Transcript of Mike Rowe: How to Land Six-Figure Opportunities Doing “Dirty Jobs” | Career | YAPClassic New

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People just don't believe you can make 6 figures working with your hands. There are 8.7 million open jobs. Most of them don't require a 4-year degree. What they require is training and the mastery of a skill that's in demand.

A lot of people know you from your very, very famous show called Dirty Jobs.

Dirty Jobs became a hit in 2006. By 2008, it was the number 1 show on cable. There were 12 million people looking for jobs. But the crazy thing was on Dirty Jobs, Everywhere we went, we saw help wanted signs. Those jobs are real. They're not vocational consolation prizes for people who can't do the other thing.

How do you feel about following your passion?

Just because you love something doesn't mean you can't suck at it. Follow your dreams, follow your passion. The trap with that is—

Young Improviters, the best careers are not always built by chasing a perfect dream. Sometimes they're built by getting honest about where opportunity, skill, and hard work can actually take you. In this replay, I sit down with Mike Rowe, Emmy Award-winning TV host, producer, narrator, podcaster, and the creator and host of Dirty Jobs. Most people know Mike for spotlighting tough jobs and the people behind them, but what makes this conversation so powerful is learning how he thinks. Mike's career is full of unexpected turns, hard-earned perspective, and insights that challenge a lot of common career advice. In this episode, we dig into experiences that shaped him and the mindset that helped him build such an unconventional career path. Enjoy the CF Classic with Mike Rowe. Mike, welcome to Young and Profiting Podcast.

Thank you. Um, do I still qualify as young? I mean, profiting, I understand, but I'm not sure the young thing still applies, but I'll take it.

Well, you're definitely profiting and you are young at heart. I know that for sure. And I interview people of all ages. I'm really trying to get your wisdom and I know you've got so much to share today. A lot of people know you from your very, very famous show called Dirty Jobs. But I found out that you had a really extensive career before that, and you did so many different jobs in the '90s. So talk to us about all the different experiences that you've had that led you up to Dirty Jobs.

I grew up on a little farm outside of Baltimore. My, my granddad lived next to us and he was a magician, not a literal magician, but he was a tradesman. He only went to the 7th grade, but he, he could build or fix or fabricate anything from scratch. I'm not even kidding. He could take your stereo apart behind you there and put it back together blindfolded. He just had that chip. So, um, as a boy, I grew up with a front row seat, uh, to all kinds of different work, all kinds of trade work, and just an incredible work ethic, both in my dad, my granddad, and my mother, by the way, who just finished her fourth book at 87. The woman has written every day for 67 years now. But the point is, I got really good cards as a kid. We didn't have a lot of money or anything like that, but I, I just had a great example of what work looked like and a really great exposure to the trades. And I was pretty sure I was going to follow in my pop's footsteps. That's what I wanted to do. But the handy gene, tragically, is recessive.

And the things that came easily to him didn't come easily to me. It was my pop who suggested that I could be a tradesman if I really wanted to. I just needed to get a, a different toolbox. And that's, uh, that's when I realized that being a tradesman is, is really a state of mind more than a mastery of a specific set of skills. It's both, obviously, but I think today a lot of people really think about being in the trades in a a very narrow way. Yeah, it's, it's very much a state of mind. And, um, when I got it around my— when I accepted the fact, honestly, that just because you, just because you love something doesn't mean you can't suck at it, uh, and, and, and started to put together a different toolbox, you know, in a, in a community college and, uh, with a couple of really great mentors and The way I just kind of was able to Forrest Gump my way into the TV business was, was a real blessing. And it, and it started with the attitude of touch everything like it's hot. Don't swing for the fences.

It's not about home runs in this game. It's about singles and doubles and do as much work as you can and in as many different categories as you're able. And so I, I got a liberal arts background, a healthy sense of curiosity, and consequently I tried a lot of different things. And the ones that stuck, I doubled down on. And before long, I had my toolbox in order. And yeah, I was singing in the opera, I was doing infomercials, I was guest starring in sitcoms, I was doing pilots for talk shows. And God, I wasn't terribly proud of the work, but I wasn't ashamed of it either. And spent probably 15 years probably doing maybe 200 different jobs in the entertainment business before Dirty Jobs even, even came along. So, wow, there's a weird but bright line on, on my resume that I would call before Dirty Jobs and after Dirty Jobs, because really everything, everything changed in a huge way once that show hit.

Yeah. And you were getting so many experiences, you were doing so many things, and I read somewhere that you were really treating TV as a mercenary, right? And that you weren't worried about the quality of work, you just thought of it as work. So talk to us about having that kind of a mindset and how that actually helped you when it's such a competitive world to be in. You became really successful where so many people struggle to find success as an actor and things like that.

Well, it helped me for as long as it helped me, and then it didn't. And that's the thing, really. I mean, I'm— the thing about advice is that I've lived long enough to know that the best advice I've ever gotten only applied at the time I needed to hear it. And I don't know who's listening to this conversation right now necessarily, or really what they need to hear. All I know for sure is that I, I live two very different lives in the course of the career that I've had, and, and both were fun and both were necessary, um, but neither could have happened contemporaneously. So the mercenary thing you read about was probably me talking about my foundation today and, and, and how I squared this kind of bloody do-gooderism with the business of actually making a buck in an industry that is in fact very mercenary. And, um, in those conversations, I, I typically say something like, look, I think there's, I think there's a missionary position and a mercenary position in all things, and I think both those positions are somewhat underrated. Um, but prior to Dirty Jobs, it was all mercenary.

I was a freelancer in every sense of the word. By the way, do you know the etymology of that, where freelance comes from?

No.

I didn't either. And when I, and when I learned about it, it really resonated with me that the word is actually medieval. It, it refers to, uh, a knight who served no lord or no king. His lance, in other words, was for sale. He was a freelance, um, not an inexpensive one, but he was free to work for anybody he wanted to. And that, that attitude, uh, combined with the tools in the box my pop told me to assemble, um, a willingness to relocate whenever necessary, those things really informed the first 15 years of my career. And, and I loved that life, you know. I, I loved looking at every job like it had a beginning and a middle and an end. I, I enjoyed doing the best work that I could, but I also love knowing that I wasn't going to be tied to any particular project the way success demands. And so I carved out a really fun niche in the entertainment business where I owned virtually nothing. Uh, I was working on multiple projects at the same time. I had clothing deals, for instance, with like American Eagle and Nordstrom's, and different shows had different deals.

