How Do We Close the Skills Gap? | Mike Rowe

- [Man] We believe and have always believed in this coun­try, that man was cre­at­ed in the image of God, that he was giv­en tal­ents and respon­si­bil­i­ty and was instruct­ed to use them to make this world a bet­ter place in which to live. And you see, this is the real­ly great thing of America.

- [Man] It’s time to dis­cov­er what binds us togeth­er. And find­ing it has the pow­er to trans­form our world. That’s what I believe. How about you?

- Hi every­one, I’m Doug Devos and wel­come to ​“Believe”. You know, a few weeks ago, I had a great oppor­tu­ni­ty with Mike Rowe from ​“Dirty Jobs”. And I was… We were at an event at a din­ner and I had a chance to kind of lead a dis­cus­sion with him. And if you know any­thing about Mike, he’s a pret­ty enter­tain­ing guy, a pret­ty pow­er­ful guy. And so, this dis­cus­sion was a great joy. We wan­na share it with you. We wan­na have you hear what he had to say about the val­ue of work and how he has lived it his whole life. So enjoy this episode and thanks for join­ing us. Mike, thank you for being here.

- [Mike] .

- [Doug] Mike’s a long stand­ing stand togeth­er friend that has been part of this orga­ni­za­tion. Very help­ful and has a won­der­ful, unique per­spec­tive on life and on work. And we’re gonna dive into it here. Mike, I’m just gonna… We’re gonna chat a lit­tle bit and then have a con­ver­sa­tion with some of you. If you have ques­tions or top­ics that you want Mike to talk about. So please kind of think about that a lit­tle bit, and we can facil­i­tate that con­ver­sa­tion in a lit­tle while.

- [Mike] You invit­ed the ​“Dirty Jobs” guy to talk dur­ing dinner.

- [Doug] Yeah, yeah.

- [Mike] Just think about that, but it’s subtle.

- [Doug] Yeah, it is.

- [Mike] Yeah, is it? We’ll see.

- [Doug] Not quite, not quite.

- [Man] That’s one distinction.

- [Doug] So Mike you’re talk­ing. Start with that. How did that start? How’d you become-

- [Mike] ​“Dirty Jobs”?

- [Doug] The ​“Dirty Jobs” guy. Where’d that come from? How did you get into that?

- [Mike] Well, I was liv­ing in Bal­ti­more where I grew up next to a guy named Carl Noble, who hap­pened to be my grand­dad. And he built the house I was born in with­out a blue­print. He could take your watch apart, put it back togeth­er blind­fold­ed just knew, right? And I was always in awe of him and the handy gene, which I assumed I inher­it­ed turned out to be reces­sive. And so- My hopes and dreams of fol­low­ing in my pap’s foot­steps were not meant to be. He did, how­ev­er, tell me so much great advice from Carl Noble, but he said that, ​“You can be a trades­man ​“if you want, just get a dif­fer­ent tool­box.” And so I did, I went to a com­mu­ni­ty col­lege at a high school. Stud­ied all sorts of things I was­n’t real­ly inter­est­ed in includ­ing act­ing and singing and music and per­form­ing and writ­ing and all of it. And way leads on to way, right? I got out­ta there. I got into the opera for a few years. Then I went back to a state school and got a degree. And then I got in sales and I got in enter­tain­ment. And then for 20 years, I was just free­lanc­ing, mind­ing my own busi­ness, imper­son­at­ing a host for a lot of dif­fer­ent cable chan­nels. I mean, seri­ous­ly, I would, it’s a weird skill, but you can cre­ate the illu­sion of com­pe­tence in short bursts, you know? And that’s what I did, you know, for the longest time. And then one day I was work­ing for CBS in San Fran­cis­co for a show called ​“Evening Mag­a­zine”. And I would go, it was a ter­ri­ble lit­tle show. You prob­a­bly saw it. Every local mar­ket had one. It comes on after the news, you know, and you basi­cal­ly, I would host it. I’d go to winer­ies, I’d go to muse­ums and I would just hit my mark and say my line. And one day my mom called me. I was in my cubi­cle sit­ting there after a shoot. And she said, ​“Michael, your grand­fa­ther ​“turned 90 years old today. ​“And I was think­ing, would­n’t it be great if before he died, ​“he could turn on the tele­vi­sion and see you doing some­thing ​“that looked like work.” Moth­ers, right?

- [Doug] Thanks mom.

