Mike Rowe: The Hidden Path to Wealth, Career Growth, and Business Success | Career | E343

Career success isn’t about degrees, corner offices, or chasing dreams. It’s about mastering valuable skills and seizing real opportunities. Before becoming a TV icon, Mike Rowe spent years jumping between industries, side hustles, and freelance gigs, working nearly 200 jobs. His willingness to embrace unconventional opportunities led to the creation of Dirty Jobs, one of Discovery Channel’s biggest franchises. In this episode, Mike shatters career myths, reveals why skilled trades and overlooked industries are goldmines for entrepreneurs, and shares the mindset shifts needed to achieve financial freedom in today’s job market. In this episode, Hala and Mike will discuss: (00:00) Introduction (01:20) Building a Flexible Mindset for Career Growth (09:42) Pitching Dirty Jobs and Facing Rejection (17:28) Why Chasing Opportunities Beats Passion (27:55) The Six-Figure Trade Jobs People Ignore (34:16) Shifting America’s View on Career Success (36:04) Debunking Trade Job Myths (41:24) Skilled Labor: The Future of Work (45:55) Entrepreneurs Building Wealth in Trades (54:27) How to Avoid Getting Stuck in Your Career (59:51) The Urgent Need to Prioritize Skilled Trades (01:07:06) How Pivoting Drives Business Growth Mike Rowe is an Emmy award-winning TV host, producer, narrator, and entrepreneur, best known for hosting Discovery Channel’s Dirty Jobs. He is also the founder of the mikeroweWORKS Foundation, which has awarded millions in scholarships to students pursuing trade careers. As a bestselling author, podcaster, and America’s top advocate for skilled trades, Mike challenges the stigma around blue-collar work and promotes skilled labor as a path to financial success. Sponsored By: Shopify - youngandprofiting.co/shopify OpenPhone: Streamline and scale your customer communications with OpenPhone. Get 20% off your first 6 months at openphone.com/profiting Airbnb - airbnb.com/host Indeed - indeed.com/profiting RobinHood - robinhood.com/gold Factor - factormeals.com/factorpodcast Rakuten - rakuten.com Microsoft Teams - aka.ms/profiting Resources Mentioned: Mike Rowe’s Foundation: mikeroweworks.org Mike Rowe’s Podcast, The Way I Heard It: https://apple.co/4bVOtLC About My Mother by Peggy Rowe: https://amzn.to/4c04L6h Vacuuming in the Nude by Peggy Rowe: https://amzn.to/4ksE1PT Active Deals - youngandprofiting.com/deals Key YAP Links Reviews - ratethispodcast.com/yap Youtube - youtube.com/c/YoungandProfiting LinkedIn - linkedin.com/in/htaha/ Instagram - instagram.com/yapwithhala/ Social + Podcast Services: yapmedia.com Transcripts - youngandprofiting.com/episodes-new Entrepreneurship, Entrepreneurship Podcast, Business, Business Podcast, Self Improvement, Self-Improvement, Personal Development, Starting a Business, Strategy, Investing, Sales, Selling, Psychology, Productivity, Entrepreneurs, AI, Artificial Intelligence, Technology, Marketing, Negotiation, Money, Finance, Side Hustle, Mental Health, Career, Leadership, Mindset, Health, Growth Mindset, Productivity, Startup, Business Ideas, Growth Hacks, Career Development, Money Management, Professionals, Workplace, Career Podcast.

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

• 0:00Hala Taha?

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• 0:45Hala Taha?

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• 1:24Speaker 01

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

• 1:38Hala Taha?

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

• 1:42Speaker 01

  Dirty Jobs became a hit in 2006. By 2008, it was the number-one 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.

• 2:03Hala Taha?

  How do you feel about following your passion?

• 2:06Speaker 01

  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...

• 2:29Hala Taha?

