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

29:11Hala Taha: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. It's back to cookie cutter advice, unfortunately. You know, I just we all need to hear what exactly what you just said at some point in our life.

29:46but we don't all need to hear that at the same time because we're on a trip. This is a journey. And it's, it's very, I just had this conversation with my mom again, not to drag her back into it, but, but it's really apropos. This woman wrote every day for 60 years. I'm not even kidding. Her dream was to become a published writer. And she gave up on that dream after 40 years of beating her head against the wall, but she never stopped writing. She kept doing it because she knew the work. She found a passion in the work. Her dream of being a bestselling author was out the window, right? Until she turned 80.

30:30And then she sold a manuscript and it went to number four on the New York Times bestseller list. It's on the wall behind me over there. I don't know if I can see it, But, you know, there it is. That's so amazing.

30:42Hala Taha:Yeah. And then two years later, she freaking did it again. Wow. And then I'm just going to show you. I mean, if you want the persistence rap, this is the story. She's 80 and she writes a book called About My Mother. She's 82 and she writes About Your Father. That thing also 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?

31:30It actually contradicts and makes my point at the same time. Based on that, I said, Mom, so what do you tell a writer who comes to you and says, do you have any advice? Because it's 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 gone around killing people's dreams. How do you how do you square that? And she said, oh, Michael, you know what I do? I tell them that I encourage them the way somebody in the crowd of a marathon might encourage a runner.

32:17I just stand there and I applaud as they go by. And maybe I offer them a sip of cool water, you know, to make their journey a little more pleasant in that moment. But that's all I can do as somebody who finally got to do what she wanted to do at 87. All I can do is encourage you at whatever point you are in your race that, you know, you better be enjoying the race because there is no guarantee that you're going to hit the finish line. So you better be having fun right now. And so there's something in that.

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37:34Hala Taha:And on your website, you say that America has declared a war on work and the casualties are all around us. So how has America made work the enemy? Well, in a lot of ways, I think one way is we've told kids that job satisfaction is a result of their ability to make their dreams a reality. It kind of starts with that. And so you put this incredible burden on a kid to say, look, if you want to be happy with your life, you need to identify right now the thing that's going to make you happy. And then we'll embark upon a plan to borrow vast sums of money in order to get you the proper credentials that will permit you to pursue this goal, right?

38:20That's baked in. It's kind of like, you know, not to digress, but it's like a soulmate. You know, if you're out there looking for your soulmate, that's like looking for your dream job. It's really hard to find, you know, better to find a job and then craft it into the thing you want. Better to find a good and decent person you can trust and then find a way to love him or her, right? 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.

39:05I'm sorry, but wanting a thing is not enough. So the first order of business is to get a more realistic set of expectations. Then you have to take an honest look at the opportunities that exist. Again, I'm not saying ignore your dreams. I'm just saying take a breath and just push them aside for a minute and look around to where the opportunities really and truly are. Right now, there are 8.7 million open jobs. 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 in student loans that are currently on the books.

39:55That's a fact. It's a fact that most of the people who hold that debt don't even have a degree. That debt includes people who got halfway through a college experience and threw their hands up and said no. Well, yeah, you can walk away from the university, but you can't walk away from that debt. It's a fact that many people who did graduate in their chosen field are either not working at all or not working in their chosen field. And that debt is real to them, too. So I spend a lot of time saying, look, that amount of debt didn't happen by accident. And that amount of open positions in our country, many of which are in the skilled trades, that didn't happen by accident.

40:40It happened because we told a whole generation that you can have whatever you want if you want it bad enough. And then we took shop class out of high school. Maybe you're too young to remember shop class, but I'm sure some of our listeners do. I mean, when I was in high school, sure, you took music and you took English and math and all the normal stuff. 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.

