Name: Mike Rowe on Trump’s Tariffs Bringing Manufacturing Back
Uploaded: 2025-04-22T17:25:39.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Mike Rowe on Trump’s Tariffs Bringing Manufacturing Back' from Theo Von Clips on Comedy Buff. Published 2025-04-22. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Mike Rowe on Trump’s Tariffs Bringing Manufacturing Back' from Theo Von Clips on Comedy Buff. Published 2025-04-22. Transcript available.

but it's it's crazy to think that when you think about this is a misconception
that i started to
realize that i had that when i traveled around the country because we probably
and i just said
this recently but we touring comedy we've probably done the top 200 cities size
wise right like some
comedians they go to 50 cities right sure and they go to the we went as many
places you as you could
go and we still have more to go but i mean like you know anywhere from like um
you know lubbock
to lacrosse um yeah i mean just we we to fargo i mean we're going to medium-sized
cities and you
always think like oh well there's factories everywhere that make things and
stuff like that
there's not no there's not and you you think oh well i'm sure there's always we
were flying on an
airplane you're like oh i'm sure we're passing thousands and hundreds of
thousands of factories
that are making products and sweatshirts that we're not no it used to be i mean
the rust belt in
particular like that part of the mid-atlantic those were factory towns the tetanus
belt too they called
the tetanus well i mean it was uh you know there's so many rivers up there and
so the mills were by the
rivers and so the the factories were near the mills and the cotton was spun
there but this guy byard he's
actually become a friend of mine and he's on a mission and like flannel like
hand dyed yarn
in flannel was something like those old thick flannel shirts that we grew up
with you can't get
them anymore so american giants started making those they started making these
hoodies and uh and the
more i read about them the more i liked them so he's become like he's in my
world now because i try it on
my podcast i'm not there yet but i'm really trying to make sure all the
sponsors have an american-made
story just because why not see the thing is man if trump succeeds at the reshoring
effort with the
tariffs yeah that's part of it but if in if in general he gets manufacturing
reinvigorated in this
country then there's going to be a challenge that like a lot of people aren't
talking about which
which is labor right so there's in january there were 482 000 open positions in
manufacturing in this
country right 480 000 open positions if he gets his way and this all gets reinvigorated
you're talking
about two or three million new jobs but there's there's no workforce sitting
there going this is
what i want to do or prepare to do it that they're not so there's a skills gap
for sure okay but there's
also a a will gap right donald trump is going down a road and if he succeeds he's
going to create
millions of millions of manufacturing jobs in a country that currently has
nearly 500 000 manufacturing
jobs open because the people who run those factories can't find people who want
to do the work so it's
not enough to create the jobs right and look a lot of you your listeners are
probably thinking well
make the pay better make it more make it more interesting make it more palatable
and we can
have that conversation for sure but the bigger issue still is there's no
enthusiasm for the work we took
shop class out of high school we robbed kids of the opportunity even see what
that kind of work even
looks like meanwhile we told a whole generation of kids they were screwed if
they didn't get a four-year
degree right and so people say mike how the how did college get so expensive i
know you know this but
nothing has gotten more expensive in the last 40 years than a four-year degree
yeah not not real estate
not health care uh not not energy nothing right and so we keep telling kids
they're screwed if they don't
go in this direction we free up endless money to loan them so now you got 1.7
trillion dollars in
student debt on the books you've got 7.6 million open jobs right now most of
which don't require a
four-year degree and here's the other screwed up part you got 6.8 million able-bodied
men who are not
only not looking for work they're i mean they're out of the out of the
workforce and not looking right so
so all of that together we've never seen that before in in peacetime anyway so
so
something beyond the tariffs something beyond policy is is going to have to
happen to make
22 year olds go yeah man i would consider doing that right from my perspective
after traveling on
the country i don't know how else you're going to get jobs back here because it
just there's a lot of
towns that are boarded up there's a lot of small cities that are boarded up i
mean a whole city you