  Yeah, fam. I'm joined today by a huge figure in both television and podcasting, someone who's perhaps America's most celebrated blue collar storyteller. I'm talking, of course, about Mike Rowe. Mike is an Emmy award-winning TV host, producer, narrator, and podcaster. He's the creator and host of Dirty Jobs and the podcast The Way I Heard It, amongst many other things. Before he was profiling America's toughest jobs, Mike was just trying to figure out his own path. And get ready, because his career is a masterclass in how to adapt and how to become a transformative content creator and storyteller. Mike, welcome to Young and Profiting Podcast.

• 3:06Speaker 01

  Thank you. 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.

• 3:13Hala Taha?

  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. So, 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. You were working as an opera singer, and you did QVC. So, talk to us about all the different experiences that you've had that led you up to Dirty Jobs.

• 3:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, guilty as charged. I grew up on a little farm outside of Baltimore. 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 seventh grade, but he could build, or fix, or fabricate anything from scratch. He just had that chip. So, as a boy, I grew up with a front row seat 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,

• 4:30Speaker 01

  but 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 pops' footsteps. That's what I wanted to do. But the handy gene, tragically, is recessive.

• 4:46Speaker 01

  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 different toolbox. That's when I realized that being a tradesman 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 very narrow way. It's very much a state of mind. When I accepted the fact, honestly, that just because you just because you love something doesn't mean you can't suck at it. And started to put together a different toolbox in a community college and with a couple of really great mentors.

• 5:29Speaker 01

  And the way I just kind of was able to Forrest Gump my way into the TV business was a real blessing. 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 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.

• 6:12Speaker 01

  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 came along. So there's a weird but bright line 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.

• 6:49Hala Taha?

  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 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 struggled to find success as an actor and things like that.

• 7:16Speaker 01

  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 lived two very different lives in the course of the career that I've had, and both were fun and both were necessary, but neither could have happened contemporaneously. So the mercenary thing you read about was probably me talking about my foundation today

• 7:59Speaker 01

  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 in those conversations, 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, 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?

• 8:33Hala Taha?

  No.

• 8:34Speaker 01

  I didn't either. And when I learned about it, it really resonated with me that the word is actually medieval. It refers to a knight who served no lord or no king. His lance, in other words, was for sale. He was a freelance, not an inexpensive one, but he was free to work for anybody he wanted to. That attitude, combined with the tools in the box my pop told me to Assemble, a willingness to relocate whenever necessary. Those things really informed the first fifteen years of my career. And I loved that life. I loved looking at every job like it had a beginning and a middle and an end. I enjoyed doing the best work that I could.

• 9:19Speaker 01

  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. 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 didn't really own any clothes, except the ones I picked up in whatever town I landed in. 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.

• 10:02Speaker 01

  I had deals with hotels. And so I was like a nomad for fifteen 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 twenties and thirties, I was affirmatively looking for work and ideas that had been so, so poorly conceived that no amount of execution could possibly save them. That's the thing nobody talks about in Hollywood. There's so many ideas and so many of them are bad. And 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.

• 10:47Speaker 01

  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 thirty five, I realized I'd been taking my, my retirement in early installments. I'd been traveling a lot, working maybe seven 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 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 pretty satisfied with all that until I wasn't.

• 11:33Hala Taha?

  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. So talk to us about how you got the idea for Dirty Jobs and what was it like to actually bring that to market?

• 11:58Speaker 01

  It was very strange. 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 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. 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,

• 12:42Speaker 01

  Michael, your grandfather turned 90 years old yesterday, as you know. And, um, 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?

• 13:01Speaker 01

  And so remember, my pop is the guy who could build a house without a blueprint. He's the guy can, he was a tradesman's tradesman. And I laughed a lot when I think about what he must have thought when he saw me singing in the opera. We're selling things in the middle of the night on the QVC cable shopping channel or, or doing all of these jobs 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 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, from a winery or a museum or opening night at a theater or something?

• 13:43Speaker 01

  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 don't care. Do whatever you want. Nobody's watching the show anyway.