So I, I didn't really own any clothes except the ones I picked up in whatever town I landed in. I, I was working for American Airlines at the time. Doing a traveling show, so I had a free pass to travel anywhere in the world I wanted to. I had deals with hotels, you know, and so I was like a nomad for 15 years. I flew wherever the work was. I did the best I could on the job. And I mean, not to sound too cynical about it, but honestly, in those days when I was in my late 20s and 30s, I was affirmatively looking for work and ideas that had been so, so poorly conceived that no amount of, of execution could possibly save them. And so that's the, that's the thing nobody talks about in Hollywood. There's so many ideas and so many of them are bad. And if you, if you associate yourself with these ideas that don't turn into hits, but do a good job working on them, you'll get a good reputation and you'll get hired. For virtually— I got hired a lot. I got hired for a lot of things I auditioned for, and I never really got punished for the fact that most of those things didn't actually work long-term.

And so by the time I was 35, I realized I'd been taking my, uh, my retirement in early installments. I'd been traveling a lot, working maybe 7 months a year on projects that didn't really matter too much to me, but I didn't care because at that point in my life, it, it all made perfect sense. I had made enough money to save and be comfortable, and I had enough time to enjoy myself. And so for a long time, I, I thought I'd cracked the code, and I was And I was pretty satisfied with all that until I wasn't.

Yeah.

And then until you got famous basically with Dirty Jobs. So I was actually pretty surprised to find out that you actually were the one who pitched Dirty Jobs to different networks and you're the one who came up with the idea. I had always thought you were just like the host of the show. Mm-hmm. So talk to us about how you got the idea for Dirty Jobs and you know, what, what was it like to actually bring that to market?

It was very strange. Um, and again, you know, I, I don't want to take too much credit in the sense that I don't want your listeners to think that this was my wish fulfillment and that I had a plan and that through patience and hard work and determination and persistence, I was finally able to realize this plan. That, um, that would make for a good book, but that's honestly not what happened. What happened was I was 42 and I was living that freelance life and everything was great. I had moved up to San Francisco to work, uh, temporarily as a host for a show called Evening Magazine, which is one of those local shows that comes on after the news. And I was the host of this show, and it was a pretty good gig. I would go to wineries up in Napa, and I would go to museum openings, and I would basically host the show every night from these different locations. It could be anywhere. And, um, I had settled into the job and my mom called me. I was sitting in my cubicle at KPIX here in San Francisco, and she called to say, Michael, your, your grandfather turned 90 years old yesterday, as you know.

And, you know, I was just thinking he won't be alive forever. And wouldn't it be great, she said, if before he died he could turn on his television and see you doing something that looked like work. And so remember, my pop is the guy who could build a house without a blueprint. He's the guy who can— he was a tradesman's tradesman. And I laughed a lot when I think about what he must have thought, you know, when he saw me singing in the opera or, or selling things in the middle of the night on the QVC cable shopping channel, or doing all of these jobs, you know, that I had been doing that I didn't really care about, that made absolutely no sense to his brain. So my mom calls and, you know, kind of gives me this good-natured challenge, as she always does. She still does, in fact. But she was right, you know. I'm like, why does— why does Evening Magazine always have to be hosted from a winery or a— or a museum or— or opening night at a theater or something? Why can't it be hosted from a factory floor? Or a construction site or a sewer.

And that was the question I asked my boss back in 2002. I said, I want to host tomorrow night's episode from a, from a sewer. He said, I, he said, I don't care, do whatever you want. Nobody's watching the show anyway. So I, I took my cameraman, I went into the sewers of San Francisco, and what happened down there is a book that I, that I got around to writing a few years ago. And the massive lesson that I learned down there was that I, I was basically unable to do my job between just an endless river of crap that kept knocking me over and rats the size of a loaf of bread and millions of roaches that completely covered us. It was so disgusting and so impossible to be a host that I, I stopped trying, and instead I just asked the sewer inspector who was down there sort of as my guide if I could, if I could help him do whatever it was he was doing. He was replacing the bricks in the wall. That was basically his job. So my camera guy filmed me working alongside this sewer inspector, and our conversation was captured on the video.

When I looked at it later, I thought, you know, there's something here. It's kind of interesting. To learn, not from a host or from an expert. You got to remember Discovery back in 2003, 2002. I mean, reality TV wasn't even a thing. They, they were all about, um, you know, Jane Goodall and, and Richard Attenborough and Jacques Cousteau and these, and these experts and these scientists, and they would put them on television and they were voices of authority. I thought when I looked at this footage of me working with Gene Cruz, the, the sewer inspector back then, it was like, why, why does the authority figure have to be the host? Why can't they just be a regular person? And if that happens, then what am I if I'm not the host? And the answer was, well, maybe you're an apprentice or a guest or an avatar or a, or a cipher of some kind. It, it might not seem like a big distinction today, but back then it was It was huge. And, and this idea, like, after 15 years of impersonating a host, if, if all of a sudden I could work instead as a guest and find a dynamic where I could spend time with regular people doing real work, you know, would anybody watch that?

That, that was the question. Well, holy crap, man, I put that segment, went on the air, on Evening Magazine, and the response was telling. It wasn't that people said, God, that was enjoyable. People were horrified. They were horrified. They were trying to eat dinner, you know, and I'm crawling around in a river of crap, and it was just totally inappropriate for that show. In fact, I was fired, um, ultimately for putting that on the air. But the feedback that I'll never forget came from hundreds of viewers who just said, hey Mike, if you think that was dirty, wait till you see what my dad does, or my, my pop, 'Or my brother, my cousin, my mom, my sister, my niece, my nephew. Wait till you see what they do. Why don't you come and blah, blah, blah, you know, drive the poo truck at the zoo or replace a lift pump in a pumping chamber at a wastewater treatment plant and so forth.' And I just thought I'd never seen that kind of reaction to anything I'd ever done on TV. It wasn't thumbs up or thumbs down. That didn't matter. It was like, 'Hey, 'Come and let me show you what I do.' And that was the moment for me.

I thought, 'Man, there's something here.' And even though CBS let me go, uh, they let me take the tape with me, and I got their permission to try and sell a show. I called it Somebody's Gotta Do It back then. It was just based on this, this one segment that I had done, but Um, I mean, everybody said no, by the way. I took it to every network, every place you can take a show to sell it. Um, the only people who didn't say no were Discovery, and they didn't say yes. They just said, look, we'll take— we'll let you do a pilot, like 3 episodes. They hired me to be sort of the Discovery guy. They wanted me to go on expeditions around the world and see the Titanic and climb Kilimanjaro with experts. And I was totally into that. And they let me narrate pretty much everything they did for about 15 years there. But this thing we call Dirty Jobs was not supposed to be a hit. It wasn't supposed to be a series. It certainly wasn't supposed to be a franchise. And it sure as hell wasn't supposed to launch, uh, 38 different shows.

You did. All those things happened. And, um, as, as they started to happen, I realized for the first time in my life that I was actually working on something that I did care about. And I began to take it way more seriously. And that's when I stopped taking my retirement in early installments. And that's, that's when I went to work in earnest, truly. For the first time in my life, when that thing went on Discovery and hit and we were overwhelmed again with the same response, only this time it was thousands of letters. That's when everything changed because my mom called and, uh, told me to do something that looked like work.

