#308： The Case for Blue Collar Work With Mike Rowe
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Summary
Mike Rowe, host of the hit TV show, Dirty Jobs, argues that our obsession with college, white-collar work, and the denigration of blue-collar workers has left us economically and spiritually poorer both on the individual and national level.
Transcript
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Brett McKay here and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast.
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Well, in America, there's an assumption that the most meaningful careers are found in office
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buildings among those taking part in the information economy rather than the nitty
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gritty of blue-collar trades. And to be eligible for these desirable white-collar jobs, you need to
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take out tens of thousands of dollars in student loans so you can go to college for four years to
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get a degree. The sacrifice is always worth it, though, or so we're told. My guest today on the
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show has made a career of questioning in this narrative. In fact, he argues that our obsession
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with college education and white-collar work to the denigration of blue-collar kind has left us
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economically and spiritually poorer, both on the individual and national level. His name is Mike
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Rowe. You might have seen his popular show, Dirty Jobs. Since his time as a TV host, he's become
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an ardent advocate of trade work through his foundation, Mike Rowe Works. Today on the show,
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Mike and I discuss where the idea of dirty jobs came from and why the show about blue-collar workers
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became a surprise national hit. We then explore why we devalue blue-collar work, the societal and
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individual consequences of that devaluation, and what Mike is doing to make pursuing vocational
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and trade work cool and viable again. If you're a young man trying to figure out if college and an
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office job is right for you, or if you're a guy in a dead-end office job looking for an
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alternative, Mike is going to make a strong case on why you should consider putting on a hard hat
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and getting your hands dirty. After the show is over, check out our show notes at aom.is
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slash Rowe, where you can find links to resources, where you can delve deeper into this topic.
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Well, a big fan of your work with Dirty Jobs, and plus the work you're doing now after Dirty Jobs,
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promoting the trades, being an advocate for that. And I got to say, your TED Talk about
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sheep castration holds a dear place in my heart, because my grandfather just passed away last year,
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101. When he was in high school, he was a shepherd. And in his memoirs, he goes into detail about
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sheep castration. And I remember when I saw that episode, when you put your teeth on a sheep's
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testicles, I was like, I know that. I know how to do that because of a grandpa.
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You know how few people have actually uttered that sentence in the history of time?
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I mean, you know, it's just, it's, it's Dirty Jobs was so, was so great in the sense that no two
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days were ever the same. But that particular day, yeah, you know, the sheep, the testicles,
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the cameras, and off you go. And yeah, that episode changed everything. Really looking back on it,
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it was, it was something the network didn't want to put on the air. It was something people were
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completely freaked out about. It was something we had gone out of our way to get permission to do.
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You know, I mean, I called all the proper acronyms. I called the Humane Society. I called the,
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you know, PETA. They told me how it was supposed to work. And when I got there, of course,
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it was a totally different deal. And we just learned so many things in that episode that it
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completely changed the direction of the show. And to some extent, my own career. It's amazing what'll
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happen when you, you know, bite the balls off a sheep. How do you, how did it change the direction
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of the show after you did that? Well, in a couple of ways, you know, we, you have to understand,
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first of all, Dirty Jobs was such an anomaly. It never was supposed to be a hit, much less even on
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the air. You know, we, we snuck onto the air in 2003 at a time when there was really no other shows
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about work anywhere. And, and the network was, was kind of horrified, to be honest, by the number of
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people who liked it, because it didn't really fit with their, with their brand, or at least what their
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notion of what the brand was at the time. So there was a lot of cognitive dissonance about the show.
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And so we were constantly at odds. You know, I was always trying to push the envelope a little bit
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with the network and argue for a completely transparent look at whatever the job at hand
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was. And, you know, so there was just a lot of, there were files, Brett, that, that already existed
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on me files from OSHA, from the Humane Society, from PETA, from the FBI. I mean, there's an army of
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angry acronyms that used to watch the show and complain about things that they saw on TV that didn't
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comport entirely with their worldview. So when I told my boss that I was going to be castrating
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sheep, she said, for God's sakes, Michael, her name was Gina, Gina McCarthy. She said, for God's
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sakes, please make sure we do this right. So, you know, I called the proper authorities to tell them
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what I was going to do. And, and they explained that you would take rubber bands and put them over
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the testicles of the sheep and that would retard the flow of blood. And eventually the testicles
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would fall off. And I thought, well, that's pretty weird, but it'll be great TV. And of course, when
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we went there, there were no rubber bands. It was just a rancher and his wife and a pen knife
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and a scrotum that was quickly sliced open. Two testicles were exposed and this guy started
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literally biting the balls out of the scrotum of sheeps and spitting them into the bucket that I was
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holding. And it was just so, it was just so shocking because it was so unexpected because
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I'd done all my homework. You know, I knew how we were supposed to do it. So my Ted talk, which by the
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way, I had no idea I was giving one until about 20 minutes before I gave it. But my Ted talk was
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really an explanation of that episode and how you can get all the authorities to tell you precisely how
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you're supposed to do a thing and still be completely dead wrong. As brutal as it sounded, the sheep
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that we castrated with our teeth fared so much better than the ones that we used the rubber bands
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on. Because, you know, after Albert bit the balls off and spit them into my bucket, I was like,
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oh, hold on a minute. We can't do it this way. We have to do it the approved way. And so we did it
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the approved way. And then we had a chance to see the aftermath. And if you, if you look at a baby
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lamb with a rubber band around its testicles next to another baby lamb who just had its testicles
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bitten off, the baby lamb with the testicles bitten off doesn't have a care in the world. He there's
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very little blood. He's already forgotten about that, which is gone. And he's prancing around like
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it's a new day. The one with the rubber band around his nuts, he limps around and, and quivers and
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sits in the corner in agony. It changed the direction of the show. And it changed the direction
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of my career because it indicated perfectly that you can be absolutely right in terms of compliance
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and still somehow managed to have your head completely up your own ass.