• 14:01Speaker 01

  I took my cameraman, I went into the sewers of San Francisco and what happened down there is a book 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. I mean, it was so disgusting and so impossible to be a host. 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.

• 14:46Speaker 01

  So my camera guy filmed me working alongside this sewer inspector. And our conversation was captured on the video. And I thought, when I looked at this footage of me working with Gene Cruz, the, the sewer inspector back then. It was like, why does the authority figure have to be the host? Why can't they just be a regular person? And if that happened. 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 cipher of some kind. It might not seem like a big distinction today, but back then it was it was huge. And this idea, like after 15 years of impersonating a host,

• 15:29Speaker 01

  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, would anybody watch that? That was the question. Well, holy crap, man. I put that 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 and I'm crawling around in a river of crap. It was just totally inappropriate for that show. In fact, I was fired 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,

• 16:13Speaker 01

  if you think that was dirty, wait till you see what my dad does. Why don't you come and drive the poo truck at the zoo or replace a lift pump in a pumping chamber to wastewater treatment plant and so forth? And I just thought I'd 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, they let me take the tape with me. And I got their permission to try and sell a show. I called it Somebody's Got to Do It back then. But everybody said no.

• 16:58Speaker 01

  I took it to every network, every place you can take a show to sell it. The only people who didn't say no were Discovery. And they didn't say yes. They just said, look, we'll let you do a pilot, like three 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 38 different shows.

• 17:42Speaker 01

  It did. All those things happened. And 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. 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 told me to do something that looked like work.

• 18:11Hala Taha?

  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?

• 18:40Speaker 01

  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 accessories, right? They hang on walls everywhere. They say things like, stay the course. And it'll be a picture of, you know, some guys maybe rowing in a shell or kayaking. And 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 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.

• 19:25Speaker 01

  If they're not, it's probably the worst thing in the world you can tell them to do. Never quit, never give up. So to answer your question, 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. And boy, sometimes 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, Beyonce, Lady Gaga and Cher and all the rock stars of our day.

• 20:09Speaker 01

  Say, look, never give up on that dream. I've heard him say it when they're standing there clutching their Grammys. 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, many of whom are in their early twenties, who realize that incredibly, 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,

• 20:54Speaker 01

  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. 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. And then it's true, I am saying all those things and I say them every day, 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.

• 21:39Speaker 01

  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 beat 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 that's why friends are important. And that's why books are important. And that's why the unexamined life is a tragedy. 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, not that way, this way. Try this instead. Wouldn't it be fun if your pop could see you doing

• 22:24Speaker 01

  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. And 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. And it was just the right thing for her to say and just the right time for me to hear it. 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 success of a show like Dirty Jobs. I just wasn't mentally prepared for it. So, you never know.

• 23:07Hala Taha?

  I just love the, 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 going to 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 going to get you to where you want to go.

• 23:37Speaker 01

  I'm just sitting here nodding in violent agreement. It's back to cookie cutter advice, unfortunately. 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. 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.

• 24:21Speaker 01

  Her dream of being a bestselling author was out the window. Until she turned 80. Then she sold a manuscript and it went to number four on the New York Times bestseller list.

• 24:32Hala Taha?

  That's so amazing.

• 24:34Speaker 01

  And then two years later, she fricking did it again. 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 top 10. Then she writes Vacuuming in the Nude and Other Ways to Get Attention, which goes to number one. And then she just wrote her fourth, Oh No, Not the Home. True Stories About Life in This Retirement Community. 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 actually contradicts and makes my point at the same time.

• 25:18Speaker 01

  Based on that, I said, Mom, so what do you tell a writer who comes to you? And says, do you have any advice? Cause 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 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 to make their journey

• 26:03Speaker 01

  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 eighty seven. All I can do is encourage you at whatever point you are in your race. That you better be enjoying the race because there is no guarantee that you're going to hit the finish line.

• 26:26Hala Taha?

  So I want to switch gears here. I want to talk about skilled trades. And we're here talking about how it's really hard to become a famous actor, a 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, twelve million dollars 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?

