls have been all over the place. I think that we're going to see one more shift back to our side the closing days. Yeah, they're ahead, Joe. Nice try.

15 days and counting. So and so many are saying this will be a red state tsunami that they weren't saying that in July and August. The midterms are going their way because the issues are going their way and they're much more credibility at them. And as you know, Mike doesn't take a political scientist to know that crime matters. The border matters. Inflation matters. The economy matters. And those are the top issues for this election. Abortion, the Dobbs decision, that's about seventh.

Climate change, about 20th. That doesn't bode well just on unsympathetic terms. I don't care where you're voting.

Doesn't bode well for a Democrat. No, but the president makes a good point. You know, in a two-party system, you're always in the top three. Yes.

Yeah, it's always one way or another. I came in second everywhere. You know what? It was a great ad campaign. You'll remember it years ago. Avis was just getting into the game. And they were very, very competitive, you know, the rental car market.

And nobody knew about them. And some guy came up with the slogan, we are number two. We try harder.

We have to. Yeah. Well, they weren't number two. They weren't anywhere in the top 20.

But in a year, they became number two. So you know what? The whole self-fulfilling prophecy thing, there's something to it.

You say a thing out loud, whatever it is, any of the topics you just mentioned. I think that's what we've been seeing as citizens for the last couple of years. We've been seeing very certain people say very specific things that are kind of unbelievable. Right.

And then to our horror, in many cases, we start to see them unfold. So for example, this can't be Russian propaganda. This can't be the Chinese working behind the scenes. No, the economy is a challenge. It can't be.

Inflation is absent. I don't know. Wait a second. What was on Facebook?

No, I don't have to look at Facebook. Don't look over there. The border is secure. Those people coming across in the tens of thousands, don't look at that.

Just listen to what I'm telling you. And finally, it mattered, and it did take somewhat of a stunt to ship these illegal immigrants. Might be greatest people in the world, might be the worst people in the world to Martha's Vineyard.

Until you bring it to the doorstep of the people causing the problem, they would not acknowledge the problem. And I've been to the border. Have you been to the border?

Yes. So you know what these people are? They're blue-collar people, work hard for a living.

There's not a lot of social things going on. And if you're a border patrol agent, you've given up a lot in making your families move down there. And then you find out you're overwhelmed, underappreciated, now being defunded while these people blitz the country. We have no sense of it, right? I mean, look, the shows I work on, Dirty Jobs, How America Works, at base, they're designed to shine a spotlight on that, which is typically out of sight and out of mind.

Right. A couple years ago, on another show called Returning the Favor, I went to Yuma, just to profile a guy who had opened a gym who was trying to make his community a better place. To your point, exactly, the vast majority of people in this country have no idea what a border town is. They have no idea the daily realities of trying to assimilate, of trying to handle it.

And you're right, you can call it a stunt, you can call it a thing, but holy cow, it made people pay attention. And it made people ask and potentially answer a really important question, which is, why isn't every town a border town? It is. Why isn't every state a border state?

And why shouldn't it be? How about looking around the corner? Your policies will perpetuate something. For example, if you do not enforce the border, the word gets out to Central and South American countries, even Sri Lanka, they're coming across right now.

India coming across. This is the one time to get through. And then if you are a sanctuary city, you think, wow, what a great hearted city. What a great hearted state Illinois is.

Isn't that so nice of Chicago? Well, guess what? Now you have 5,000 people who know there's no chance of being deported or reported. So guess what? You're going to have 10, you're going to have 15, and don't tell me that you don't have the money or the room, and that you're not responsible for the ramifications.

You're absolutely responsible. The fundamental reason to take your medicine with regard to the shipping of migrants here and there is that we don't live in the independent states of America. We don't live in the disunited states of America. The states are united. And in my view, anyhow, when you're talking about an issue that impacts everybody in some way, shape, or form, it makes no sense to say, well, this is a sanctuary city and this is not. This state is this, this is not.