- [Mike] Yeah. So that was a moment. I was 42. And the next day I took my cam­era­man into the sew­ers of San Fran­cis­co, and I told this sto­ry at length about five, six years ago in Col­orado, poor Charles and Liz were sit­ting right in front of me try­ing to eat their choco­late moose and I- I walked him through the most hor­rif­ic, true sto­ry of my life. Where basi­cal­ly I told the sto­ry of a bap­tism in a riv­er of poop. You know, where every­thing I thought I knew about my cho­sen pro­fes­sion turned out to be wrong. And I resolved to become a guest instead of a host, right? And this idea of high­light­ing real work­ers start­ed as a seg­ment on Evening Mag­a­zine called ​“Some­body’s Got­ta Do It”. I was fired two weeks after it pre­miered because it turns out peo­ple on Evening Mag­a­zine, you know, they’d sit down at sev­en o’clock to enjoy heart tug­ging sto­ries about a three-legged dog up in Marin over­com­ing canine kid­ney fail­ure. What they got was me crawl­ing through a riv­er of crap now, and then just did­n’t play well with the meat­loaf. Any­how, they fired me and I sold the idea to the Dis­cov­ery Chan­nel it became ​“Dirty Jobs”. And that was 20 years ago. This week we shot three ​“Dirty Jobs” here in Florida.

- [Doug] Yeah.

- [Mike] Fin­ished the last one just yes­ter­day, down at West Palm. Drained a pool that had­n’t been ser­viced in 17 years.

- [Audi­ence] Ooh!

- [Mike] Unbe­liev­able, unbe­liev­able. Any­how, when I heard that you guys were doing your thing here, and I talked to my boss, Mary, and we looked at the cal­en­dar, we were like, well, be a great chance to come by and see what’s new at Stand Togeth­er. So that’s how ​“Dirty Jobs” hap­pen. I blame my mom and my grand pap-

- [Doug] Yeah.

- [Mike] And now you Doug.

- [Doug] All right, so. Well, I’m in a very great com­pa­ny there. I’m hap­py to be part of that whole crowd. And I did see pho­tos from you in that pool. You looked good.

- [Mike] Thank you.

- [Doug] He was float­ing, he had like a lounge, you know, like a float­ing lounge chair you were in there-

- [Mike] Yeah, it was noth­ing, but it was algae about a foot thick and it was so bad. It was so bad. I got there with the crew yes­ter­day and we just thought, there’s no way we’re gonna be able to get this done. We did. But at a glance, it was so hor­rif­ic that the only sen­si­ble thing to do was put on a bathing suit, get one of those big inflat­able things and get a, like a piña cola­da and just lie in the mid­dle of it and shoot pro­mos, which is what we did. Any­how, you know, if you val­ue the idea of no two days being exact­ly the same, espe­cial­ly sequen­tial­ly, I would rec­om­mend drain­ing an algae rid­den pool and then sit­ting in a room full of real­ly pret­ty suc­cess­ful peo­ple talk­ing about the future of the coun­try. That’s good.

- [Doug] That’s good, that’s good.

- [Mike] Yeah.

- [Doug] Well, let’s talk about that. We’ll make a bit of a tran­si­tion. You’re at this idea and your show and what you’ve high­light­ed has a huge and impact­ful role in our coun­try. How do we cre­ate an envi­ron­ment where peo­ple see their abil­i­ty to con­tribute in a vari­ety of ways and not just one pathway?

- [Mike] Yeah.

- [Doug] So talk to me a lit­tle bit about what you’re doing there. You have your foun­da­tion and not just the show, it’s the foun­da­tion and the work you’re doing there. Talk to every­body about how you are approach­ing that, because it’s a huge thing that we all see. We have tremen­dous respect for the work that we see hap­pen­ing in the world around us. We all see it hap­pen­ing, but yet, some­times peo­ple say, ​“Oh, no, don’t do that, we want you to do this.”

- [Mike] Cor­rect. Not that way, this way. You know?

- [Doug] Yeah.

- [Mike] I mean, every­body in the room, I think I’m preach­ing to the choir. It’s just, there’s so many dif­fer­ent ways to come at a thing. And I… Full dis­clo­sure, this was not the plan, you know, ​“Dirty Jobs” was­n’t the plan for the show and the mikerowe­WORKS Foun­da­tion, which evolved out of the show was not a plan either. But just by way of back­ground, what hap­pened in 2008, ​“Dirty Jobs” had been on the air about five years. And it had become the most suc­cess­ful, cer­tain­ly most suc­cess­ful show on Dis­cov­ery, maybe in cable. We were in 180 coun­tries and it was work­ing, you know? And I, in that show, have you guys seen ​“Dirty Jobs”? I my just make it up. I don’t- Who has­n’t? Who has­n’t seen the show just so we can be clear, any­body? Be honest.

