476: Michael Cadenazzi—The Department of War is Hiring

What does it take to rebuild America's industrial backbone—and who's actually going to do the work? Mike sits down with Michael Cadenazzi, Assistant Secretary of War for Industrial Base Policy, to discuss his role at the Department of War (DOW) and his mission focused on restoring the muscle behind America's might. Cadenazzi makes the case that while the U. S. still produces world-class engineers and cutting-edge weapons designs, there's a growing gap where it matters most—the skilled workforce needed to actually build them. From welders and machinists to technicians and fabricators, he argues the country's strength depends on rebuilding the trades that turn ideas into reality. It's a candid conversation about work, purpose, and why the future of national security may hinge less on innovation—and more on the people willing to pick up the tools and get it done.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:04Mike Rowe?

  Well Charlie, I'm gonna break some rules on this one.

• 0:06Speaker 01

  Oh, do tell.

• 0:08Mike Rowe?

  Our guest today is ASW Michael Cadenazzi.

• 0:14Speaker 01

  An ASW stands for?

• 0:17Mike Rowe?

  I think Assistant-

• 0:18Speaker 01

  Secretary of War?

• 0:19Mike Rowe?

  Yep, that's it.

• 0:21Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 0:21Mike Rowe?

  That's it. It would not be charitable to simply call him a bureaucrat or a public servant, although I suppose technically, he would answer to both, but he would also answer to a patriot. Years in the Navy, years in the engineering game.

• 0:38Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 0:39Mike Rowe?

  Years as an entrepreneur, very successful in the private sector.

• 0:44Speaker 01

  Uh huh.

• 0:45Mike Rowe?

  Family man, married man, wife's helicopter pilot, raised three beautiful girls. And, well, he got sucked in, didn't he?

• 0:53Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 0:55Mike Rowe?

  Mike Cadenazzi works in the Pentagon, and I vowed, well, I didn't really vow, but I've I've aspired over the years to avoid the swamp and the politics of it all. But I'm making an exception, because I think our country's entering an extraordinary time. And Mike Cadenazzi, among other things, is in charge of billions and billions of dollars. It's called the DIB. It's the, what's it stand, the Domestic Infrastructure Base. Mike's in charge of reinvigorating the skilled trades in the military industrial complex.

• 1:38Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:39Mike Rowe?

  This is amazing, right? And this guy reached out to MicroWorks before he was even confirmed. He had been nominated, and he had such a clear vision of what he wanted to accomplish internally. And I was so flattered that he knew who I was, and that he wanted to see if perhaps MicroWorks could work with the feds.

• 2:04Speaker 01

  It's really unfortunate that his email got lost in the shuffle for such a long period of time.

• 2:09Mike Rowe?

  It didn't get lost. It got ignored because my crack team here knows that, you know, when elected officials or political figures reach out, they just don't go to the top of the stack. And we have a stack of people that I'm really keen to talk to. But he called back, and he called back again. And long story short, I went to the Pentagon. I've been there a couple of times. I saw Mike both times, had a meeting with him on this workforce thing, had another meeting with him around rare earths and deep sea minerals. Why? Well, because I'm kind of, I'm sticking a toe in that world.

• 2:50Mike Rowe?

  I'm so interested in what I think is going to become a conversation around metal independence, the same way like energy independence.

• 3:00Speaker 01

  Right, right, right.

• 3:01Mike Rowe?

  Executive orders have been signed. There is a giant effort underway to scoop up trillions of dollars worth of cobalt and copper and manganese and nickel as they exist in these polymetallic nodules that are all over the seafloor, all over the world. And so, we're going to talk a little bit about that. Mostly, we're going to talk about the challenges of what Mike describes as hands down the best job in the Pentagon. He loves what he does.

• 3:39Speaker 01

  Yes, he does.

• 3:40Mike Rowe?

  He's good at it, he's passionate about it. And by the time this thing airs, which will be mere moments from now, for all I know, MicroWorks and the Department of War may have a basis for working together to accomplish the goal that our humble little foundation set out to accomplish 17 years ago, which is to start to close our country's skills gap in a meaningful way. No guarantees, I don't have a crystal ball, but this guy and I, we're singing out of the same hymn book. I like him a lot, and you will too. It's a really interesting conversation. And full disclosure, it's happening on the 6th of March. When this airs, is anybody's guess. I'm guessing it's going to be a few weeks.

• 4:25Mike Rowe?

  Yeah. Right? So maybe it's like the 24th right now. We talk about Iran. We talk about the radical way the entire conversation has changed in just the last couple of days. So if you hear something that's out of step with the current headlines, apologies. We're in a fluid situation, as Mr. Cottinazi would put it. He puts a lot of things in a very, very memorable way, and he'll prove it right after this.

• 4:59Mike Rowe?

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• 6:25Mike Rowe?

  For the record, your business card reads exactly what?

• 6:29Speaker 02

  Assistant Secretary of War for Industrial Base Policy. And I am also performing the duties of the Assistant Secretary of War for International Armaments Cooperation.

• 6:38Mike Rowe?

  How big is the card? I mean, is this like a three by five or you just go with an eight by 10?

• 6:42Speaker 02

  It's a standard card and fits a lot of stuff on it.

• 6:44Mike Rowe?

  Are there no acronyms on the card? This is all spelled out?

• 6:48Speaker 02

  It's all spelled out, ASWIBP and ASWIAC.

• 6:53Speaker 02

  Pretty good.

• 6:54Mike Rowe?

  Okay, it's great to see you again. The listeners should understand that the first time we met was in the hallowed halls or the labyrinth maze of the Pentagon a few months ago. Where you had just begun to occupy your new office.

• 7:10Speaker 02

  Well, it was about a month in, I think we got ahold of you finally, after trying to get ahold of you last summer.

• 7:14Mike Rowe?

  Okay, well, I guess this is the place to start. This esteemed individual sitting across from me wanted to reach out to MicroWorks because as a guy who's in charge of the DIB, which is the Defense Industrial Base.

• 7:26Speaker 02

  Absolutely.

• 7:27Mike Rowe?

  There's a fair amount of shared real estate on the old Venn diagrams. And you wanted to talk to me about ways that the Department of War and MicroWorks could potentially partner around a shared objective. I didn't know any of this, of course, because being in the government, you reached out to an info account. And your request was lost in the, Mary, I think it was Libby who got the first one. Is that right?

• 7:53Speaker 02

  It was Sherry.

• 7:54Mike Rowe?

  Well, Sherry.

• 7:55Speaker 02

  Sherry, I think, was the one who politely declined.

• 7:58Speaker 01

  That's info. Yeah, that's info. Sherry does info.

• 8:00Mike Rowe?

  She just literally, Sherry literally blew off the guy. And tell me if I got this wrong, I think you've got the best job in the Pentagon.

• 8:09Speaker 02

  I have the best job in the Pentagon and at the best time, truly. I am honored to be doing this.

• 8:13Mike Rowe?

  I didn't know that seven months ago and you didn't have the job yet.

• 8:17Speaker 02

  I didn't. I was not confirmed then. It was aspirational.

• 8:20Mike Rowe?

  So you thought you were going to be appointed and if such an occasion would come to pass, you wanted to be able to reach out to me to have a conversation about an objective that was not yet signed off as a prime directive, but currently is.

• 8:34Speaker 02

  Yeah, so technically you're avoiding, pinning yourself down to a guy that wasn't actually in the job. So I understand. Very deftly handled then.

• 8:41Mike Rowe?

  Thank you. Well, by the time the request made it to my partner, Mary, and she asked me and she's like, you know, it's, he's going to be a bureaucrat. It's a political thing. We've worked so hard to, to stay out of that world. But you know what? We're in a new world now and the stakes seem just incredibly high. And I Googled you as one does these days. And when I saw your curriculum vitae and what you had done for the Navy, cryptography, was it?

• 9:11Speaker 02

  Cryptology.

• 9:12Mike Rowe?

  What's the difference?

• 9:13Speaker 02

  Uh, I mean practically cryptography is sort of the hardcore science of actually cracking code. So that's sort of the math that goes into it and all the, the engineering to build the systems. Cryptology is the broader field of all the associated and ancillary systems and support that go into making that capability work for the country, along with other technical stuff as well.

• 9:32Mike Rowe?

  But what struck me is with a background leg, you're basically, you probably do puzzles, right? To pass the time, like you do the Sudoku, you do a crossword.

• 9:39Speaker 02

  Sure, absolutely.

• 9:40Mike Rowe?

  Okay. Your, your job in the Navy was to crack codes and now you're doing that on steroids.

• 9:46Speaker 02

  Anybody that's an officer would tell you your job's to do paperwork, but yes, the, the guys underneath us were doing the hard stuff. Yes.

• 9:51Mike Rowe?

  All right. And out of the Navy, you were in the private sector for a spell?

• 9:54Speaker 02

  20 years.

• 9:56Mike Rowe?

  That's a spell. What'd you do?

• 9:57Speaker 02

  Uh, so I did. I started a bunch of little companies with people. First few were disasters, lost some money and learned some lessons as one does on the entrepreneurial side. And, and I finally figured it out and I sold the company in 2012, uh, which is doing defense stuff. So in the Pentagon, just doing paperwork. But I'd also started a little business, uh, doing, uh, SaaS, like software as a service for defense market and budget analysis, which is kind of an esoteric spot in like the, the 2010 timeframe. And then I turned, converted that into another company, which ended up selling to a large, well-known consulting firm and. It was a great opportunity for me to go ahead and take what I was doing locally and sort of have a chance to apply it sort of nationwide and even internationally.

• 10:37Mike Rowe?

  Had you ever aspired prior to that to government service? I mean, were you even thinking about that?

• 10:42Speaker 02

  No, I think honestly, my pursuit of this job came out of a desire to help, honestly. So I have a lot of friends, all my besties are in the Navy or in the Marine Corps or in the service of some kind. My wife's in the Navy. I've spent a lot of time working on, my dad was in the Navy as well for that matter. And for me, it's incredibly important that the country do what we can to go ahead and make sure we're focused on national security. And in consulting, you have an opportunity to help, but you can't really drive the change. You're outside, you're offering advice. At the end of the day, you have to be in the system to help. And I was lucky enough to go ahead and throw my resume into the Trump administration, have a bunch of people look at it and say, I think this guy has what it takes. More importantly, they brought me in and they let me talk about the way I wanted to tackle the problem. And it really resonated with them. I don't know why, I was very lucky.

• 11:27Speaker 02

  They had a lot of choices for a lot of talented people, but ended up getting the nomination from President Trump and the team. And it's been a ride since.

• 11:34Mike Rowe?

  Well, I want to talk more about that, obviously. But back to the Navy days, which ship were you assigned?

• 11:39Speaker 02

  So I was, first of all, my first tour was in Guam. So I was stationed at a base in Guam, which was a Cold War naval communication station. And then I went to Monterey, California to go ahead and get a master's degree in electrical engineering. So I went back to school immediately. And the reason why is because although I was an engineer, my bachelor's was in civil engineering. So all this magical math that they were doing, I really wanted to go ahead and learn about it. And so I had to go ahead and understand exactly what was happening with the black boxes. After that, I went to the USS LaSalle at Sixth Fleet, which was in Gaeta, Italy at the time. And I was there during nine 11. And so that was a very exciting time for the country and for me. And I remember being there on the ship that day, watching CNN and the first plane hit

• 12:22Speaker 02

  the first tower, and then the second plane hit the second tower. And somebody said, Holy shit, we're going to war. And I remember quite clearly being stunned by the situation. And I think world changing in my life, not having been through something like that as an adult. I had a little girl at the time, my first baby was about a year old. And everything changed after that. My last tour was at Naval European Forces Command up in what was then the base in London, which was right by the US Embassy, and they've now since moved that down to Naples, Italy.