• 27:04Speaker 01

  Well, in a lot of ways, I think one way is exactly what we've been talking about. 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. 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.

• 27:50Speaker 01

  It's really hard to find. Better to find a job and then craft it into the thing you want. Better to find a good and deep. Person you can trust and then and then find a way to love him or her. It's I know I'm saying the same thing in a slightly different way, but we've got it so inculcated 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.

• 28:33Speaker 01

  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. Most of them don't require a four-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 dollars 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. Debt includes people who got halfway through a college experience and threw their hands up and said, no.

• 29:16Speaker 01

  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. When I was in high school,

• 29:57Speaker 01

  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, 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 who can't do the other thing. They're actually really important. And we're not going to 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

• 30:42Speaker 01

  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 of 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 I had not I had not thought about

• 31:22Speaker 01

  really until Dirty Jobs became a hit in like a real hit in 2006. And then by 2008, it was the number one show on cable when our country went into a recession, 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 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 a lot of small business 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. When I said, what's your, what's your biggest challenge?

• 32:07Speaker 01

  It was 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. 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, as a PR campaign for those jobs.

• 32:50Speaker 01

  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 four-year education. I have one actually. It served me well, but in 1984, two years in a community college and three years in a university cost me $12,900. Same exact course load today in the same schools is close to 90 grand. So it's just no longer tenable.

• 33:35Speaker 01

  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. It's also become, and I don't know how this happened, but I woke up one morning and it was the, it was the sun in my solar system. It was the thing that had been there longer than any other thing. I'm working on three different shows. I got a podcast, I got books, I got, 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. This is the thing in your life. This is the thing that makes you not an asshole.

• 34:17Hala Taha?

  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. 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?

• 34:43Speaker 01

  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 not to put myself on a couch, but it was, was really interesting. 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.

• 35:28Speaker 01

  I was like, I was gobsmacked by that as a kid. And what happens in life, 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 heating and air conditioning and all that stuff. I only mention it because by the time I was 42, I had lost all of that on a personal level. I just wasn't in touch anymore with a lot of people in the trades the way I used to be.

• 36:11Speaker 01

  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, I thought I had truly cracked the code. I had figured it out and I was comfortable in all. 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 forty two, forty three years old. And what happens is if you spend two hundred 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.

• 36:56Speaker 01

  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 who is that? Who is that guy? And why is he doing what he's doing? And the answer to your question is, if you're if you're actually curious and if you're me, then when you start to get reconnected to these things that that you know are important. It, I mean, this sounds uncharacteristically earnest of me, but it's true. It it made me grateful 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

• 37:36Speaker 01

  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 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 dubious that you can make a hundred and eighty thousand dollars a year welding? Today, I know dozens of people who do in all different types of welding.

• 38:20Speaker 01

  I know plumbers who make two hundred fifty, three hundred thousand dollars 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. 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 things that inform our ideas. So these ideas are with us, these beliefs are with us. And like most dangerous beliefs, they're not wholly untrue.

• 39:02Speaker 01

  There's truth in everything, but there is no truth in the idea. The best path for the most people is is going to be the most expensive path. Or that this whole category of jobs, it does require people to get up early and stay late and work hard are in some way subordinate to these other jobs. I would just say that if we want a balanced workforce, and believe me, we need one, then we have to stop thinking about blue collar versus white collar. The color of collars, 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 what I used to call the muddy boots architect, people

• 39:46Speaker 01

  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, 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 chilling. I got a call not long ago from a guy who runs an organization called Blue Forge Alliance. Does this ring any bells?

• 40:16Hala Taha?

  No.

• 40:17Speaker 01

  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 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 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.

• 41:02Speaker 01

  But he says, look, we need to hire in the next nine years, 100,000 tradespeople. A hundred thousand. 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, 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 eighth grade, man. They're in the eighth grade. And so what's happening in the country right now is that companies are beginning to realize

• 41:43Speaker 01

  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. 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 eight and a half 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 see if it makes sense to your brain. Cause we've helped 2,200 people get the training they need and their stories, their stories

• 42:28Speaker 01

  are way more persuasive than my own and I hear them every day.