- [Doug] Oh-oh.

- [Mike] Ma’am, get out.

- [Mike] Not seri­ous. 20 years on the Dis­cov­ery Chan­nel. Nev­er saw it. So, to answer your ques­tion, I’ll just, what’s your name?

- [Pat­ty] Patty.

- [Mike] Pat­ty, that’s nice. All right, so, on the-

- [Pat­ty] I’m gonna look it up first thing.

- [Mike] Yeah, Google it when I’m done. Okay. You’ll see some images. No, it’s the sim­plest show in the his­to­ry of TV, except for maybe ​“The Gong Show”, right? I mean, I’m an appren­tice, I show up and what we do is, show the view­er pre­cise­ly what I expe­ri­ence. No writ­ers. No, pre-pro­duc­tion. No sec­ond takes. We nev­er did a sec­ond take in 20 years. It’s a blis­ter­ing­ly unflinch­ing hon­est look at what it takes to drain and main­tain a pool in West Palm.

- [Doug] Right.

- [Mike] Right? We did 350 jobs. And so the cumu­la­tive effect of show­ing the coun­try, what actu­al work looks like in an unscript­ed way, had a lot of delight­ful, unin­tend­ed con­se­quences. One of them hap­pened con­tem­po­ra­ne­ous­ly with the great reces­sion in 2008. When it became clear that our coun­try was head­ed for a rough time and every morn­ing on the road, you know, I mean, I lived in Super 8 and Motel 6es for lit­er­al­ly like six, sev­en years. By the way, if the hotel has a num­ber in its name, if it’s writ­ten out like the Four Sea­sons. But if it’s the 4 Sea­sons. So I’m liv­ing in these motels and I’m with my crew and, you know, we do a dirty job, we come back at night, I check the social media, ​’cause all the ideas for the show, by the way, came from the viewers.

- [Doug] I was gonna ask that. Yeah.

- [Mike] Right? Every sin­gle idea came from fans of the show, right? ​‘Cause every­body knew the sto­ry of my grand­dad and they would, you know, they’d say, ​“You think your grand­dad had it , ​“wait and you see what my pop does?”

- [Doug] Sure.

- [Mike] My broth­er, my cousin, my sis­ter, my mom, my dad. So we’re in this real­ly great rhythm, but I walk out of the hotel and I pick up the paper every morn­ing and the head­lines are always the same. The unem­ploy­men­t’s going up about a quar­ter point every day, it seemed. You know, six and a half, sev­en, sev­en, and a quar­ter, this, I mean over weeks. It’s like 10% unem­ploy­ment. It’s all any­body’s talk­ing about. Except on ​“Dirty Jobs” every­where we went, we saw Help Want­ed signs. And I thought, I don’t know what’s going on, but there’s some oth­er nar­ra­tive in the coun­try that nobody’s talk­ing about and it has to do with the exis­tence of oppor­tu­ni­ty. And that struck me as impor­tant because so much of the unem­ploy­ment nar­ra­tive is based on the assump­tion that, well, if we had more jobs, we’d have less unem­ploy­ment. But that was­n’t the case in 2009, and it’s cer­tain­ly not the case today. There were 2.3 mil­lion open posi­tions back then, today there are 11.1, right? 11.1 mil­lion open jobs. The vast major­i­ty of which don’t require a four year degree. And yet today as we sit here, we have $1.7 tril­lion in stu­dent loans on the books. And for what­ev­er rea­son, we keep telling our kids that the best path for the most peo­ple is a four year path. Noth­ing wrong with it, just kind of pricey. And it seems like we’re lend­ing mon­ey we don’t have to kids who are nev­er gonna pay it back to train ​‘em for jobs that don’t exist any­more. Kind of crazy, right? So-

- [Doug] Out­side, that’s a great system.

- [Mike] Yeah.

- [Doug] Yeah, out­side of that is great-

- [Mike] Beyond that it’s brilliant.

- [Doug] Yeah, yeah.