• 12:51Mike Rowe?

  I forget what Malcolm Gladwell called those moments that galvanize countries and worlds, really. You know, most big moments you don't know are big until you look back at them and go, oh, boy, you know, I was there for that. But to your point, that certainly in our lifetime, that was in an instant, most people who were paying attention, I think, realized on a visceral level, it's all going to be different. Chuck, do you remember? I called you.

• 13:20Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, of course I remember. And I said, you said, turn on the TV. And I said, why? You said, just turn it on. I'm like, it was like, I don't know, six or seven in the morning or something.

• 13:28Mike Rowe?

  You said, which channel?

• 13:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, and you said, every channel.

• 13:31Mike Rowe?

  Yeah, doesn't matter.

• 13:32Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 13:33Mike Rowe?

  So.

• 13:34Speaker 01

  Tipping points is what Malcolm Gladwell calls those.

• 13:37Mike Rowe?

  That's the book, yeah. But those moments where like, he just remembered with such specificity where he was. And that's the point of it. I was in bed and I'd been on Wall Street the day before. I'd been downtown and I'd flown home to LA and just remember thinking, it's just, it's such a sliding doors moment.

• 14:00Speaker 02

  Absolutely. Everything different after that, the way we view the world, the way the military operated, the pivot into the global war on terrorism and sort of, that's kind of what leads us to where we are now, which is the coming out of the Cold War, the shift from our Cold War industrial apparatus into fighting what was essentially a low end asymmetric counterterrorism operation at scale, really shifted the way we think about buying gear, the kind of gear that we buy, the companies that we buy from, and the scale that we bought it from. The thinking was really, it's the end of history. We weren't going to need big ships, planes, tanks and bombs anymore. What we needed was little, light, agile tools, and we needed counter ID capabilities and small vehicles and troops. And it turns out, we hollowed ourselves out in the process, which is not great.

• 14:43Mike Rowe?

  Okay, so the other thing that's happened, like in real time, it seems, I'm reflecting on our first meeting, all the things we're going to talk about regarding workforce and minerals and so forth, and now we're in Iran. And now we're tearing through stockpiles of weapons. And I would imagine a big part of your job vis a vis keeping the industrial base reinvigorated and frosty is to make sure we have the capacity and the redundancy to keep the arsenal filled. Is there just a whole new tenor and tone right now in your office, in those halls of the Pentagon? It's gotta be.

• 15:23Speaker 02

  Absolutely, and I think the administration started off strong in this regard, which is talking about moving to a wartime footing for production as a way of driving up urgency into an industry that's pretty complacent. They're there every day. They're working with us, they're working with the warfighters about how we're going to go ahead and effect change. But at the same time, the way we've been buying our capabilities has been pretty lackadaisical because there hasn't been the same urgency. And so the Trump administration, Secretary Hegseth, Deputy Secretary Feinberg, all the way down to my boss, Honorable Mike Duffy, have spent a lot of time to sort of drive up the level of urgency going forward. We really capped that off with a series of changes to the way, or aspirationally, changes

• 16:05Speaker 02

  to the way we acquire systems in November with a new strategy put out by our team, and I was honored to be a part of the thinking that went into that. And that's led into where we are, which is the beginning part of this year, a whole series of new agreements with companies about changing the way we buy and the scale at which we buy to make sure that we are thinking through structurally how we unlock demand to go ahead and create capacity and do that in partnership with the Congress, who has to pay the bills and give us the authorities to do this, and a way that ties it into the supply chain, but really gets at the heart of what our gap has been is we just simply don't buy enough over long enough periods of time for anyone to feel comfortable that we can produce enough munitions to meet the needs in a fight. And you're seeing that and hearing about that today.

• 16:50Mike Rowe?

  I think for a lot of outside observers, we kind of look at this whole thing and say, who took their eye off the ball? How do we fall so far behind China, for instance? How did our shipbuilding become so...

• 17:03Mike Rowe?

  Degraded, was it a moment in time in your estimation? Or was it just the frog in a boiling water and a little bit here and a little bit there?

• 17:11Speaker 02

  So I'll go back to something that happened in my confirmation process, which is you get the chance to speak to a lot of senators and a lot of people on Capitol Hill. And there's two sentiments that came out very strong. One was incredible bipartisan support for the defense industrial base production for the warfighter, which is really incredible in this time when you sort of think about how tense things can be. You watch the news, you think about the public statements really as bipartisan behind the scenes, and that's gratifying for me to have walked in and had so much support. Secondarily, the other question was, why are things so messed up? And I just don't understand, we're give you a trillion dollars, all these authorities, you spend time, and the Congress isn't perfect by any means, they know that, we know that. But they're trying, I think their heart's in the right place. And so I think it's a fair question, which is, why are things different?

• 17:56Speaker 02

  Why are things not working out the way that they want? And I'll go back to the post-Cold War period of the end of history and sort of the books that frame that up, which is, we made a lot of seriously rosy assumptions about how globalism would unfold. They've been well-studied in books. We thought that working with China would allow them to go ahead and democratize, there would be a place where we could go ahead and buy what we needed, and we would shift to a lovely, polite service economy and war would be over. Instead, what we did is the opposite. We actually empowered our number one adversary, our strategic competitor, to go ahead and actually take over huge chunks of our industrial base.

• 18:33Mike Rowe?

  Here's a crazy idea. What if there was an academy out there that paid students to learn instead of the other way around? Specifically, men and women who want to work in the skilled trades. And what if this academy not only paid for your training, but also covered all the expenses associated with your training, like travel and food and lodging? And finally, what if this academy guaranteed you a job at the end of the training period? Well, that's exactly what's happening at America's Workforce Academy by Meta. This is a five-week, highly immersive, pre-apprenticeship program that gets you all the necessary certifications you'll need to start a Career in the skilled trades immediately.

• 19:15Mike Rowe?

  I'm talking about AI proof, six-figure jobs, helping to build out the new infrastructure that our economy is depending on. Electricians, plumbers, HVAC techs, welders, fiber optic technicians, these jobs, they are all in demand like never before. And again, every graduate of America's Workforce Academy is guaranteed a job on a Meta website. I first announced this program a few months ago, and I have been watching the response ever since. It's extraordinary. This is a nationwide, unprecedented fast track to a long-term career in a skilled trade. If you or your spouse or your kid or your grandkid are looking for a straight path

• 19:58Mike Rowe?

  into a career with no cost at all, check out the opportunities for yourself at meta.com/america'sworkforceacademy. That's meta.com/america'sworkforceacademy.

• 20:12Speaker 02

  So we've talked about this on the minerals front. China makes 95% of the world's rare earths. We're completely dependent upon them for rare earth metals. That's not a place you want to be in where your adversary is. We made an assumption that was going to be okay for us structurally in a world that is historically been wrought with geopolitical trauma. We never would have taken those risks during the first Cold War. And now, in whatever way you frame the current competition with China, I think you see a recognition that we can no longer allow those assumptions about markets to go ahead and dominate the conversation because unfortunately, left to its own devices, markets will go ahead and take our 95% dependence and make it 96% tomorrow and 97% the day after that.

• 20:54Mike Rowe?

  That's what I was getting at. It's drip, drip, drip.

• 20:58Speaker 02

  All for reasonable incentives along the way, efficiency, global supply chains, cost. And you know, there's an element of people want to make money. I could make more money by taking my factory and closing it down in the States or my supply chain and moving it from Europe and moving it to China. We're seeing that up and down the way, and we're seeing that people have made those choices, companies have made those choices, even when they know that their IP is at risk, they're threatened, it's stolen, they're Developing a workforce which is going to work at the competitive Chinese factory for the future. The recognition in the near term that this can no longer go on and that we have to go ahead and fundamentally bend the curve on what it means to go ahead and manufacture in America. This is a great part of what I'm seeing today, not just from the Department of War, which is fantastic.

• 21:41Speaker 02

  But you see the whole re-industrialized movement, all the companies and investment that's going into bringing manufacturing back here is truly exciting.

• 21:48Mike Rowe?

  How many jobs are currently open in the industrial base that you oversee?

• 21:55Speaker 02

  So we think there's about 400,000 or so in this current year at this current environment. The challenge is that, you know, it's hard to go ahead and gauge that because so much of the defense industry is dependent upon multi-industrial firms in the supply chains. As you go further and further down, there are fewer companies that make things specifically for the department and more companies that make like ball bearings or gaskets or some piece of material.

• 22:17Mike Rowe?

  Tactical to practical.

• 22:18Speaker 02

  For, yes. And they do things for aerospace companies, they'll do things for cars, auto manufacturing. And so it's kind of hard to gauge, our number's around 400,000. We see this defense demand continues to grow, given the number of retirements, which has got an aging workforce, a workforce that came in in the 50s and 60s in many cases now and then to the 80s, that they're really struggling to go ahead and backfill that. That over the next 10 years, we're likely to have as many as 4 million jobs are needed to go ahead and fill the skilled trades within the defense industrial base. It's a big gap.

• 22:49Mike Rowe?

  I mean, that's a lot.

• 22:51Speaker 02

  That's why I wrote you last summer my.

• 22:54Mike Rowe?

  No pressure, Mr. Rowe, but regarding our national security, we sure would appreciate a moment of your time. Look, I was flattered that you reached out, but it is daunting, I mean, to think about, to think about that gap and how to close it. Like, from my perspective, the conversation changed overnight from, hey, these opportunities are unloved, they're better than you think. And so your kid would behoove him or herself to explore these jobs. And it'd be wise for you, Mom, Dad, to, you know, maybe let go of some of the stigmas and stereotypes that surround this work because this Employer over here is going to roll out the red carpet and these two will live happily ever after.

• 23:38Mike Rowe?

  That that's kind of been the paradigm. That's not what this is. This is now our submarines. I talk all the time on this podcast and out in the world about the call I got from Blue Forge Alliance. And these 16,000 individual companies who are collectively charged with delivering three nuclear subs a year to the Navy. And they're freaked out, man.

• 24:00Mike Rowe?

  I mean, I don't know if I told you at the Pentagon, but they literally called me to say, can you? We're having a hell of a time.

• 24:06Speaker 02

  Did you answer, Mike?

• 24:07Mike Rowe?

  No, it went to info and it's still there. We're still getting back. No, I answered them and and I'll never forget the exchange. It started with. We're having a hell of a time finding welders, electricians, CNC operators, you know, you know, do you think you can help? I said, how many do you need? I said, 400,000.

• 24:28Mike Rowe?

  In the next eight or nine years, but like 100,000 yesterday. They said, we've looked everywhere. Do you know where they are? I said, yeah, man, they're in the eighth grade.

• 24:36Speaker 02

  Yes, absolutely.

• 24:37Mike Rowe?

  And that that sort of, I think, hit a chord and then the floodgates opened. And then it's like not a week goes by where I don't hear from somebody in a significant position in some industry. Having a similar freak out. But you're the granddaddy of all this. It all kind of trickles back to the biggest, most consequential employer in the world. And that back to your job, whatever. I can't remember what you told me your business card says, but maybe I should just ask you why. It is the best job at the Pentagon.

• 25:11Speaker 02

  Because we do have these gaps and I've been empowered to try and help, right? And I think I've it's an interesting thing. You remember, I think I mentioned this before to the folks. During like COVID, there was those weird WEF commercials of like the handsome European man with a beard. And it was like, you will own nothing and you will be happy. And it was kind of dystopian sort of pitch to for the future of, you know, rental and whatever.

