The Jordan Harbinger Show - 264: Mike Rowe | The Way I Heard It

Episode Date: October 15, 2019

Mike Rowe (@mikeroweworks) is a host and narrator known for his work on Dirty Jobs, Somebody's Gotta Do It, The Way I Heard It Podcast, and Returning the Favor. He is also now an author, and his first book, The Way I Heard It, is out now. What We Discuss with Mike Rowe: The kind of cognitive dissonance Mike believes our country needs right now, and the tropes we could afford to grasp more loosely. How the prevailing desire among correction culture commandos to prove others wrong on the Internet stifles our ability to exchange ideas freely. Why Mike eschews second takes in favor of presenting his audience with the authentic moments they trust him to share. How Mike's thrifty (and crafty) parents suckered him into feeling sorry for rich people when he was growing up. Why we shouldn't view a blue collar career pursuit as a cautionary tale in comparison to the lifelong debt likely incurred by chasing a four-year degree these days. And much more… Full show notes and resources can be found here: https://jordanharbinger.com/264 Sign up for Six-Minute Networking — our free networking and relationship development mini course — at jordanharbinger.com/course! On No Dumb Questions, a science guy from the deep south (Destin of Smarter Every Day) and a humanities guy from the wild west (Matt Whitman of The Ten Minute Bible Hour) discuss deep questions with varying levels of maturity. Give No Dumb Questions a listen here! Like this show? Please leave us a review here — even one sentence helps! Consider including your Twitter handle so we can thank you personally!See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

This episode is sponsored in part by Conspiruality Podcast. You know how I'm always talking about critical thinking and spotting manipulation? Well, there's a podcast that's all about dismantling new age cults, wellness grifters, and conspiracy mad yogis, basically the wild overlap of spirituality and misinformation. It's called the Conspiruality Podcast. The hosts, a journalist, cult researcher, and a philosophical skeptic, dive deep into how this stuff spreads, from Project 2025 and the Heritage Foundation's dystopian vision of the future to how former leftists get pulled into far-right conspiracies.

An interesting episode to check out is called Speaking Truth to Goop, where Jen Gunter breaks down the pseudoscience behind the wellness industry in a way that is super entertaining and eye-opening. It's sharp, funny, and makes you a lot harder to fool, which if you listen to this show, you know I'm all about that. From exploring cults to analyzing our cultural and political landscape, the Conspiruality Podcast will help you stay informed against misinformation and resist fear tactics.

Find Conspirality on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to the show. I'm Jordan Harbinger. As always, I'm here with producer Jason DeFilippo. On the Jordan Harbinger show, we decode the stories, secrets, and skills of the world's most brilliant and interesting people and turn their wisdom into practical advice that you can use to impact your own life and those around you. Today on the show, Mike Rowe, one of the funniest and most upstanding guys in television. This is a really fun conversation with one of my favorite personalities, and we just had a blast with this one. We'll go behind the scenes with Dirty Jobs and Mike's new Facebook show, returning the favor, where he essentially travels around the country, doing nice things for nice people. Can't beat that. We'll also explore Mike's philosophy on why you should not follow your passion,

and why his scholarships over at Mike Roe Works Foundation are based on work ethic, something that seems to be in increasingly rare supply these days, and we'll discover that blue-collar jobs are in massive supply, but demand is low. Turns out we have plenty of jobs here in the United States for people, people willing to take them, and we'll explore what that says about our country and your ability to succeed in it. It's hard to pin down all the gems in this one, and I'm positive. You'll be glad you had to listen, especially if you're a fan of humorous and or intelligent

conversation. By the way, I met Mike through my network, and I'm teaching you how to do the same. Six-minute networking. It's our free networking class. Very, very free, not enter your credit card free. It's over at Jordan Harbinger.com slash course. All right, here's Mike Rowe. By the way, most of the guests on the show, they subscribe with the course in the newsletter.

So come join us, and you'll be in great company. I know that, well, I watched a ton of returning the favor in prep for this. And my wife watched Dirty Jobs driving to and from Los Angeles and San Francisco with a cat and the passenger seat in a laptop. Let me just ruminate on that image for a minute. Got a cat, laptop, wife, dirty jobs, contained space. Yeah. That's fantastic. At some point, paying a job.

attention to the road, hopefully, while watching every episode of Dirty Jobs on DVD, which I'm sure is still somewhere in the house. But when I was doing prep for the show watching Dirty jobs or something along those lines, you had your hand down the business end of a sheep. I figured you probably weren't at that time thinking, one day I'm going to be at one union doing voiceover work. But in the meantime, no, I was actually coming from one union to do. I mean, I've been coming here to this space for 21 years. Really? Yeah.

Oh, I didn't know that. Yeah. I moved up to San Francisco. Well, I guess it's not quite 21 years because I came up here right after 9-11. And so that was 2001. That was before Dirty Jobs, but I was, I've been impersonating a voiceover guy for 35 years. So the business end of it. The sheep cervix came sometime between.