Of course states have their rights and their governors and their policies, but this is a top-line national issue and we can't be divided on it. We can't. And the one thing that I was wondering if we could have, and I've brought this up before and no one really takes me up on it, could you ever run for office, win an office big or small by saying we have to work harder? We have to be more responsible. You have to put in that extra effort on a daily basis, the stuff that you might be telling a sports team, but we need to tell it to the American people. There's glory and effort. Sure, not all the time, but from time to time, usually right in the wake of a thing going splat, I think you'll find people looking around for something that's truly authentic.

And most authentic things hurt, right? There was a movie, I think Warren Beatty was in it called Bullworth. Remember, he's a guy who decides to, I think he's diagnosed as terminal and he says, I got nothing to lose. I'm going to run for office. And as he runs for office, he just says anything he wants. He tells the absolute unvarnished politically incorrect truth about everything, and he winds up getting elected, right?

Because people are just so starved for it. I'm not running for anything except another season of how America works on Fox Business. So I don't have to worry about this. But, you know, I'm very mindful of the fact that right now, yeah, somebody could get elected simply by saying there's no shortcut, folks. Shortcuts lead to long delays, and right now we are surrounded by long delays.

So you're going to have to show up early, you're going to have to stay late, and you're going to have to take a bite of the poop sandwich when it comes around. I've not heard outside that John Kennedy line, don't ask what America could do for you, ask you to do for your country. Outside that, I haven't heard anything like it. I've never heard anything like it except blame somebody for both sides. Blame the other person. I never heard take responsibility. By the way, you brought up how America works.

America should know we have a brand new season ready to roll out. Mike Works Foundation is something else we had a very- Mike Rowe works, for God's sakes. How many times do I have to do your show before you get the name of my foundation right, before you just nail it on the first take? Wait a second, how America works is not the name of it? That's the name of the show.

The foundation is Mike Rowe Works. Oh, yeah. Don't make me come over there. It's my fault.

It was written right. I might have, I got to blame somebody, right? I mean, I'm not saying that I'm for that take responsibility thing. Ask not what you can do for Mike Rowe's career.

Ask what Mike Rowe can do for yours. Right, that's an easy one to get messed up. So don't put that in your inaugural.

Get it backwards. And by the way, Fox Business, 8 o'clock. Mike, it was right there. It was right there. I mean, it's not like it was written wrong.

No, look- I would love to blame somebody. These are confusing times. At the risk of some real shameless plugger, you've got how America works on Fox Business. You got Mike Rowe Works online, the foundation. You got Dirty Jobs on the Discovery Channel. You got the story behind the story on TBN. You got a new line of whiskey called Noble for my granddad, which raises money for the aforementioned foundation.

And of course, you have my podcast, the way I heard it, which is easy to find wherever you look for podcasts. So I can understand why you were confused. Who makes up your things to do lists on a daily basis? We have just- we put a lot of words into a like a bingo thing and we turn it. I mean, how do you know? Like, for example, let's say you're never really off. No, never.

Never, never, never. Look, I was off- Do you know what you're doing tomorrow? I'm here again tomorrow, and then I think I go to Nashville. And then we do some very important work in Nashville, the nature of which escapes me at the moment.

But I will circle back before the end of the hour and spell it out for you. But someone else will say to this, this is how important it is, Mike, and this is exactly what you're doing. Somebody will grab me, typically Mary, my business partner, and she'll just say, hey, in the next 15 minutes, this, this, and that are going to happen. Don't screw it up.

She'll give me a quick slap, focus. And so I've become fairly adroit in small bits. Short-term bits of creating the illusion of competence. You might not remember this, but it was probably 10 years ago or maybe more where you said to me, I'm tired of working for people, that you just wanted to do your own thing. Yeah, I don't care how the chips fall, let them fall where they may, but you wanted to call your own shots.