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You talk about peripatia, that Greek concept in the show.
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Yeah. Adagnoresis and peripatia. Sure. That's it.
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I'm wondering who, I wonder who's the guy that figured out you bite the testicles off a sheep
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to castrate them. Like, oh, that's, that was the best way to do it.
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I, I shudder to think like the true etymology of that, of that process. But, but I would imagine
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it simply evolved out of practicality. You know, if you're, I'm sure your grandfather would have told
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you back in the day, you know, you're not out in the field with a team of people. It's really just
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you and sometimes one other set of hands to properly apply the banding method. You need three
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people. And that's, you know, I mean, that's, that's a lot of extra personnel. This, this method
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is quicker. It's less painful for the sheep. It's a hell of a lot weirder, admittedly, but primarily
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it's more efficient. And in the end, one of the big lessons from dirty jobs was effectiveness
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is ultimately the thing that drives innovation. Conversely, and a little weirdly, not efficiency,
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but effectiveness. And we could probably do a whole hour on the difference between the two, but
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bottom line, biting the balls off sheep is a lot more effective than the approved method.
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Yeah. So, I mean, you, you mentioned your, your mind shift changed after that moment. Like,
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so before that, were you, were you kind of following the experts quote unquote that, okay,
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this is the right way to do it. And I'm, I'm here to make sure this is how work should be done.
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When I don't see it according to how the experts say it should be done, then something's wrong.
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And so after that you decided, I guess your shift was, well, let's just see what the guys on
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the ground are actually doing this, what they think is useful. And that's, that's what we should,
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that's what we should, we should go after. You know, in hindsight, it's, it's easy and tempting
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to always frame these conversations in terms of the exact moment of awareness. And I said that in
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my Ted talk, and it was true to a degree, but, but the real truth is awareness and understanding and
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realizations, anagoresis, peripatia, enlightenment, that stuff is almost always more analogous.
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to a frog in the boiling water. You know, it's, it's things you realize over time. You, you have
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a moment of awareness, but it doesn't really take root until you have some proof that you can really
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put behind it. And that takes time. So for me, the real peripatetic moment in my career happened in a
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sewer before dirty jobs, when I was working at evening magazine and I was, I was working on a segment
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called somebody's got to do it. And I kind of, I didn't hate my career. In fact, I, I'd always kind
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of liked it. I'd been impersonating a host for, for 15 years was more effective as a guest instead
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of a host. That realization happened when I was working with a sewer inspector, thanks to a rat
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actually, who assaulted me and drove me headfirst into just a river of, again, another long story.
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But that's when I began to realize that personally I could do better on camera as an apprentice,
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as opposed to an expert, as a, uh, as a guest, as opposed to a host. So when I sold dirty jobs,
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I went into it with this understanding that I, I didn't want to do or impersonate a conventional
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host. In fact, my pitch to discovery was, look, you guys, you guys need another expert. Like you need a
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shanker. I mean, what you need is a fan of the brand out in the world doing things not on your
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behalf, but out of his own misplaced curiosity. That was the pitch for dirty jobs. When we started
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shooting it, what I learned again and again, over and over and over was that just about everything I
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thought I knew about work had been, well, was wrong. Honestly, I had, I had become, uh, disconnected
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from a lot of the things that I had grown up with. You know, I had a lot of certainty growing up. My
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grandfather was a, uh, was a master electrician and also a plumber and a steam fitter and a pipe
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fitter and a welder and a guy who could build a house without a blueprint who only went to the seventh
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grade. My, my connection to work as a kid was profound. I knew where our food came from. I knew
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where our energy came from, you know, and I had a lot of direct lines between how things worked and
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how the working of things benefited me. By the time I was 43, after working for 15, 16 years in
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Hollywood, I'd forgotten most of that, or at least become disconnected from it. And so for me on a very
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personal level, dirty jobs became a reminder of all of those disconnects, all of the things that I,
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that I had taken for granted from the lights coming on when we flicked the switch to the crap going away
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when we flushed the toilet, those little miracles took on a larger significance for me, thanks to that
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show. And I think maybe hopefully, uh, to the viewers as well. So that's a long answer to your
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question, but, but peripatetic moments happen one on top of the next and their effect is almost always
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exponential. So one day you wake up and you look back on all that stuff and you realize, holy crap,
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that's the point where my thinking diverged. That's the point where my career went in a direction I
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didn't intend it to. And, and so you can look back and you can retrofit things and try and sound
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smarter than you are. But in truth, in the moment, you're just a guy biting the balls off sheep,
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trying to understand why everything you thought you knew about this process turned out to be
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completely upside down. Well, speaking of how your career went a different direction than you thought
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it would go, I mean, since dirty jobs ended, you've become an advocate for what, for making manual labor
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cool again, started different foundations. We'll talk about that here in a bit, but let's talk about
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this. Why do you think manual labor is seen as uncool, right? And most kids don't aspire to be
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a plumber. They aspire to be some, I don't know, social media influencer or banker or something.