I love that story. And you just mentioned that like you don't love to give advice, but I've heard you give some advice where you say, don't chase your passion, chase opportunity. And I think when you first were thinking about this Dirty Jobs concept, you were really chasing that opportunity of the fact that you were getting such a great reaction from people and it was exciting, and then that turned into your passion. So I'd just love to hear a bit about that for all the young people listening. How do you feel about following your passion?

You know, I— so much of what eventually came out of Dirty Jobs was an alternate compendium for living. And it was somewhat contrarian. I had seen, and I'm sure you and all your viewers have too, these successories, right? They hang on walls everywhere. You know, they say things like, you know, stay the course. And it'll be a picture of, you know, some guys maybe rowing in a shell or kayaking and, or maybe sailing a big ship and And, or maybe something about persistence or determination or, or passion. To your point, you know, that's a big one. Follow your dreams, follow your passion. Well, at some point during Dirty Jobs, when it really blew up, I started to realize that the people I was working with almost always had a different take on conventional wisdom. So, you know, stay the course is a great example. It makes great sense to tell somebody to stay the course if they're going in the right direction. If they're not, it's probably the worst thing in the world you can tell them to do. Never quit, never give up. You know, the, the bookshelves are filled with books written by very successful people who ultimately attribute their persistence to their success.

And the trap with that is not that it's untrue, it's that it's not always true. In fact, it's not even true a lot. It's true enough to sell the book that says Never Quit, you know, but it's the same thing that will keep you standing at a slot machine for days on end. It pays off enough. And so I started to think, look, there's got to be another version of every bit of conventional wisdom I've ever heard that's also true, but merely applicable at a different time to a different person under a different circumstance. So to answer your question, if the, if the subject is passion and the topic is your dream, well, I'd wager most people listening right now have been told from an early age, just as I was growing up, to follow your dream and to never give up on your passion and to be resilient and to be stubborn in this regard, right? And, and boy, sometimes that, that is great advice, but my God, the evidence to the contrary is voluminous. We've all seen American Idol and we've all heard, you know, Beyoncé and, uh, Lady Gaga and Cher and all the rock stars of our day say, look, never give up on that dream.

I've heard them say it when they're standing there clutching their Grammys, you know. And yet, what's the real lesson from American Idol? The real lesson isn't the winner. It's the thousands of people who audition. And it's the many, many, many hundreds of those people, uh, many of whom are in their early 20s, who realize that incredibly they're, they're not going to be the American Idol. In fact, many of them realize, to their wonder and horror, that they can't sing at all. And they realize it on national television as they're standing there watching their dreams crumble around them, watching their passion drain out of them when they realize Like I said earlier, just because you love something doesn't mean you can't suck at it. And conversely, just because you don't feel passionate about a thing doesn't mean you can't change the way you feel about something. We're not— like, that stuff is not written in the stars. It's not decided for us. Were it otherwise, then I would have followed in my pop's footsteps. I would be a contractor today. I'd be a general contractor. And modesty aside, I bet I'd be a good one. I'd be building homes and I'd be working maybe as an architect, and I'd be in the field that I always thought I was supposed to be in.

But that's just not how life works. And many times we'll wind up with, with hopes and dreams that don't complement our skills. And so why do we always default to this idea that says, well, you just have to get more skilled? You just have to, uh, find a new way to master the thing you want to master. I mean, that's fine and well and good for some, but there are plenty of other people, I think, who ought to be told, hey, why don't you think differently about what you're passionate about? I, I get a lot of pushback in this conversation, Hala, because, because it sounds like what I'm saying is screw your dreams. I don't care about your dreams. Don't follow your dreams. I'm— and, and it's true, I am saying all those things, and I, and, and I say them every day, uh, many times to people who apply to our scholarship program. But I'm not saying your dreams aren't important. What I'm saying is your dreams are way too important. Your passion is way too important to follow. You don't follow a thing that's important. If you identify a thing that's important, you take it with you, you put it in your pocket and you say, okay, I'm a passionate person and I'm passionate about learning how to build homes.

But if I can't— if I can't crack that nut, am I really going to spend 50 years beating my head against the wall or am I going to change my course? So look, it's a hard thing to do. On your own. And, and that's why friends are important, and that's why, uh, books are important, and that's why the unexamined life is a tragedy. You, you, you have to kick your own tires, and sometimes you just have to pick up the phone in your cubicle so your mom can tell you, no, not that way, this way, try this instead. Wouldn't it be fun if your pop could see you doing something that looked like work? She didn't call and say, "Hey, you know what you should think about doing is maybe changing the topography of the Discovery Channel by taking reality TV at its literal definition and reimagining yourself as a guest instead of a host." Had she said that, I would have hung up on her and told her to stop drinking so early in the day. But all she said was, "Do something that looks like work." It was just the right thing for her to say.

At just the right time for me to hear it. At 42. At 42. Had this happened to me 10 years earlier, I wouldn't have been able— I would not have been able to handle the, the success of a show like Dirty Jobs. I just wasn't mentally prepared for it.

Yeah.

So you never know.

I just love the realistic approach that you take just to life and careers. And I feel like it's really smart because I see it all the time. People think they're gonna become TikTok stars or Instagram stars or celebrities and actors and actresses, and they waste so much time and they end up just not doing any work because they're waiting for like that big opportunity and they don't realize that it's all the hard work and the opportunities that don't look sexy that are actually gonna get you to where you want to go.

Uh, it's back to cookie cutter advice, unfortunately. You know, I just, we all need to hear what exactly what you just said at some point in our life. But we don't all need to hear that at the same time because we're on a trip. This is a journey. And it's very— I just had this conversation with my mom again, not to drag her back into it, but, but it's really apropos. This woman wrote every day for 60 years. I'm not even kidding. Her dream was to become a published writer, and she gave up on that dream after 40 years of beating her head against the wall. But she never stopped writing. She kept doing it because she knew the work. She found a passion in the work. Her dream of being a best-selling author was out the window, right, until she turned 80. And then, wow, she sold a manuscript and it went to number 4 on the New York Times bestseller list. It's on the wall behind me over there. I don't know if I can see it, but there it is.

That's so amazing.

Yeah. And then 2 years later, she frickin' did it again.

Wow.

And then I'm just going to show you. I mean, if you want the persistence rap, this is the story. She's 80 and she writes a book called About My Mother. She's 82 and she writes About Your Father. That thing also took off. Top 10. Then she writes Vacuuming in the Nude and Other Ways to Get Attention, which goes to number 1. And then she just wrote her fourth, Oh No, Not the Home: True Stories About Life in This Retirement Community. I, I don't mean to turn this into a commercial for her books. What I mean to say is, what are we to learn from a woman who wrote every day for 60 years before she got what she wanted? It, it, it actually contradicts and makes my point at the same time. Based on that, I said, Mom, so what do you tell a writer who comes to you and says, do you have any advice? Because it's, it's, it's a very heavy thing. If you encourage somebody to do what you did, the odds are very good they're never going to get published and they're going to spend 60 years making little rocks out of big rocks.