- [Mike] So I’m kind of leapfrog­ging around that’s where we are today, but in 2008 and the rea­son I’m here tonight is because I was just start­ing to see it, right? And I would go out with the dirty job­bers that we worked with and I would, so many of them were entre­pre­neurs, small busi­ness own­ers, an extra­or­di­nary num­ber were mul­ti­mil­lion­aires. You would’ve nev­er known it ​’cause they were cov­ered in mud and grime and slime and worse, right? And the show was­n’t about mak­ing that point. It was about hon­or­ing the dig­ni­ty of work. But it was a heck of a thing to chal­lenge the con­cep­tions of suc­cess in a show. And so I want­ed to do some­thing for the indus­tries that had allowed my show to pros­per and shine a light on the oppor­tu­ni­ties that exist­ed in min­ing, in ener­gy, in agri­cul­ture, in the big tent-pole indus­tries that for what­ev­er rea­son, so many peo­ple includ­ing me had become dis­con­nect­ed from. And so, I start­ed a foun­da­tion called mikerowe­WORKS, which was real­ly a PR cam­paign for those oppor­tu­ni­ties. That mor­phed into a trade resource cen­ter, fans of the show, aside from pro­gram­ming it, we’re also build­ing this online resource that would essen­tial­ly prove the exis­tence of jobs. You could type in any zip code and see the jobs that were avail­able there that did­n’t require for your degree. And then you could click on links that would explain what kind of train­ing would be nec­es­sary to do this. And so that all felt sen­si­ble and good. And I went to Con­gress a few times and banged my shoe on the table and talked about the need for bet­ter PR. And that real­ly was our foun­da­tion for the first cou­ple years. And we start­ed to raise some mon­ey for work eth­ic schol­ar­ships. And to this day, in fact, in a month or two, we’ll give away anoth­er mil­lion bucks in very small incre­ments to kids who make a per­sua­sive case for them­selves, who sub­mit videos and ref­er­ences and write essays. I don’t care about their GPA. I care about their atten­dance. I wan­na make a case for work eth­ic, and that res­onat­ed with Charles and it res­onat­ed with a lot of peo­ple who sup­port what we do. And so today to answer your ques­tion, I’m sit­ting here because now we’ve assist­ed over 1400 people.

- [Doug] Wow!

- [Mike] Who have learned to weld, who’ve become steam fit­ters and plumbers, pipe fit­ters, elec­tric, HVAC. And ear­ly on, we had some suc­cess because I could tell their sto­ries, excuse me, anec­do­tal­ly. But today we’re mak­ing all kinds of videos. We tell their sto­ries, they come back and you would­n’t believe it. The sto­ries we hear from peo­ple who took a $6,000 work eth­ic schol­ar­ship and learned to weld and today own four vans, a mechan­i­cal con­tract­ing com­pa­ny, a dozen employ­ees and are killing it. So that’s how it hap­pened, you know? And that’s why it’s still hap­pen­ing because we still have 1.7 tril­lion in stu­dent loans, 11 mil­lion open jobs and a skills gap that’s get­ting wider and frankly, scar­ing the hell out of any­body who’s pay­ing attention.

- [Doug] Yeah, well, amen to those 1400 kids-

- [Mike] Amen.

- [Doug] That you’ve con­nect­ed with. Let’s hear it for that. Let’s hear it for that. I’m gonna ask if there’s any ques­tions or top­ics from our friends at din­ner here tonight that you want Mike to talk about. We’re gonna put you on the spot, Mike. I got a cou­ple oth­ers if every­one’s too timid. This is a timid ground-

- [Mike] Oh yeah, right.

- [Doug] Crowd, you know?

- [Mike] Yeah.

- [Doug] All right, Hans, come on, step up, make it happen.

- [Hans] Thank you all so much for hav­ing us here. Mike, I wan­na say your best work was actu­al­ly the nar­ra­tion job on ​“Dead­liest Catch”. Oh, thank you. Thank you.

- [Mike] Thank you.

- [Hans] Big fan, big fan. I’m sor­ry you did­n’t get to do it in per­son, but the nar­ra­tion, your gold­en bari­tone is, you’re the next Frank Sinatra.

- [Mike] Don’t make it weird, Hans?

- [Hans] Sor­ry, I’m big fan. You touched on it ear­li­er. And it was, you know, we have, it was 11 mil­lion jobs open and only, you know, 9 mil­lion job seek­ers and yet we still have 9 mil­lion job seek­ers. You know, what is in your mind? I mean, the COVID real­ly reset a lot of things. Some for bet­ter, some for worse. What is it that you think are sort of hold­ing back the meet­ing, that 11 mil­lion open­ings and 9 mil­lion seek­ers? Is it just sim­ply they’ve been dis­placed, they moved to a dif­fer­ent part of town, dif­fer­ent part of the coun­try. They’re just a wage gap. You know, what are your, thinks the issues are and how can we fix it?