• 25:33Mike Rowe?

  Bugs.

• 25:33Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's exactly what it was. But I sort of saw that and I was like, you know what? Industrial-based policy really owns nothing. We don't own the actual end item units. I don't buy weapons. We don't sustain weapons. We don't deploy. We don't deploy with the troops. We actually help people solve problems across the industrial base to make the production and the readiness of those platforms more available to everyone, whether that's do it cheaper, to go ahead and solve a production gap, to help find another supplier. So we truly have the ability to just work with an incredibly talented team to go off and find hard problems. And luckily, the Congress has been kind enough to invest a lot of funds in our program to actually get in and work and say, how can I help you overcome this gap? There's a huge technical challenge there.

• 26:16Speaker 02

  The idea of actually solving and doing more manufacturing capabilities. And we partner with groups like Oak Ridge National Laboratories, which famously for, you know, World War II and uranium processing, those kind of things, absolutely. But they also have an incredible manufacturing capability, which is truly a national asset as part of the Department of Energy. We work with them, with associations and 501(c)(3) charities to go ahead and find ways to just improve the way we're manufacturing. We go into the companies. We talk to them about problems they're having and ways that they could unlock capacity and capability. We also, and I have inherited this from an amazing team. We also fund 41 different workforce programs across the country right now. So we do everything from partnering with Honolulu Community College on skilled trains development. So milling machines, CNC machines.

• 27:01Speaker 02

  We bought machines and re-equipped the facility there in Honolulu.

• 27:04Mike Rowe?

  Is that the Forge program?

• 27:05Speaker 02

  No, the Forge is separate. The Forge is actually an additive and advanced manufacturing capability, which we've built at Schofield Barracks to allow the military services and their personnel to come and actually kind of play around with the gear and build new stuff. The training program's actually at HCC, where they can go in and actually learn over the course of 16 weeks how to become, you know, a journeyman kind of, you know, tradesman. We're also a program at ATDM down in Danville, which is a welding academy. It's a sponsorship, a scholarship academy, where people can come in 16 weeks. They come in knowing nothing. They can live there. They get fed, the whole deal. And at the end of the 16 weeks, we go ahead and help them get a job somewhere in the industrial base. These are incredible programs. We do things in the Gulf Coast, in New England, up in Michigan.

• 27:48Speaker 02

  We're driving a lot of impact because it's been this gap for the industrial base, although there have been lots and lots of state programs and tactical programs that you've talked about in the past. They're not really aligned to what the Department of War needs and what the industrial base needs. And so a lot of times, companies are forced to solve the problem on their own. And in a problem like this with the scale of the gap that you need, you really need to bring resources at scale. And that's where I'm really excited that we're talking to people like you about how we can do a better job of tying all of our programs together, leveraging your sort of expertise and contacts, and really do a better job of moving the needle on hiring and exciting these folks, which, as you mentioned, starts with talking to kids in kindergarten and elementary school.

• 28:27Mike Rowe?

  Look, I think Dale Carnegie said, "All problems are communication problems." You just mentioned four great solutions that are clearly moving the needle and have proof, evidence.

• 28:41Speaker 02

  Absolutely.

• 28:42Mike Rowe?

  99.9% of the country's never heard of them.

• 28:45Speaker 02

  That is part of the problem. And why I'm here talking.

• 28:47Mike Rowe?

  I thought we were friends. You just wanted to hang. Look, it's, well, it's why I invited you, partly to genuinely atone for all of that.

• 28:59Speaker 02

  You are forgiven officially, Mike. Thank you.

• 29:01Mike Rowe?

  But, look, I'm keen to help. I think part of what I'm supposed to be doing this year, aside from highlighting the individuals that we've been able to assist through MicroWorks, is to tap the country on the shoulder, right? Again and again, and say, "Hey, this thing in Tennessee, this thing in Honolulu, this other thing over here." It's almost like we need a weekly, a short weekly show called, "How the hell are we going to close the skills gap?" This episode brought to you by...

• 29:32Speaker 02

  Did you just come off the cuff?

• 29:34Mike Rowe?

  Pretty much.

• 29:34Speaker 02

  It's pretty amazing.

• 29:35Mike Rowe?

  Right out of the ass.

• 29:35Speaker 02

  That's why you're a pro.

• 29:36Mike Rowe?

  Just like that. But, no, I first, like, the top part of the funnel has to be awareness. And then, I think it has to be genuine, because the bullshit meter on this generation is keen. They know when they're being marketed. But I would... I was at the Army Navy game and ran in, maybe you know the guy, he's the CTO of the Army. His first name's Alex. We just were chatting and I, he had his phone out and I said, show me something in your phone right now that you're not supposed to show me, that you're just super excited about.

• 30:11Speaker 02

  Is this a test?

• 30:11Mike Rowe?

  Yeah. And he was like, alright.

• 30:15Mike Rowe?

  It's okay for you to see this, but, but I really haven't shown a lot of people. And he showed me this tank. Maybe a F-35 or something like.

• 30:24Speaker 02

  No, the M1, it's the Abrams.

• 30:27Mike Rowe?

  No, I know, I think it's.

• 30:28Speaker 02

  Oh, another tank?

• 30:28Mike Rowe?

  He, this thing had a cockpit that was modeled after the F-1. This thing like shoots lasers and could take a satellite out of the orbit and it goes 75 miles an hour. I'm standing there at the game and we're not looking at the game, but the guy's so enthused by it. And I thought, you know, that enthusiasm for the tech, right? That's what has to like come through the camera, that's what has to jump off of the page. Because it seems like, I mean, that's what's super cool. That's what's going to make some kids somewhere go, you know what, I want to learn how to do that. Or more to the point, some other kids say, look, maybe I don't get to drive that tank, but I'd like to build it, man.

• 31:12Speaker 02

  Absolutely.

• 31:13Mike Rowe?

  That would be amazing. So making all this cool is job one.

• 31:17Speaker 02

  Absolutely, and that's why it's been really exciting to see Secretary Hegseth off in his Arsenal of Freedom Tour, where he's been visiting factories, talking about the warriors behind the warriors. And so from the factory floor to the foxhole is sort of the framing is, which is we've got to get people excited about however, about national service as a broad category. And some people will want to serve on active duty, as I did, as Scott, my Stratcomms lead here today did. And so many people do, and as you talked about, today are serving currently over in the Middle East, doing really hard, dangerous things on behalf of the country, because the country's asked them to. But there's other ways to serve, right? There's other ways to serve in terms of your support to the department, being a government civilian, working in the Pentagon, I work with amazing folks, or working in the many factories

• 32:01Speaker 02

  that actually producing the gear that we need to actually. Fight and win, and we really want to encourage people to think about service in that way and serve whoever you want, but serve, make that part of your portfolio of your life. You don't have to do it forever. We think part of the opportunity of the now is that there's this ability to think about skilled trades for the future and a way where you can build a real career that's valuable, that's impactful, that is fulfilling, and also will provide a great life for you and your family in whatever way that you set that up. And that that's the opportunity of really exciting people about this moment, about getting involved with the defense industrial base, but more broadly with the skilled trades as a national issue where we can sort of draft off and make sure we're meeting our requirements because lots of those people will want to go ahead and do cool stuff like make ships, planes, tanks, and bombs.

• 32:49Mike Rowe?

  Couple of weeks ago, on this very podcast, I talked with Brooke Rollins, our Secretary of Agriculture, about the incredibly complicated business of delivering affordable beef to our citizens without disadvantaging American ranchers. We also discussed the very controversial decision to import 300,000 metric tons of ground beef from various foreign countries and the maddening policy that allows meat packers to label imported meat as a product of the USA. Well, shortly after that conversation, one of my sponsors, Good Ranchers, reported an unusually high level of interest in their product. And this is not surprising. Given

• 33:30Mike Rowe?

  a choice, most people would prefer to buy their meat from American ranchers. And Good Ranchers is the number one company in America that delivers 100% American meat straight to your door. They partner with over 100 local farmers and ranchers to deliver pasture-raised meat with no antibiotics and no added hormones. They've got 25,000 five-star reviews on Trust Violet, 25,000, including my own. This month, when you visit GoodRanchers.com/Row, you'll get a free Angus ground beef bundle with your first order. Again, that's GoodRanchers.com/Row for four bonus pounds of ground beef raised right here in these United States, and that's

• 34:14Mike Rowe?

  guaranteed. Support your local ranchers by insisting on American meat delivered at GoodRanchers.com/Row.

• 34:26Mike Rowe?

  Right, because somewhere between fulfilling and valuable is this other thing that I feels kind of unique. It's meaningful. It's consequential, right? So like whatever news channel you watch, when you when you flick around and when you see a, you know, a boat filled with drugs being vaporized, obliterated, when you see some of this footage that right, right now, we should again just remind people, we're having this conversation on the sixth of March. Who knows what the state of play

• 35:07Mike Rowe?

  is going to be a week or two from now when this drops. But I mean, just turning on the TV and seeing the handiwork in action is in itself its own kind of, I mean, not to reduce it to a recruiting video, but it sure makes me wonder, man, who made that happen? Who made that thing? What is that thing? And, you know, can I be a part of that?

• 35:34Speaker 02

  Absolutely. So we've been blessed by incredible engineering technical talent within the department for a long time. Since the Cold War, we have the best scientists and engineers working at incredible scale on the most amazing weapons platforms. The challenge has always been that they're really hard to build. They're very, very slow. And so what we need to go ahead and do is incentivize kind of the next generations of engineers and scientists to help us build really cool stuff that's a little easier to manufacture so we can get more of it. And then we need to concurrently bring in that next generation of skilled tradesmen, the laborers, the welders, the electricians that can help us actually deliver on that promise. And that's going to be, we think, a highly automated future, which is going to be people not just manually doing stuff,

• 36:16Speaker 02

  but actually working in partnership with technology, with the latest tools. And you can go to all these amazing factories, you can see how people are building a capacity which is really unlocking speed for the skilled tradesmen to actually go ahead and apply their tools and their skills and their handiwork, but to do it at scale where you have one guy controlling 10, 10 systems. As opposed to some sort of three-shift capability where one human being would have to sit with one machine for eight hours straight. The leverage that this provides for the future and the ability to go ahead and provide more impact is truly phenomenal. And I think we're at the cusp of that innovation being here. And people have talked about some of those capabilities existing over in Asia. We're there. We've got the skills and the talent. Now we just need to unlock it for the country.

• 37:00Mike Rowe?

  Palmer Lucky sat right there a few months ago.

• 37:03Speaker 02

  In flip-flops?

• 37:04Mike Rowe?

  You know what? No. You know what he wore? He wore these, uh, it was the, it was like a glove for your foot. Like, like his toes each had an individual sleeve.

• 37:15Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 37:16Mike Rowe?

  I mean, he flew his own helicopter here. So he's like, yeah, the flip-flops are kind of hazardous with the pedals. These work better. But yeah, full-on Hawaiian shirt, goatee. And he, um...

• 37:25Speaker 02

  Outstanding.

• 37:26Mike Rowe?

  You know, I, I got to circle back with him because he made some really, really great points regarding what you're, what you're intimating around automation. I mean, I think he just outright said, look, our only hope, given the challenges posed by China and all these other categories, is to truly master autonomy in our warfighter or some version of it. So he's busy, you know, with these subs, these unmanned subs. And of course, everybody knows about the drones now, but I mean, don't answer this if you can't, but what, what don't we know that you can share about just the sheer lethality

• 38:09Mike Rowe?

  and the awesomeness of the machine that is in place? I know it needs to be maintained, and I know that's, that's your job, but I just feel like a lot of people who don't quite have an accurate understanding of what the US military is capable of doing.