walk through the city of jackson mississippi during the day it looks like a
movie set it's very clean
it's beautiful but there's nothing and that's one of 40 probably cities that we've
seen that are like
that um so i'm just thinking what's going to come and save these cities if
something needs to and so
then you start to see trump put these tariffs on and then you start to get the
idea well it's to bring
jobs back so we have jobs here so it keeps cities busy yeah and so so it's two
different conversations
i think okay and obviously i'm not an economist in fact either i don't know an
economist who thinks
tariffs are a good idea i really don't i don't know an economist i know a
couple but the ones i'm most
interested in are like slightly right of center where they don't agree either
right so like everybody
is either having a conversation about whether or not it's a good idea
economically i call that like
a tier two conversation you're having a tier one conversation you're saying
well wait a minute what
if there's something in the country that's actually more important than the
economy long term right
what if like what could that be the economy of the human spirit i think it
could be that
and you know i get i get all kinds of grief for this but i i think it's a fair
analogy i think about um
well hell i think about slavery in 1870 right and i think about the
conversation that was going on in
the country and a big part of it was wait if we get rid of this do you have any
idea what it's going to
do to the economy not just for the south which would collapse but for the north
who was behind all
the products it was all dressed in cotton right and of course there's the
triangle trade molasses rum
slaves right this this is an eternal wheel that had been going on for time in
memoriam yeah dark
rum where do you think that came from you know what i'm saying you put a couple
you know i think i
know what you're saying i'm just saying you mix a few items and you got some
that's the best rum they
got it's good rum but if you fundamentally were to make the slavery decision
based on nothing but whether or
not it was good or bad for the economy well we'd still have slavery right so we
got to a point where
people said wait wait wait the this can't this can't keep going this isn't
human that's right right
right and so uh it was bad right the economy crapped the bed we fought a war a
lot of people died and
i don't mean to sound glib when i say it i don't know what the real uh ramifications
are going to
be i don't have a crystal ball but i do think that the reason people are
talking past each other with
the tariffs is because some people are saying look it's a tax period it's not
good for global trade
which is true but if there's this other if you're trying to transform jackson
mississippi
then you at least have to elevate the the conversation to these this other set
of consequences that
might happen if you shake the whole thing up right now i again i put a big like
asterisk on that
i.e i don't really know what i'm talking about but i do believe that there are
unintended consequences
and intended consequences and um the consequences of of messing with the
tariffs uh are are probably
both right so you're saying that if the tariffs work right part of that is
going to have to be that
we're going to need people who can do the jobs do the manufacturing jobs here
we're going to need
those skilled labor workers right yes okay so and we don't have all those right
now we need them we
don't have them um how do you so we almost see like a like remember that uncle
sam poster like i want
you like we need that pr campaign yeah to get people hype because i think that's
the one thing that
connects our audience is just there's this way that we feel and a lot of it is
hopeful right and so that's
the side that i choose to err on when it comes to the tariff stuff it's like i
have no clue like if it
doesn't work what the what do we lose we're out of it we are i believe that we
are at a
severe crossing point right now where if it gets an if another generation
without like a sense of
purpose it's it's not going to matter nothing nothing's going to matter anymore
there won't
even be enough of a person inside of our grandchildren for it to matter too
like even
if you bring the gasoline there's not gonna be enough of a amp inside of them
to even spark it up
it's like even i think the human spirit is a muscle right but that's how i feel
about it
and i feel like it's always there but it's like the stronger that we work it
and the more that we
encourage others to work it you know um and it's scary man it i think people
don't realize it's
scary but then i think part of all of us realize that something scary is going
on well the stakes are
big right i mean 37 trillion dollars in national that that's the national debt
yeah 37 trillion most
people like you really don't have to be an economist you don't have to be you
don't need a pedigree to