Was it because of a bad experience or just an aspiration or- Well, it was, I mean, it was a little naive because you can't do that. First of all, you can't, you can't really do it alone. But what you can do is try and figure out how many unnecessary parts are between you and the people that you truly work for. And the people you truly work for are the people who are listening to this right now. They're the people who listen to your stuff and they watch your shows, right? Without an audience. That's right. And so, yes, you need a network or a podcast platform or a studio, or maybe you need an agent or a manager, so that's- but do you really, right?

So everything for me just became a question of what's the best way to live in both worlds? So on Dirty Jobs, for instance, to this day, every show I do is suggested by a viewer. They program the show.

They essentially host the show. And so what I meant to you 10 years ago was I don't mind being a host. I'm okay at it, but I think I'm a better guest. I think I'm a better avatar. So like if I can go out into the world and actually work with somebody who does know what they're doing, you know, that was the secret sauce.

And so in some way, shape, or form, I try and do that with whatever project is in hand. But it also lets you do the way you want to do it. So someone else looking over your shoulder going, yeah, Mike, not good enough. Well, we want that shorter.

I want this longer. Or don't wear that jean shirt. That doesn't happen anymore.

Well, it happens, but it happens in a good-natured, look, you don't provide options. I don't have a backup shirt, right? So I spilled coffee on the shirt today. I'm going to spend the rest of the day with a coffee stain.

And stress. And the other thing I did years ago that mattered was I insisted on hiring a behind-the-scenes camera to document any show that I was working on. And I insisted on using footage from that camera in the final cut of the show. So viewers started to see how the sausage was made.

And they started to see me out in the world trying to get the show together that they themselves wanted me to do. And so that's what I mean by working for the viewer. That camera, we didn't even call it a behind-the-scenes camera. We called it a truth cam on Dirty Jobs because I could always look to it. I always knew it would be rolling. And in those little moments of unapologetic verisimilitude and truth, I would tell the viewer exactly what's going on in the course of making the show.

That's the thing that really gave me permission to do things a little different. Two words, verisimilitude. That's one word. That was, no, two words you said. That was in my vocabulary tapes.

I could set tapes to expand my vocabulary. Nice. And that was one of the words. I haven't heard it since.

Good. And adroit was an SAT word because I started studying words one at a time, which is really ridiculous. And adroit was one of the first words I had to learn because it was going to be in the SATs. It's a good word.

It was not on the SATs. That's too bad. I felt like I wasted my time. Up until this moment, I had wasted my time. But now, it pays off. Now it did. Yes.

When we came back, how one of your shows helped me with one of my shows. How about that for adroit? Well, that's a tease. Let's see if the truth cam would pick that up. Very adroit.

By the way, that's true. How America Works is on Fox Business Mondays, every Monday. And today's Monday, 8 o'clock Eastern, back in a moment. Fox News Podcasts dot com.

Information you want, truth you demand. This is The Brian Kilmeade Show. Hey, welcome back.

A few more minutes and then a little longer segments with Mike Rowe. So Mike, your six-degree show. So when I go on stage, I did it for the first time in Albany.

I'll do it two more times on November 12th and 13th and then December 2nd. Instead of just going through the different points in history where I find that news people like history and able to do it in a conversational way to push back on 1619. I thought, wouldn't it be great if I got two of my friends who stand-up comedians, the MC, to reenact great moments in history behind and I would visit step in and out of it and I totally watched your six-degree show where you would step in and out of history, sometimes in front of a green screen, sometime in front of actors and get that idea. I found the audience loves it.

Yeah, you stole it from me and I stole it from a guy named James Burke who had a great show in the late 70s called Connections. And you know, my way of thinking about history and I know we share a lot of the same views on this is you. It's a story obviously and you have to make it relevant and sometimes you just you just kind of have to take the seriousness out of it. Yeah.

