The Brian Kilmeade Show Presents | America's Work Ethic: What Happened?

And now the Brian Kilmeade Show presents a look at America's Work Ethic. Where have American workers gone? What's quietly quitting?

And how do we fix it? Here's Brian Kilmeade. Hi everyone, I'm Brian Kilmeade and welcome to America's Work Ethic.

Yes, we have one, we got to get it back, or we had one. This is going to be a special special hour as featuring Mike Rowe and Blake Manley. Now you know Mike Rowe, Blake Manley you should know.

He's a guy that's really concerned. He grew up in the Pacific Northwest. Logging was the number one industry. People got their hands dirty. They wore hard hats and jean shirts and they worked outdoors and now nobody's doing it. These jobs are unfilled and he as a teacher went out and decided to take the bull by the horns and start training people, sending them into different trade schools in order to learn the skills necessary to make money, make a living, and bring glory back to these jobs. Because for the longest time in America, at least from the 70s and 80s, we were told get your highest education possible so you don't have to work with your hands.

You don't have to do the manual labor. And what happened is we exported all of our manufacturing elsewhere and then they said okay we'll be white collar workers. And now that we had to build stuff, now that we got to learn the trades, have somebody build a house, have somebody work on the plumbing, have somebody work on the streets, on the sewers, somebody be a logger.

It turns out there's nobody out there that does it, has the skills for it, or wants to do it because of the perception in American society. Look, we have generations of people who have generations of people who talk about working hard and working your way up in America. And as you work your way up, you do the blue collar job to get your kids a white collar job to get to the highest education possible. But somewhere along the way, we lost the glory in the blue collar job, which is a great job.

And you have to tell that to Mike Rowe or Blake Manley. But what you do have to do is express to the American people that there is glory in that job. And a lot of times the pensions come in, just like you're a cop or a firefighter. And for the most part, until recently, you'd have no problem filling those jobs even as police officers.

Why? Because after 20 years you do it, you provide law enforcement to get through. Well, the same thing could be done with all those other jobs, union or non-union.

And I just think that we have to as parents, as educators, and with the general public and politicians. You don't just go to Wall Street. You don't just go to Madison Avenue, not to be too New York focused. You don't just go to Los Angeles and San Francisco and New York and Washington and say, wow, I want to be a powerful person with a lot of political power, a lot of rich person who owns these buildings. So we'll see how to work in these buildings. And then you get the family life you're looking for. You set an example and you get that feeling of hard work and accomplishment that you only get for many times by using your hands.

But you got to learn the skills. That's why I think it's important to listen to Blake Manley, the creator of Manley Jobs. You see him on YouTube, or at least you will from now. Here's my interview with Blake Manley. Hi, good morning, Brian. Thank you for having me.

So what prompted Blake? First off, what is your background? So I grew up with a logger kid in Eastern Oregon. My dad's been a logger for 50 years. And then I got into education and found a job teaching forestry to high school students, 9 through 12 at a little high school called Sweet Home in Western Oregon.

So you start doing that. So you realize what about your industry and about where the blue collar workforce is going? Well, we realized several years ago that we were aging. And then a few years back, they did a study and they found that 40% of the loggers specifically, not just the timber industry, but the loggers in the West are over the age of 60.

And so that gets to be pretty scary when you look at, okay, if they're over the age of 60 in 10 years, they're either going to be gone, retired or gone, gone, and who's going to replace them? And so the state of Oregon actually started dumping some money into career technical education, CTE, which is the trades, but that's more of a technical term for it. And one of those areas that they were putting the money was into forestry education. So we went from six programs that were teaching some sort of forestry education in 2015 to today, we have 45 different programs around the state that teach forestry and natural resources to our ninth through 12th graders, just giving them a look at a different career path that they're not seeing in the everyday classroom. So what's the result been?

The result's amazing, actually. In my community individually, we ran a job fair last spring. We have about 650 in our high school. We did a job fair for just what I do, forestry and natural resources, and we placed 25 kids into the industry. Now, that might not seem like a ton, but for a small community, filling 25 jobs where kids would normally fumble their way through was a really big deal. And so from the small snapshot of Sweet Home, we've had a positive effect.

So that's great. And these are jobs that pay well, right? These jobs are amazing, Brian.

That's the thing that I don't think people understand is two things that have changed over the last 50 years. One of them is the jobs start out between $22 and $30 an hour, but my friend that just got out of doing what he was doing before and went into logging made almost $100,000 last year as a logger. So that job pays really well, and it's not your grandpa's logging.