• 42:33Hala Taha?

  That's the point that I want to 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 three businesses 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 want to be a doctor, I want to be a lawyer and they've been studying for 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,

• 43:15Hala Taha?

  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. I had Cody Sanchez on the show and she talks about boring businesses and she's all about finding and buying boring businesses, main street businesses. And so she'll teach people how to value a business and kind of take it over and to stop worrying about just having a sexy business. 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

• 43:55Hala Taha?

  have to be online, can make you a lot of money. So I'd love to 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 becoming an entrepreneur in this space is actually a really great financial opportunity.

• 44:17Speaker 01

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

• 44:21Hala Taha?

  I will, I will. She's awesome.

• 44:23Speaker 01

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

• 44:41Hala Taha?

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

• 44:48Speaker 01

  Okay. So I would go back to, 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 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 different ways, depending on their needs. She's a jobber, probably has short-term contracts with some, longer-term contracts with others. She's probably paid on her results at some point. At some point, you're gonna 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.

• 45:31Speaker 01

  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. 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? Because the gig economy, that's under siege today.

• 46:15Speaker 01

  Freelancing is under siege. Here in California, it's a real thing. There's a thing called AB15. 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. That's the relationship that a lot of people are being pushed into. And I think it's kind of tragic, because it kills their entrepreneurial spirit. So to answer your question, 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 dirty jobbers and things that I had seen.

• 46:59Speaker 01

  What's happening now and the reason the foundation is so robust is that for the first time I'm able to go back five or six 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. And oh my God, the stories are amazing. But Dirty Jobs is the, I mean, it's the granddaddy of essential working shows shot through with an entrepreneurial spirit. And I could just talk for hours about all of them. Not all of them.

• 47:41Speaker 01

  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, 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. If you go back and look at old episodes of that show, I think the exact number was 41. Forty-one 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

• 48:21Speaker 01

  look like the modern version of what a successful aspirational entrepreneur looks like. But they're there and their stories are amazing. Now, it's a privilege to tell them.

• 48:35Hala Taha?

  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 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.

• 49:18Speaker 01

  Way leads on to way and part of what I think we've we've lost is patience. We want to see a playbook. We want to understand if I do this, this, this, and this, am I going to get to where I want to be? And it's reasonable. Well, it's just not accurate. It just doesn't happen that way. And this is my complaint. Aside from what I think is a preponderance, a proliferation of cookie cutter advice. It's just this tendency among successful people to look back and say, let me tell you how I did it. 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

• 50:02Speaker 01

  and taking your advice are you. And of course they're not. 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 my pop explained were beyond my my grasp. 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 do what I'm good at. And so, once you find that out, and maybe you've seen this in your own business, but you know,

• 50:47Speaker 01

  I've done, I don't know, probably seven shows, starting with Dirty Jobs that are all out there. But the truth is, honestly, they're all the same show. I just change the title every few years. Dirty Jobs, Somebody's Got to Do It, People You Should Know, Returning the Favor, Six Degrees, even some history shows I've worked on. They're all a version 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. To the extent that that can be a brand, that's my trade. And that's why I ask you before, how do you really see yourself? And that, at the risk of contradicting myself,

• 51:29Speaker 01

  that is some advice that I would offer 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? Cause who you are and what you do, it becomes more crystallized when you hang a label on it, for better or worse. And so for me, it was useful for a while to see myself as a host and to see host in the credits. Okay, that's what Mike does. He's a host and I'll 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 moment in the sewer.

• 52:12Speaker 01

  The Greeks call it a, um, a parapetia. It's a moment in the narrative 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, if you're really interested in storytelling and you start to look for parapetias, you'll, you'll find them everywhere. You remember The Sixth Sense?

• 52:46Hala Taha?

  Yep.

