Mike Rowe knows dirty jobs. After all, he was the longtime host of the hit TV show “Dirty Jobs.”

And being in the U.S. military can often be a dirty job.

Rowe appeared Monday — Veteran’s Day — on “Fox & Friends” and told of how a meeting he had with an injured veteran changed his life.

He said he met Travis Mills, one of four surviving quadruple-amputees, while he was at a convention eight or nine years ago.

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Rowe said Mills didn’t have an “ounce of self-pity.”

“In a heartbeat you go from put-upon, in a hurry, trying to take care of your stuff to saying, ‘OK, let’s cancel that, let’s sit down,’ and I talked to Travis for an hour,” Rowe said.

“Some people hit the reset button to start their life over and some people get the reset button hit for them. And that was Travis. He just simply refused to quit.”

Then Rowe summed up the problem with the modern generation.

“Is there a greater meritocracy in the world? Is there a better example of true diversity? The thing that I’m most proud about when I go to bases when I visit with people, they are utterly colorblind. There’s no conversation about ‘trigger words.’ There’s no safe space. The military is not a safe space,” Rowe told a live Veterans Day studio audience, Fox reported.

“In the military, there’s a set of rules, there’s a different reality, and there’s a different commonality,” Rowe said.

Rowe is known to speak his mind. The host of “Somebody’s Gotta Do It,” appeared Thursday on Fox Business to promote his new book “The Way I Heard It.” On the show, Rowe was asked by host Stuart Varney what he thought about the $1.5 trillion federal student loan debt.

“We have unintendedly maligned an entire section of our workforce by promoting one form of education, in my opinion, at the expense of all of the other forms,” he said.

“Forty years ago, colleges needed a PR campaign,” Rowe added. “We needed more people to get into higher education, but when we gave the big push for college back the in ‘70s, we did it at the expense of alternative education. In other words, we told people, ‘If you don’t get your degree, you’re going to wind up turning a wrench.’ “

Rowe said the decision by many school systems to do away with shop and metal-working classes has led to a “skills gap” in which millions of vacant jobs have no qualified applicants.

“The skills gap today, in my opinion, is a result of the removal of shop class and the repeated message that the best path for the most people happens to be the most expensive path,” he said.

“This is why, in my opinion, we have $1.6 trillion of student loans on the books and 7.3 million open positions, most of which don’t require a four-year degree,” Rowe added. “We’re just disconnected. We’re rewarding behavior we should be discouraging. We’re lending money we don’t have to kids who are never going to be able to pay it back to train them for jobs that don’t exist anymore. That’s nuts.”