And so if you look at like Ridley Scott's take on Gettysburg, you know, and if you look at some of the stuff on history and discovery, big beautiful recreations done as as as cinematically well as the thing can be done. Well, how do you compete with that? Right? You can try but 99% of people are going to fall short.

So why try? So that's right. I hired my best friend from high school to play 35 different roles in the show called Six Degrees and basically a bunch of community theater type people and you just drop the pretense. It's like I got a barn you got some costumes. Hey, let's put on a show and so you create these really important moments in time and you just walk right through them.

Yeah, like like Zellig and you keep telling your story and you're right. People dig it because you're not trying to sell them something. You're trying to entertain them as you inform Brandon, Mississippi. Yeah, the 12th on the 13th Tulsa Oklahoma will be traveling. You can come with us have a station wagon.

I'll be there. I got the seat that faces backwards. You got the wood on the side. Yes, you got the way back seat.

Some of it is worn off a little bit and some of the molding not only they have wood, but they put molding around the wood, which is amazing. They took a bad living room and then put it on your station wagon. By the way, how great was it just to point the kids backwards in the front face you on the way don't even look at us, right? It's called the cannon. You shot of a cannon like the circus and then on December 2nd be in Newark, New Jersey because that's where the hot pet of my support is in Newark in Newark, New Jersey. Yeah, you know, it's important to know where your fan base is performing Arts Center. Awesome. And that's where arts perform and I prefer him to go there. Well, I would like to come see one of these shows in person.

So I can you know arrange my legal case since you ripped me off shamelessly, but maybe go to all three and really built a case against that would send a message more with micro. To your ears. It's Brian Kilmeade. Our eyes were open during the pandemic to what was going on, but the school system one of the things they're doing is changing the way they grade so equity grading not letting kids fail. So after the pandemic they were bragging about how high the graduation rates were will come to find out you couldn't fail. And so instead of spending the resources and the time on helping those kids learn and helping them gain the skills they need. They're just spinning the story to make it look like they have mastered it and that's not fair to those kids. I mean education is so important for kids to rise up.

Yeah, you would think so. And that is just a that is a parent over in Fairfax County, Virginia talking about how alarmed they were about what's going on with their schools and using the metrics there so far in terms of math and science. We had an an English we had an unprecedented drop in production and comprehension and they blame me the pandemic we were heading in that direction to start with Mike Rowe with us Mike Rowe works Foundation. Nailed it.

He's the host and narrator executive producer of how America works which is on airs tonight at 8 o'clock, but I wanted to bring the schools in because what's happening in schools right now is breeding what's going to happen in our workforce and we're also going over something that Allison pulled out about the work ethic in America and that you brought up something on Fox and friends if I did not know we don't do this anymore. Yeah, we don't do this grades and attitude and how hard you're working. You know, you got an A but you got a five and add to that's trouble.

You got to see but you got a number one and add to that's great. Yeah, let's maybe you know, maybe you just need extra help here. Well, you can call it attitude. You can call it effort. You know, when I was in school, you would get a grade for your effort and you would get a grade for your actual accomplishment and those two things were were looked at at the same time.

It was important. Like if you got an A for effort and a C for achievement. Well, then you got a lot of credit because you busted your ass. Yeah, you were trying and that mattered. Now if you get a C for effort and an A well, that's like, okay, so he's kind of mailing it in but he's so smart, you know, so you one day it's going to catch up to you.

That's right. So you sit down and you get a different talk today. We don't do that at all. And part of the reason in my view that we don't talk about effort or attitude is the same reason we don't talk about work ethic or delayed gratification or personal responsibility or all that other happy Horatio Alger stuff that a lot of us grew up with that has now been deemed either problematic like ambition like ambition drive you don't use those words at major corporations anymore. A year ago, I read a thing about it was Lockheed Martin who affirmatively said we don't use terms in the office like work ethic because it's problematic for some people because baked into it is the suggestion that if you lack it you might be lazy. Well, yes.