• 52:47Speaker 01

  That's a great example of a modern parapetia. You got Bruce Willis, spoiler alert. But you got Bruce Willis and he's a psychologist and he's helping this little kid who sees dead people. And all through the, the movie, their relationship develops and, 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. Dead the whole movie. So like when you realize you've been dead the whole movie, when you realize you're you're actually not really a host,

• 53:31Speaker 01

  you're not really the thing you've been seeing when you look in the mirror. 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. I would say to people, 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?

• 54:14Speaker 01

  Or I mean, 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 mix it up a little bit. Well, what are you going to do? How are you going to mix it up? I would say maybe one of the ways is to think about, think about a different business card, different label.

• 54:41Hala Taha?

  This has been such an awesome conversation, Mike. I really enjoyed it. My last question to you before I ask a couple of kind of close out questions is really like, how do we think it's all going to 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.

• 55:05Speaker 01

  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 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 Of a four-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.

• 55:49Speaker 01

  My job in the missionary side of things is to do a better job of sharing those stories. 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 nine years? Is unfortunately, things need to get a little worse before they get better. And going splat is never fun, but sometimes that's what needs to happen. For people to really think twice about the value of the Ivy League, maybe they need to see the Ivy League affirmatively

• 56:30Speaker 01

  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 really live in harmony with nature is to control burn, to clear the forests from time to time, 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.

• 57:12Speaker 01

  I hate to say that, 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. Just 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.

• 57:53Speaker 01

  I have seen more and more people step back and think a little more critically about the opportunities that exist 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. It's quixotic, but I I've been tilting it windmills my whole life and pushing the rock up the hill. No, wait, that's not quixotic. That's Sisyphean. Whatever it is, all we can do is what we can do.

• 58:19Hala Taha?

  Now, if somebody's 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?

• 58:29Speaker 01

  There's no age limit. In fact, I'm I'm more excited when I when I get applications from people who have hit the reset button at thirty five and forty years old and want to go back and write, just kind of start from scratch. It takes a lot of balls to do that and I'm and I appreciate it and I admire it. Typically, though, we're talking about men and women who are just coming out of high school or or a 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 there are lots of different scholarships

• 59:09Speaker 01

  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 a four 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.

• 59:36Hala Taha?

  Amazing. Mikey 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?

• 59:55Speaker 01

  Well, again, I would contradict myself if I actually answered that directly. 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. 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, blah. So I won't say that, but I will make a case for the importance of being uncomfortable. If you're willing to be uncomfortable, that's a step in the right direction. Because discomfort doesn't necessarily mean failure.

• 1:00:37Speaker 01

  It really doesn't mean anything other than are you willing to be uncomfortable? Actually, it was my old scout master 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 character has a lot to do with a willingness to be uncomfortable. But what I'm saying is, is slightly different. It's great to be willing to do a hard thing or to agree to volunteer for a difficult thing. That's well and good. The next level though, is to figure out a way to like it. That's what Mr. Huntington said to me. He said, look, man, if you, if you want to go somewhere, it's not enough to simply endure being uncomfortable.

• 1:01:22Speaker 01

  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'm 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. 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 the kind of discomfort that usually leads to something good.

• 1:01:59Hala Taha?

  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?

• 1:02:12Speaker 01

  Well, a couple of things come to mind, but I'm gonna go with the word you used earlier 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 a word you don't hear a lot about anymore, which is initiative. God, that's a talk about which is in short supply. That's what every employer I know is just dying, dying to find people with, people with initiative. But I'll go back to pivoting. 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.

• 1:02:56Speaker 01

  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, two weeks to flatten the curve. All right, I'll wait another two weeks. I'll wait two more. Meanwhile, life is happening right in front of you. I remember two 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, 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.

• 1:03:41Speaker 01

  I thought it was just some, 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, in a totally new way. I said, "What if we, um, 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. That happened about a month into the lockdowns. And then after that, I was like, look, I don't care what it takes.