41:19You could at least know that, oh, that's what work looks like. Those jobs are real. They're not vocational consolation prizes for people who can't do the other thing. They're actually really important. And we're not 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 that that trade schools and the kinds of jobs that a trade school education can lead to are somehow subordinate to a tick tock influencer or a successful podcaster or a successful TV host or an accountant or somebody on Wall Street or.

42:07Down 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 thought about really until Dirty Jobs became a hit, in like a real hit in 2006. And then by 2008, it was, it was the number one show on cable when our country went into a recession, a bad one. And that's when all of this started. I saw the unemployment numbers every single day at its worst, there were 12 million people looking for looking for jobs.

43:02But the crazy thing was on on dirty jobs, everywhere we went, we saw help wanted signs. And so I would have these conversations with, you know, a lot of small business owners who, you know, would welcome me and my crew into their place of work. And we would sit and we would talk after filming all day long. And it was always the same story. You know, when I said, what's your what's your biggest challenge? It 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. You know, it was just I just heard it constantly.

43:43And 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 PR campaign for those jobs. It turned into a trade resource center. Fans of Dirty Jobs helped me build this online destination where anybody could go and look at the opportunities that existed in all kinds of different trades.

44:30And 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 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. Wow. It's just no longer tenable. And so today, MicroWorks, it's still a PR campaign for a bunch of good jobs that people aren't excited about. But it's also a scholarship fund.

45:17And it's also become, and I don't know how this happened, but I woke up one morning and it was, it was the sun in my solar system. It was the thing that has, had been there longer than any other thing. I'm working on 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. Oh, this is the thing in your life. This is the this is the thing that makes you not an asshole.

45:54Hala 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. Right. So when you are on Dirty Jobs, what were some of the stereotypes that you saw about blue-collar work and dirty jobs that you feel like were just so inaccurate that you want to share with people? Great question. Consciously, it didn't occur to me for a while, because the truth is I had become disconnected from some really primal and fundamental things that as a boy, I was very mindful of.

46:38This is, you know, not to put myself on a couch, but it was really interesting. You know, as a teenager, I knew where my food came from. I was always on a farm at some point helping bring the food in. I knew where my energy came from. I was very close to people who worked in the mines, people who worked in the oil fields. I had a real appreciation for the miracle of flicking a switch and actually seeing the lights come on and flushing the toilet and watching the crap go away. I was like I was gobsmacked by that as a kid. And what happens in life, you know, if you're we get busy, we all just get busy.

47:22And 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. So 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. And I had been freelancing the way I described for all those years. And to be honest, I was kind of arrogant, I think, in the sense that I thought I had truly cracked the code.

48:14I had figured it out. and I was comfortable in all of that. Well, my mom makes that phone call to me and I go in the sewer and then Discovery orders it and then it turns into this hit. And then the honest answer to your question is that that's when my education started when I was 42, 43 years old. And what happens is if you spend 200 nights a year flying around working with dirty jobbers and small business people who are doing this kind of work, usually out of sight and out of mind, you learn more than you think you'll learn. It's not just about, oh, what is that job? How does that work? It's more like, well, who is that?

49:06Who 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. I mean, this sounds uncharacteristically earnest of me, but but it's true. It it made me grateful in in a way, not just for my job or for my career. It literally made me grateful to know that Gene Cruz is in the sewers making polite society possible in San Francisco and that Bob Combs is running his pig farm outside of Las Vegas in a way that's not only environmentally friendly, but but potentially a model.

49:51for a lot of other farms. And I just found myself genuinely engaged and interested in a lot of things that I had forgotten about. And that's what brings you to 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 dubious that you can make$180 ,000 a year welding. Today, I know dozens of people who do in all different types of welding. I know plumbers who make$250 ,000,$300 ,000 a year. Plenty of them. Some have come through my own foundation. So when you say what kind of myths, I think the first one is that people just don't believe you can make six figures working with your hands.