It's not, I'm going to sweat and it's extremely dangerous. There's still a danger factor. There always will be, but you're in a cab now. Most of it is mechanized. Most of it is running a piece of machinery and your boots are off the ground or you're in a cab. So Blake Manley, our guest, he's the author and creator of Manley Jobs. Blake, are you worried overall like the micros of the world or about people just running from the trades?

We manufacturing left and so did any interest in becoming a blue collar worker in America to a degree? I'm terrified, Brian. I'm absolutely terrified. I see it all the time.

The little snapshot that I do with high school stuff is great. What the University of Idaho is doing by offering a two-year program is great, but I see it as a huge gap right now. I mean, Mike got on the other day and said that there's 10 million open jobs right now and unemployment's only 7 million people. So we're still way out of whack and not able to fill all those jobs. And people got to realize that if we don't have loggers, we don't have lumber mills, we're not toilet paper. I mean, something as simple as that, that comes from the forestry industry.

And when we don't have people cutting down trees and replanting them and doing all that, we don't have some basic essentials. I think so. And did you think that growing up for you, was that ever an issue that you thought you'd be looking at right now?

No way. No, I never looked at this and said, you know, 20 years from now, when I graduate from high school, we're going to have a massive logger shortage. You know, my dad talked all the time about how the workforce was aging throughout the late 90s and then the 2000s. And people are discouraged from going into a job like that, into any of the jobs, welding, fabrication, all that. It was you go to college or you're not going to be worth anything. And we just know that's not the case today.

But I never imagined that. At Sweet Home last year, 63% of the students that walked in my room, seniors that had walked in my room, did not go to a four-year college. They went on to higher education in different ways, whether it was a trade school or a two-year or something, but not the typical four-year.

You know what I think you need? I think just like the stop smoking campaign, you know, the stop texting and driving campaign, you need a positive campaign on a blue-collar, the image of a blue-collar worker, just like the military does in order to get recruits in time, in peaceful times. And I think the same thing because parents feel pressure from other parents to make sure their kid, when he graduates or she graduates, is going on to a four-year school. If they say, well, my kid's going to be a plumber, that's suddenly not looked at with great pride. And it should be.

It should be because that plumber is going to have no debt and that plumber is going to own their house before the university student and that plumber is going to be the one that they call to fix their problem. And I think that's hugely vital right now. And we don't do what you're talking about.

We don't make it flashy and nice. That's what we kind of started doing with Manly Jobs is, you know, during COVID, I would follow around different people, mainly in the forestry industry, but we went with Knife River in the construction industry as well. And we would look at them and we'd show people, hey, these jobs are good jobs. People are enjoying their self. It's a good life. I mean, it's almost like for one thing, anyone who's ever a firefighter, they always talk about the camaraderie.

The minute you do, you never want to stop it and you never want to forget when you do retire. There's the same camaraderie that can be built in these blue collar situations. And you know better than me, but I've heard it with logging specifically. You become like a team out there. You become like a family out there.

It's one step further. Like the guys that I broke into the woods with when I was first coming out of high school, they're like family. And when they pass away, you know, we all go to the funeral. It's like a family reunion. Gotcha. You know, and the scary thing is, is that's where that workforce is at.

Now we get together for family reunions, longer reunions at services. So that's Blake Manly. Hope you enjoy his perspective. You might have the biggest names in the business, but he's also making a big impact already. He's putting people into the workforce. He's already seeing it.

And I also think a lot of this to do with perception. Somebody did not have to be woken up to the dangers of not having Americans willing to work hard for a living and a generation deciding their above blue collar work and learning the skills of manual labor is Mike Rowe. He's got a series of foundations. He's got some great shows. He's got Dirty Jobs that have his emergent that had him emerge here. He's got a great series, by the way, on Fox News. So Mike Rowe, if you talk off camera as well as on camera, he's fascinated with the inventor, the entrepreneur, but also in awe of those people who, who have to take a shower after the workday. I love that description. At the end of the day, you're sweaty, you're grimy and to go out, you need to take a shower.

I have to say as much as this is kind of work, I don't necessarily have to take a shower at the end of the day, unless I work out, then I'll take a shower. Next, Mike Rowe, Brian Kilmeade show America's work ethic. America's work ethic. What happened? More with Brian Kilmeade coming up. From the Fox News Podcast Network. I'm Janice Dean, Fox News senior meteorologist. Be sure to subscribe to the Janice Dean podcast at foxnewspodcast.com or wherever you listen to your podcasts.