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Why, why, why don't people want to go into the trades? We're suspicious of anything that doesn't
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come with a playbook. We want a playbook. We want to know what a good job is and the best way to figure
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out what a good job is. Now, I don't subscribe to any of this, but, and I'm not an expert, obviously,
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but I, but I think, I think what's going on right now in society is we have a lot of anxiety around
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education and vocation. And that anxiety primarily exists with parents who are desperate not to screw
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their kids. There's also anxiety within the educational system from administrators and guidance
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counselors who don't want to be accused of sending some kid down the wrong path. And of course,
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there's a lot of anxiety among kids themselves because they're looking at the vast unknown future
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of their careers and, and hoping not to, at the same time, there's endless money available and a lot
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of pressure to borrow it in order to go down what a lot of people have said is the best path for the most
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people. If you put all of that stuff together, essentially, you've got a lot of anxious people
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saying, look, this is your best hope of being happy. Borrow the money, get a four-year degree,
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get out in the world and get busy chasing your dream. And I know I'm generalizing, but from what I've seen,
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that's, that's, that's the trope, that's the bromide, that's the, that's the platitude that informs
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so much of what passes as good advice today. Regarding why blue collar work is not aspirational,
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I think the main reason is because parents are hardwired to want something better for their kids
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than they had. The problem is we don't know what better means, but we now know that we have to
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define something as subordinate. So it gets a little wonky, but as theories go, I think it really comes
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down to in the mid seventies, we decided that college needed a big PR campaign and we gave it one.
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And that PR campaign elevated the importance of a four-year degree, not just for its inherent benefit,
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but it elevated it at the expense of every other form of education. So the message that started to
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go out to high school kids was, if you don't do this, you're liable to wind up over here turning a
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wrench or doing something that you really don't want to do some kind of, uh, you know, vocational
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consolation prize. So what we did was we separated higher education from all other forms of enlightenment.
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Then we attached a price tag to higher education that exponentially rocketed through the roof.
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That was in the mid seventies. At the same time, pop culture started to portray
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traditional working vocations as subordinate. I mean, if there's a plumber, come on, he's 300 pounds
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with a giant butt crack. It's just the way we portray plumbers. We write books, you know,
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look at the bestselling books over the last couple of years. The four hour work week is somewhere near
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the top. I'm friends with Tim Ferriss. I like his book, but the things we started to respond to
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were messages that said, Hey, you can work less. And if you, if you don't work less than you're
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going to be a sucker. So pop culture portrayals of work in the media, educational distinctions that
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are basically presented as a false choice. In my opinion, all combined to drive the cost of college
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through the roof, $1.3 trillion in student loans right now, as a result of this cookie cutter approach
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to, you know, what a good education is. And on the other end, where does most of the opportunity
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exists today? Well, it's in the skills gap. It's 5.6 million available jobs right now that nobody seems
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to want that are sitting there waiting to be filled. It's not a coincidence that 75% of those jobs
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don't require a four year degree, but rather training for the very jobs that we're talking about
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right now. So again, kind of a meandering answer, but the reason blue collar jobs fell out of favor
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is because alternative education fell out of favor. It's because the people who do the kinds of work
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that we're talking about started being portrayed in a negative light. And here we are. The skills
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gaps, not a mystery. It's just a reflection of, of what we value. So too is the cost of a four-year
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degree, in my opinion. Right. And the irony is this playbook that we've been pushing on our culture.
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I think it's just resulted in a lot of unhappiness. You have people with four-year degrees up in their
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eyeballs in debt, working some office job that they hate and barely making ends meet. Yeah.
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Look, the hell of it is, you know, you, here's what happens to me that, that's always problematic.
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I'll do an interview like this and everyone will more or less agree that there's a, there's a problem
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worth talking about. But what comes back over the net is Mike is anti-college and sometimes anti-education
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and nothing could be further from the truth. The problem that you're describing happens because
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of money. It's not, it's not that a liberal arts degree is bad. I've got one and it served me well,
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but I got mine in 1984 and it costs $12,000 today. The same degree from the same school costs $85,000.
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So if you spend that kind of money and borrow that kind of money and wind up suddenly in a cubicle
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doing something that, as it turns out, you really didn't want to do, how do you get off the road?
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You know, you've already majored in your major, you've already borrowed the money and now you've
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got to pay all that stuff off and you don't really have the freedom or the flexibility to hit the reset
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button without, you know, punching out of the whole proposition with a giant pile of debt.
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That's really what the problem is, you know, and, and I feel badly for this generation because they
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get a bad rap in my opinion, you know, and obviously there's room for improvement everywhere, but
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you know, we, we raised an entire generation of kids to believe that if they borrow the money
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and if they get the degree, then they will get the job of their dreams and then they will be happy.
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That entire, that entire proposition is fallacious and, and you can see it on the faces of dissatisfied
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workers, not just in cubicles across the country, but in all kinds of jobs because so many people
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have come out of our educational system convinced that the key to job satisfaction is finding the job
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that will satisfy you. And of all the lessons that came out of dirty jobs, I think the biggest one
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is the fact that that belief is completely and totally upside down. So don't follow your passion.