- [Mike] Yeah, there’s not a snap­py answer obvi­ous­ly, but if there were, I would say stig­mas, stereo­types, myths, and mis­per­cep­tions that sur­round the trades to this day. It’s very, very pow­er­ful and it’s hard to undo, but you’re talk­ing about 50 years of pop cul­ture and adver­tis­ing and mar­ket­ing cam­paigns that rein­force. Look, if I say plumber and ask you to pic­ture the guy, he’s 250 pounds and he’s got the butt crack and the whole rou­tine, right?

- [Hans] Yeah, yeah-

- [Mike] And that’s-

- [Hans] Yeah, exactly.

- [Mike] Those images are seared into our reti­nas. And so too are so many mis­per­cep­tions about the kind of mon­ey that they make, and the kinds of lives that they can lead. And the bal­ance of hav­ing a trade that you can fall back on and the way you can pro­vide for your fam­i­ly. And there’re just so many things that con­spire to make it very, very dif­fi­cult for par­ents and guid­ance coun­selors to feel real­ly good about say­ing, ​“Hey, wait, wait, look at all of the oppor­tu­ni­ty.” And so I think a part of what hap­pened, Hans that real­ly is a gonna be a very dif­fi­cult thing to cor­rect was the removal of shop class from high school.

- [Audi­ence] Yeah, yeah.

- [Mike] Very, very tough, right? And so, to under­stand how insid­i­ous that was. It’s not like we woke up one day and said, ​“Ah, there’s no mon­ey bud­get cuts no more shop.” Way before it was called shop, you’ll remem­ber Tom­my, it was called the indus­tri­al arts. And we took the art out and the indus­tri­al arts became voca­tion­al tech­nol­o­gy. Then it became VO-tech. Then it became shop. Then we walked it around the barn and shot it in the head, right? ​‘Cause then it was easy to get rid of because it had become a voca­tion­al con­so­la­tion prize in the eyes of mil­lions of par­ents and guid­ance coun­selors. And in the midst of this push for col­lege, which we need­ed, by the way in the sev­en­ties, you’ll recall, we need­ed more peo­ple matric­u­lat­ing get­ting into high­er ed, pur­su­ing big degrees. But like most PR, we did­n’t, we weren’t sat­is­fied to make the case for col­lege and leave it alone. We had to turn it into a cau­tion­ary tale. We had to say, if you don’t go this way-

- [Doug] Yeah.

- [Mike] You’re gonna wind up over here, turn­ing a wrench or doing some­thing beneath you, right? And so once that land­ed, once that real­ly became a part of the trans­ac­tion, it became real­ly, real­ly dif­fi­cult to change that mind­set, you know? And it still is dif­fi­cult. So that’s why I’ll say stig­ma, stereo­types, myths, and mis­per­cep­tions. We have to fight ​‘em on every sin­gle lev­el. We have to do it with humor. We have to do it with TV shows like ​“Dirty Jobs” and ​“Dead­liest Catch”. We have to do it with foun­da­tions, mod­esty aside like mikerowe­WORKS, which is a micro endeav­or and Stand Togeth­er, which is a macro endeav­or. We need to tell the sto­ries. We can’t just preach to the choir. You guys need a kind of plat­form that allows a show, essen­tial­ly, a per­son who could we get?

- [Doug] Who, any ideas, any ideas? Okay.

- [Mike] We need some­body to tap the coun­try on the shoul­der in a reg­u­lar peri­od­ic way and say, ​“Hey, what about her? ​“What about him? ​“Get a load of this guy.”, right? This coun­try in my view is starved not just for shows like ​“Dead­liest Catch” and ​“Dirty Jobs”, which are great. They’re starved to meet peo­ple who wake up agi­tat­ed because the world’s not the way they want it And they believe they have a solu­tion. We wan­na meet those peo­ple. ​‘Cause they’re inter­est­ing. Let’s all get out. And they’re also the neigh­bors we all wish we had. So there’s a future where all the good work you’re doing and all the com­pa­nies you’re sup­port­ing and the foun­da­tions you’re cham­pi­oning where all that lives under an umbrel­la, not as a foun­da­tion, not as a lec­ture, not as a ser­mon, but as an enter­tain­ment propo­si­tion. Because if you don’t enter­tain first and fore­most, trust me, your moth­er’s gonna be on the phone telling you to do some­thing that looks like work. And any­how, thanks, Hans.