• 38:27Speaker 02

  So I think people's indexing around the Ukraine conflict with regards to autonomy is a useful starting point, but it's not the end starting point because I think everyone who knows how the US fights understands that we would not fight the way that anyone on that conflict fights. We would bring much more mass, we'd bring much more technology, we would fly P-52 bombers over top and lay waste to huge sections of land to go ahead and penetrate lots, large numbers of tanks through. We would drive 1,000 miles north to go around them and come around behind them. We would do lots of incredible things. But we would also enable that with a lot of incredible sensor technology, space, cyber, you name it. And so at the end of the day, I think as autonomy fits in for the future into the way we think about it is that it is a compelling capability that's going to

• 39:12Speaker 02

  augment the power of the individual to go ahead and achieve more. So much like we talk about on the factory floor, how that one skilled tradesman could go ahead and now operate 10 machines. Think about that in terms of the way that your near term, your fighter pilot's going to not just have his own aircraft's capabilities, that fighter pilot is going to go ahead and have three, four, or five different capabilities that are in the air with it, that are linked, meshed, controlled, and operating system synergistically with thousands of other units that are all connected to provide what is hopefully a vexing problem for the adversary at every turn and one that provides us demonstrable advantage over time. That is the promise of these capabilities. I think we're at the, again, at the cusp of that, where we're not going to fundamentally replace the human being. As you can see today,

• 39:56Speaker 02

  there are manned aircraft doing many of these things. There are probably a lot of autonomous systems out there. They've talked about some of the Lucas drone which is out doing its thing now for the first time. What's that? The Lucas drone is one of the first sort of US, you know, low-cost manufactured drone systems which is used for combat operations. So it's kind of like a one-way attack drone as you've seen in Ukraine. And so we're really excited about these programs, ERAM, FRAM for the future, that are going to allow us to go ahead and provide these capabilities at scale in partnership with the manned capability. The challenge has always been, you can, you can sort of use these autonomous systems to achieve effects. You ultimately need people to hold grounds and objectives in a conflict. And so we don't think there's a window Where the the person becomes or the soldier, the sailor, airman, marine or guardian becomes

• 40:42Speaker 02

  less valuable in the near term, we're going to make them more important because we're going to make them more powerful. Through the use of all this tech that we bring to them and that's the exciting part is actually working with the companies. And going to the factories and talking about how they can unlock these capabilities to deliver it at scale, at volume and on time. And I think that's one of the things that the drone capabilities actually promises. I can build you a lot of these things really fast. I can deliver boatloads of them quickly. And if I order a hundred for next month, I'll probably get a hundred next month. Whereas if I order a hundred fighter aircraft over the next five years, hmm, maybe I get 75, maybe I get 60. Those have been the real challenges for how we buy things in the past. And this allows us a level of certainty in the capacity we can bring, which is really exciting too.

• 41:27Mike Rowe?

  Well, we're getting awfully foggy as we know and

• 41:29Speaker 02

  We are in the fog.

• 41:31Mike Rowe?

  We must be because I just read a story about, you know, we're spending a million dollars on a missile to take down a $20,000 drone. And then I read another story that said, no, that's not true. And then I read another story that said, no, actually it is true. And then another one said, no, let me assure you that's not true. Is that true?

• 41:48Speaker 02

  So I think it's true in the sense that if you go back and look at what we did over the past couple of years with in the Red Sea. Sort of countering the Houthis and those kind of capabilities. We were forced to fire a lot of very expensive weapons to keep US naval aircraft and ships safe. And so a lot of times there was a cost mismatch and one of the reasons why we won the Cold War is that we were on the We put the Soviets on the wrong side of a cost incurring strategy. That is, they were having to spend more money on their defensive capabilities and an economy that really couldn't sustain it. We are now probably on the wrong side of that cost occurring strategy to some degree when it comes to that fight. However, for now, and we're we've recognized that and we're ramping up the capacity to go ahead and do that.

• 42:30Speaker 02

  We are rapidly creating a series of tools, directed energy, high-power microwave, small attritable drones themselves. Interceptor drones, so that little raptor drone that's going to go ahead and take out another drone. Smaller munitions and missiles that'll allow us to go ahead and deal with this at scale at a much More realistic price point. It's never going to be satisfying, given the fact that what we don't want to do is take a lot of risk with our service members. So there are other countries that are willing to go ahead and accept a fair amount of risk. So they'll go ahead and not spend as much. We'll want to make sure that we wrap all of our aircraft and ships and ground support bases with as much capability as possible. Sometimes that's going to be expensive to make sure that they're safe until we can go ahead and find a lower cost solution.

• 43:14Speaker 02

  So that is the natural instinct of the department is to go ahead and make sure that we're investing heavily to take care of the troops. It's not cheap to go ahead and be the best in the world. We think it's worth it and then we're going to continue to be the best in the world as we transition to leveraging more of these new capabilities.

• 43:30Mike Rowe?

  I'm interested too in the way in which conventional wisdom loses its convention. And when so many of the things we've just accepted as dogma, especially in the business of, you know, global hegemony. Is that the right word?

• 43:49Speaker 02

  Hegemony, yeah.

• 43:49Mike Rowe?

  Hegony?

• 43:50Speaker 02

  It's a good, depends what you mean, but sure.

• 43:53Mike Rowe?

  I don't know what I mean.

• 43:53Speaker 02

  Sounds good.

• 43:54Mike Rowe?

  I don't know what I mean. I think what I'm getting at is there's this assumption, there's a fear of a quagmire. There's always a fear of a quagmire and people are looking at Iran right now and going, well, listen, you just, you can't win it from the air. And you're not going to win it autonomously because that's never happened before. The troops are going to have to go in and when that happens, all hell is going to break loose. And then you're going to have a political disaster and then it's Vietnam and da, da, da, da. But, you know, who's a Santa Ana, right?

• 44:23Mike Rowe?

  You don't learn from history, you're doomed to repeat it. But on the other hand, the past is the past. And what is the goal vis a vis? Is it to keep troops from ever needing to go into a situation like this? Will the tech get to the point where you can fight a war?

• 44:41Mike Rowe?

  From that distance and actually, pardon the phraseology, but get away with it?

• 44:47Speaker 02

  So I can't speculate on future leaders or this leader's relationship to that decision. I mean, I know what we've been tasked to do and I know what the situation is now, which is to go ahead and provide as much capacity as problems that the president, the commander in chief, the leadership of the department have a lot of options. And so what I think more than anything else, what I'm focused on is how we can unlock capacity to provide those options. And sometimes you're, you just want to go ahead and standoff from a distance, do whatever you're going to do. And sometimes you're going to want to go ahead and do Venezuela, which is going to go ahead and require you to go ahead and be on the ground tactically for short periods of time. The issues of and the opportunities associated with taking and holding ground will almost

• 45:27Speaker 02

  assuredly for the, for the near term, require large numbers of manned capabilities, soldiers and marines actually occupying space for a period of time. If that is your objective, I would expect you still need those people. But for the moment, we're really excited about all the mix of capabilities that allows you to provide a solution, which is faster, lighter, less expensive, more lethal, able to project power over longer distance and deal with whatever combination of things are necessary. And that's really the job for the department is to provide options in support of the president and all of the strategic commanders like Admiral Papparo out in Indo-Pacific Command to make sure that they know they've got what they need to fight and win however they want to fight and win.

• 46:08Mike Rowe?

  Sidebar, did you play Risk as a kid?

• 46:10Speaker 02

  Absolutely. You a Siam, Australia guy or?

• 46:14Mike Rowe?

  Well, I read this thing the other day, man, that basically said, one of the hacks in that game was if you were defending North America or the United States, say, and you wanted to, there's one thing to do to make sure you don't lose when you're in that position. Three things, actually. You need to control Alaska, you need to control Venezuela, and you need to control Greenland. If you have those areas under control, you can't lose. Is he playing Risk?

• 46:47Speaker 02

  That's the literal application of the game to this. That's pretty good. I never thought about that.

• 46:51Mike Rowe?

  I mean, you can't lose if that's the thing you're defending.

• 46:56Speaker 02

  I knew I always tried to have my sister get Europe, so she'd end up losing.

• 47:04Mike Rowe?

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• 47:48Mike Rowe?

  find the plan that's right for them. It's a free service. Anyhow, Joseph called Chapter. He connected with an advisor named Heidi. And Heidi caught something that most people miss, because his current plan was about to close. Joseph had a limited window to continue with his current coverage through a new plan without any additional medical underwriting. In other words, Heidi found a way to get Joseph the coverage he needed with the doctors he preferred. Then she found great coverage for his wife, too. Moral of the story: Medicare plans are constantly evolving. You are too. Call Chapter. Make sure you're on the best plan for you. Also, people who switch plans after calling Chapter

• 48:33Mike Rowe?

  save an average of $1,100 a year. 804-Chapter. That's the number. Call it today. It's free. Whole thing takes about 20 minutes. 804-Chapter.

• 48:46Speaker 02

  So I think there's a lot of logic to territorial aspirations and no one argues that there are incredibly strategic things. I think anyone from Alaska will remind you that, I think it was John Boyd that described Alaska as the most strategic place on Earth. Was it John Boyd or was it Billy Mitchell? Can't remember. One of the big Air Force guys.

• 49:07Mike Rowe?

  Seward bought it, right?

• 49:08Speaker 02

  Seward, yes, absolutely. Back in the day.

• 49:10Mike Rowe?

  Seward's folly.

• 49:11Speaker 02

  But described Alaska as the most strategic place on Earth, right? And so you could look at a place like Greenland and say it's incredibly strategic as well. But there are a number of strategic challenges associated with our role controlling the global commons that we're managing in an effective way. And we do that right now every single day. And I think, I always think back to the Ben and Jerry's commercial, like 1% for peace. And then the response, which is that the Marines do more for peace every day than Ben and Jerry's will do in 100 years. And although it's a delicious ice cream, I do think I concur with that approach that the investment we make in these capabilities, our ability to be there every day at great human cost, at great cost to the taxpayer, we generate incredible value for that as citizens. And I think we take it for granted when we don't

• 49:52Speaker 02

  think about what is beneficial to us as a country in terms of the things that have accrued from this presence and our ability to respond to challenges.

• 50:01Mike Rowe?

  Back to, you have to understand a lot of interdisciplinary things, it seems, to enjoy the best job in the Pentagon, or at least to, you know, to occupy that position well. So I was thinking of rare earths, which really aren't rare or earth technically.

• 50:23Speaker 02

  Nope.

• 50:24Mike Rowe?

  Like, how much did you know about that? And to what degree have you reacquainted yourself with the periodic table of elements?

• 50:34Speaker 02

  I have a periodic table of the elements next to my desk in the Pentagon that I refer to all the time. We spend, I actually spoke to a guy that previously had this job, Eric Tuning. And I said, how much time did you spend on minerals when you were in this job in 2017 and 2018? And he was like, I don't know, like 5% maybe, something like that. We're spending significantly more time on minerals. And I assure you, that was not part of it.

• 50:55Speaker 02

  Part of my plan for taking this job. Um, because the last time I touched chemistry seriously was probably in 10th grade. Um, and, uh, learning about it, talking to experts, we have literally geologic geologists, PhDs and uh, chemical PhDs on staff for us, engineers whose whole life is working in these areas and I, I truly am thankful they don't leave because they could go make way more money working for

• 51:18Mike Rowe?

  I met some of these guys.

• 51:19Speaker 02

  They're incredible.

• 51:20Mike Rowe?

  They're PhDs.

• 51:21Speaker 02

  Absolutely.

• 51:22Mike Rowe?