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That's bad advice. I think it's bad advice, but I would never say, don't be passionate about what you
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do. See, this is the, the, the fun part of dirty jobs. Once it really got its feet under it. And once it
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became a thing was that it, it allowed me to look back honestly and question some of the advice that
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I'd gotten in my life. And I think a lot of other people have as well, follow your passion is somewhere
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near the top. The worst advice ever given it's right up there with work smart, not hard, but always
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follow your passion. The first time I saw it, it was written on a photo of a guy in a kayak paddling
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on some lake with mist on the surface. And there were butterflies in the background and maybe even
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a unicorn. And it was just awful, you know, and the, and under it, it just says, always follow your
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passion. And I'm just like, what, what, what does that even mean? So on dirty jobs, the corollary was
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never follow your passion, but always, always bring it with you. Passion's too important to ignore,
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but it's too fickle to, to follow. And I just, I think, look, if you really want to see what
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following your passion looks like, watch any of the first episodes of American Idol, you know,
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any of the seasons, episodes one through five, where you see tens of thousands of people
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absolutely passionate about singing, right? Absolutely passionate about their, their artistry and
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their, and their love of vocalizing. And they show up and they audition. And it's, it's incredible
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to me that so many people can't sing. That's, that's obvious. What's incredible is that these
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18, 19, 20 year old people are realizing for the first time in their life, the first time in their
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life that they can't sing. That's amazing to me. And, and that disconnect, I mean, you can see it in
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their faces when they realize this is the first time somebody told them they're no good at a thing
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that they like. And so it's a great truth that, you know, we used to teach early on, but now a lot
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of people don't find out until it's very, very, very late in their career. But the reality is it's
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entirely possible to be very passionate about something that, that you suck at. And, um, and that's,
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that's useful, especially if you're going to attach money to your pursuit. So if you're going to go
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out into the world to try and make a living, you know, the big lesson on dirty jobs, time and time
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again, the people I met all said the same thing. I didn't go looking to be a septic tank cleaner.
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I went looking for an opportunity. And that started by watching where everybody else was heading and
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going in the other direction. Then I bought a septic tank cleaning truck. And then I hired three people.
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Then I bought another truck and then another truck after that. Now I've got 12 people. We
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clean septic tanks. I'm a millionaire. I've got a summer house and a margarita machine next to my
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pool. Yes, I clean septic tanks and I'm passionate about my life and my career, but I didn't start.
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I didn't get here by sitting down one day when I was 18 years old and going, okay, what is going to
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make me happy? This will make me happy. Therefore, I'm going to go get that. And I'm not going to be
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happy until I do. Look, we do the same thing with romance, right? Same exact thing. Happiness
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vis-a-vis romance today requires us to find our soulmate. Well, where's our soulmate? Depends who
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you ask. Maybe she's on Match. Maybe he's on Tinder. Maybe it's eHarmony. Maybe it's in the bar
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down the street. But it just seems like a tough way to go if your romantic happiness is going to
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be entirely contingent upon your ability to find the one other person walking around on the planet
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who you were meant to be with. It's no less nuts, in my view, to approach the wide world of work and
00:25:46.540
say, okay, all this opportunity is out there, but the one that's going to make me happy, that's the
00:25:52.660
one I got to find. And then I can be happy. We just make it pretty hard for ourselves, I think. And
00:25:59.660
the dirty jobbers I met did not fall victim to that. We've had a guest on the show, a guy named Cal
00:26:04.920
Newport. He wrote a book, So Good They Can't Ignore You. And yeah, he agrees. Following your
00:26:09.300
passion is terrible advice. He says, passion comes whenever you get really good at a job and you see
00:26:15.380
that you're effective in the world and that you provide value. That's when you start feeling
00:26:19.740
passionate about the job. That's when you start feeling satisfaction with your jobs when you see
00:26:23.940
that. But it's not chasing your passion. Yeah. Good for him. I couldn't agree more. Gladwell put it,
00:26:30.080
I thought pretty well too. A couple of books ago, he talked about meaningful work. Meaningful work
00:26:37.280
is the thing that ultimately will lead to satisfaction faster than anything else. But again, the trick is
00:26:45.380
there is no book out there called meaningful work, right? But we act as though there is. We're telling
00:26:54.940
our kids today that this work over here is meaningful and important and worth your time. This work over
00:27:04.140
here is not. Why we do that is really, I think, one of the great questions. I've never heard it answered
00:27:14.800
properly. I've tried to, but I usually just ramble on into incoherence because it's almost unknowable.
00:27:23.600
But we can't help ourselves as a society, as a culture, as parents, as teachers. We simply can't
00:27:31.620
help but somehow prioritize jobs into this jacked up ranking system that is completely and totally
00:27:43.340
counterintuitive to the result we want. You can Google 100 top jobs and you'll have thousands of
00:27:51.260
pages, thousands of pages filled with hundreds and hundreds of surveys about what the best jobs
00:27:59.000
are. You can do the same thing with schools every year, every year. Every major publication rolls out
00:28:07.420
the top colleges in the country and the top jobs in the country. And you'll never find a trade school
00:28:14.840
on that list. And you'll never find the jobs that are begging to be filled right now on that list.
00:28:25.220
We just double down on the worst odds in the world. And we make it really, really hard for kids
00:28:32.360
to feel excited about learning a skill. That's why we do what we do, you know, in this foundation thing.
00:28:40.000
If you train somebody to weld, well, then you can start working in nine months at 60 grand.
00:28:47.060
Two years later, you can easily be making six figures. But beyond that, the business of mastering
00:28:54.060
a trade opens an entire set of doors that most people didn't even know existed. And so way leads
00:29:03.200
on to way, as the poet said. And before you know it, you'll find meaning in your work,
00:29:12.720
So let's talk about some of the big picture societal consequences of this skill gap you talked about.