Yes, in fact that that is a thing, but but but lazy choice but but lazy is a word we don't use either because some people who might be exhibiting traits of laziness might in fact be wrestling with some sort of problem. That's not so readily apparent all along way of saying you can't possibly grade or evaluate a person's effort if you're not allowed to use the very words that define it. So here's an ad this whole thing from the National Assessment of Education Progress did fourth and eighth graders overall and fourth graders math down five points reading down three points the eighth graders math down eight points reading down three points.

I saw it. I mean I had the best student in the world. They couldn't pay attention on Zoom and then my my sister-in-law is a grade school teacher. She teaches I think second or third graders, you know hard is to get a second or third grader to pay attention at all and then the parents who might be working two jobs to have a parent conference via Zoom obviously thought it was going to suffer which is blows me away because over the weekend or excuse me last Thursday, the CDC came out with recommendations the CDC came out with recommendations that we believe these kids should get a vaccine shot in order to get to school like polio rheumatic fever or whatever you get right now that should be part of it. Well, there's a lot of people that don't want any part of this vaccine. That's a yes in just about a year old that are going to have to be either forced to drop out or go somewhere else.

So this is going to create great derision and perhaps a boycott or perhaps mask wearing Dr. Scott Gottlieb weighed in on this craziness that's going to be bestowed on all of us cut 31. So what got started on Twitter initially was that the CDC recommendations automatically translate into state mandates, which is not true. One of the reasons why the CDC went ahead and made this formal recommendation is that it also allows the vaccines to be incorporated into the vaccines for children's program which provides federal funding for indigent kids to get access to vaccines.

And so that's part of the impetus, but there will be no state mandates. But if you look at the what's going on with Moderna and with Pfizer people are saying are they looking to make money by giving these kids shots that they don't need? I just saw I think it was Pfizer a big conference a couple days ago in Holland and one of the muckety mucks there said look we never ever said that these vaccines were going to impact transmissibility. We never weighed in on that really at all and I looked at that and I thought boy, you know what a lot of people are going to feel fundamentally deceived but it's all of a piece right.

I mean I I'm certainly not an expert in any of it, but I know that a lot of parents I talk to the vaccine issue the work ethic issue the slipping of the standards issue all of it rolled up together is is a really unattractive frightening thing they don't and to you know when we talk about the zoom thing I wanted to say it earlier. It's like we know that it's the only thing we can do during a lockdown. It's better than nothing, but it wasn't sold as better than nothing. It was sold as this is just as good. In fact, it might even be better right.

It was served up with with such it was so oversold as a happy solution to this terrible problem when in fact, they should have just told us the truth. They should have just said listen if you if you're preparing for a long walk and you don't have the proper hiking boots. Here's a pair of slippers now. They're not hiking boots.

They're not nearly as good as that reinforced ankle and that steel toe and so forth and so on but it's better than bare feet. So let's hold our nose and get through this as quickly as we can but we didn't we look at that pair of slippers and said it's just as good as the other thing, right? And it clearly isn't and what you use with your human interaction of the competition. I think we just got to compete again. I mean if you want to say that there was two members decide on winning they should be more emphasized on competing. That's what I thought we were going to be talking about if you don't come in first now your glories delayed you competed you gave it your all.

We used to talk about that. Well, what is a winner as opposed to if you compete as hard as you can and lose are you that used to be the conversation now it's where if you bring up winning that's an issue that's now we don't have standing in sports and I could just escalate down that way which brings me back to this if if this election reinforces the whole gender fluidity if it reinforces the whole Socialist expanding if it reinforces the workflow the workforce participation being at 62% which is a historic low which is going to keep on talking about unemployment which drives you nuts. I know because unemployment is very low, but you don't think it really even matters doesn't matter then I think the ripple effect to be bad. But if it does if there is a tsunami the other way, maybe the other party will correct you're basically saying the bad news is the good news because ultimately we have to get through it right as Churchill said when you're when you're going through hell keep going it has to it has to go splat now what the splat look like I'm not entirely sure but I do think with regard to that workforce participation rate that to me is the most chilling metric of all it's more chilling than the latest report card because it it's an indication of what's to come now Nick ever stat who was just on my podcast and you should have him on your show wrote a book a few years ago called men without work. He's just put it out again because what's happened post pandemic is unprecedented 7 million able-bodied men between the ages of 25 and 54 are not only not working. They are affirmatively not looking for work.