50:45Well, 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 skills. There's a long list of things that inform our ideas and prejudices. You know, that whole Varsity Blues scandal, that didn't happen around trade schools. That happened because parents were completely convinced that it was their job to do anything they had to do in order to get their kid into the right school. So these ideas are with us. These beliefs are with us. And like most dangerous beliefs, they're not wholly untrue.

51:30There's truth in everything, but there is no truth in the idea that the best path for the most people is going to be the most expensive path or that this whole category of jobs that does require people to get up early and stay late and work hard are in 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, you know, blue collar versus white collar. The color of collars is, who cares? That ship sailed. We're entering a new era, and it's going to be defined by AI and robotics, and it's going to be defined by, you know, what I used to call the muddy boots architect, people who can work with their hands and think with their brain and are willing to do both.

52:28That'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 bring any bells?

53:00Hala Taha:No. Okay. So the Blue Forge Alliance oversees something called the American Submarine Industrial Base. That base is a collection of 15 ,000 individual companies, some large, some small, but all of whom collectively are responsible for building 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 now.

53:50But he says, look, we need to hire in the next nine years, 100 ,000 tradespeople. 100 ,000. Now, that's incredible. I mean, there's already a skills gap and every major company in this country who relies on skilled labor is currently struggling. But I hadn't heard a number that big yet. And this guy says to me, you know, we've been looking all over the place for these tradespeople. Do you know where they are. And I laughed and I said, well, yeah, actually I do. I know exactly where they are. And he said, where? And I said, they're in the 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 they need to make a more persuasive case for a whole bunch of good jobs that are really important to all of us.

54:46And 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 and and see if it makes sense to your brain, because we've helped twenty two hundred people get the training they need.

55:26And and their stories, their stories are way more persuasive than my own. And I hear them every day.

55:34Hala Taha:Yeah.

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59:36Hala Taha: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, you know, their tests and they just keep studying and they keep studying and they can never pass the test and they can never pass the test. And then they end up just studying and never working is what I've seen. Like a lot of people fall into this pattern. And to your point, what we were talking about way earlier in this conversation, it's like, it's okay to pivot. It's okay to like stop and think what other opportunities are out there that I may have not really dreamed about doing, but are really lucrative and skilled traits.

1:00:15Hala Taha:I had Cody Sanchez on the show a couple of times. Do you know who she is? I don't tell me. Well, she's awesome. She's somebody you should know because it's kind of like in your world. And she talks about boring businesses and she's all about finding and buying boring businesses, main street businesses. And so she'll 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 have to be online, can make you a lot of money.

1:00:55Hala Taha: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. My God, there's so many. Please hook me up with Ms. Sanchez. I will. I will. She's awesome. 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, if you had a business card, what would it say?

1:01:38What's it come down to for you vocationally?

1:01:41Hala Taha:um i scale personal brands i guess is like my my main thing monetize personal brands sure scale personal brands okay um so i would go back to like i think one of the very first things that came out when we started talking which was my pop if he were still around would say oh this woman this hollow woman yeah she's a uh she's a tradeswoman clearly and if you pressed him he would say, well, think about how she approaches work. She has many different clients. She advises them in different ways, depending on their needs. She's a jobber. She probably has short-term contracts with some, longer-term contracts with others.

1:02:25She's probably paid on her results. At some point, you're going to say, well, if I grow your business to this degree, how can I participate? Or are you purely time and materials? I don't know. No wrong answer either way. But those are all questions that tradespeople with an entrepreneurial bent will ask themselves. So I look at myself, I think much the same way you do in the sense that I do a lot of different things, but I'm, I'm really not trying to define the work by any one thing. That's why I went out of my way to say, I don't know when it happened, but for micro works to become the sun in my solar system was a big deal because that had never happened before.