00:29:18.760
These are skill gap is there's jobs that are available ready for workers that just isn't anyone
00:29:23.280
there to take them because they don't have the appropriate skills. I mean, how does that affect
00:29:29.460
Well, it's a micro macro thing. So look, on a on a micro level, no pun intended, it's it's
00:29:35.700
consequences are, are devastating, you know, for an individual who goes down the wrong road,
00:29:42.520
simply because he or she didn't know other opportunities were available. That to me is the
00:29:48.480
very, the very definition of, of a tragedy. You know, I mean, Aristotle said a tragedy was that
00:29:55.380
moment in the narrative where the protagonist comes face to face with the unescapable truth
00:29:59.960
of their own identity. And when you realize that your identity was based on the pursuit of a thing
00:30:07.540
that you, that you never really cared for or understood at the expense of all the other
00:30:14.880
opportunities that are out there, that's, that really is nothing short of a, of a personal micro
00:30:20.300
tragedy. To answer your question on a macro level, I think the skills gap, not to overstate it, but
00:30:28.320
I think it's a matter of national security. Our, a balanced workforce is kind of like a coin,
00:30:37.940
you know, each, each side heads and tails is, is equally important. We don't have a balanced
00:30:45.020
workforce today. And the most obvious ramification of that is supply and demand. Call a plumber with a
00:30:54.440
plumbing emergency right now. Tell me how long it takes for him to get there or her and tell me how
00:31:02.020
much it costs. I guarantee you the first number, how long does it take him or her to get there is
00:31:08.540
going to be a lot larger than it was 10 years ago. And the second number, how, how much does it cost?
00:31:14.660
That's going to be a lot larger too. So the cost of taking care of our infrastructure
00:31:20.820
is going through the roof, plumbing, electric, heating, air conditioning. I'm talking about our
00:31:27.720
personal infrastructures in our homes, but the same thing is happening on a macro level. And I think
00:31:35.420
when I, when I, when I look at the current administration's desire to invest a trillion
00:31:41.600
dollars in infrastructure repair, I say the same thing I did eight years ago when the last guy
00:31:50.580
promised 3 million shovel ready jobs in 2008. I remember I, I wrote a letter to the president back
00:31:57.820
then. And I said, look, I'm pulling for you. Good luck. I've got this foundation. If I can help,
00:32:04.040
I will. But the short version from my position is this, if you're getting 3 million shovel ready jobs,
00:32:12.520
then you have to understand that you're talking to a country that really doesn't admire the business
00:32:20.920
of picking up a shovel. You just have to understand that. And you have to hit the, the PR element of
00:32:28.140
your program squarely on the head. Eight years later, I said the same thing to the current guy.
00:32:34.040
If you're going to spend a trillion dollars to open up infrastructure repair, you have to,
00:32:41.200
you, you surely know that we do not have a workforce standing by that's trained to do work.
00:32:48.360
It's going to take years of training people and getting them the skills that they need. And that's
00:32:55.260
not going to happen until, or unless we celebrate these opportunities for what they are. So on a national
00:33:03.320
level, the skills gap is nothing less than a matter of national security, 5.6 million jobs open right
00:33:13.800
now. And Brett, no one talks about them. And we don't talk about them because it's, well, it's
00:33:20.620
unflattering. The existence of all that opportunity in a country like this, it's, it, it doesn't speak,
00:33:27.680
it doesn't speak well of us, but more to the point, it contradicts the prevailing narrative.
00:33:34.500
And the prevailing narrative says, if we bring jobs boundary, we're going to put more people to
00:33:41.600
work. I'm not saying that's not true. It is, it is true, but it's not a panacea. And it's not,
00:33:49.820
it's not an action for which there's an equal or opposite reaction. Our current narrative, in my
00:33:56.380
opinion, basically says that the more opportunity we can create, the more people will go back to
00:34:04.780
work. It's, it's not untrue, but it's not completely true because the existence of this skills gap
00:34:13.780
proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that the existence of opportunity alone is not enough
00:34:21.540
to get everybody working. So those two narratives collide. And, and honestly, I've, I've never seen
00:34:33.160
anybody on TV reconcile it in a, in a persuasive way. How do you reconcile, you know, 60, 70 million
00:34:43.700
people out of the workforce who could be working with millions and millions of open jobs that
00:34:51.300
nobody's excited about doing? Whatever your answer is, is probably going to get sucked into some
00:34:57.980
polemic because everything is political today and, and that it's going to get drowned out. So the skills
00:35:04.580
gap continues to exist because we keep lending money we don't have to kids who are never going to be able
00:35:10.780
to pay it back to encourage them to get a four-year degree, which while valuable does not train them
00:35:18.420
to do the jobs that actually exist. And I imagine the skills gap is only going to get bigger as baby
00:35:25.420
boomers start to retire. You know, these guys who own plumbing shops or carpentry shops, there's no one
00:35:31.200
else there to replace them. There's going to be a reckoning. And, you know, much like the parapetia we
00:35:36.900
were talking about before, it's not going to happen overnight. It's not going to be the flick of a
00:35:41.620
switch. Right now you can see it in different states manifesting in different ways. I, I worked for years
00:35:49.540
on a campaign in Alabama called Go Build Alabama, which was motivated primarily by the construction
00:35:56.560
industry down there, who is in a full-on panic, a full-on panic. The average skilled tradesman
00:36:03.900
in Alabama is north of 55. And, you know, these aren't jobs you do into your 80s. These guys are
00:36:12.040
going to retire and there is no one there. There's no one standing by. There's no new generation of
00:36:19.220
trained apprentices waiting to step in. The skills gap in Idaho is different. You know, they've got a,
00:36:27.120
they've got a different situation up there because they actually export a lot of materials all over the
00:36:33.400
world that people really aren't up to speed on. And over the next 15 years, the billions of dollars
00:36:39.740
of opportunity that exists for manufacturing is, is literally sitting right there. And that state
00:36:48.540
has a pretty bad record of kids coming out of college or sorry, out of high school and going into
00:36:57.820
any kind of additional training college or otherwise. So they're looking very specifically
00:37:03.740
at a massive chunk of opportunity that they're going to lose if they don't get some kind of
00:37:10.300
giant training program in place where people can get the skills that are so clearly going to be needed
00:37:18.480
in the next couple of years. It's Georgia has a, has another challenge. Arizona has a different
00:37:24.600
challenge. Iowa has a different challenge. You know, some of these are fundamentally agrarian
1.00
00:37:29.820
challenges. Others are manufacturing it. It's different in different geographies in the country.