- [Hans] That’s great, great.

- [Doug] We have time for a cou­ple more ques­tions. Any­one wan­na raise some­thing? Please.

- [Man] All right, here we go.

- [Woman] Just curi­ous. Is your mom proud of you now?

- [Mike] No, she’s nev­er real­ly liked me.

- [Mike] My moth­er, by the way, Peg­gy Rowe is her name. She has just fin­ished her third book. She’s 84 this year. She pub­lished her first book when she was 80.

- [Doug] Wow!

- [Mike] Was num­ber four on the New York Times list. Two years lat­er, she did her sec­ond and now she’s doing her third. And yeah, my mom’s a leg­end on social media. She has her own fol­low­ing. I start­ed putting her in com­mer­cials a few years ago and my dad, God helped me. They’re gone now. They’re a night­mare, they got their own agent, they got their . Okay, pub­lish­ers. But, you know what? She says she’s proud of me. And I think she is. The big­ger ques­tion is, you know, I think of my pap. I think of Carl Noble and I hope he is look­ing down. I think he’s prob­a­bly bemused. Because, you know, for a long time that guy, I mean, he was the trades­man­’s trades­man. And as much as I want­ed to fol­low in his foot­steps, I know he want­ed me to fol­low his foot­steps. Instead, he got to see me sing opera for eight years. And then sell stuff in the mid­dle of the night on QVC. And the last thing he saw was the first episode of ​“Dirty Jobs”.

- [Doug] All right.

- [Mike] And he gave me a thumbs up. So I hope he’s good with it.

- [Doug] That’s pret­ty cool. That’s pret­ty cool.

- [Woman] So thank you so much for being here. I’m a huge fan, my moth­er is a huge fan. I came from a fam­i­ly that worked hard and are super proud of it. But are you sat­is­fied? I mean, my ques­tion is what’s next? And are you achiev­ing what you set out to do and what real­ly makes you happy?

- [Mike] Well, I mean, yes, I’m sat­is­fied. I’m not con­tent, but I’m also aware that, I mean, if you ask the goal of mikerowe­WORKS, the first stat­ed goal was to close Amer­i­ca’s skills gap. That’s nev­er going to hap­pen. I know that. So, there’s a Sisyphean qual­i­ty to all great endeav­ors. And every­body in this room knows that. You know, we’re not gonna get, there is no net zero. There’s no COVID zero. There’s no clos­ing the skills gap, but there’s a great Sisyphean chal­lenge to it. There’s ele­gance and there’s dig­ni­ty in know­ing that it’s an unreach­able star, right? But you have to try. And so it took a while for me to real­ly not just accept that, but to be okay with it and then to like it. File it under man­ag­ing expec­ta­tions, right? I’m not going to suc­ceed in the stat­ed goals of the foun­da­tion, but what hap­pened that changed every­thing for me was like I said, the first few years, it’s me telling you what I think I know. And then it’s me point­ing to a web­site that was built that moved the nee­dle and feel­ing kind of good about it. But then it’s the cir­cling back and find­ing peo­ple we helped four and five years ago. I can’t tell you what that does that, you know, every cou­ple of weeks we put out a new video. And one of the most recent ones was a woman named Chloe Hud­son. Who five years ago applied for a work eth­ic schol­ar­ship because her dream of becom­ing a plas­tic sur­geon had come down to bor­row­ing approx­i­mate­ly $400,000, $400,000 to go to med­ical school. That was the all in long term cost. And she just freaked out at the last sec­ond and we gave her six grand and she learned to weld. Now, Chloe Hud­son looks like she fell off the cov­er of Glam­or. Fake eye­lash­es, beau­ti­ful stat­uesque, sassy, smart and as it just so hap­pens a savant with a weld­ing torch. So she winds up in new Eng­land, work­ing at a nuclear pow­er plant. And now she’s in North Car­oli­na with Joe Gibbs Rac­ing, okay? She makes 160 grand a year. She has zero debt. Our mis­sion now is to get Chloe Hud­son on a bill­board, on a poster. I got her on ​“Fox & Friends” a cou­ple months ago, sat down right next to her and got her sto­ry out there. So all of this real­ly comes down to what­ev­er your sto­ry is, tell it, you know, and if it’s not per­sua­sive, tell it bet­ter. And if no one’s lis­ten­ing, tell it loud­er, right? And be a jagged lit­tle pill. Be Sisy­phus, be Quixote, you know? Because it’s a great, what you guys are doing is extra­or­di­nary. And the guys I met today and the peo­ple Mary’s intro­duced me to every sto­ry, every orga­ni­za­tion you all are assist­ing is head­line news if we say it is. I say, we should.