understand that that's getting a little wobbly and yeah and it's not
sustainable so something radical
has to happen something really unpopular is going to have to have right
uncomfortable it's going to be
uncomfortable it's going to be wildly uncomfortable but what's going to be way
more uncomfortable is
whatever's after that sounds it doesn't even sound human to me after that i'd
go back to the
slavery thing i mean the idea of getting rid of that in eight eighteen sixty
right it was
so many otherwise rational people who were walking around influencers of the
day with columns and and
people giving oratories and speeches really smart people were saying we can't
do this the country will
collapse and other people were like well then let the heavens fall because that's
a hill i'll die on
right yeah so every now and then something rises to a place where you you you
just can't talk about
it the way you'd been talking about it right and look man i really wonder 150
years from now
what our great great great great grandkids will be saying about us like how
right look what will be
the slavery of today will it be the fact that we let our country become
completely dependent
on other countries who really don't like us much what i mean nothing of any
care it's it's in it's insane
if you only look at the economic ramifications of a tariff that's not much
different than only looking at
whether or not you like your job based on what your paycheck says yeah and if
you if you take the bait
on that the next thing you know you're going to be having an argument about uh
ubi universal basic
income and you're going to get sucked into this whole conversation about well
what are people going
to do if there is no work and we ought to just pay them not to do anything and
then you've got all kinds
of uh moral and ethical questions and kind of but it never stops if at a
certain point a certain point you
have to invest in your own country and your own people the spirit of your own
people and i can't
understand how that's not extremely evident right now and if ubi if universal
basic income helps people
to get by for a couple years or five years while these while like things adjust
from going from let's
try to build stuff here in our own country and make people feel empowered and
if they're as if they're
part of the an assembly line of humanity and of purpose in um of a nation and
of a a group think of
of a moral code then i i don't i think that that's totally fine let's stop
giving money to other places
um who have enough money right now and help our own people out for a little
while you know and i know
i know i'm opening up bigger cans of worms but yeah it's just i i am all in
because if if you don't do
it now it is to me it appears like it's kind of gonna be a wrap and but i still
believe that there's
that human spirit that there's that there's that team spirit there's that like
that whatever made
those people whatever if that thing is to be an american even if it's not even
real but we believe
in it there's still that inside of us that makes me believe that we could turn
it around that guy
byard who you who you brought up he's a wall street guy and 16 years ago he
said no i've just
his family came over on the freaking mayflower just so you know that's who this
guy is and he said nope
redo i'm going to build a company called american giant and i'm going to prove
that this country can
still make quality clothing now that's a very personal mission that could only
be embarked upon
by a genuinely hard-headed dude okay but 16 years later they're still standing
and they they're doing
it they're proving it right now can you do it to scale this is a whole other
conversation right we'll
talk about it another time we can but yeah can you do it to scale what pieces
have to start but you
have to start somewhere it's like the crazy person the leader was first the
crazy person the revolutionaries
were first in viewed at as insane always it's not just that it's it's it's
every great accepted truth
today began as madness yeah it was dismissed and then it was grudgingly
considered and then it was slowly
accepted as fringe and then it was more widely believed as possible and then it
got a consensus and then it
became the truth and then it became the self-evident truth yeah that's how it
always always happens
it's going to happen with every with every single thing right now from from
tariffs to climate change
to meat eating to to addiction all the things we think we know about all of
these different things are in
a state of evolution i agree and i don't i don't know where or how it ends but
i'll tell you this man
it's exciting we are long we are long in certainty today and and and and we're
very short in in
understanding and it's it's it's just going to take time it's just going to
take time to be as certain
about these other things as we are about slavery you know it it takes time for
people and
Thank you.