1:03:14Even when dirty jobs was at its peak, that was never the main thing. That was a big thing, but my relationship with Ford was, was bigger actually for a while. And then with Caterpillar and then publishing and then speaking. And so I, I, I realized, you know what, you're let the plates spin, you know, every now and then one's going to fall and shatter, but who cares? You know, you got a lot of plates in the air. Most of the jobbers I know, most of the trades people I know think the same way some some some jobs are going to be pretty pretty lush others are going to be a nightmare you just you just don't know but you're going to move on from one to the next to the next anyway and so that's just a long way of saying i i think one of the things really missing from the conversation today whether you want to be an influencer or whether you want to be a plumber.

1:04:09The 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. 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.

1:04:58So 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, you know. But 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. Oh my God, the stories are amazing. There was a guy, Jake, who wanted to be a welder and he filled out the work ethic scholarship there there's some hoops you have to jump through my my scholarship full disclosure is a you know it's kind of a hassle you gotta gotta make a case for yourself you have to write an essay you have to make a video you gotta give me references all the things you do in real life it's amazing how how many people get scared away by that but the people who don't are serious and and this guy i wound up giving him i think maybe seven thousand dollars and he got his welding certificate.

1:06:20When I checked back, the story was, well, I'll tell you what I did. My question was, are you still welding? He said, well, yes and no. I took the welding certificate, MIG and TIG welding. I got hired by a couple of automotive companies and that went great. And then I met a guy who wanted me to underwater weld. And so I learned how to underwater weld. That's a whole different set of muscles. And that's like$300 ,000 a year. You're in a big dry suit, you're 100 feet down, you're working on pipelines and all sorts of stuff. That's amazing. And then he got hired to do that in the Gulf of Oman and in Saudi Arabia.

1:07:00So now he's making pretty great money with no taxes. And then he comes home a year later and he's looking around. He's like, well, I think I'm going to buy a van and I'm going to hire my best friend who's a plumber because welding and plumbing go hand in hand and pipe fitting, of course. They got a pipe fitter involved and bought another van, and then they got an electrician, and then they got a couple of HVAC guys. And now Jake has three vans, seven employees, and he's doing about$3.5 million a year. And nobody tells that story because nobody's quite sure what the story is. Is it the story of a welder?

1:07:44Is it the story of an underwater welder? Is it the story of an entrepreneur? I mean, these are the small businesses that make our country work. And so many of them wind up coming into existence because somebody mastered a skill that was in demand.

1:08:01Hala Taha:Yep. As opposed to saying, God, all my life, you know what, I've dreamed of welding. Jake didn't dream of welding, right? So, yes, I've got plenty of stories like his in my foundation, but Dirty Jobs is the 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. That's a bit rich. We did 350 different jobs. Wow. And all of them are important. Some are critical. Some are small businesses. Others were independent contractors. Others were big companies with an employee focus. It was a mosaic. But I'll tell you what shocks people to this day, and they just straight up don't believe me when I tell them, but I swear it's true.

1:08:58If you go back and look at old episodes of that show, I think the exact number was 41. 41 of the people we profiled were multimillionaires. And you would have never known it because they were covered in crap or something worse because they, they, they just didn't look like the modern version of what a successful aspirational entrepreneur looks like, but they're there and their stories are amazing. And, um, yeah, it's a privilege to tell.

1:09:30Hala 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. see like, that's the easiest way that you can start a business. And it reminds me like, as we're talking, getting a skill in the real world with a, you know, a trade skill. Once you learn that skill and you figure things out, maybe learn under somebody else's dime, see how their business works. You can slowly start to build a business and basically just bootstrap it. And everybody has this like conception of starting a business that they need to have a product and they need to raise money and they need to do all this stuff when you can just like start small, learn a skill and evolve.

1:10:08Hala Taha:And there's so many millionaires and multimillionaires that get started in that way. Way leads on to way. And part of what I think we've lost is patience. We want to see a playbook. We want to understand, you know, if I do this, this, this, and this, am I going to get to where I want to be? And it's reasonable. It's just not accurate. It just doesn't happen that way. And this is my complaint, you know, aside from what I think is a preponderance or a proliferation of cookie cutter advice. 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.