But if you discourage them then you're this sweet little America's grandmother who's going around killing people's dreams. How do you— how do you square that? And she said, oh, Michael, you know what I do? I tell them that I encourage them the way somebody in the crowd of a marathon might encourage a runner. I just stand there and I applaud as they go by, and maybe I offer them a sip of cool water, you know, to make their journey a little more pleasant in that moment. But that's all I can do as somebody who finally got to do what she wanted to do at 87. All I can do is encourage you at whatever point you are in your race that, you know, you better be enjoying the race because There is no guarantee that you're gonna hit the finish line, so you better be having fun right now. And so there's something in that.

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So I wanna switch gears here. I wanna talk about skilled trades and you know, we're here talking about how it's really hard to become a famous actor, famous podcaster, whatever it is. You're not really pushing young kids to do that. You are actually pushing young kids to keep the lights on, keep the water running in America. And you've got this foundation, the Mike Rowe Foundation. You've done like over, I think, $12 million in scholarships. Which is absolutely amazing. And on your website, you say that America has declared a war on work and the casualties are all around us. So how has America made work the enemy?

Well, in a lot of ways. I think one way is we've told kids that job satisfaction is a result of their ability to make their dreams a reality. It kind of starts with that. And so you put this incredible burden on a kid to say, look, if you want to be happy with your life, you need to identify right now the thing that's going to make you happy, and then we'll embark upon a plan to borrow vast sums of money in order to get you the proper credentials that will permit you to pursue this goal, right? That's, that's baked in. It's kind of like, you know, not to digress, but it's It's like a soulmate, you know. If you're out there looking for your soulmate, that's like looking for your dream job. It's really hard to find, you know. Better to find a job and then craft it into the thing you want. Better to find a good and decent person you can trust and then, and then find a way to love him or her, right? It's— I know I'm saying the same thing in a slightly different way, but we've got it so inculcated in, in the minds of this generation that they could be the next American Idol.

All you have to do is want it bad enough. So yeah, to that I do say bullshit. I'm sorry, but wanting a thing is not enough. So the first order of business is to get a more realistic set of expectations. Then you have to take an honest look at the opportunities that exist Again, I'm not saying ignore your dreams. I'm just saying take a breath and just push them aside for a minute and look around to where the opportunities really and truly are. Right now, there are 8.7 million open jobs.

Mm.

Most of them don't require a 4-year degree. What they require is training and the mastery of a skill that's in demand. That's not my opinion. That's just the way it is. Other facts worth thinking about are the $1.7 trillion in student loans that are currently on the books. That's a fact. It's a fact that most of the people who hold that debt don't even have a degree. That debt includes people who got halfway through a college experience and threw their hands up and said no. Well, yeah, you can walk away from the university, but you can't walk away from that debt. It's a fact that many people who did graduate in their chosen field are either not working at all or not working in their chosen field, and that debt is real to them too. So I spend a lot of time saying, look, that amount of debt didn't happen by accident, and that amount of open positions in our country, many of which are in the skilled trades, that didn't happen by accident. It happened because we told a whole generation that you can have whatever you want if you want it bad enough.

And then we took shop class out of high school. Maybe you're too young to remember shop class, but I'm sure some of our listeners do. I mean, when I was in high school, sure, you took music and you took English and math and all the normal stuff, and, but then you could walk down the same hallway and stick your head in a wood shop or an auto shop. Or a metal shop. And even if those things, those pursuits weren't your dream, even if they weren't really of interest, uh, you could at least see them. You could at least know that, oh, that's what work looks like. Those jobs are real. They're not vocational consolation prizes for people who can't do the other thing. They're actually really important. And we're not gonna have much of a country if that skills gap isn't, isn't filled. But it didn't matter. We, we took shop class out of high school, and over 40 years or so, we just drilled it into our heads that, that trade schools and the kinds of jobs that a trade school education can lead to are somehow subordinate to a TikTok influencer or a successful podcaster or a successful TV host or an accountant or somebody on Wall Street or down the list it goes.

So we're in the fix we're in right now because we've been lending money we don't have to kids who never are going to be able to pay it back to perpetuate dreams that aren't going to be realized. So what does that mean to me? That goes back to the missionary position, which which I had not, uh, I had not thought about really until Dirty Jobs became a hit, like a real hit, in 2006. And then by 2008, it was, it was the number one show on cable when our country went into a recession, um, a bad one. And that's when all of this started. I saw the unemployment numbers every single day. At its worst, there were 12 million people looking for, looking for jobs. But the crazy thing was, on, on Dirty Jobs, everywhere we went, we saw help wanted signs. And so I would have these conversations with, you know, a lot of small business owners who, you know, would welcome me and my crew into their place of work, and we would sit and we would talk after filming all day long. And it was always the same story, you know, when I said, what's your, what's your biggest challenge?

It Finding people who are enthusiastically willing to either hit the reset button and learn a skill that's in demand, show up early, stay late, you know, it was just— I just heard it constantly. And then the Bureau of Labor and Statistics came out with this stat that really freaked everybody out. They were like, there are 2.3 million open positions in 2009 that employers can't fill. Even though you got 12 million people out of work, you've got all of these jobs, many of which are a straight path to a six-figure income, and nobody wanted them. So Microworks started as a, uh, as a PR campaign for those jobs. It turned into a trade resource center. Fans of Dirty Jobs helped me build this online destination where anybody could go and look at the opportunities that existed in all kinds of different trades. And then it became the scholarship program you mentioned. We award Work Ethic scholarships. We do a few million every year, and they're only for trade schools. And again, there's, there's nothing wrong with a 4-year education. I have one, actually. It served me well. But in 1984, 2 years at a community college and 3 years in a university cost me $12,900.

Same exact course load today in the same schools is close to $90 grand.

Wow.

It's just no longer tenable. And so today, Microworks, it's still a PR campaign for a bunch of good jobs that people aren't excited about, but it's also a scholarship fund. And, uh, it's also become— and I don't know how this happened, but I woke up one morning and it was, it was the sun in my solar system. It was the thing that has had been there longer than any other thing. I'm working on 3 different shows. I got a podcast, I got books, I got to be— I've got a great business and a fun life. But my mother still makes fun of me now because she's like, oh, Michael, Your grandfather would be so proud of you. No, this is the thing in your life. This is the— this is the thing that makes you not an asshole.

Yeah, it's awesome what you're doing. Honestly, it's awesome what you're doing for so many kids. It's awesome how you are basically trying to change culture in America, because a lot of this is just our culture and what we value in terms of what is an acceptable job, right? So when you are on Dirty Jobs, what were some of the stereotypes that you saw about blue-collar work and Dirty Jobs that you feel like were just so inaccurate that you want to share with people?