Mike Rowe on Trump’s Tariffs Bringing Manufacturing Back

but it's it's crazy to think that when you think about this is a misconception
that i started to
realize that i had that when i traveled around the country because we probably
and i just said
this recently but we touring comedy we've probably done the top 200 cities size
wise right like some
comedians they go to 50 cities right sure and they go to the we went as many
places you as you could
go and we still have more to go but i mean like you know anywhere from like um
you know lubbock
to lacrosse um yeah i mean just we we to fargo i mean we're going to medium-sized
cities and you
always think like oh well there's factories everywhere that make things and
stuff like that
there's not no there's not and you you think oh well i'm sure there's always we
were flying on an
airplane you're like oh i'm sure we're passing thousands and hundreds of
thousands of factories
that are making products and sweatshirts that we're not no it used to be i mean
the rust belt in
particular like that part of the mid-atlantic those were factory towns the tetanus
belt too they called
the tetanus well i mean it was uh you know there's so many rivers up there and
so the mills were by the
rivers and so the the factories were near the mills and the cotton was spun
there but this guy byard he's
actually become a friend of mine and he's on a mission and like flannel like
hand dyed yarn
in flannel was something like those old thick flannel shirts that we grew up
with you can't get
them anymore so american giants started making those they started making these
hoodies and uh and the
more i read about them the more i liked them so he's become like he's in my
world now because i try it on
my podcast i'm not there yet but i'm really trying to make sure all the
sponsors have an american-made
story just because why not see the thing is man if trump succeeds at the reshoring
effort with the
tariffs yeah that's part of it but if in if in general he gets manufacturing
reinvigorated in this
country then there's going to be a challenge that like a lot of people aren't
talking about which
which is labor right so there's in january there were 482 000 open positions in
manufacturing in this
country right 480 000 open positions if he gets his way and this all gets reinvigorated
you're talking
about two or three million new jobs but there's there's no workforce sitting
there going this is
what i want to do or prepare to do it that they're not so there's a skills gap
for sure okay but there's
also a a will gap right donald trump is going down a road and if he succeeds he's
going to create
millions of millions of manufacturing jobs in a country that currently has
nearly 500 000 manufacturing
jobs open because the people who run those factories can't find people who want
to do the work so it's
not enough to create the jobs right and look a lot of you your listeners are
probably thinking well
make the pay better make it more make it more interesting make it more palatable
and we can
have that conversation for sure but the bigger issue still is there's no
enthusiasm for the work we took
shop class out of high school we robbed kids of the opportunity even see what
that kind of work even
looks like meanwhile we told a whole generation of kids they were screwed if
they didn't get a four-year
degree right and so people say mike how the how did college get so expensive i
know you know this but
nothing has gotten more expensive in the last 40 years than a four-year degree
yeah not not real estate
not health care uh not not energy nothing right and so we keep telling kids
they're screwed if they don't
go in this direction we free up endless money to loan them so now you got 1.7
trillion dollars in
student debt on the books you've got 7.6 million open jobs right now most of
which don't require a
four-year degree and here's the other screwed up part you got 6.8 million able-bodied
men who are not
only not looking for work they're i mean they're out of the out of the
workforce and not looking right so
so all of that together we've never seen that before in in peacetime anyway so
so
something beyond the tariffs something beyond policy is is going to have to
happen to make
22 year olds go yeah man i would consider doing that right from my perspective
after traveling on
the country i don't know how else you're going to get jobs back here because it
just there's a lot of
towns that are boarded up there's a lot of small cities that are boarded up i
mean a whole city you
walk through the city of jackson mississippi during the day it looks like a
movie set it's very clean
it's beautiful but there's nothing and that's one of 40 probably cities that we've
seen that are like
that um so i'm just thinking what's going to come and save these cities if
something needs to and so
then you start to see trump put these tariffs on and then you start to get the
idea well it's to bring
jobs back so we have jobs here so it keeps cities busy yeah and so so it's two
different conversations
i think okay and obviously i'm not an economist in fact either i don't know an
economist who thinks
tariffs are a good idea i really don't i don't know an economist i know a
couple but the ones i'm most
interested in are like slightly right of center where they don't agree either
right so like everybody
is either having a conversation about whether or not it's a good idea
economically i call that like
a tier two conversation you're having a tier one conversation you're saying
well wait a minute what
if there's something in the country that's actually more important than the
economy long term right
what if like what could that be the economy of the human spirit i think it
could be that
and you know i get i get all kinds of grief for this but i i think it's a fair
analogy i think about um
well hell i think about slavery in 1870 right and i think about the
conversation that was going on in
the country and a big part of it was wait if we get rid of this do you have any