- [Doug] Amen to that. Amen to that, huh? Any­more? Maybe one more if we can oth­er­wise I’m gonna… Oh, we have one more in the back there. Alan’s got a…

- [Mike] Oh God, it’s Alan.

- [Doug] You can do it. Hang in there, Mike, you can do it.

- [Alan] Mike, obvi­ous­ly I’ve been a long time fan of yours. Two ques­tions, one less seri­ous, and one more seri­ous. The first one. What’s the dirt­i­est job you ever did? And the sec­ond one is, I have to think that you’ve been prob­a­bly excom­mu­ni­cat­ed from Hol­ly­wood and all that mat­ters in Tin­sel­town, and yet Hol­ly­wood seems to be in lock­step with a gov­ern­ment that seems to be pro­mul­gat­ing these ideas of mak­ing loans to stu­dents to get an edu­ca­tion that for a job that does­n’t exist any­more. So, what’s the key, is it to sell an idea to Hol­ly­wood because obvi­ous­ly they’re just self-inter­est­ed. So, do you sell them an idea that makes them mon­ey that is like a Scott Strode idea Is that the solu­tion? Or, is it just hope­less and you wait for them to catch on to your idea?

- [Mike] Oh, I mean, if it weren’t some­what hope­less, it would­n’t be a challenge.

- [Doug] Right.

- [Mike] But yes, you argue from the mid­dle first and fore­most, you know? You have to, if you can, you have to. If you can’t enter­tain them, then there’s noth­ing there. ​“Dirty Jobs”, full dis­clo­sure was a wolf in sheep­’s cloth­ing. And I did­n’t even know it. That’s how super secret it was, right? I’m a farm boy from Bal­ti­more, Bal­ti­more Coun­ty. I did­n’t live in Hol­ly­wood, I did some time there, but I was nev­er part of the machine. I nev­er had an agent. I nev­er had a man­ag­er. I nev­er had a pub­li­cist. I nev­er had a lawyer. All I have is Mary, who is all those things. So we were able to nav­i­gate from the perime­ter. So I was in it, but not off it. So what hap­pened, Alan hon­est­ly, is when ​“Dirty Jobs” became a Hol­ly­wood hit and launched, lit­er­al­ly 38 oth­er TV shows that evolved out of that, I sud­den­ly real­ized I had For­est Gumped my way into the grown up table, and I’m sit­ting there. And so I start­ed to do spe­cials on ​“Dirty Jobs”. And then I did it right under the net­work’s nose. I did a spe­cial called ​“Brown Before Green”, where I argued that while we all want­ed a healthy plan­et and while every­body agreed with sen­si­ble con­ser­va­tion, a big chunk of the coun­try did­n’t nec­es­sar­i­ly wan­na fol­low Al Gore or Leonar­do DiCaprio off to wher­ev­er they were going. And I did this because I met a farmer, a pig farmer named Bob Combs. And I asked him what he thought about green. And he said, ​“Green, that stu­pid col­or.” And I said, ​“What do you mean a stu­pid col­or? ​“It’s spring, it’s renew­al.” He goes, ​“Ah bull­shit. ​“Let me tell you what green is. ​“Green is the col­or of rot. ​“It’s the col­or of decay. ​“It’s gang green. ​“Green is the col­or of mon­ey. ​“It’s the col­or of envy. ​“Who in the world would all align them­selves ​“behind a col­or like that? ​“Now brown, brown is the col­or from which all green grows. ​“Brown is stead­fast and eter­nal. ​“Brown is the soil. ​“Brown is the dirt.” And I’m like, I’m hear­ing this from a pig farmer in Vegas. So I do a spe­cial called ​“Brown Before Green”, where we look at the alter­na­tive ways to fos­ter a healthy plan­et that does­n’t nec­es­sar­i­ly align with only one polit­i­cal par­ty. The Dis­cov­ery Chan­nel puts this on the air in 2008 on the same day that they launch a new chan­nel called Plan­et Green. So, I tell you this, because your plans don’t mat­ter in Hol­ly­wood. Your strat­e­gy does­n’t mat­ter. They’ll make a fool of you. They’ll say no. If you tell ​‘em what you wan­na do, it’s not gonna hap­pen. You have to bob and weave and play the cards you get. And then sud­den­ly you have a chance to take a farmer’s phi­los­o­phy and turn it into a spe­cial that airs in prime time. That moves the nee­dle. So too did a spe­cial called ​“Safe­ty Third”, where we took a look at the unin­tend­ed con­se­quences of ele­vat­ing safe­ty above every­thing else in the world. It was­n’t a smart alec attempt to take unnec­es­sary risk. It was a rea­soned attempt to ques­tion the whole notion of telling your cus­tomer that noth­ing mat­ters more to them or to you than their safe­ty. That kind of thing fos­ters com­pla­cen­cy. And I made a whole case for it and got it on the air. It was nom­i­nat­ed for an Emmy. Did­n’t win, but it was nominated.