Great question. Consciously, it didn't occur to me for a while because the truth is I had become disconnected from some really primal and fundamental things that as a boy I was very mindful of. This is, you know, not to put myself on a couch, but it was, was really interesting You know, as a teenager, I knew where my food came from. I was always on a farm at some point helping bring the food in. I knew where my energy came from. I was very close to people who worked in the mines, people who worked in the oil fields. I had a real appreciation for the miracle of flicking a switch and actually seeing the lights come on and flushing the toilet and watching the crap go away. I was like, I was gobsmacked by that as a kid. And what happens in life, you know, if you're— we get busy, we all just get busy. And it's so easy to lose your sense of wonder and appreciation for the miracle of our infrastructure, the miracle of affordable electricity, and really the way that we're all Similarly addicted to smooth roads and indoor plumbing and, right, heating and air conditioning and all that stuff.

So I only mention it because by the time I was 42, I had lost all of that on a personal level. You know, I just, I just wasn't in touch anymore with a lot of people in the trades the way I used to be. And I had been freelancing the way I described for all those years. And to be honest, I was kind of arrogant, I think, in the sense that I thought I had truly cracked the code. I had figured it out. And I was comfortable in all of that. Well, my mom makes that phone call to me, and I go in the sewer, and then Discovery orders it, and then it turns into this hit. And then the honest answer to your question is that that's when my— education started when I was 42, 43 years old. And what happens is, if you, if you spend 200 nights a year flying around working with dirty jobbers and small business people who are doing this kind of work, usually out of sight and, and out of mind, um, you, you learn more than you think you'll learn. It's not just about Oh, what is that job?

How does that work? It's more like, well, who is that guy and why is he doing what he's doing? And the answer to your question is, if you're actually curious and if you're me, then when you start to get reconnected to these things that you know are important, I mean, this sounds uncharacteristically earnest. Of me, but, but it's true. It, it made me grateful in, in a way, not just for my job or for my career. It literally made me grateful to know that Gene Cruz is in the sewers making polite society possible in San Francisco, and that Bob Combs is running his pig farm outside of Las Vegas in a way that's not only environmentally friendly, but, but potentially a model for a lot of other farms. And, and I just found myself genuinely engaged and interested in a lot of things that I, that I had forgotten about. And that's what brings you to the, the fact that, good God, why are there so many stigmas and stereotypes and myths and misperceptions around this work? Why, for instance, are people so skeptical and and, and dubious that you can make $180,000 a year welding.

Today, I know dozens of people who do in all different types of welding. I know plumbers who make $250,000, $300,000 a year, plenty of them. Some have come through my own foundation. So when you say what kind of myths, you know, I think the first one is that people just don't believe you can make six figures working with your hands. Well, you can make a lot more than that.

Yeah.

People don't believe there are any opportunities in the trades for women. That's insane. Companies are falling over themselves now to hire young women who want to learn these kinds of, of skills. There's a long list of, of things that inform our ideas and, and prejudices. You know, that, that whole Varsity Blues scandal That didn't happen around trade schools. That happened because parents were completely convinced that it was their job to do anything they had to do in order to get their kid into the right school. So these ideas are with us, these beliefs are with us, and like most dangerous beliefs, they're not wholly untrue. There's truth in everything, but there is, there is no truth in the idea that the best path for the most people is, is going to be the most expensive path, or that this whole category of jobs that does require people to get up early and stay late and work hard are in, in some way subordinate to these other jobs. I, I would just say that if we want a balanced workforce, and believe me, we need one, then we have to stop thinking about you know, blue collar versus white collar.

Yeah, the color of collars is— who cares? That ship sailed. We're entering a new era, and it's going to be defined by AI and robotics, and it's going to be defined by, you know, what I used to call the muddy boots architect, people who, who can work with their hands and think with their brain and are willing to do both. That's really where the opportunities are. In my view today. Not all of them, but those are the ones that have been underserved, uh, pushed aside. And as a result, I get— not a week goes by where I don't get a phone call that I would call, uh, chilling. I, I got a call not long ago from a guy who runs an organization called Blue Forge Alliance. Does this ring any bells?

No.

Okay. So the Blue Forge Alliance oversees something called the American Submarine Industrial Base. That base is a collection of 15,000 individual companies, some large, some small, but all of whom collectively are responsible for building, uh, half a dozen nuclear-powered submarines over the next decade. Virginia and Columbia class. These things are mind-boggling. The tech, the skill that it takes to build one. They're longer than the Washington Monument is tall. In fact, they, they build them vertically, which is a trip to watch. Point is, this guy calls and he says, yeah, so they advertise on my podcast, full disclosure now, uh, but he says, look, we need to hire in the next 9 years, 100,000 tradespeople.

Mm.

100,000. Now, that's incredible. I mean, there's already a skills gap, and every major company in this country who relies on skilled labor is currently struggling. But I hadn't heard a number that big yet. And this guy says to me, you know, we've been looking all over the place for these tradespeople. Do you know where they are? And I laughed and I said, well, yeah, actually I do. I know exactly where they are. And he said, where? And I said, they're in the 8th grade, man. They're in the 8th grade. And so what's happening in the country right now is that companies are beginning to realize they need to make a more persuasive case for a whole bunch of good jobs that are really important to all of us. And they need to do that in junior high and high school.

Mm-hmm.

On the other hand, right now in real time, as I'm talking to you, we need to make a more persuasive case for those 8.5 million jobs that currently exist, which is all a long way of saying I don't know how many people who are listening to this thing should be working in the trades, but I can tell you that the opportunities are absolutely real and there's never been a better time to at least kick the tires in that world and, and, and see if it makes sense to your brain. Because we've helped 2,200 people get the training they need. And, and their stories, their stories are way more persuasive than my own. And I hear them every day.

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I feel like that's the point that I wanna get across in this podcast is that all of us are so focused. A lot of us, like I'm an online entrepreneur, I have a social media agency, I have a podcast network, I have this podcast. I basically have like 3 businesses. This and I'm an online entrepreneur, but I excel at those things. I'm a great marketer. It's always come really easily for me, but I have peers that I've seen that, for example, like wanna be a doctor or wanna be a lawyer and they've been studying for, you know, their tests and they just keep studying and they keep studying and they can never pass the test and they can never pass the test. And then they end up just studying and never working is what I've seen. Like a lot of people fall into this pattern. And to your point, what we were talking about way earlier in this conversation, it's like, it's okay to pivot. It's okay to like stop and think what other opportunities are out there that I may have not really dreamed about doing, but are really lucrative and skilled trades. Um, I had Codie Sanchez on the show a couple times.

Do you know who she is?

I don't tell me.