• 1:04:26Speaker 01

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

• 1:05:05Hala Taha?

  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.

• 1:05:16Speaker 01

  The way I heard it is probably playing right where this podcast is playing, you know, Spotify, Apple, wherever people get podcasts. I talk to people I find interesting every single week. I write a lot of short stories, 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. Working on a new show called People You Should Know that'll be coming to YouTube and there's a website with my name in it called microwork.com and, and of course, nine 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'd join them and most importantly, microworks.org.

• 1:06:00Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:06:08Hala Taha?

  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.

• 1:06:14Speaker 01

  Thanks for having me.

• 1:06:19Hala Taha?

  Yeah fam, I truly enjoyed this conversation with Mike Rowe. In fact, this was one of my favorite conversations ever on the podcast. Can you say instant Yav classic? He's got such a refreshing and pragmatic view of life and career development. And like Mike Rowe said, there's a lot of cookie cutter advice out there. And there's certainly no shortage of self-help books, YouTube channels, social media feeds that tell you to follow your passion, never give up, and don't stop until you achieve your dreams. But of course, life is more complicated than this. You're not going to become the next big influencer just because you've worked hard and you want it badly.

• 1:07:00Hala Taha?

  So many young entrepreneurs harbor these unrealistic expectations of becoming overnight sensations or celebrities. And what many fail to realize is that success is typically built on a foundation of more realistic expectations. And yes, a willingness to embrace less glamorous opportunities. Sometimes, like Mike, you've got to be willing to go out and freelance for years, selling your skills to a number of clients, picking up new skills along the way. And don't be afraid to learn a trade and use your hands as well as your brain, or like Cody Sanchez suggests, to start a boring business like a laundromat or a car wash. You can start small, learn an expertise, and then go from there.

• 1:07:43Hala Taha?

  Just remember that, as Mike put it, "nobody else's playbook is going to work for you." You're going to have to write your own as you go along. Thanks for listening to this episode of Young and Profiting Podcast. If you listened, learned, and profited from the wonderfully contrarian wisdom of Mike Rowe, please share this episode with somebody who might enjoy it. And if you did enjoy this show, as you guys probably know, my favorite thing in the world are Apple Podcasts and Spotify reviews. Nothing helps us reach more people than a good review from you. I love to read them. They motivate me, they motivate the team, it's important for social proof. Please. We don't charge for this show. Least you could do is drop us a review. And if you like to watch this podcast as video, you can find us on YouTube.

• 1:08:28Hala Taha?

  We're getting a lot more YouTube engagement lately. I'd love for you to drop a comment on YouTube. Just look up Young and Profiting, you'll find all the videos on there. You can also find me on Instagram at Yap with Hala or LinkedIn by searching my name. It's Hala Taha. And before we wrap, this week, I want to do something a little different. I want to shout out a listener. Actually, I got this really heartfelt Instagram DM. Again, you can DM me at Yap with Hala. I read those messages. I talk to my listeners all the time, actually. And this listener said, "My loved one listens to your podcast while currently incarcerated. He's been incarcerated for 18 years. He spoke so highly of you, I just had to follow."

• 1:09:09Hala Taha?

  He wrote an amazing self-published book, and now he's starting a podcast. And so his name is Kevin Townsend. He's a Brooklyn native. He's actually been in prison for 18 years. And while he was in prison, he transformed his life through education and introspection. He completed an electrical vocational program, a legal research course, and now has his associate degree all behind prison walls. He wrote an amazing self-published book, and now he's starting his own podcast. Shout out to Kevin. Thank you for tuning into the show. I'm happy that I could have been any sort of inspiration or light on your journey. I'm happy that you're following your dreams, no matter what your situation is.

• 1:09:52Hala Taha?

  You are a true example of resilience, and I hope that you make it and make all your dreams come true. And thank you so much for listening to the show. And I also want to shout out all you guys tuning in too. I love you guys so much. Thank you for tuning into the show. This is your host, Hala Taha, AKA The Podcast Princess, signing off.