They've punched out they're done the vast majority of them spend over 2,000 hours a year on screens. Now I'm going to get a lot of pushback for this because people will say we're just calling lots and lots of people lazy. No, I'm not I'm saying that the unemployment rate is an artifact left over from the Depression era when we tried to make sense of what was happening in our economy during a time when we explained unemployment by a lack of opportunity today you have 11 million open jobs you have 7 million able-bodied men sitting it out.

So what's really happening in the country now that scares me right to my core fundamentally is that we've never had so much unrealized opportunity and so little enthusiasm for it and you brought up to the whole thing of welfare has to be work fair and the Clinton understood that and the compromise Republicans that if you're going to get welfare you have to work for it. You have to prove that you're working for it when possible. Obviously a single mom might have some different there's different circumstances here's the problem that you brought up in the break which I don't think ever discussed is disability.

Yeah. Are you really disabled or you know, are you collecting disability? So Nick Eberstadt would say the overwhelming majority of people who are collecting disability the overwhelming jury are back pain and mental anguish the two forms that are the most difficult to prove or quantify now that doesn't I'm not suggesting that people collecting disability are gaming the system. I'm not going to say that out loud, but Nick told me that the overwhelming majority of money that goes over the transom are for those two areas. Now look someone's paying for that so that comes out of where micro works sure it comes out of everybody here that works at Fox News. You've seen if you do do the you added up federal and state taxes and city taxes almost 60% of your paycheck is taken out in cities like this in New York City in Chicago and others tax in Philadelphia taxes through the roof and what are you getting for your money people are running for the hills because of that people are also looking around and I think look, I'm not a justice is justice. I get suspicious of it whenever you put a word in front of it, you know, whether it's criminal or social it's it's just starts to get a little weird but fundamentally people are desperate for fairness to your point if we are going to pay someone not to work then we better be convinced that they can't we need to know that we're saving them so we can at least have the upside, but that's right. But I my feeling is lots and lots and lots and lots of people are starting to look around and saying we are graduating kids who can't read we have lowered our standards to the point where everybody's going to get through the school and now it's going to be somebody else's problem that is attached to 7 million able-bodied men choosing not to work and we did tell people 2 years ago go home unless you're essential. Yeah, and we will pay for your job your company the PPP loans all well intended. I believe maybe and then all of a sudden they go okay, we're going to continue that a little bit longer 6 2 weeks or 6 weeks to stop the spread whatever was and it be in 2 years. There's no and then the money never stopped and and the rent was frozen and the student loans were frozen and now you got to rip a band-aid off and there's no playbook for how to do it to the point where lots of people at Apple got together and signed basically a demand letter remember about a month ago and sent it to Tim Cook and basically said we're not coming back to the office and here's why a lot of people have done that. And so I mean it's it's Atlas shrugged basically at some point a lot of entrepreneurs and a lot of job creators are going to look around and say look that's that's not the deal. That's not what I signed on for either. So that's what I meant before so how many workers do you have a micro works 8 7 or 8 people what if it's you know all well.

Yeah, very well, they're amazing. What have they just said to you. Yeah, we were talking we're not coming to work. We're not going to be traveling.

We're going to be able to zoom in we're going to do site surveys from FaceTime. Yeah, well, we'd have to have a conversation about right and you couldn't your company couldn't exist. No, at what point are big corporations and small companies and production companies like yours going to say I don't have a choice. I'll be politically correct. Go put you know, go sue me you got to go back to work. Well, that's water house and others.