Well, she's awesome. She's somebody you should know because it's kind of like in your world and she talks about boring businesses. And she's all about finding and buying boring businesses, main street businesses. And so she'll, uh, teach people how to, you know, value a business and kind of take it over and to stop worrying about just having a sexy business. Uh, you can buy a roofing company and become a multimillionaire or a window cleaning company or a landscaping company or a laundromat, right? So it's just like real jobs doesn't have to be sexy, doesn't have to be online. Can make you a lot of money. So I'd love to, you know, hear some stories from you in terms of real entrepreneurs that are doing incredible work that you've met either on Dirty Jobs or maybe the students that come out of your scholarships and what they've been able to achieve and how, uh, becoming an entrepreneur in this space is actually a really great financial opportunity.

My God, there's so many. Um, please hook me up with Ms. Sanchez.

I, I will. I will. She's awesome.

Yeah, I'd love to meet her. Um, but I'd love to know too, before I answer you, how— I mean, you just described what you do in a, in a pretty broad-based way, but like, if, if you really distill it, if you had a business card, what would it, what would it say? What's it come down to for you vocationally?

Um, I scale personal brands, I guess, is like my, my main thing. Monetize personal brands, scale personal brands.

Okay. Um, so I would go back to, like, I think one of the very first things that came out when we started talking, which was my pop, if he were still around, would say, oh, this woman, this Hollow woman, yeah, she's a, uh, she's a tradeswoman, clearly. And if you pressed him, he would say, well, think about how she approaches work. She has many different clients. She advises them in, in different ways depending on their needs. She's a jobber, you know, she probably has short-term contracts with some, longer-term contracts with others. She's probably paid on her results at some point. You know, at some point you're going to say, well, if I grow your business to this degree, you know, how can I participate? Or are you purely time and materials? I don't know. No wrong answer either way, but Those are all questions that tradespeople with an entrepreneurial bent will ask themselves. So I look at myself, I think, much the same way you do in the sense that I do a lot of different things, but I'm really not trying to define the work by any one thing. That's why I went out of my way to say— I don't know when it happened, but for Microworks to become the, the sun in my solar system was a big deal because that had never happened before.

Even when Dirty Jobs was at its peak, that was never the main thing. That was a big thing, but my relationship with Ford was, was bigger actually for a while, and then with Caterpillar, and then publishing, and then speaking. And so I, I, I realized, you know what, you're Let the plates spin, you know. Every now and then one's going to fall and shatter, but who cares? You know, you got a lot of plates in the air. Most of the jobbers I know, most of the tradespeople I know, think the same way. Some, some, some jobs are going to be pretty, pretty lush. Others are going to be a nightmare. You just, you just don't know, but you're going to move on from one to the next to the next anyway. And so That's just a long way of saying, I think one of the things really missing from the conversation today, whether you want to be an influencer or whether you want to be a plumber, the question is, are you an entrepreneur? Do you think like a freelancer? Do you even like the whole notion of a gig economy? You know, because the gig economy, that's under siege today.

Freelancing is under siege here in California. You know, it's a, it's a real thing. There's a thing called AB 15. It's a, it's an assembly bill that turned into something called the PRO Act, which is currently in Congress. And there's a giant effort in this country to discourage people from freelancing. They want more employees. They— that's the relationship that you know, a lot of people are being pushed into. And I think it's kind of tragic because it, it kills their entrepreneurial spirit. So to answer your question, I, I, I got a call the other day from— and this happens all of the time because early on in Microworks, there was nobody but me to tell anecdotal stories of, of dirty jobbers and things that I had seen, you know. But what's, what's happening now, and, and And the reason the foundation is so robust is that for the first time, I'm able to go back 5 or 6 years ago to check in with somebody who we helped and ask questions like, so how's it going? And what I do is I bring a small crew with me, and I've been recording the answers to that question.

Oh my God, the stories are amazing. There was a guy Jake, who wanted to be a welder, and he filled out the Work Ethic Scholarship. There, there's some hoops you have to jump through. My, my scholarship, full disclosure, is a, you know, it's kind of a hassle. You gotta, you gotta make a case for yourself. You have to write an essay, you have to make a video, you got to give me references, all the things you do in real life. It's amazing how, how many people get scared away by that. But the people who don't are serious. And, and this guy, I wound up giving him, I think, maybe $7,000, and he got his welding certificate. When I checked back, the story was, well, I'll tell you what I did. Um, my question was, are you still welding? He said, well, yes and no. Um, I took the welding certificate, MIG and TIG welding. I got hired by a couple of, uh, automotive companies, and that went great. And then I met a guy who wanted me to underwater weld. And so I learned how to underwater weld. That's a whole different set of muscles.

And that's like $300,000 a year. You're in a big dry suit, you're 100 feet down, you're working on pipelines and all sorts of stuff. That, that's amazing. And then he got hired to do that in the Gulf of Oman and in Saudi Arabia. So now he's making pretty great money with no taxes. And then he comes home a year later. And he's looking around, he's like, well, I think I'm going to buy a van and I'm going to hire my best friend who's a plumber, because welding and plumbing go, go hand in hand and pipe fitting, of course. So he got, got a pipe fitter involved and bought another van, and then they got an electrician, and then they got a couple of HVAC guys. And now Jake has 3 vans, 7 employees, and he's doing about $3.5 million a year. And nobody tells that story because nobody's quite sure what the story is. Is, is it the story of a welder? Is it the story of an underwater welder? Is it the story of an entrepreneur? I mean, this is— these are the small businesses that make our country work, and so many of them wind up coming into existence because somebody mastered a skill that was in demand.

Yeah.

As opposed to saying, God, all my life, you know what? I've just— I've dreamed of welding. Jake didn't dream of welding, right? So, yes, I've got plenty of stories like his in my foundation. But Dirty Jobs is the— I mean, it's the granddaddy of essential working shows shot through with an entrepreneurial spirit. And I could, I could just talk for hours about all of them. Not all of them. That's, that's, that's a bit rich. We did 350 different jobs and all of them are important. Some are critical, some are small businesses, others were independent contractors, others were big companies with an employee focus. It was a mosaic. But I'll tell you what shocks people to this day, and they just straight up don't believe me when I tell them, but I swear it's true. Um, if you go back and look at old episodes of that show, I think the exact number was 41. 41 of the people we profiled were multimillionaires, and you would have never known it because they were covered in crap or something worse, because they, they just didn't look like the modern version of what a successful aspirational entrepreneur looks like.

But they're there and their stories are amazing. And, um, yeah, it's a privilege to tell.

Yeah, this is obviously an entrepreneurship show, and so I'm always telling people, get a skill and then you can scale, start an agency. Like, that's the easiest way that you can start a business. And it reminds me, like, as we're talking, getting a skill in the real world with a you know, a trade skill. Once you learn that skill and you figure things out, maybe learn under somebody else's dime, see how their business works, you can slowly start to build a business and basically just bootstrap it. And everybody has this like conception of starting a business that they need to have a product and they need to raise money and they need to do all this stuff when you can just like start small, learn a skill and evolve. And there's so many millionaires and multimillionaires that get started in that way.