1:10:56And there's nothing wrong with doing that. In fact, it's fun to do, but it presupposes the idea that the people who are reading your book and taking your advice are you. And of course, they're not. They're not. Like I said, the phone call I got from my mom, I got exactly when I needed it. And the 15 years I spent freelancing, I wouldn't trade for anything. I loved it. But neither would I trade where I am now. And really, I mean, I'll take my own advice, even though I couldn't master any of the trades I was interested in that that my pop explained were beyond my my grasp. I don't know if I've mastered anything necessarily, but I've become fairly facile at the things I get paid to do.

1:11:45So I don't waste anybody's time. I know how to narrate. I can write. I know how to I know how to do what I'm good at. And so once you find that out, and maybe you've seen this in your own business, but, you know, I've done, I don't know, probably 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 of me tapping the country on the shoulder and saying, what about her?

1:12:31What 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, you know. And that's why I asked you before, you know, how do you how do you really see yourself? and that, you know, at the risk of contradicting myself, that is some advice that I would offer, you know, really to anyone. It's really like take your own inventory and be really honest with yourself and ask yourself, how have you been defining yourself? Because who you are and what you do, it becomes more crystallized when you hang a label on it, for better or worse.

1:13:16And 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 moment in the sewer. The Greeks call it a peripetia. 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 was wrong. And it's like, those are the moments that I find myself most interested 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.

1:14:13And like, 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?

1:14:22Hala Taha:Yep. I mean, that's a great example of a modern parapetia. You got Bruce Willis, spoiler alert, right? But you got Bruce Willis and he's a psychologist and he's helping this little kid who sees dead people, you know, and all through the movie, their relationship, you know, develops. And Bruce is very fond of this kid, but he's crazy. Obviously he's mentally troubled. And that's what Bruce Willis believes. And that's what informs everything he does. And then in the final act of the movie, he realizes this little kid really can see dead people. And therefore he realizes in that moment, oh shit, that's why he can see me.

1:15:02I'm dead. I've been dead the whole movie. Right. So like when you realize you've been dead the whole movie or when you realize you're, you're actually not really a host, you're not really the thing you've been seeing when you look in the mirror. And the, and the, and it's true, I think, honestly, 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.

1:15:48I don't want to be a host. Not forever. I wanted to change that. And so I would say to people, you know, like really think about it. Are you sure you're a lawyer or are you something else? Are you sure you're a brand consultant? Or 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, I want to mix it up a little bit. Well, what are you going to do? How are you going to mix it up?

1:16:26I would say maybe one of the ways is to, is to think about, think about a different business card.

1:16:35Hala 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 closeout 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? 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.

1:17:16People 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 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. 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 going splat is is never fun but sometimes that's what needs to happen for for people to really think twice about the value of the ivy league maybe they need to see the ivy league affirmatively discriminating against free speech maybe they need to see the leaders of certain universities be found guilty of plagiarism, which they clearly were.

1:18:42Maybe 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 forest 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. 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 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.

1:19:40Submarines do, but oh my God, we didn't know that, but now we do. And I hope it's not too late, but I hope we start to think differently about the definition of a good job before those kinds of things go splat. I don't have a crystal ball, but I'm basically a glass half full kind of guy. And I know that from where I'm sitting, I can see the ship starting to turn. I have seen more and more people step back and think a little more critically, you know, about the opportunities that exist 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.

1:20:17And it's quixotic, you know, but I've been tilting at windmills my whole life and pushing the rock up the hill. And wait, that's not quixotic. That's Sisyphean, whatever it is. All we can do is what we can do.

1:20:29Hala 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? There's no age limit. I'm is in fact, I'm I'm more excited when I when I get applications from people who have hit the reset button at 35 and 40 years old and want to go back and write just kind of start from scratch. It 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 a partway through college and realizing that they want to change the road they're on.