And don't forget to spread the sunshine. From the Fox News Podcast Network. I'm Ben Domenech, Fox News contributor and editor of the transom.com daily newsletter. And I'm inviting you to join a conversation every week. It's the Ben Domenech podcast. Subscribe and listen now by going to foxnewspodcast.com.

You're listening to a look at America's work ethic with Brian Kilmeade. Would you walk us through a typical day for you? Yeah. Great. Well, I generally come in at least 15 minutes late. I use the side door that way Lumber can't see me. And after that, I just sort of space out for about an hour. Space out? Yeah, I just stare at my desk. But it looks like I'm working.

I do that for probably another hour after lunch too. I'd say in a given week, I probably only do about 15 minutes of real actual work. The thing is, Bob, it's not that I'm lazy. It's that I just don't care. Don't, don't care. It's a problem of motivation. All right. Now, if I work my ass off and Inateck ships a few extra units, I don't see another dime.

So where's the motivation? And here's something else, Bob. I have eight different bosses right now.

I beg your pardon? Eight bosses. Eight?

Eight, Bob. So that means that when I make a mistake, I have eight different people coming by to tell me about it. That's my only real motivation is not to be hassled. That and the fear of losing my job. But you know, Bob, that'll only make someone work just hard enough not to get fired. There you go. That was a long clip from Office Space but gets the point across.

Hi, everyone. Welcome back to our special edition of The Brian Kilmeade Show. We look at America's work ethic with Mike Rowe. Before I get to Mike Rowe's portion of our show, just a quick thing about America's work ethic.

That's the longest way, the way people always described us as extremely hard workers. So that's one thing the Europeans just don't have. You know, the French in particular, they got culture. They are smart.

They're well read. But we have the work ethic. In fact, they did a study. The strong work ethic of America has been a defining characteristic of this country from almost day one.

In fact, in 2017, America's work at work 25% more hours, take less vacation, and are retiring later relative to the workers throughout the world. What happened? Since the pandemic, as America took a deep breath and sat back and kicked back, and with all the social money, with social programs, as well as the money flooding in, we've lost the hunger. You need hunger.

And what you just heard in that comedy and that clip from that funny movie was really kind of based in fact. You know, how much do you need me? If I'm not really worth anything, am I paying anything? Do I have some stake in the game? Do I have a stake in the game?

Do I have a horse in the race? And if I'm going to get paid the same, whether I work 15 minutes or 15 hours, I personally would work 15 hours, but more and more people are saying it's called work 15 minutes. So that's what Mike Rowe and I were discussing for the most part. So John Mackey has said the same thing too about Whole Foods. He's the Whole Foods CEO.

He says he needs to find people to fill his jobs. They're not glorious jobs necessarily, but working for Whole Foods is a procedure stop. People love working there.

It's almost like a tourist attraction. So John Mackey weighed in on Whole Foods, on the work ethic, and the need to find people that really want to work. States increased the amount they gave and extended the version. Did that have an impact on your workers? It had an impact on our ability to hire. A lot of people were making as much money or 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, they got used to it. Mike Rowe with us. Mike Rowe works.

You got his foundation. You got Mike Rowe, how America works on Fox Business, Mondays at eight o'clock, brand new season. And that was Whole Foods CEO talking about something that's passionate with you is about work. John Mackey, one of the most successful executives in the country, can't get people to work. And he 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.

You 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 what choice does he have? 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 I go, it's my only question I ask everybody. How many are you hiring? Yeah. How many could you hire?

It's amazing. 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 because 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?

But 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 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 the arts. You can't really, it's hard to work in a Wall Street. But man, if you're 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 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 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 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. You're listening to a look at America's work ethic with Brian Kilmeade. Welcome back everyone to this special edition of America of the Brian Kilmeade show America's work ethic.

Where has it gone? And by the way, this is an opportunity too. If you do have a work ethic, if you come from a family of hard workers, you're going to stand out more than ever because so many people phoned it in, were told to go home after the pandemic and famously didn't come back. So as micro travels the country and meets people who do their job because they have values in ethics and what you do when people aren't watching to find who you are, and that's how they live their life. The pure good, the backbone of this country, I would argue. People with skills they like working with their hands and not afraid to do it. Dare I say, maybe have both great intellect and choose to break a sweat.