  Like you, you're surrounded with, with big brained.

• 51:25Speaker 02

  Incredibly smart people.

• 51:26Mike Rowe?

  And they, did they, like, did you bring a few of them in yourself? Did they volunteer?

• 51:31Speaker 02

  Uh, I, we're hiring some people. We are hiring by the way. So if you have any friends in that, that big Rolodex. Um, I have been blessed by the fact that this is an incredible program in office, which has attracted a lot of really talented people for a long time. Because we are solving problems and we have the resources to solve problems. So, I inherited a team of amazing chemists and geologists that are off doing incredible stuff every single day. And, um, I did not have to hire them. Um, but they're really motivated by national security and I think it's working on that national security challenge. So there's no place else you can do what we do in our office. Working with the services, working on really demanding challenges and trying to do it on an operational timeframe. That is, I'm not interested in like a five or 10 years, sort of like science and technology study.

• 52:14Speaker 02

  I'm trying to solve a problem for a customer in the Department of War today. That is, how can I put money out the door to a process, to a procedure or buying a gear, a piece of gear that's going to solve this manufacturing, this workforce problem in the short term. And that's really the exciting part about what it is. And they get to do it touching like the classified stuff, which makes it a little more exciting than, than normal work. If you're at the bench, uh, sitting at a lab someplace.

• 52:38Mike Rowe?

  Well, I, last thing I thought I'd get involved in is undersea mining and polymetallic nodules and this whole rare earth thing, but it came to me back in July, I was at an energy conference in Pittsburgh. And some guy ran up to me and he, and he gave me this charcoal briquet shaped thing. That he described as a battery in Iraq, you know, filled with copper and cobalt and nickel and manganese, billions of them lying on the ocean floor. And an executive order the president signed about a year ago this month, or in the coming month, to encourage people to go get those things.

• 53:22Mike Rowe?

  That's part of what you and I talked about in the Pentagon. But I wasn't looking at it as a business opportunity. I was looking at it as this thing's going to create 100,000 jobs if it's for real. And ever since then, with every passing day, it's for real. We're going to go get those things. And some of them have rare earths, some of them have these other minerals. But if you could, just talk generally about the impact that that industry represents, not just for workforce, but for the national security that, you know, I imagine is your prime directive.

• 54:00Speaker 02

  Absolutely. So this is an incredible situation in the country where if you think about our dependence on overseas resources, primarily China, but there are other dependencies as well for things like cobalt, which come from Africa. Processing can be in different places, a lot of that in China. That last April, when the Spica got turned off for rare earths, everyone in the White House at the time, the NSC, as I understand it, got really concerned very fast because industry called and said, this is going to practically tactically limit my operations here very shortly. What are you going to do about it? And so all of a sudden, the word went out that we needed to change. And so you saw the executive orders. You saw the urgency from the White House and from the Department of War to start investing. You've seen some of these deals. We're investing substantial into and in partnership with others in the department,

• 54:45Speaker 02

  within the Department of Energy, within Department of Commerce, to go ahead and unlock resources that are available domestically, but also with our partners. We partnered in with our Japanese colleagues, Australian, European partners, to make these capabilities available for the future. The challenge has been they're very dirty and they take a long time to come online. And so what we need is an all of the above approach to this. That is, I need investments in mining today to unlock a path. For the future, I need opportunities to invest in production and refining. I need to go ahead and find every rock I can to bring forward and figure out the quickest, fastest, most viable way for us to make that available to the industry writ large. For us, if you think about what I said at the earlier on about our acquisition transformation

• 55:29Speaker 02

  strategy to drive things from the top down, that is, I want to fix the demand signal so that everyone knows we need way more of these missiles, right? That's a huge thing.

• 55:38Mike Rowe?

  I don't want to gloss over

• 55:39Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 55:39Mike Rowe?

  What you just said, the, did we abdicate our responsibility to take care of our own rare earths simply because the process of cultivating them was dirty?

• 55:52Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 55:53Mike Rowe?

  Is that why we just set back and let, watch China do it?

• 55:57Speaker 02

  So essentially in the 90s at the end of the Cold War, we decided there were industries that no longer needed to be done here. The Chinese were happy to go ahead and take these dirty chemical processes and do them in China with far less environmental restriction. And as a result, we were quite happy to go ahead and ship that stuff over. They started delivering that to us and over time, every individual factory, every individual process here was outsourced to China almost entirely. And so we became incredibly dependent on them. That was a decision we made in light of, again, rosy assumptions about how things would work in a globalized world. Those assumptions were wrong. We're revisiting them now, hence the need to go ahead and literally take billions of dollars. And I think that's our challenge is trying to make the case to folks that some of the deals we're doing look really big.

• 56:41Speaker 02

  We're like, oh, here's, here's a billion dollars that the government is investing. Oh my God, it's outrageous. When you think about the standpoint that the Department of War, just the DIB, probably uses half a percent, right? 0.8% of domestic demand for rare earths. We are a very minor consumer of this. It is the nation writ large, all of its industries, your iPhones, your laptops, your cars, aircraft, everything else you do, your TVs, that is where the demand signal is in terms of domestic demand. And so for us, we recognize that we have a problem from the national security standpoint of assured access to these capabilities. And we have a stockpile with some stuff on the shelf, which allows us some flexibility. But we need to unlock this for the country because the same spick, it could be turned off again.

• 57:24Speaker 02

  And that's going to affect not just us, it's going to affect everybody working to go ahead and do electronics and software and anything else that you can imagine across the economy.

• 57:31Mike Rowe?

  So you've got billions of dollars, billions of dollars that you can

• 57:35Speaker 02

  The department does.

• 57:36Mike Rowe?

  The department does, not Mike Cottinazi personally. But you've got access to a lot of money. And I mean, are companies just queued up outside your office now? And if so, what kind of companies? Are you looking for uniquely American companies, wholly American companies? Or how do you reinvigorate? My friend, Tom Albanese, who used to run Rio Tinto, sent me a thing earlier today that said, "Look, we're half of the existing mining workforce will be gone, retired by 2029." That whole sector needs to be wildly reinvigorated. And he's dealing with that same crazy math.

• 58:20Mike Rowe?

  Five out, two in, five retire, two come in. I think it might even be worse than that in mining at this point.

• 58:26Speaker 02

  I believe it.

• 58:27Mike Rowe?

  But I mean, I just find it really, from the, it's fascinating from the investment side. It's horrifying from the workforce side. It's a challenge. But in the end, I, do I understand, right? That you're sitting on a pile of money, trying to figure out how best to deploy it?

• 58:44Speaker 02

  So we, our teams, luckily, these amazing scientists and engineers, are building essentially national and global models of mineral demand across a whole variety of them. So it's probably like 30 or 40 that we're focused on, kind of 20 something that are the key. And our goal is to understand, what do we need to meet the defense industrial base requirements? Which is, again, a relatively small amount in most cases. And then how do I go ahead and meet that? From the mine through to production, refining, all the way to recycling. And then we're trying to go ahead and target our investments in the most opportunistic way. That's everything from preliminary site assessment to sort of say, what's here? Is it worth it? Into direct investments in mines to technology unlocks. And so there's a need for investment at every level.

• 59:28Speaker 02

  And I think that's why there's so much money flooding this from our side. What we're trying to do is catalyze all the private investments. So the folks at Rio Tinto will sort of come along and say, all right, well, the Department of War, the governments, done some of the initial testing. They're investing. We think we can help scale this. And that's sort of the, you're talking about the seabed nodules and those sorts of things. That's really the opportunities for us to partner and figure out. What's the economic unlock there that allows that company to sort of do what it needs to do? And then bring it back here. We're not overly indexed on US only because I think we recognize that some cases it's going to take a long time to unlock capacity here because there is no mine. So we're just going to have to go ahead and work with our partners or our partners already have capacity and they're willing to share it.

• 1:00:09Speaker 02

  And I'll say that for all of our partners, these deals that we've set up, they've been a lot of interest in terms of how we move forward. And I'm really excited about that. We've got investments in three or four countries at this point, just since I've come on board. And that's really exciting to find that there's so much interest in solving the Western problem. Which is, you know, the West writ large being our European partners, Japan, South Korea, Australia, Canada, the US. We're really excited about that broad interest and making sure that there's enough capacity for all of our economies and our militaries to deliver the capabilities required.

• 1:00:43Mike Rowe?

  It just seems in so many cases like the resources that we need, we have or we have access to. And we just get in our own way so often. Do me a favor Chuck, Google polymetallic nodules and just put up a couple of these images so people know what we're talking about. And you know, I think about the incredible petroleum reserves that we have and the whole conversation around energy independence. And I think about the timber that we have, maybe more than anyone, but we're a leading importer of timber. We have these things and and we have access, I say mining, just so people understand. These aren't, these nodules, you don't dig them up.

• 1:01:26Speaker 02

  They're just sitting there.

• 1:01:26Mike Rowe?

  They're sitting there at the bottom. Now granted, they're sitting there at like 20,000 feet and there's a lot of tech to get them. But this is a, what do you reckon, a 16, a $20 trillion industry?

• 1:01:39Speaker 02

  Oh, there's a lot. Yeah, there you go.

• 1:01:41Mike Rowe?

  Look at those things.

• 1:01:42Speaker 02

  Absolutely gorgeous.

• 1:01:43Mike Rowe?

  Little, little boogers at the bottom of the sea.

• 1:01:46Speaker 02

  They are sitting there.

• 1:01:47Mike Rowe?

  Waiting to be picked up and that's. That's nickel, cobalt, copper, and manganese.

• 1:01:55Speaker 02

  And I think that is a great example of the challenge to your point around, we have the solution, we know we could do this, and that's the same across the country. There's lithium in Arkansas, there's cobalt in different parts of the country, there's the rare earths that are in California. All these rocks are available. What it takes is the will and the leadership to go ahead and actually start the process of thoughtfully working through reasonable environmental considerations, which are reasonable, making sure that there's enough investment from the country to go ahead and stimulate the private capital to do that, and then to make sure that we're thinking holistically about how we get it to the people that are going to buy it for the end-user needs. And I think there's been

• 1:02:35Speaker 02

  times when we've started and stopped this, and I'll take our investments in MP Materials and what that means for the future. We've tried Molly Corp back in, you know, 2010 went bankrupt and they went bankrupt again.

• 1:02:46Mike Rowe?

  I want people to understand this.

• 1:02:47Speaker 02

  Yeah, sure.

• 1:02:48Mike Rowe?

  So MP, what do they do and what did the feds do to allow them to do more of it?

• 1:02:59Mike Rowe?

  I'd like to talk about initiative, if I could, for just a moment. Here at MicroWorks, we value it a great deal. In fact, it's the most important quality we look for in our work ethic scholarship applicants, but everybody wants it. I'm talking about the quality in a lift driver that inspires him or her to carry your bags to the door without even asking, or the grocery clerk who shows you where an item is on the shelves, or a doctor who personally calls you to explain your test results. If you're hiring, you want to encourage initiative because it's invaluable. And ZipRecruiter has a way to allow a candidate to tell you, in their own words, why they're interested in your job. Not just why they're

• 1:03:41Mike Rowe?

  qualified, but why they're interested. This is a way that allows the best candidates to distinguish themselves from the competition, and a great way for you to separate the wheat from the chaff, as it were. Right now, you can try it for free at ziprecruiter.com/row. ZipRecruiter is the number one Hiring site in large part because of this new initiative that shows you the most interested, qualified candidates first. So you meet the right people faster. Four out of five employers who post on ZipRecruiter get a quality candidate within one day. Try it for free, ziprecruiter.com/row. Meet your match on ZipRecruiter.