That's the split. It'll it'll trickle up to there. But right now talk about construction. I can't I know a lot of people in construction. I don't know of a single. I don't know of a single construction company who couldn't hire 30% more people than they currently have on the payroll right now. Not a single one. And I promise you it's every single year.

We give away a few hundred work ethics scholarships and at the top of the list. It's always the same. It's plumbers. It's steam fitters. It's welders. Right. It's these and every for every five tradespeople who retire this month to will replace them.

That is terrible arithmetic and it's been it's been like that for 10 years and it's getting worse and worse and worse. And as we look to bring manufacturing back as a country because what's happening with China macroeconomics where real life's got to bring in these microchips of the first now we're going to start looking to bring manufacturing back if not here close to here. Yeah, then we're going to ask people start doing the manufacturing and they got to show up again.

They have to be willing to do it. Look, I how dependent I want to be part of the world. I want to be connected to other economies.

I want to trade freely and fairly, but how dependent do you want to be on China? How reliant do you want to be regarding your pharmaceuticals regarding your vaccines regarding your clothes regarding your microchips every single thing every there's I'm going to I'm going to tell you what I learned at NASA when we come back about manufacturing why it has to be on site. You want something to micro doesn't I wouldn't be surprised this end up on one of your shows as your idea because you because you feel as you want to get back at me you owe me one idea back in a moment. A talk show that's real. This is the Brian Kilmeade show. Hey, we're back.

Mike Rowe here at micro works Foundation. He's also excited because a brand-new season of how America works is out Fox business tonight at 8 o'clock every Monday night. So Mike you got the old series got the new series. You also have something I've been called and I have that story to tell you so don't take up the whole segment. But you also said to yourself, I like drinking liquor. Why don't I have my own I did a show 10 years ago called how booze built America for discovery and it rated off the charts and yes, it's true.

I enjoy a libation at the end of a long day. But my granddad Carl Noble Dirty Jobs was for him. So is my foundation KNOBL and he had girls when he died his name died with him. So Noble Tennessee whiskey. We launched it about a year ago as a fundraiser for the foundation and I thought it was just going to be you know, a thing to do. Well, people like it and now we're getting on shelves.

And so I'm that guy I looked around Brian and I said, you know what this country needs another B-list celebrity with a line of booze. Really? That's a good revelation.

Remind me to meditate like that come up with something like that. But no, it's great. But you say it's great whiskey. Oh, it's amazing.

Look, it's 5 year-old Tennessee whiskey and look this will sound hardly self-serving. But the nicest thing I've ever heard consistently from fans of Dirty Jobs and whatnot is I'd like to sit down and just have a drink with you someday and just, you know, have a conversation length. So at this point in my life, it's like, you know what? I'd like to do that too. Right with my drink with my so that's the American spirit.

So Mike, here's my story that you're thirsting to get out in the air, please. Right. So I'm at NASA and we're talking about Mars their next mission and they got to make rovers. We have to go deep into these crevices and they came up with this new this new bot or whatever it is to be able to do like never done before and it's ready to go and be a prototype and ready to go to manufacturing. I said, where are you going to do it?

He goes here. Said why I said with no one realizes that when you when you outsource manufacturing, you're not there to make the adjustments here. The complaints here is here about the imperfections.

You get reports, but once you sell the rights, you given up ownership, even if you pretend not and he wants it here in America and he says that's what's got to happen. You lose quality when you give it to somebody else even if you get a cheaper product. The real thing that I take from your story that that's encouraging are the innovators at NASA nose rings 28 years old right side by side with the suits. Yes, right and they appreciate each other. Yes, two sides of the same coin. You got to have it, but we dress too much alike. We do right. So one of us got to get a nose ring to prove your theory. I get you know what? I just take mine out of my navel and run it straight through the schnoz now. I'm sick.