00:37:35.980
So that's why it's, it's kind of hard to say anything smart that sums the whole thing up.
00:37:40.560
And I'd be suspicious, honestly, of anyone who, who tries, but in a very general way, the skills gap
00:37:47.340
manifests in, in different ways in different places. But in all cases, the, the first step of
00:37:57.240
the remedy is the same. We have to make a more persuasive case for the opportunities that actually
00:38:04.380
exist and the educational alternatives that will train people for those opportunities. If we don't do
00:38:12.660
that as a society, back to your prior question, you know, what's the real threat on a macro level?
00:38:17.760
If we can't persuade the majority of Americans to be suitably gobsmacked by the miracle of affordable
00:38:29.300
electricity, smooth roads and runways, modern plumbing, all the things that make civilized life
00:38:34.420
possible. If we no longer give a damn about those things, then I don't know how to fix the problem
00:38:40.980
because it has to start with a larger shared collective appreciation, uh, for the society
00:38:48.500
that we have. If we don't have that, then we're just going to have to slip a little bit further
00:38:54.340
down before we hit bottom and somebody slaps us upside the head.
00:38:58.480
So yeah, different geographic locations have different demands for different types of blue
00:39:02.100
collar jobs. So it's hard to say, I mean, I guess, are there professions that overall the
00:39:07.120
country needs more of like welding? Is that, is there a big skills gap there?
00:39:10.720
I'd put it somewhere near the top to tell you the truth. We've, we've had about 600,
00:39:15.440
maybe 800 people come through my little foundation and welding is somewhere near the top of the list
00:39:23.800
of the skill that, that we're most often asked to help.
00:39:29.080
Well, here's a question. Um, you know, one reason I've heard people say, Oh, I'm not going
00:39:34.140
to go into the trades is like, well, it doesn't pay as well as say a white collar job being an
00:39:39.400
attorney or being a business manager. What's the pay like for these blue collar trades?
00:39:46.000
Well, look, the, the actuarial charts, the statistical charts, you know, they are, um,
00:39:53.900
and, and they'll give you an idea of factoring in millions of people in all different areas.
00:40:00.880
And I've, I've seen most of that. And honestly, my, my feeling is so what, how is it? I mean,
00:40:08.600
a writer in Spokane versus a writer in Tallahassee, there's absolutely no reason to assume one is going
00:40:17.380
to be making anything similar to the other. A welder in Dakota right now is going to be making more money
00:40:26.000
than a welder in Oklahoma guaranteed. So, you know, the, the geographical impact on blue collar
00:40:32.520
wages, I do think is real, more real maybe than on white collar. But again, I don't know what to
00:40:41.180
conclude from that actually in a world where you're either willing to relocate or you're not. And, and I
00:40:47.980
think that applies equally to both blue and white collar. I don't know when it happened. This, um,
00:40:53.360
this aversion to mobility. I mean, the country fundamentally formed because people were willing
00:41:03.120
to, to go from one coast to the other, they'd go wherever the opportunity was. They, we were,
00:41:10.900
we were very transient people. We've become really sedentary. You know, I'm amazed personally when I sit
00:41:18.080
out and talk to people who are resistant to exploring a career in the blue collar trades,
00:41:23.360
or in the construction trades, the first thing they'll say is, well, the money's not as good.
00:41:27.920
And I can say, okay, look, if I can show you where the money's better and how the money's better,
00:41:33.740
will you give it a shot? And they'll say, sure. And then I'll, I'll walk them through. I mean,
00:41:38.120
look, I can, I can take the same statistics that show a four-year degree is always better. And,
00:41:44.500
and I can conclude a completely, a completely different conclusion. It's, it's easy to manipulate the
00:41:52.800
numbers, but it never really comes down to that. What it comes down to next is people are like, well,
00:41:57.880
tell me again where I have to go. And, and that's almost always where it falls apart.
00:42:04.420
We're just, we want the job that we've identified that will make us happy. We want that job at the
00:42:13.140
money that we believe is fair. And we want that job in the zip code where we currently live.
00:42:18.840
And, and those three things are primarily what, what I run into most often with people who are
00:42:26.600
resistant to at least looking at the opportunities as they exist today. I'm not sure I answered your
00:42:32.420
question because you did. No, the, the, we had an economist on our podcast, Tyler Cowen,
00:42:38.320
just published a book called The Complacent Class. And he talks about how we become less mobile
00:42:42.600
in our country. People just want to stay put. Yeah, you're right. We used to go travel the country for
00:42:47.820
opportunities. We no longer do that anymore. And he makes these, all these arguments that it's,
00:42:51.560
it's hurting the economy, but it's also causing us to become more segregated. And it's a lot of
00:42:56.680
downstream effects of us becoming less mobile. So if you haven't checked, check that book out,
00:43:00.600
check it out. It's really interesting. What's it called again? The Complacent Class.
00:43:03.620
I'm writing it down right now. It reminds me of a thing. There used to be this thing called the
00:43:08.920
popcorn report. Woman called herself faith popcorn. This is back in the eighties,
0.99
00:43:13.420
but she talked about it in terms of our unwillingness where our, our growing unwillingness
00:43:20.740
to even venture out of our, out of our own homes. And she was looking at the coming technology,
00:43:27.580
uh, and predicting that we'd have something, uh, she called it cocooning where, you know,
00:43:34.200
we would just more and more and more build our homes in a way that allows us to stay in them
00:43:40.860
more and more. And then of course, with delivery services and better technology, better TVs,
00:43:47.260
everything else cocooning turned into something she called burrowing. So, you know, we just kind
00:43:53.520
of doubled down on the whole notion of a cocoon. And so essentially we're, we're here now we're,
00:43:59.140
we're, we're more connected than we've ever been. Thanks to the kind of technology we're using right
00:44:05.560
now and social media, but we're more disconnected than we've ever been as a result and less mobile
00:44:13.460
at the same time. And so, you know, I'm not sure what's next. Where do you go after burrowing?