Way leads on to way. And part of what I think we've lost is patience. We want to see a playbook. We want to understand, you know, exactly if I do this, this, this, and this, am I going to get to where I want to be? And it's reasonable. It's just not accurate. It just doesn't happen that way. And this is my complaint, you know, aside from what I think is a preponderance or a proliferation of cookie-cutter advice. Um, it's just this tendency among successful people to look back and say, let me tell you how I did it. Here, here's what you do. And there's nothing wrong with doing that. In fact, it's fun to do, but it presupposes the idea that the people who are reading your book and taking your advice are you? And of course they're not. They're not. I, like I said, the phone call I got from my mom, I got exactly when I needed it. And the 15 years I spent freelancing, I wouldn't trade for anything. I loved it. But neither would I trade where I am now. And really, I mean, I'll take my own advice, even though I couldn't master any of the trades I was interested in that, that my pop explained were beyond my, my grasp.

Um, I, I don't know if I've mastered anything necessarily, but I've become fairly facile at the things I get paid to do. So I don't waste anybody's time. I know how to narrate. I can write. I know how to— I know how to do what I'm good at. And, and so once you find that out, and maybe you've seen this in your own business, but, you know, I've done, I don't know, probably 7 shows starting with Dirty Jobs that are all out there. But the truth is, honestly, they're all the same show. I just changed the title every few years. Dirty Jobs, Somebody's Got to Do It, People You Should Know, Returning the Favor, um, Six Degrees, even some history shows I've worked on. They're all a version of, of me tapping the country on the shoulder and saying, what about her? What about him? Get a load of that. Look at what they're doing over there. That's my brand. Um, to the extent that that can be a brand, that's my trade, you know. And that's why I asked you before, you know, how do you, how do you really see yourself? And, and that, you know, at the risk of contradicting myself, that, that, that is some advice that I would offer you know, to really to anyone.

It's really like, take your own inventory and be really honest with yourself and ask yourself, how do you— how have you been defining yourself? Because, because who you are and what you do, it becomes more crystallized when you, when you hang a label on it, for better or worse. And so for me, um, it, it was useful for a while to see myself as a host and, and, and to see host in the credits. Okay, that's what Mike does. He's a host. And I work for a bunch of people being a host. But the truth is, I would probably still be doing that kind of thing had I not had that, that, that moment in the, in the sewer. The Greeks call it a, a peripeteia. It's a It's a moment in the narrative when, when the hero of the story or the protagonist realizes that everything he thought he knew about himself, uh, was wrong. And it's like, those are the moments that I, that I find myself most interested in, in, in people's lives. Not when they realized they were on the right track, but when they knew they were on the wrong one.

And like, if you're really interested in storytelling and you start to look for peripeteias, you'll, you'll find them everywhere. You remember The Sixth Sense?

Yep.

I mean, that's a great example of a modern peripeteia. You got Bruce Willis— spoiler alert, right? But you got Bruce Willis and he's a psychologist and he's helping this little kid who sees dead people, you know, and all through the, the movie, their relationship develops, and Bruce is very fond of this kid. But he's crazy, obviously. He's mentally troubled. And that's what Bruce Willis believes, and that's what informs everything he does. And then in the final act of the movie, he realizes this little kid really can see dead people. And therefore, he realizes in that moment, "Oh, shit. That's why he can see me. I'm dead. I've been dead the whole movie." Right? So like when you realize you've been dead the whole movie, or when you realize you're, you're actually not really a host, you're not really the thing you've been seeing when you look in the mirror. And the— and it's true, I think, honestly, of, of all of us. We are who we see in the mirror, but we can decide to call that reflection whatever we want. And that makes a difference. So if my buddy Jake sees himself as a welder, period, he's never going to go on to run a mechanical contracting company.

And if I see myself as a host, period, then hey, look, Ryan Seacrest had a pretty great life, but that's not the life I want. I don't want to be a host, not forever. I wanted to change that. And so I would, I would say to people, you know, like, really think about it. Are you sure you're a lawyer? Or are you something else? Are you sure you're a brand consultant? Or maybe, maybe that's exactly what you ought to be right now. Maybe that makes sense. Maybe everything's firing on all cylinders, but a year or two, it probably won't be. And you'll probably be looking around going, ah, God, somebody moved my cheese, right? Something changed. I want to, I want to mix it up a little bit. Well, what are you going to do? How are you going to mix it up? I, I would say maybe one of the ways is to, uh, is to think about, think about a different business card. Mm-hmm.

This has been such an awesome conversation, Mike. I really enjoyed it. My last question to you before I ask a couple kind of closeout questions is really like, how do we think it's all gonna change? Like, I know you started your foundation in 2008. So much has changed since then, but what needs to happen so that some of these stereotypes go away so that we see more young men being employed? And things, you know, are changed for the better.

The happy answer is we need to carpet bomb the country with myriad examples of guys like Jake and women like Chloe Hudson, another scholarship recipient who's living basically the exact same life. People who, uh, are thriving as a direct result of mastering a skill that's in demand to make the skills gap close and to challenge the primacy of a, of a 4-year degree, we need to make sure that parents and guidance counselors and everyone in every state has a steady diet of examples of the very thing I'm talking about. And the good news is those examples are out there. My job in the missionary side of things is, is to do a better job of, of sharing those stories. The, the more cynical part of me says what needs to happen for the ship to truly turn around and for the Blue Forge Alliance to find the 100,000 tradespeople that they need in the next 9 years is unfortunately things need to get a little worse before they get better. Going splat is, is never fun, But sometimes that's what needs to happen for, for people to really think twice about the value of the Ivy League.

Maybe they need to see the Ivy League affirmatively discriminating against free speech. Maybe they need to see the leaders of certain universities be found guilty of plagiarism, which they clearly were. Maybe, maybe these bad things need to happen in some ways to create some kind of wake-up call inside that institution. Maybe in order to understand that the only way to, to really live in harmony with nature is to control burn, to clear the forest from time to time, to, to do the thing that's uncomfortable to watch and to get that through our head. Maybe the Palisades need to burn. Maybe Santa Monica needs to burn. Maybe I hate to say that, you know, but, but maybe we don't get enough skilled workers to build those submarines until we get into some kind of hot conflict and we realize, you know something, the aircraft carriers that we used to believe were the pointy part of the spear are now on the bottom of the ocean because they have no defense against hypersonic missiles. Submarines do. But oh my God, we didn't know that, but now we do. And I hope it's not too late, but I hope we start to think differently about the definition of a good job before those kinds of things go splat.