- [Doug] Oh, that’s all right-

- [Mike] Right.

- [Doug] Pret­ty good.

- [Mike] So, my answer, Alan, hon­est­ly, is you stick to your prime direc­tive. And in Hol­ly­wood, your prime direc­tive is you have to enter­tain. And if you’re lucky enough to get a pro­gram that gives you a toe­hold, then pick your bat­tles, pick your spe­cials, tell your sto­ries. And thanks to that. And ​“Dirty Jobs” has been noth­ing but very, very good to me. But some­thing else hap­pened that you guys should know about in the way of TV, because it might be instruc­tive to some of the con­ver­sa­tions you’re hav­ing around PR. We did a show three years ago on Face­book called ​“Return­ing the Favor”. And ​“Return­ing the Favor” was a look at the neigh­bors you wish you had, peo­ple in your com­mu­ni­ty doing some­thing nice that they cared about, but there were many 501Cs, but there were also just reg­u­lar bloody do-good­ers. We treat­ed these peo­ple like ​“Access Hol­ly­wood” treats Brad Pitt. And we did 100 episodes. That show did win an Emmy, but because it was Face­book, they can­celed it a week after we won the Emmy. ​‘Cause they’re Face­book, does­n’t mat­ter. But again, you have to enter­tain first and then maybe you get to scratch wood issues. With regard to your first ques­tion. The answer is replac­ing a rup­tured lift pump at a waste water treat­ment plant. That is the dirt­i­est job in the world. A lift pump is a four ton motor and it lives at the bot­tom of a five sto­ry silo. You got it? I don’t think you do.

- [Doug] I don’t think so.

- [Mike] I don’t think you do. This is way beyond Hen­ry Kissinger. This is… When that pump breaks that pump­ing cham­ber fills with sewage, because in this case, the good peo­ple of St Louis, they don’t know it’s bro­ken. They keep flush­ing their toi­let. Alarms go off, men in woe­ful­ly, inad­e­quate Tyvek suits, descend spi­ral stair­cas­es, and they mus­cle their way through a series of water­tight doors, and then you dog pad­dle through the muck to the lift pump and you crawl on top of it. This is the good part. You crawl on top. And from five sto­ries above, a man in a crane low­ers a cable and you grab the cable and you cinch it off to the top and you hang on Alan. And when they say go, they lift, they hoist this four ton motor out of a room about this size that’s just lit­er­al­ly filled with the worst thing you can imag­ine. And the sound, the sound a rup­tured lift pump makes when it breaks the seal of crap that’s been hold­ing it to the floor, that my friend will hunt your dreams.

- [Doug] Oh my gosh. You always wan­na end on a pos­i­tive, uplift­ing mess-

- [Woman] St Louis, thank you.

- [Mike] You’re welcome.

- [Woman] And them.

- [Doug] That’s right. There’s a lot of appre­ci­a­tion going on there. Mike, thank you for shar­ing your sto­ries. Thank you for shar­ing your per­spec­tive. Thank you most of all for what you do to make these issues that are so impor­tant to us, impor­tant to you, but also enter­tain­ing so the mes­sage gets across to oth­er peo­ple, so we can tell the sto­ry and more and more peo­ple can see the val­ue in work.

- [Mike] You’re welcome.

- [Doug] What­ev­er it may be. Thank you.

- [Mike] Sure.

- [Doug] Thank you, sir. Thanks. All righty. Mike, thanks so much. Well, hey every­one, thanks again for lis­ten­ing to the pod­cast with Mike Rowe. I hope you enjoyed it as much as I did. Just such a won­der­ful per­son, very insight­ful, incred­i­bly help­ful as we think about the val­ue of work and all the jobs that we do. So thanks for join­ing us and we look for­ward to see­ing you the next time.