00:44:20.880
Probably like the, uh, you know, you're going to wind up in an altered States tank, like William Hurt,
00:44:26.300
you know, he's going to be, we're just going to be there suspended in some kind of gooey animation,
00:44:31.460
completely connected and mentally fulfilled, but it's the atrophy that's going to kill us in the end.
00:44:39.520
Besides the blue collar trades, are there other trades where we're seeing a, a skills gap? Cause
00:44:44.780
I can think of one off the top of my head is a tailoring. I've got a, my tailor, he's this 96
00:44:49.700
year old Polish immigrant. He survived the Holocaust. He's here in town. I, and I'd be like,
00:44:54.240
why are you still working? And he says like, there's no one else to do the work. Like I can't retire.
00:44:58.640
He says, yeah, no one wants to go into tailoring or learn a trade. And the thing is, the money's
00:45:02.880
good. Like he's, he's expensive and he can be expensive because he's the only one who can do
00:45:08.000
what he does like really well. Yeah. Look, there's a, there's a tension between what I do,
00:45:14.480
what I want and what I hope for. You know, I'm, I'm, I'm a fan of the guy you just described and I'm
00:45:21.720
a fan of the plumbers and the electricians and the pipe fitters and all the people that I,
00:45:27.480
that I rely on. I want them to do well, but at the same time I'm a consumer. And so, you know,
00:45:35.120
when my toilet explodes, you know, when my, when my engine just falls out of the car,
00:45:40.760
how do I want to pay? Right? So this is where labor and work sort of diverge, you know? Oh,
00:45:48.120
they've, they've come to mean different things. I love the fact that your 96 year old Polish
00:45:53.840
Taylor is still making a great living, but I hate the fact that no one has looked at that industry
00:46:01.240
and said, good grief. Look at all the opportunity here. The answer to your question is sure. The
00:46:06.880
skills gap applies to any vocation that requires a skill that can only be attained through training
00:46:15.640
and apprenticeship. And I can't think of a single vocation that relies on those two things where a
00:46:23.800
gap hasn't manifested. So yeah, you can, you can talk about, uh, cosmetology. You can talk about
00:46:33.160
Taylor. You can talk about all that stuff. The, the only distinction I make, and it's, but it's just a,
00:46:40.120
it's just a fact. Some jobs fundamentally improve, call them the, the wants of our life. You, you want
00:46:49.760
your suit to look good. You, you, you want to be able to, uh, get a haircut in a way that doesn't
00:46:57.080
require you to schedule the thing three months in advance, but you need, you need your toilet to flush
00:47:04.360
when you hit the handle, you need your lights to come on when you flick the switch. You know, we need
00:47:10.340
this technology you and I are using right now to function properly for this interview to occur.
00:47:16.480
So, so there's certain vocations upon which the entire country depends. And there are certain
00:47:26.700
vocations, uh, that we like. So I do draw, I do, I do make a distinction. You know, it's not a,
00:47:36.100
it's not a, it's not a judgment, but I make a distinction between a really great plumber
00:47:40.040
and a really great tailor because life goes on without a really great tailor with plumbing.
00:47:46.480
Not so much. That's true. That is true. Not so much. So tell us a little about the,
00:47:50.380
the foundations you've started to promote blue collar trade work.
00:47:54.300
Well, actually not long after that whole sheep castration thing, it became so clear to me,
00:48:00.500
this was in 2008, you know, and when the economy tanked the obvious narrative and the obvious
00:48:07.060
headlines that we saw day after day after day focused on unemployment numbers. And as the
00:48:13.080
unemployment rate nationally crept up to around 10%, everywhere I went on dirty jobs, I saw
00:48:18.700
help wanted signs, I mean, everywhere, uh, all 50 States. And so it was that awareness that there
00:48:28.000
were two conflicting narratives going on, a widening skills gap contemporaneous with rising unemployment
00:48:35.080
that made me think, you know, if this show has any kind of worthwhile legacy, maybe it should be
00:48:43.740
me talking about the opportunities that exist that no one else talks about. So that's how the foundation
00:48:51.660
started in, in 2008 on labor day. I asked the fans of dirty jobs who happily numbered in the millions
00:49:00.740
to help me build a trade resource center online that, that collated the alternative educational programs,
00:49:12.740
state by state, along with apprenticeships and fellowships and all of the things that weren't a
00:49:18.800
four-year degree that would lead to jobs that actually existed. And the fans of the show were
00:49:26.360
amazing. They, they just overwhelmed us with information and links. So I, I hired people to try and organize
00:49:34.660
that. And then I built a trade resource center and put it online and we called it micro works. It was,
00:49:40.800
it was, it was useful to a point. It wasn't a job board, but really what it was, was just proof
00:49:45.940
positive that opportunity was everywhere. And that was a useful message. I think for people to hear in
00:49:51.640
2009, I think it's useful to hear now, but the trade resource center became very difficult to manage
00:49:58.940
because it was so enormous and I'm not an it guy and I didn't want to spend so much time, you know,
00:50:04.980
organizing things through some sort of, you know, modern age Dewey decimal system. It just,
00:50:10.980
it was, it was killing us. And besides the more important element from building the trade resource
00:50:17.600
center was just the idea that I could go out and say, look what the fans of the show did look at the
00:50:24.800
opportunities that exist. And as I started doing that companies started coming and saying, you know,
00:50:30.040
we have a lot of those opportunities right here. How can we help? And so I started partnering with
00:50:34.840
lots and lots of different companies to focus on jobs that existed under their roof. And then,
00:50:40.380
then people wanted to contribute and I didn't, I didn't really have a mechanism for accepting money
00:50:46.160
and I didn't know what to do with it. So I resisted that for a while, but ultimately it seemed
00:50:51.700
like a sensible thing to do to set up a scholarship program. So micro works kind of evolved over the
00:50:58.960
years, but today it's still a PR campaign for jobs that actually exist. But primarily it's a scholarship
00:51:08.560
fund. We call it a work ethic scholarship program. We look for people who are willing to get the
00:51:16.580
necessary training to pursue the kinds of jobs that we're talking about. And that's, that's been
00:51:22.360
pretty rewarding. And it's been, it's been good, you know, not, not huge by foundation standards.