• 1:04:21Mike Rowe?

  Build your team, build it sooner. Meet your match at ZipRecruiter. Try it free.

• 1:04:32Speaker 02

  Sure. So, MP Materials is the resurrection of a company that has been trying to go ahead and do domestic rare earths manufacturing since the 2005, 2008 timeframe. They've gone bankrupt twice in various formats and MP Materials is trying to create a domestic capability for us to go ahead and manufacture these. So we get off of entirety. You're not going to meet all of our requirements, but to go ahead and provide capabilities that meet a large chunk of US domestic demand. And so going forward, we made a partnership with MP Materials to sort of invest in them. We catalyzed that investment by bringing in other investors. So Apple actually invested them on the back of this. And we've started the process of trying to work

• 1:05:15Speaker 02

  with them to make sure that they're producing new capabilities at their facility down in Texas, and that we can find other partners that want to come in and bring new capabilities to accelerate what they're doing. It's a really exciting opportunity. One that some people don't like because they're like, why is the government getting involved in this? At the end of the day, I think we're trying to solve these problems in a very different way from the past because we're forced to. I don't think anybody, again, came into this business thinking that we were going to go ahead and start, spend so much time on mines. We have to. It's not optional because we don't have access to the materials we need and therefore we won't be able to build the weapons and systems we need to fight and win. And so that's kind of like a necessary challenge. It's a national security issue for us. We're keen to be talking to the guys like at Ria Tinto and

• 1:05:58Speaker 02

  your other folks there that are interested in solving these problems. There you go. Nodules.

• 1:06:03Speaker 01

  Gives you an idea of the size.

• 1:06:05Mike Rowe?

  Mary, do you have one on your desk by any chance? A nodule? One of those little... I might have one in my backpack too. I just think these things...

• 1:06:16Speaker 02

  It's the coolest thing. It just exists.

• 1:06:19Mike Rowe?

  And no, I mean, again, it's like, nobody really knows too much about them. I'd wager... Later this year, metal independence will become a phrase in much the same way energy independence has become. It just takes time. And people are drinking from a fire hose. There's just endless information. The tech is just moving so fast. The headlines change before you have a chance to read them. It's just impossible to keep up to speed on anything. But that stuff is primary. You know, it's fundamental.

• 1:06:53Speaker 02

  You've got to build, while you're building top down from the demand side, you've got to stabilize bottom up by making sure that you have enough materials because you could say you want to build new factories and all these new capabilities. You can't if you don't have the rocks, if you don't have the metals and the materials to close it. And so that's a really exciting opportunity is to go ahead and think about, you want to toss it over there?

• 1:07:14Mike Rowe?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:07:14Speaker 02

  Oh, it's a little one. It's a baby one.

• 1:07:15Mike Rowe?

  Yeah, this is a baby. This little thing. Cute little thing there.

• 1:07:19Speaker 02

  It's adorable.

• 1:07:20Mike Rowe?

  Yeah. No, I've just, I mean, like the idea, this was introduced to me, this whole thing. I told you I was at an energy conference, but it was a guy from the old days that had these produced shipwreck stories and treasure hunting, you know? And like after all these years, the idea, you know, bringing up millions of dollars in gold and silver off these old, old galleons, you know, finding them first and then diving on them. And then he said, you know, this whole time, the real treasure was just lying around on the ground, all around them.

• 1:07:55Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:07:56Mike Rowe?

  These things, a battery and a rock.

• 1:07:58Speaker 02

  I think the leadership here that you've seen from the White House and from the department, I think is really the key. We're committed to this. We're spending a lot of time in it. We're talking to industry. We're trying to encourage them to go ahead and take steps to do just that, which is how can we help you take advantage of this resource, which is sitting there, and make sure that we go ahead and get it into the, the economy in some thoughtful way. So that's really cool stuff. Those kinds of things are going to unlock capability for us for the future.

• 1:08:25Mike Rowe?

  Specifically, when

• 1:08:27Mike Rowe?

  This thing is processed and when its various component metals are separated. What's the practical application for them? Wait, what industries are most in need of what's in that rock?

• 1:08:42Speaker 02

  So, pretty much every industry, your cameras, your microphone, that TV, the sensors that are going ahead and providing RF capabilities, they all need something, right? They all need cobalt and germanium and gallium and yttrium, turbine blades for engines. You name it, they're all requiring an incredible number of very bespoke minerals that are very, very difficult to get. Even just standard lithium for your battery, right, is something that we require tons of. Copper, you talk about data centers for the future, you're going to need boatloads of copper to go ahead and make that work going forward, your power lines, et cetera. The demand is relentless and if you want to grow the economy, you have to grow your access to this. And again, the point is that they're all there, right? It isn't that America lacks us.

• 1:09:27Speaker 02

  In fact, we have pretty much everything we want, maybe not everything, but pretty much everything we need to go ahead and do it. We just need to unlock that in a reasonable way and we'll find partners that can close the gap on the minerals needs that we don't have in abundance. We just need the leadership to continue to understand that this is a national security threat.

• 1:09:45Mike Rowe?

  You know what they say, history doesn't repeat itself, but it rhymes, right? And I think about, you know, Edwin Drake and Titusville and oils discovered really for the first time and people know, yeah, this is portentous. This is a game. It's like another one of those moments, you know? Surely, the consequences of finding oil and being able to bring it out of shale, bring it out of rock is going to change the world. They probably didn't think, you know, what else is going to do? It's going to save the whales. But of course it did, you know, because lamplight, we needed the oil from the sperm whales, so we hunted them down. I think there were like six of them left. And I'm thinking of the fight that's going to be coming from the NGOs and the conversation

• 1:10:30Mike Rowe?

  that's going to involve getting these things off the ocean floor. And I, I know somebody's going to point to the rainforest. And say, where do you think we're getting the cobalt now? What do you think we're doing to the environment now? I mean, we've got to be mindful and we've got to be careful for sure. But I just, when I look at the child labor, when I look at the biodiversity, when I look at the trees, when I look at this indigenous tribes that have been totally displaced in the Amazon in our, in our quest for these, we're gonna get them, we need them. And the idea that there's decades of them just lying there, I mean, it's just, it's mind boggling.

• 1:11:12Speaker 02

  Well, this is one of the things I think that, again, we made a mistake in the 90s of assuming that we were gonna go ahead and continue to do, and then the processing was dirty at the time, but that we would continue to process dirty forever and it would never get better. And that's not the history of the country. The history of the country is, we do some dirty things for a while and then we find technology unlocks that actually make it cleaner. The challenge with a lot of these technologies is because we've exported a lot of the refining and processing, we're still doing it the old way. We've missed two and three generations of scientists working on these problems at the cutting edge American institutions. We've had unlocks in things like cellphone technology and RF and space and other things and sensors. And that's fantastic. We haven't had our best and brightest at volume, working on these issues to say,

• 1:11:55Speaker 02

  how do I process rare earths in a way that's relatively clean? So we reduce the amount of environmental waste. What we know is that eventually we'll do it much cleaner. We'll actually reduce carbon emissions and whatever your particular concerns are, there are ways to do this, we've always found that. And so there are programs at DARPA in research and engineering within the Department of War that are investing in now, finally, new and exciting ways to do this stuff, to process it into something useful, but to do in ways that's much cleaner. And that's a lot of hope for the future. But we've got to go ahead and get scientists engaged, which means we need the capital engaged and the support for that change over time.

• 1:12:30Mike Rowe?

  Tell me again how we lost two generations, exactly?

• 1:12:33Speaker 02

  Uh, well, we shipped the capabilities over there and the Chinese just continued to do it the old fashioned way. So there's no incentive for us to go ahead and invest in the science to actually make it better. There's no demand signal for it. So why would I go ahead and become a rare earth scientist? If there's no demand for rare earth scientists in the United States of America? All that went over there and even we trained generations of scientists that were Chinese and then shipped them back. And then they've taken that technology and they now own it. So we have to come up with our own unique Western capabilities. To sort of leap ahead what the processes are for the future. Or we're going to end up stuck doing it the dirty way. And I don't think that's where the country wants to be. And it's not been our history that we just sit quietly and let bad processes continue forever.

• 1:13:14Mike Rowe?

  Well, it sure feels like, you know, sometimes the country needs to be grabbed by the lapels and just shook. Like we need a wake up call here and there. And how do you think about? Did the lockdowns really send a message through the Pentagon and through the halls of power? When we realized just how reliant we were, you know, from a medical standpoint?

• 1:13:38Speaker 02

  Buy chains.

• 1:13:39Mike Rowe?

  Like, is there a corollary to that?

• 1:13:41Speaker 02

  A hundred percent. I think everyone sort of recognized in the moment, you've seen the rhetoric change since then regarding. The critical need for countries to have some level of domestic resilience. That is, I may not need to go ahead and disconnect entirely from these globalized supply chains. But I need to know that a certain amount of my capacity is domestic. The challenge is markets don't like that. They're like, well, why would you have an onshore capability? That is 15 or 20% more costly than just buying it from wherever the original source is. The challenge is in those moments when supply chains break down or when a competitor wants to go ahead and turn off access. You're forced to go ahead and face the fact that you have no capacity that you can scale up. And so I think we're in an interesting time where.

• 1:14:25Speaker 02

  Business people, consultants, bankers, governments are thinking through, how do you go ahead and create resilience at scale on a domestic level? How you do that among like countries, so say in the West? And how do you go ahead and take the best advantages of a globalized supply chain? That is, maybe there's things that I do want for cheap, but to not let yourself be at a vulnerability or suffer a vulnerability from adverse situations. We're at the beginning of building that resilience right now. We are nowhere near along. And I don't think we have a playbook yet. We have a lot of people trying a lot of different things. And more than anything else is that we have to continue to go ahead and experiment with how we create that resilience domestically.

• 1:15:05Mike Rowe?

  How much time do you think we have to get this done?

• 1:15:08Speaker 02

  We need it now because I think you're in a world geopolitically where there's likely to be more disruptions for the future. We're certainly betting on the fact that disruption will be more significant and faster. And that's why we're taking so much time and effort here. It's hard to say when. I just want it all move to the left immediately as fast as possible.

• 1:15:29Mike Rowe?

  How much urgency do you feel on a day to day basis? Like when you wake up and go to... What's it like being here? I mean, it's a powerful job. You know what I mean? I mean, it's like, do you... How do you unwind and how do you think about just the consequences of what you've been tasked to accomplish? And what happens if you screw it up?

• 1:15:52Speaker 02

  Uh, thanks. No pressure. Honestly, I don't like view it that way that I am honored to be doing this job. The country trusted me through the president's nomination, through the confirmation process, to go ahead and take a stab at doing this at a time that is incredibly important. So every day I am there grateful for the incredible team I have and for the opportunity. And I really am super psyched that I have the ability to actually go out and meet people like you or go to companies and say, what do you need? How can I help you? And they're like, really? I said, yeah, we can go ahead and pay for that. We can go and call that guy. And a lot of times I think my biggest value is just orchestrating discussions between really smart people who have an interest in a problem and that I can connect them together.

• 1:16:34Speaker 02

  And help lubricate that discussion with something that is an imperative from the government or a connection to a requirement occasionally to invest in it. But I think that's the most exciting part is actually seeing these things come together and driving real change. So for me, it is an honor. I do feel the pressure at times because I know that when I took this job, I said that I wanted to be a part of America's future victories. That's why I did this. And so I want to make sure that I'm there contributing every day. I couldn't look at myself in the mirror. My daughter's in the mirror every day to go ahead and say that I didn't give it at all. And so we're going to leave it all on the tail, on the table. We're going to smoke to the filter, phrase it however you like. I'm going to go ahead and do whatever I can to have a difference and know that I tried my best.