I don't have a crystal ball, but I'm basically a glass half full kind of guy. And I know that from where I'm sitting, I can see the ship starting to turn. I have seen more and more people step back and think a little more critically, you know, about the opportunities that exist, uh, and the way they might interact with their own sense of dreams and passions and hopes and so forth. But all we can do is what we can do. And it's quixotic, you know, but I've been tilting at windmills my whole life and pushing the rock up the hill. Oh wait, that's not quixotic, that's Sisyphean. Whatever it is, all we can do is what we can do.

Now, if somebody is interested in your scholarship program, is there any sort of age limit or, you know, how can they get involved or find out more about that?

There's no age limit. Um, I'm as— in fact, I'm, I'm more excited when I, when I get applications from people who have hit the reset button at 35 and 40 years old and want to go back and write, just kind of start from scratch. It, it takes a lot of balls to do that, and I'm— and I appreciate it and I admire it. Um, typically though, we're, we're talking about men and women who are just coming out of high school or, or partway through college and realizing that they want to change the road they're on. If you're that person, what you do is you go to microworks.org and you just click on the apply button and you apply for a Work Ethic Scholarship. No guarantees, but you know, the scholarship game is simple. There are lots of different scholarships out there, by the way. Some focus on athletic achievement, others on academic, others on art. There's scholarship for everything. Ours are for work ethic and the skilled trades. So if, if a 4-year degree is in your future, I can't help you. But if you're open to any of the other jobs that require a different kind of education, I'm your guy.

Check us out. We're here to help.

Amazing. Mike, you provided so much guidance. I feel like people are going to love this episode. You're just such a great storyteller and you've got such a great heart. So I just appreciate all your time. I end my show with two questions I ask all my guests. The first one is, what is one piece of actionable advice our young improfitters can do today to become more profitable tomorrow?

Well, again, I would contradict myself if I actually answered that directly. Um, but I will, I, because I don't know what leads to profit, especially like tomorrow, if you mean that in the literal 24-hour sense. It took me 42 years to figure out my career, right? So I don't know about tomorrow, but I will tell you this. There's nothing new to say about failure. I'm sure everybody who's ever come on your podcast has, has talked about failure is just learning. Failure is— that's where we learn how, blah, blah. So I won't say that, but I, I will make a case for the importance of being uncomfortable. If you're willing to be uncomfortable, that's a, that's a step in the right direction. Because discomfort doesn't necessarily mean failure. It really doesn't mean anything other than, are you willing to be uncomfortable? And, um, actually, it was my old scoutmaster who, who told me this, you know. And I, I hated him for saying it at the time, and I didn't believe him for a long time. But you will hear that, you know, character has a lot to do with a willingness to be uncomfortable. But what I'm saying is, is slightly different.

You know, it's great to be willing to do a hard thing or to agree, uh, to volunteer for a difficult thing. That's, that's well and good. The next level though is to figure out a way to like it. And that's what, that's what Mr. Huntington said to me. He said, look man, if you, if you want to go somewhere You know, it's not enough to simply endure being uncomfortable. You have to find a way to like it and look forward to it. That's what Dirty Jobs was for me. It was uncomfortable. I took a pie in the face in every single episode. There were broken bones, and I seared off my eyelashes and my eyelid. I mean, it was just— it was painful. It was painful. But the Navy SEALs say the same thing, you know, embrace the suck. Look forward to it. Take a cold plunge. It's good for you and it's miserable, but you feel great afterwards. There's so many things you can do, little things to reintroduce yourself to, to the kind of discomfort that, that usually leads to something good.

I love that. And what would you say is your secret to profiting in life? And now this can go beyond financial. Just what do you feel like is your secret to a successful life?

Well, a couple things come to mind, but I, I'm gonna go with the word you used earlier, uh, because I love it, and the word is pivot. It has to do with changing your course but still, still being persistent. It has to do with, um, a word you don't hear a lot about anymore, which is initiative. God, that's— and talk about what's in short supply. That's what every employer I know is just, is just dying, dying to find people with initiative. But I'll go back to pivoting. You know, I've, I've always known it was important, but it wasn't until the lockdowns that I saw just how clarifying that was. And I mean, it was pivot or perish. It was adapt or die. And how many businesses went out of business because they just sat around waiting to be told what to do, where they just got into that, okay, 2 weeks to flatten the curve. All right, I'll wait another 2 weeks. I'll wait 2 more. Meanwhile, life is happening right in front of you. I remember 2 weeks into that, I called the president of the Discovery Channel. And I said, hey, this can't be good for you guys.

I mean, your whole pipeline of content relies on people going out into the world and working, and we can't go out into the world now. And she said, look, I know, I know, we're freaking out over here. Any ideas? And I had just read an article on this thing called Zoom. I'd never heard of Zoom. I thought it was just some, you know, some adjective or something like Zoom, whatever. But I looked at it, I'm like, wait a minute, people are talking. People are having like meetings. This thing is connecting people in a totally new way. I said, what if we call the crab boat captains from Deadliest Catch, which I've been narrating for 21 years, and I'm like, what if we do a Zoom call and record it? And what if you put that on at 9:00 PM? As a show, at a time when we're all literally, like, in the same boat, what if you go to crab boat captains to talk about what's happening in the lockdowns and get their take on it? So we did it. And we were the first Zoom show to ever air in prime time. Mm-hmm. And that, that happened about a month into the lockdowns.

And then after that, I was like, look, I, I don't care what it takes. I'm gonna put this show back in production. I got my old crew together. And we went out into the world, and we started filming a new season of Dirty Jobs. That show went out of production in 2012. We went back into production in 2020.

Hmm.

And, you know, I'm proud of that. Not because it was particularly great, although, frankly, I thought it was pretty good. I was proud because my crew was so anxious to pivot, and the network was willing to pivot. And I was desperate to pivot and, and being allowed to pivot when you feel like that's what you gotta do, man, that's, that's Freedom 101.

Mm-hmm.

And being willing to pivot even into something uncomfortable. That's life.

Yeah.

Mike, this has been an amazing conversation. Where can everybody learn more about you? Everything that you do? I know you've got a very popular podcast, the way that I heard it. Tell everybody where they can find you.

The way I heard it is probably playing right where this podcast is playing, you know, Spotify, Apple, wherever people get podcasts. Um, I talk to people I find interesting every single week. I write a lot of short stories, uh, mysteries that we put on the podcast. That turned into a show, and those have been a lot of fun as well. The shows are all out there. I'm still narrating a bunch of stuff. Dirty Jobs is still on every day on the Discovery Channel. God bless them. I'm working on a new show called People You Should Know that'll be coming to YouTube. And, um, uh, there's a website with my name in it called MikeRowe.com, and And of course, I don't know, 9 or 10 million people somehow or another on Facebook and Instagram still pretend to care what I say. So I'd be honored if you join them. And most importantly, microworks.org. You know, we got a big pile of money there I'm desperate to give away to people who want to learn a trade. So if that's you, go get some.

Amazing. Mike, thank you for all that you do. Thank you for coming on the show and for everything that you do for the world.

Thanks for having me.