1:21:11If 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 the scholarship game is simple. There are lots of different scholarships out there, by the way. Some focus on athletic achievement, others on academic, others on art. There's scholarship for everything. Ours are for work ethic and the skilled trades. So if 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.

1:21:55Hala Taha:Amazing. Mike, you provided so much guidance. I feel like people are going to love this episode. You're just such a great storyteller and you've got such a great heart. So I just appreciate all your time. I end my show with two questions I ask all my guests. The first one is what is one piece of actionable advice our young and profiters can do today to become more profitable tomorrow? Well, again, I would contradict myself if I actually answered that directly. But I will say, 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.

1:22:32Right. So I don't know about tomorrow, but I will tell you this. There's nothing new to say about failure. I'm sure everybody who's ever come on your podcast has, has talked about failure is just learning. Failure is that's where we learn how blah blah so i won't say that but i i will make a case for the importance of being uh uncomfortable if you're willing to be uncomfortable that's a that's a step in the right direction because discomfort doesn't necessarily mean failure it really doesn't mean anything other than are you willing to be uncomfortable and um actually it was my old 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 of him for a long time.

1:23:15But you will hear that character has a lot to do with a willingness to be uncomfortable. But what I'm saying 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. And that's what, that's what Mr. Huntington said to me. He said, look, man, if you, if you want to go somewhere, you know, it's not enough to simply endure being uncomfortable. You have to find a way to like it and look forward to it. That's what Dirty Jobs was for me. It was uncomfortable. I took a pie in the face and every single episode, There were broken bones and I seared off my eyelashes and my eyelids.

1:24:09I mean, it was just, it was painful. It was painful. But the Navy SEALs say the same thing, you know, embrace the suck. Look forward to it. Take a cold plunge. It's good for you and it's miserable, but you feel great afterwards. There's so many things you can do, little things to reintroduce yourself to the kind of discomfort that usually leads to something good.

1:24:35Hala 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? Well, a couple of things come to mind, but I'm going to 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 in, talk about what's in short supply. That's what every employer I know is just, is just dying, dying to find people with initiative.

1:25:21But I'll go back to pivoting. You know, I've, I've always known it was important, but it wasn't until the lockdowns that I saw just how clarifying that was. And I mean, it was pivot or perish. It was adapt or die. And how many businesses went out of business because they just sat around waiting to be told what to do, where they just got into that. Okay, 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.

1:26:06I mean, your whole pipeline of content relies on people going out into the world and working. And we can't go out into the world now. And she said, look, I know. I know. We're freaking out over here. Any ideas? And I had just read an article on this thing called Zoom. I'd never heard of Zoom. I thought it was just some, you know, some adjective or something like Zoom. But I looked at it, I'm like, wait a minute, people are talking. People are having, like, meeting. This thing is connecting people in a totally new way. I said, what if we call the crab boat captains from Deadliest Catch, which I've been narrating for 21 years.

1:26:48And I'm like, what if we do a Zoom call and record it? And what if you put that on at 9 p.m. 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. And that that happened about a month into the lockdowns. And then after that, I was like, look, I don't care what it takes. 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.

1:27:24That show went out of production in 2012. We went back into production in 2020. And, you know, I'm proud of that. Not because it was particularly great, although, frankly, I thought it was pretty good. I was proud because my crew was so anxious to pivot and the network was willing to pivot. And I was desperate to pivot. and being allowed to pivot when you feel like that's what you got to do, man. That's freedom 101 and being willing to pivot even into something uncomfortable. That's life.

1:27:59Hala 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. 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.

1:28:31Dirty Jobs is still on every day on the Discovery Channel. God bless them. I'm working on a new show called People You Should Know. That'll be coming to YouTube. And there's a website with my name in it called MikeRowe.com. And of course, I don't know, 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 join them. And most importantly, microworks.org. You know, we got a big pile of money there. I'm desperate to give away to people who want to learn to trade. So if that's you, go get some.

1:29:06Hala 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. Thanks for having me.