And as I said earlier in the show, people that have to shower at the end of the day. So I'll do in my research for Booker T. Washington, the guy was born a slave, wrote a book up from slavery and where he went from there and how his philosophy on African Americans had to work their way through a society where they saw black and white is a huge difference, I thought was a thing to bring up in this segment. But here's my talk with Mike Rowe, his insight and what his advice to the American people and the country as we hope to get back to work and get some skills. The definition of a good job, the whole conversation we've been having about unemployment versus labor force participation. It will impact everything.

Everything is going to impact that topic, right? We still got seven million people, able-bodied men sitting out the entire workforce. And what we're saying during the break, these big companies now in Silicon Valley, they're going to start laying people off.

Amazon? They're going to lay people off and those people are not going to have the necessary skills to fill the current openings. So now it is, in my view, we went from a skills gap to a will gap and now we're going to come back to a skill gap and a will gap. We're going to have lots of unemployed people who aren't trained for the jobs that exist and we're going to have lots of people who could step into those jobs who for whatever reason have elected not to. So Mike, that is in the big picture is people aren't working and people are frustrated they can't hire. I thought things were getting marginally better.

I always, I don't walk into a place and say, how's it going? You know, with the workforce, like, can you hire people? I do notice I'm getting more people saying I can hire people, not a lot, but more. But you pulled up one clip and we sent it in to bring up. Can you tell me what clip we're going to see? I get hundreds of these a week. This one happened to be sent to me by Gary Sinise, who just said, Mike, can you talk to this guy?

Can you do something? And what you're about to hear is just one contractor on one job who's trying to build a couple of houses who showed up for the third day in a row and none of his men showed up to work. None of them.

Here he is. I'm three weeks into a job, three days in a row, not one ******* showed up for work. I don't care if I pay him 15.

I don't give a **** if I give him 25 or 40. People do not want to work. I don't ******. I don't complain. I got a fully stocked trailer sitting over there with every tool that you can possibly imagine. I buy tools for them.

They either have no driver's license, 20 minutes too far to drive. I've even heard the excuse, well, I've got to go home and plan a baby shower from a grown ass man. I've worked all over the United States. I've done every kind of construction, remodeling, commercial, residential there is and this is the worst I've ever seen it. So there it is right now. You can call it anecdotal. You can look at one guy having a bad day and say, well, you know, try this, try that. I get hundreds of these. Hundreds of these every week. I know a lot of people in construction and they've all been saying the same thing for the last four years. They just simply can't find people who are willing to show up early, stay late and learn a skill that's in demand period. And now, now we're starting to see how that trickles down and into the rest of the economy and what it means for anybody who never mind being a plumber. I'm talking about people who need a plumber, who needed electrician, me and you, people who share our addiction to smooth roads and affordable energy and indoor plumbing and all of these things. Right. This is the stuff that's starting to fray.

And man, if it doesn't get your attention, then you're not paying attention. So one of the guys you said hello to yesterday, when you were going into the elevator, we were coming out. He has a pool company called Built Right Pools. He, so for 25 years, he literally gets in there. He'll dig him out. That's why he's strong as iron. He doesn't need to hit gym, but he does anyway. And Steve says to me, I'm doing all my own pool closings this year. I cannot find anybody.

Yeah. And you know, he's young enough to be able to do it, but in 15 years, who knows? He just can't find anybody. And he says, and he'll pay good. And he'll say, I don't need to make that much profit, but I'm making more money now, but I'm working. Introduce me to him again, because the first episode of Dirty Jobs is coming back in December is me down here in Florida with a father and son pool team. And these two do the work of like four. And I mean, we clean up the worst looking pool I've ever seen. This pool hadn't been cleaned in 17 years, but these two guys doing it together, they don't cheat.

They make a great living. It's backbreaking, but we laughed the whole day. And I just, I just saw you got in there. Oh, of course.

No, you, you, you, you have to get in there. There's no shortcuts in this, but you know, the dad is north of 60 and he's, he's bent over swinging axes and stuff, you know, and there's look, here's the math that ought to frighten your listeners more than anything else. Every single year for, for five people who retire in the skilled trades to replace them, five out, two in, it's been that way for 15 years, five out, two in. This is just math, right?

It's just math. So I'm going to introduce my other friend who's coming this weekend, very patriotic, Mike Ragusa. And I think I might've told you about him. They had a family plumbing business and now he's flooded out on his own and he is 58 now and it's pretty sore, pretty beat up his hips, his back and everything. But he says that they can't find plumbers. Like he can't, he can't possibly do all the work that's on his voicemail. There's no way. There's no way. I'm telling you, this story is everywhere and it's not been covered. It's not being covered because people are still stuck with the idea that, wait, if people are out of work, it's because there's not enough opportunity. Right.