00:51:27.340
We've given away a little more than $4 million since we started, but they're modest stipends,
00:51:33.660
you know, to 2000 here or 5,000 there, you know, people who want to be a tailor, people who want to be a
00:51:38.840
plumber, you know, well, we can help. And so we have, and, um, honestly of all the things dividing the
00:51:47.420
country right now, the thing that worries me the most is, is the divide between a big group of people
00:51:55.520
who seem convinced that the system's totally rigged and there is no hope and a group of people who are
00:52:03.860
convinced otherwise. So I'm in that group. Um, I know for a fact that there's, there's not a single
00:52:13.440
place in the country where somebody isn't hiring within sort of wherever anybody is sitting right
00:52:20.040
now. I know that. And I've seen it again and again. I've seen what can happen if people enthusiastically
00:52:27.380
go after the first few rungs on the ladder and I can prove it. So that's why the foundation evolved.
00:52:36.700
That's why I continue to work on it to this day. And, um, and with luck, uh, you know, we'll continue
00:52:42.860
to move the needle in the future. So besides the, uh, the foundation, you've also started a podcast
00:52:47.440
yourself, the way I heard it, what was the impetus behind that? And what sort of stuff will
00:52:52.920
listeners find on your show? Honestly, that, that thing turned into, that was another unexpected
00:52:58.700
parapetia. You know, I, I, I like, it was a year ago. I was, uh, saying to a friend of mine, you know,
00:53:05.900
Paul Harvey was, uh, you remember Paul Harvey by any chance? Oh, of course. Yeah. Yeah, definitely.
00:53:12.640
I think he's from Oklahoma. I'm from Oklahoma. Yeah. I think he might be too. He worked in Chicago
00:53:18.440
mostly, but he had a show called, uh, called the rest of the story. It was, you know, three or five
00:53:25.700
minute mysteries. He'd do them every day. And, um, and I loved them because they were, they were
00:53:32.260
basically biographies and little history lessons, but served up as a mystery. So you don't really know
00:53:37.800
who he's talking about until the last sentence. It just occurred to me that nobody was doing anything
00:53:42.820
like that. And by the way, Paul Harvey, Charles Kuralt, George Plimpton, Studs Terkel, you know,
00:53:50.160
these guys are all dead and, and they left a huge smoking. They just don't make them. And, and, and,
00:53:56.500
and people don't tell stories like that anymore. And I would in no way, you know, compare myself to
00:54:01.920
them. I can't fill their footsteps, but I can, I can follow in their footsteps maybe. And so with that
00:54:08.100
in mind, given the amount of time I was spending on airplanes, I just thought, you know, I'm going to,
00:54:12.560
I'm going to try and write one of these mysteries a week in the style of Paul Harvey. Anyway, we
00:54:19.320
started doing it a year ago and I started posting them on, under this podcast called the way I heard
00:54:23.880
it. I didn't pay much attention to it because I don't really understand the whole podcast thing.
00:54:29.740
And I was really writing them just to entertain myself. But somebody called a few months ago and
00:54:35.920
said, listen, these things have been downloaded 22 million times. And, you know, I was reading them on
00:54:41.560
Facebook as well and they were viewed something like 30 million times. So he said, yeah, you should
00:54:46.740
maybe do some more. So I'm, I'm doing that. And, and it, and it's really fun. You know, I'm,
00:54:51.960
I'm not a writer by trade, but I love to write. These have been rewarding and the feedback's been
00:54:56.320
great. So as soon as we're finished today, I'm going to go upstairs and I'm going to write one and
00:54:59.600
we'll post it and we'll see where it goes. But so far, so good.
00:55:03.900
Fantastic. Well, Mike, this has been a great conversation. Thank you so much for your time.
00:55:09.320
Anytime. I appreciate what you guys are doing as well. And I, uh, I hope we can do it again.
00:55:13.400
My guest name is Mike Rowe. You know him as the host of Dirty Jobs. You can find out more
00:55:16.640
information about Mike's work, what he's doing with Mike Rowe works at MikeRowe.com and
00:55:21.040
profoundlydisconnected.com. Also check out our show notes at AOM.IS slash Rowe, where you can find
00:55:27.420
links to resources, where you can delve deeper into this topic.
00:55:36.580
Well, that wraps up another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast. For more manly tips and advice,
00:55:40.640
make sure to check out the Art of Manliness website at artofmanliness.com. If you enjoy this
00:55:44.200
show, I've gotten something out of it. I'd appreciate it if you take one minute to give
00:55:46.700
us a review on iTunes or Stitcher. Helps us out a lot. As always, thank you for your continued support.
00:55:51.020
And until next time, this is Brett McKay telling you to stay manly.