• 1:17:18Mike Rowe?

  How many daughters you have?

• 1:17:19Speaker 02

  I have three daughters.

• 1:17:20Mike Rowe?

  How old are they?

• 1:17:20Speaker 02

  They are, my 25 year old daughter is married over in London. She's a lawyer. I have a 23 year old daughter who is in New Jersey and works in the city. And then a daughter who is 20 years old is a junior in college.

• 1:17:33Mike Rowe?

  What do they think of what you do?

• 1:17:35Speaker 02

  So they come from radically different political backgrounds. My, one of my daughters is definitely during the election was like, America, America, America, America. And the other daughter was a little bit horrified. So we, we definitely span the background. They are very supportive of me and have always been incredibly supportive of my work. I think they appreciate the fact that I'm out here trying every day. They know that I care. They know that I'm still a sailor at heart. When I think about who I am, it's still a midshipman cad nazi, trying to go ahead and prove that he's, can do something for the country. I take that really seriously.

• 1:18:09Mike Rowe?

  What was your confirmation hearing like? And did anybody oppose you? And if so, why?

• 1:18:14Speaker 02

  So I did get 23 votes for and four votes against. I don't know who voted against me yet. Everyone was pretty supportive, as I said, in the process. I was surprised it was less, it was not more contentious, I should say. People asked some really smart questions. There was no drama. You know, Senator Warren even asked me some great questions. And I think a lot of people would expect that politically, you'd get some, you know, nonsense in that, in that environment. But really, it was a thoughtful discussion. I learned a lot from it about what the Senate. Uh, cared about and the amount of support for change that's there. Change is hard, requires compromise, and there's not a lot of appetite for compromise right now. So I'm mostly trying to go ahead and use my opportunity here to be incredibly collaborative

• 1:18:59Speaker 02

  with all of my partners in the defense industrial base within the Department of War and across the government to demonstrate that we can get big stuff done. There's not, there's nowhere you're going to get a lot done alone. You've got to go ahead and work as a team. And I think I made that case to the senators involved. And so there's four of them that didn't vote for me. I did have one that I thought didn't vote for me, reached out and actually said, no, no, I voted for you. And it was very gratifying though. Thank you, Senator. You know who you are. So I appreciate it.

• 1:19:30Mike Rowe?

  So as some of you may have heard, I went to Congress 16 years ago to testify before a House Subcommittee. And then again, a year later, to testify before a Senate Subcommittee about the need to reinvigorate the skilled trades with some kind of national effort that would make a more persuasive case for a lot of good jobs out there that didn't require a four-year degree. Well, 15 years later, I finally heard back from the government and I am delighted to tell you about a program called BuildFreedom.us. This is the national PR campaign that MicroWorks has been talking about for a decade and a

• 1:20:12Mike Rowe?

  half now, and it's focused on 300,000 or 400,000 excellent jobs in the defense industrial base. These are the electricians and the plumbers and the steam fitters and the pipe fitters and the CNC operators and the shipbuilders and so forth. But in this case, all of those trades are focused on building out our national infrastructure through the defense industrial base. So people who are building our autonomous weapons, our planes, our ships, it's only a matter of national security and it's a very big deal. And on a personal level, it's really been very gratifying. Build Freedom donated $10 million to MicroWorks. The money's available right now for you if you want to pursue a skill that's in demand

• 1:20:56Mike Rowe?

  and work in the defense industrial base. I think it's an opportunity of a lifetime. Go to BuildFreedom.us, see what's available and then apply for a scholarship from MicroWorks. The money's there, burning a hole in my pocket. Go get some. BuildFreedom.us.

• 1:21:13Mike Rowe?

  The thing that surprised me most of all, I mean, for people who haven't been to the Pentagon, it's hard to overstate.

• 1:21:20Speaker 02

  The five-sided Puzzle Palace?

• 1:21:23Mike Rowe?

  Well, you know, how interesting that you would use the P-word, being a cryptologist. It is a puzzle. I mean, it's so easy to get lost in the place, but I really expected to kind of feel like I was just wading through, you know, molasses. I went there to meet the bureaucrats. Man, you guys move fast. What do you call Scott over there? What's his official title?

• 1:21:44Speaker 02

  He's my strategic communications advisor.

• 1:21:47Mike Rowe?

  I mean, he just ushered us through the, you know, he was a great navigator. And then I met, I guess-

• 1:21:55Speaker 02

  Retired Marine officer.

• 1:21:56Mike Rowe?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Marine and Navy? You guys get along okay?

• 1:21:59Speaker 02

  Yeah, we're okay.

• 1:22:00Mike Rowe?

  All right.

• 1:22:01Speaker 02

  We're good. I think we're good, Scott.

• 1:22:03Mike Rowe?

  Oh, right, of course. So, who else did I meet? Feinberg, who I suppose is the undersecretary?

• 1:22:11Speaker 02

  He's the deputy secretary of war. He's the number two.

• 1:22:14Mike Rowe?

  He reports straight to?

• 1:22:15Speaker 02

  Secretary of HECSE, yes.

• 1:22:17Mike Rowe?

  Right. And do you report straight to Feinberg?

• 1:22:19Speaker 02

  I report to the undersecretary of war for acquisition and sustainment, Mike Duffy.

• 1:22:23Mike Rowe?

  Mike Duffy? Okay.

• 1:22:25Speaker 02

  Who reports to Deputy Feinberg.

• 1:22:27Mike Rowe?

  Now Deputy Feinberg, when he walked in the room, people, people sat up straight and paid attention.

• 1:22:33Speaker 02

  Absolutely.

• 1:22:34Mike Rowe?

  That guy did like some amazing things in the private sector.

• 1:22:37Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:22:38Mike Rowe?

  Like real, like, serious things.

• 1:22:40Speaker 02

  He brings a capability set and experience that I don't think we've ever had in that role, at the deputy role within a department, and you're seeing it in how we're approaching the way we buy, the way we think about investment, the way we approach the defense industrial base. It's an incredible unlock for us to be able to leverage his experience and knowledge and have him talk turkey about the way things are going to run, because he understands it in a deep, in a deep way.

• 1:23:05Mike Rowe?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:08Mike Rowe?

  I just pointed out because I want to add to it's really the question I wanted to ask you vis a vis him, but both you guys were killing it in the private sector. I mean, you did great and you didn't have to do this. And it's impressive to meet people who are doing the hard thing for the right reason, you know, I mean that as a compliment, obviously.

• 1:23:33Speaker 02

  Thanks.

• 1:23:33Mike Rowe?

  Please, please pass it on to him. But I, I think the thing I want people to understand is there's so many people, you keep talking about your team, but they're voluminous as well. And certainly the ones I met all seemed to give a profound damn.

• 1:23:49Speaker 02

  Yes. So I will say the biggest, we make fun of, we criticize, we're unhappy with government often. I will tell you, and I'm like everybody else, I've criticized the government left and right. The number of people who are incredibly talented that work every day to make the government do what it does is phenomenal. A huge number of them do it through terrible processes. They do it through rotten times and good, in good times. They do it through news cycles. They do it through rain, sleet and snow. And they're just there every day in a building that is very difficult to get stuff done in. They do it for one reason, a fundamental belief in national security. And they do it not making a lot of money

• 1:24:31Speaker 02

  relative to the peers that they could go ahead and work with out in the civilian sector. They do it for not a lot of benefits. They do it in austere conditions oftentimes, but they do it because they think it's important. And we owe them all a debt of gratitude. And so running down government employees is a big mistake. We need them. And I don't mean me, I mean, the folks that actually make the engine run. The rest of us here, I am relatively well taken care of in my role. The folks that actually are out there doing the work every day, keeping them motivated, exciting people to join them, making sure that they know they're appreciated, demonstrating and letting them unlock their incredible skills that they can actually have the impact. That is the, I think, leadership is about. And I think Admiral Papparo from Indo-PACOM has talked about eating risks so that the middle,

• 1:25:14Speaker 02

  the frozen, you can get the frozen middle to unlock. And actually do what they're supposed to do so that employees can go ahead.

• 1:25:20Mike Rowe?

  Did you say eating risk?

• 1:25:21Speaker 02

  Eating risk, eating risk.

• 1:25:22Mike Rowe?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:25:23Speaker 02

  So that is what I think, and I think he said it very succinctly, which is the leadership's job is to go ahead and get the employees to go ahead and work and allow them to work. And so to make sure we're focusing them on the right thing. So that they don't have to worry about the BS every day. That's really the exciting stuff for me is seeing them actually solve problems. I can't solve those problems. I don't have a PhD in chemistry. What I need to do is get them in the right place with the right people and the right resources. And the problems will get unlocked. And I think that's the amazing thing about our government at this time.

• 1:25:52Mike Rowe?

  How many people work for you directly?

• 1:25:54Speaker 02

  I don't have about a hundred and something government civilians and another couple hundred contractors. So it's a big, super talented team.

• 1:26:01Mike Rowe?

  It's a, it's not a small thing that you took the time to come here and talk to me. Where did you come from right before this?

• 1:26:09Speaker 02

  Today?

• 1:26:10Mike Rowe?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:10Speaker 02

  I was in Texas before that, before LA.

• 1:26:13Mike Rowe?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:14Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:26:14Mike Rowe?

  So you're Texas, LA. Where are you going now?

• 1:26:16Speaker 02

  I'm going to Hawaii next.

• 1:26:17Mike Rowe?

  What are you doing in Hawaii?

• 1:26:19Speaker 02

  I'm going to, we actually have a bunch of investments. You talked about the Forge in Hawaii and Honolulu Community College. We're doing an industry day at the Forge to sort of bring in people to look at what we're building with the services. So we can build more demand there. And then I'm speaking at a conference on Tuesday with a lot of other defense people.

• 1:26:35Mike Rowe?

  Is this thing online, the Forge?

• 1:26:37Speaker 02

  Uh.

• 1:26:38Mike Rowe?

  Like, is there a website?

• 1:26:40Speaker 02

  I don't know if there's a website. We're talking about building a website for it. I think we're probably going to get there, but I was really focused on just trying to get the gear into the building first.

• 1:26:50Mike Rowe?

  So you're, you're basically on a kind of roadshow at the same time you're doing all this other stuff.

• 1:26:55Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:26:55Mike Rowe?

  And every appearance I've seen or read about, you've invited people to bring you their best ideas. Like you're literally knocking on Silicon Valley's door and saying, what do you got?

• 1:27:08Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 1:27:09Mike Rowe?

  Have they responded?

• 1:27:12Speaker 02

  I get hundreds of LinkedIn invites a week. I get 50, 60, 80 different messages a week. We have tons and tons of outreach to our office. I think people are responding, and that's why I'm trying to do this as much as possible, which is, we are looking for, and I think I've talked to us in some of the environments, some of the things you've seen, we're looking for radically different outcomes. Like, we're not going to solve the nation's national security problems doing it the way we did it five, six, eight years ago. We really need to think fundamentally differently about the kinds of companies we're working with, the way those companies operate, the way that we invest in and incentivize people to join, and you go back to your, you know, why would I go ahead and participate in this stodgy, boring industry, working in a factory that was made, you know, 50, 60, 80 years

• 1:27:56Speaker 02

  ago, using technology that is 40 or 50 years old? We need to change that. And so that, for me, is the exciting part about this job. Most of all, is going out and actually spreading the word that the fact that this is our chance as a nation to go ahead and really fix these problems.

• 1:28:10Mike Rowe?

  Do you think, like, education has to fundamentally transform as well?