And it's just the wrong way to think about it. So Mike Rose Penance is when we have an award show or he has a book out or a series to announce, he spends an hour with me. And it's one of the reasons why he's going to stop being so productive because he does not want to have to do this. So we have one block left, but I will go to break to put a cap on this historically. And I told you I'm working on the Booker T. Washington. And when he says he remembers being 12 years old and the union soldiers come in and they said, go to the main house and go to the main house. And they said, you're free. And they can't believe in all the African-Americans started celebrating. And then they came back in and said, we have nowhere to go. And the white guys basically said, well, good, because we don't know how to do anything. And the black guys, the black families said, I actually felt bad for the white families because we did all their work. So think about that. You talk about extreme.

Nobody wants to relive that. But when he formed Tuskegee University, you go to school and then at night you work in the college. You literally build and you farm because you said you can't worry about someone hiring you.

They might not be ready to hire you. You have to be invaluable. Indispensable. Yes. Yes.

Well, look, anything I can do around that project to promote it and talk about it, because the more people who understand who he was and what he did. Look, there are no new lessons. It's real.

It spins around and there's everything we need to know. Booker T learned. Absolutely. Just so funny. It's like you read some of his quotes. Did he get that from Norman Vincent Peale? No, he hadn't been born yet. Did he get that from Anthony Robbins?

No, that was him. So I hope you're enjoying this conversation. I'm getting motivated just re-hearing it more with Mike Rowe right after the break. America's work ethic.

What happened? More with Brian Kilmeade coming up. You're listening to a look at America's work ethic with Brian Kilmeade.

I feel like I've become my father. I don't understand the younger generation. They don't seem to want to work. 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 they don't want to work because they don't have to, whether it's their parents or government kind of feathering it out?

I don't know. And that is more from John Mackey just talking about he's just exasperated. He doesn't figure where the work ethic went because 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 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 weren't that case, well, guys like Booker T. Washington wouldn't have written what they wrote. If it were the case that 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. Job satisfaction has something to do with the job, but a whole lot more to do with the person. And if you start to look at work like this thing that's separate and apart from the man or the woman, then you sort of arbitrage the fun out of it. 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 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 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 you've made it a bargain. You've made a different kind of deal with yourself and with your employer. You don't have to stick with that deal for the rest of your life, but you've made that deal.

Micro, I want you to hear this. 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, if you work hard. Look, when I went to school and probably you too, we got two grades. 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? 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'd still like to hear you talk. I actually related sports. One way not to lose is not to play.

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 on Wall Street. I'm going to wear that suit.

I'm going to try to make it 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 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 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 create jobs.

We're asking those people to write the check for one point seven trillion dollars 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 the deferment, which I had to go to the I had to go to the bank and say, listen, I couldn't afford one hundred twenty six dollars a month. So they say you have 18 months.

So when I came back, it was two twenty five and I sent that to I took loans out every year till I was thirty five. I just think 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 three fifty. 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 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 a special on Hemingway. I can't say that I'm an expert on it, but doing a special on him. He would write for three or four hours a certain time, certain day.

People say, well, he's always crazy. He was on the scene. No, there was there was a time to write. There's time to work. And there was a time to live life, 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 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 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. So I hope you enjoyed this special look at America's work ethic, where it's gone and where it's, where, how we can get it back. I do hope that people understand that we're not the only ones dealing with this as a country.

When the pandemic happened and people were forced to sit back and as students kick back and maybe as workers find out you're not necessary and then look around and say, do I really want to do this for a living? Is my identity too wrapped up in work? And coming to the conclusion, perhaps I am, or you want a more well-rounded life, I understand it. But sooner or later, America has got to go back to doing what we do best. The thing that separates us from all the rest. We're willing to work harder, work longer, to get results. And all this motivation has to come from within, which goes back to parents. If parents, I don't care if you're divorced, single, whatever it is, you put in values and ethics and don't worry about the nuances of parenting, just the foundation of parenting.

I'm not saying I'm the perfect example, but I'm telling you these are the principles at work. You put it in your kids, the neighbors put it in their kids. We'll have a generation willing to take back the world again because we're willing to outwork and out innovate them. And it's got to happen in the small town and the small family and help the big picture. You know what also it adds to all that? Patriotism.

Pride in the work you do in the country that you're in. Thanks so much for Mike Rota always helping out and everybody else for listening to The Brian Kilmeade Show. And don't forget next year, we'll talk more about this as you continue to tune into the show that you support. That's why I keep doing it. Have a great day.