idea what it's going to
do to the economy not just for the south which would collapse but for the north
who was behind all
the products it was all dressed in cotton right and of course there's the
triangle trade molasses rum
slaves right this this is an eternal wheel that had been going on for time in
memoriam yeah dark
rum where do you think that came from you know what i'm saying you put a couple
you know i think i
know what you're saying i'm just saying you mix a few items and you got some
that's the best rum they
got it's good rum but if you fundamentally were to make the slavery decision
based on nothing but whether or
not it was good or bad for the economy well we'd still have slavery right so we
got to a point where
people said wait wait wait the this can't this can't keep going this isn't
human that's right right
right and so uh it was bad right the economy crapped the bed we fought a war a
lot of people died and
i don't mean to sound glib when i say it i don't know what the real uh ramifications
are going to
be i don't have a crystal ball but i do think that the reason people are
talking past each other with
the tariffs is because some people are saying look it's a tax period it's not
good for global trade
which is true but if there's this other if you're trying to transform jackson
mississippi
then you at least have to elevate the the conversation to these this other set
of consequences that
might happen if you shake the whole thing up right now i again i put a big like
asterisk on that
i.e i don't really know what i'm talking about but i do believe that there are
unintended consequences
and intended consequences and um the consequences of of messing with the
tariffs uh are are probably
both right so you're saying that if the tariffs work right part of that is
going to have to be that
we're going to need people who can do the jobs do the manufacturing jobs here
we're going to need
those skilled labor workers right yes okay so and we don't have all those right
now we need them we
don't have them um how do you so we almost see like a like remember that uncle
sam poster like i want
you like we need that pr campaign yeah to get people hype because i think that's
the one thing that
connects our audience is just there's this way that we feel and a lot of it is
hopeful right and so that's
the side that i choose to err on when it comes to the tariff stuff it's like i
have no clue like if it
doesn't work what the what do we lose we're out of it we are i believe that we
are at a
severe crossing point right now where if it gets an if another generation
without like a sense of
purpose it's it's not going to matter nothing nothing's going to matter anymore
there won't
even be enough of a person inside of our grandchildren for it to matter too
like even
if you bring the gasoline there's not gonna be enough of a amp inside of them
to even spark it up
it's like even i think the human spirit is a muscle right but that's how i feel
about it
and i feel like it's always there but it's like the stronger that we work it
and the more that we
encourage others to work it you know um and it's scary man it i think people
don't realize it's
scary but then i think part of all of us realize that something scary is going
on well the stakes are
big right i mean 37 trillion dollars in national that that's the national debt
yeah 37 trillion most
people like you really don't have to be an economist you don't have to be you
don't need a pedigree to
understand that that's getting a little wobbly and yeah and it's not
sustainable so something radical
has to happen something really unpopular is going to have to have right
uncomfortable it's going to be
uncomfortable it's going to be wildly uncomfortable but what's going to be way
more uncomfortable is
whatever's after that sounds it doesn't even sound human to me after that i'd
go back to the
slavery thing i mean the idea of getting rid of that in eight eighteen sixty
right it was
so many otherwise rational people who were walking around influencers of the
day with columns and and
people giving oratories and speeches really smart people were saying we can't
do this the country will
collapse and other people were like well then let the heavens fall because that's
a hill i'll die on
right yeah so every now and then something rises to a place where you you you
just can't talk about
it the way you'd been talking about it right and look man i really wonder 150
years from now
what our great great great great grandkids will be saying about us like how
right look what will be
the slavery of today will it be the fact that we let our country become
completely dependent
on other countries who really don't like us much what i mean nothing of any
care it's it's in it's insane
if you only look at the economic ramifications of a tariff that's not much
different than only looking at
whether or not you like your job based on what your paycheck says yeah and if
you if you take the bait
on that the next thing you know you're going to be having an argument about uh
ubi universal basic
income and you're going to get sucked into this whole conversation about well
what are people going
to do if there is no work and we ought to just pay them not to do anything and
then you've got all kinds
of uh moral and ethical questions and kind of but it never stops if at a
certain point a certain point you
have to invest in your own country and your own people the spirit of your own
people and i can't
understand how that's not extremely evident right now and if ubi if universal
basic income helps people
to get by for a couple years or five years while these while like things adjust
from going from let's
try to build stuff here in our own country and make people feel empowered and
if they're as if they're
part of the an assembly line of humanity and of purpose in um of a nation and
of a a group think of
of a moral code then i i don't i think that that's totally fine let's stop
giving money to other places
um who have enough mo