• 1:28:16Speaker 02

  I'm not an education expert. I will know, I will say that I did pretty good with my daughters. They're all smart, talented folks who went to college. They achieved, are achieving a lot, and I'm really excited about to see what they're going to do for the future. I struggle with the whole educational framework in America in a way that has created all these incentives to not have people that have skilled trades careers. So I presume that there's some fundamental mismatch there relative to the economy, and I don't understand what that is. It's guys like you talking to other people that'll unlock it. But I'm really excited about what I'm seeing as a recognition of the problem as much as anything, is you've got to start with recognition before you can start thinking about the solution.

• 1:28:53Mike Rowe?

  Well, look, I mean, anecdotally, I've heard from Carnegie Mellon and MIT, both of whom are kind of, I think, maybe saying, hey, we're certainly trades adjacent. I think Carnegie Mellon was really the country's first actual trade school.

• 1:29:11Speaker 02

  Oh, really?

• 1:29:11Mike Rowe?

  Yeah, and there's a real desire to kind of reconnect to that. So I think there's a role that the Ivy League could play as trade schools morph and evolve. But I also wanted to ask you about what individual companies are doing, in your estimation, that's moving the needle. I was looking at... Palantir, you know, Alex Karp,

• 1:29:34Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 1:29:35Mike Rowe?

  who just looks like a mad scientist and is easy to kind of dismiss at a glance is actually

• 1:29:40Speaker 02

  More so than Palmer Lucky?

• 1:29:42Mike Rowe?

  You know what? I, I would love to get them in the same room because both of them seem upset. I mean, they each named their company after a Tolkien creation, right? Andrill, the Sword of Power. Palantir, the Seeing Stone. But he is going straight into high schools and taking out like 30 kids at a time, you know, gifted kids and putting them in, I think he called it a meritocracy program. And he's teaching them like liberal arts, Western civilization, at the same time exposing them to these big engineering projects with real consequence. And they're going to go through this program in a couple of years. They'll have no debt.

• 1:30:23Mike Rowe?

  They'll be making a few hundred grand a year, working through it for a premier company. That's what I meant earlier when I'm like, I, I'm not exactly sure what I'm supposed to be doing with what's left of the useful part of my career. But I think, I think it has something to do with letting people know when a company gets it right, or when a government office gets it right. And I just can't imagine the skills gap is going to close unless it closes on a thousand fronts contemporaneously.

• 1:30:51Speaker 02

  So letting a thousand flowers bloom, trying lots of different things. And that's, that's kind of what our approach is, which is lots of different models for how we do this. We know that we need to go ahead and talk to kids in elementary school to get them excited about manufacturing. If you don't, by the time they get to kind of high school, you're, you've probably missed the boat for a huge number of them. We need to reinforce it with their parents, with their grandparents. We need to get them excited about what the opportunities are, and it needs to be repetitive. And so for us, I think that's one of the major opportunities is to continue to fund new and interesting programs that are all different in their own way, but you know, sort of a common backbone to them, which is we want it to be meaningful, we want it to be focused on the kids, focused on what the outcomes are for them, making sure that we're tying it together so there's a pipeline of excitement.

• 1:31:35Speaker 02

  That is, it doesn't just like, it's cool to go ahead and excited kids is in sixth or seventh grade, but if you don't touch them in eighth grade and ninth grade and 10th grade. They lose the fire and they'll get fired up about something else. And so programs like the program at Palantir, which I've heard about. Every company is sort of dealing with it in their own way, and that's great. We need to start investing resources and pulling the best of those models forward and sort of hyperscaling them across the country. And that'll allow us to sort of think about some, some positive outlook for, for closing that gap.

• 1:32:02Mike Rowe?

  Well, look, I'm probably out of my, I'm certainly out of my comfort zone, maybe out of my depth. You know, I'm, I'm talking to Google in a week or two. I'm talking to Nvidia. I'm gonna talk to BlackRock, who looks like they've got a big, giant investment they're contemplating in this space. And I'm talking to you. And I figure, I, we're all like throwing a lot of mud against the wall.

• 1:32:27Speaker 02

  Well, you've been talking about this problem for a long time.

• 1:32:29Mike Rowe?

  Seventeen years.

• 1:32:30Speaker 02

  I mean, I remember watching Dirty Jobs and talking about and being impressed by your ability to highlight the dignity, the honor, the challenge, the value of these roles. The first one I remember watching is you crawling around in some, underneath some house with the guy who was replacing, I don't know, it's the under part of a house. And it was super claustrophobic and I was just glad I wasn't there and there with you. And so you've done a great job for this. And I think you having these conversations will be incredibly important for the future.

• 1:32:58Mike Rowe?

  Well, the lesson from that show was that nobody wants a lecture. Nobody wants a sermon. There was a mission and I had my opinions about what I hoped would happen as a result of it. But until you get somebody's attention, until you, whether you entertain or satisfy curiosity, you just have to do something else. And that's why we went under the house, because optically it was a shit show. People, people couldn't turn away. And then they watch and then maybe they listen. And then maybe later you get permission to go, hey, it's me again.

• 1:33:32Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:33:33Mike Rowe?

  Right? That's what I hope to do with you guys. Make a more persuasive case for some of these 400,000 open jobs. And as we land the plane here, because I know you gotta go and save the world and whatnot. What do you think are the most enticing opportunities that exist in your portfolio for people who are willing to learn a skill that's truly in demand and go to work in earnest?

• 1:33:58Speaker 02

  There are a raft of new companies that are kicking off their work with that fusion of new tech capabilities and skilled trades. That is CNC machines, milling machines, automated processes, orchestration software, tying those together at the latest factories and building parts for the latest weapon systems. Incredible demand and a lot of them are designed to not require a lot of skills. You don't need to be, you know, a tradesman certified, 10 years experience to go in and do this. You can walk in the door, they will train you to run their software, you will learn how to go ahead and deliver these capabilities for the future. That is an incredible opportunity to sort of be at the cutting edge of what the next generation of trades is. There's also, if you want to work outside, if you want to work with your hands directly, there's still boatloads of programs.

• 1:34:42Speaker 02

  I would encourage you to check out our office anywhere you want, the industrial-based policy office, our workforce teams. Again, manages 41 different programs across the country. We've got a trade and a training program that's available for you. Most of the time, there's some sort of scholarship or paid stipend that goes along with it. So you don't have to do this for free, you don't have to do this at your own expense. We just want you to go ahead and give us the chance to convince you why this might be the right thing for you, why this can be the right thing for you to offer as service to the country, and ultimately what it means for your future and for your family. These are great jobs, there's honor in it, you can make good money, you can be happy, and you can feel the dignity of actually working with all of us as we're trying to go ahead and serve the nation.

• 1:35:21Mike Rowe?

  It seems unlikely Chuck, that we're going to have a more articulate government worker in here anytime soon.

• 1:35:29Speaker 01

  Whoa, whoa, wait a second here.

• 1:35:30Mike Rowe?

  So, I mean, if you have any parting questions, Mary, if there's anything you wish I would have asked this gentleman, shout it out now, because he's been here nearly 90 minutes and there is stuff to do. Going? Going? As you sift through all of those responses as a result of your invitation to bring people their best ideas, if it starts to feel overwhelming, Mike, just forward them to my info account.

• 1:36:02Speaker 02

  It'll be well cared for.

• 1:36:03Mike Rowe?

  And I will, I will give them all.

• 1:36:06Speaker 02

  Into the bin box.

• 1:36:06Mike Rowe?

  The attention they deserve.

• 1:36:10Speaker 02

  Thank you, Mike.

• 1:36:11Mike Rowe?

  I'm so grateful for your time. I mean it. I know you got a lot of plates that are spinning. And, um, look, I'm micro, you're macro. Your macro works. You're the government, man. I would love to find a way to thread that needle and work with you.

• 1:36:26Speaker 02

  Me too.

• 1:36:26Mike Rowe?

  I mean, I literally, I first offered in 2009. I wrote Barack Obama an open letter. I just started the foundation and you're old enough to remember, remember the 3 million shovel-ready jobs?

• 1:36:37Speaker 02

  Absolutely.

• 1:36:38Mike Rowe?

  Well, I said, look, man, I'm rooting for you and I love investing in the infrastructure. And I love the idea that you're creating these 3 million jobs, but you're gonna have a easier time selling them to a country who's enthused about picking up a shovel.

• 1:36:54Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:36:54Mike Rowe?

  Right? And I meant it, you know, you have to make a case for the work. You can't just go, oh, look, there, there's a job open. Go get it. And, uh, at this, uh, conference where I learned about these polymetallic nodules, um, you know, the president was there and Alex, I sat next to Alex Karp. That's when I learned about his project and there were 35 other CEOs in the room. And these guys collectively, Mike, pledged $93 billion to, uh, data center construction in Pennsylvania. Right? And it's just a deja vu all over again. I said to the president, look, man, I'm rooting for you.

• 1:37:36Mike Rowe?

  These 2 million new jobs that you're talking about, appearing as a result of reshoring and reinvigorating manufacturing, I think it's great, but what about the 450,000 open positions right now in manufacturing? Like, what do we do with that? And I was like the turd in the punch bowl, you know, just raising my hand going, look, it's $93 billion. Give me just a little, little piece of it, a tiny little sliver to make a more persuasive case for the very jobs that you're talking about creating. So I've been singing out of this hymn book for a while and it's awesome.

• 1:38:10Speaker 02

  We have a partner in our team in our office because we're really excited about the opportunity to actually make a difference in this front. And thrilled to have you talking about and talking about not just the skilled laborers thing, which has always been your jam, and we understand and appreciate that, but also the national security implications of this is incredibly important, that there's a unique angle in this, which at this time, and I think is going to be more important going forward.

• 1:38:33Mike Rowe?

  Well, just so you understand, you're on camera right now. This has all been recorded.

• 1:38:38Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:38:39Mike Rowe?

  I will take you up on that. And Mary Sullivan is sitting here taking notes, bearing witness. So we will darken your doorstep again.

• 1:38:46Speaker 02

  Please.

• 1:38:46Mike Rowe?

  And Scott, the Marine, will hopefully lead us to your office.

• 1:38:51Speaker 02

  Absolutely.

• 1:38:52Mike Rowe?

  Once again, for more enlightenment.

• 1:38:54Speaker 02

  Scott, get Mary's email so that I don't get ignored next time.

• 1:38:57Mike Rowe?

  Yeah, yeah. Don't send in to info.

• 1:38:59Speaker 02

  Thank you.

• 1:39:00Mike Rowe?

  What a pleasure to meet you again, to see you again, and thank you for doing what you're doing. I feel better knowing you're on the case.

• 1:39:06Speaker 02

  Thank you, Mike. It's my pleasure. Appreciate it.

• 1:39:08Mike Rowe?

  If you leave some stars, could you make it five? And before you go, could you please subscribe?

• 1:39:14Speaker 03

  If you leave some stars, could you make it five? And before you go, could you please subscribe? If you leave some stars, could you make it five? And before you go. Before you go. Could you please subscribe?

• 1:40:14Speaker 04

  What's that?

• 1:40:15Speaker 05

  My fresh detector.

• 1:40:16Speaker 04

  Uh, your what?

• 1:40:17Speaker 05

  There it is.

• 1:40:18Speaker 04

  What is it detecting?

• 1:40:20Speaker 05

  Fresh produce, fresh meat.

• 1:40:22Speaker 04

  OK, what happens if it detects something really fresh?

• 1:40:28Speaker 05

  Apparently, we celebrate. At Food Lion, you can count on fresh food at fresher prices when your fresh detector is going off. Head to your local Food Lion or shop at foodlion.com.