I don't even know what was in there. Yeah. It's, I mean, once you're marking your days. you know, by various kinds of animal husbandry violations, right? Like, there are no more holidays left in my calendar. It's like, oh, yeah, yeah, October. That's the time we castrated lambs with sheep. I remember that.

That's funny. That's literally the next thing I've got, which is one of the most memorable episodes had to be when you're castrating sheep. And the guy goes, you know, it's easier if you just bite it off. That moment actually became a TED talk accidentally. I gave a TED talk in 2008. And I went down there because I thought the network asked me to go out and say a few words at this conference that they were sponsoring. So I was like, well, okay, I can say a few words.

But I walked into a full-blown TED Talk. My picture was on the wall hanging there with something like Lessons from the Dirt written on it. And then some, you know, a 20-minute rumination on the changing face of the modern-day proletariat vis-a-vis the digital divide with micro, right? So I had three hours to put some kind of story together for Ted. I wasn't even sure what Ted was, to be honest. But, yeah, that moment after I had called the Humane Society to make sure I was doing it right because that show, man. Did they make sure you were properly biting off? Oh, no, I didn't know I was to be biting them off.

I just didn't know. I mean, in those days, dirty jobs, there was a file this thick on one of my boss's desks filled with letters of compliance. from what I called the Army of Angry acronyms. So every week was somebody else. You know, could be OSHA, could be PETA, could be HSUS, could be the... What's HSUS? Humane Society in the States. Oh, got it, yeah.

So, I mean, just the thing about TV, you know, everybody watches it through their own lens. And if you are in an organization, then you have an agenda. And your agenda becomes the most important thing, right? So everything you see, everything around you either comports or fails to comport with your own version of morals and dogma. And with a show like Dirty Jobs, it was like before the army of correctors really reared their collective heads, which of course is where we're living today. Yeah, good luck doing dirty jobs today. Well, that's why my podcast is called The Way I Heard it. That's why my book is called The Way I Hurd it.

Cappuccino? That's why the Cappuccino is called The Way I. This is actually, thank you, Ryan. You're welcome. This is really the single best thing about doing voiceover. Yeah, getting coffee brought to you? You know, you sit in a clean, well-lighted place. The temperature is controlled.

You sound more credible than you are, and every so often people bring you a beverage. Yeah. It's nice. I mean, you had sparkling water here. I mean, I probably shouldn't even say that. I mean, your image right now, you're this blue-collar hero, and it's like there's Perrier here at a cappuccino on the end of the table. Look, it's not like I made either one of them. That's just what was here.

Yeah. My image to the extent that I have one, I hope, is really. rooted in the fact that I will accept with grace whatever beverage is brought to me by whomever at whatever time. Didn't mean to throw the whums in there. You know what I mean? I was going to say, that's not doing you any favors with all that. I'm from Michigan, so, like, you got, we talk in a certain way. And Perrier is not in the vocabulary, and Cappuccino is also not in the movie.

But don't you think that that kind of cognitive dissonance is exactly what the country needs right now, rather than people completely embracing their own trope, right? We seem so anxious as a country to put everybody into their own category. So if you see a guy in a flannel shirt who you recently saw castrating lambs and crawling through sewers having a cappuccino, well, say, wait a second, something must be wrong here. He must be a fraud. Right. Because, I mean, nobody would crawl through a sewer and have a cappuccino, right? The capuchino drinking is just CGI.

The rest of it's real. Actually, this is all CGI. I'm not really here. I've been gone for some time. That explains why it was easy to book this. Yeah. He's not really going to be there. Speaking of which, we did this, what, like two years ago?

Oh, more. Oh, it was probably three or four years ago. Yeah. And we did it here, right? It was here, not in this room. No, the one that burned down. So we had a fire here at one union. But it's better, better than ever.

I'm just saying if I start telling you a story that I told you before. And if I remember it, I will say something. Or surely your viewer as well. We'll hear about it. We'll get letters from acronyms. Sure. This is the department. Yeah, I don't even know what the acronym would be.

The department of people who've already heard this effing story before. Yeah. D. P. H. B. Yeah. They're out there.

They're out there. So you've seen it too, right? Of course. This giant sort of spasm of correction where everybody all of the time now is armed with this thing. Yeah. And access to like 99% of all the information in the world, except that all the information in the world contradicts itself too. So we are just completely obsessed with voicing an opinion, offering proof that our opinion

is correct, offering backup from sources that may or may not be real. No one knows anything. It's amazing. And to my earlier point, that was just starting to happen when dirty jobs exploded. We were constantly finding ourselves answering questions from experts in every imaginable field, every imaginable vocation. You know, that business on the crab boat was kind of interesting, but technically what you're supposed to do. And it's, on the one hand, it's interesting. And it's good to be right.

On the other hand, it's amazing. It's just amazing, the absolute heft, the tide of correctiveness. It's a little scary because now we don't really know there's almost no way, well, first of all, there's no way to be right. which is fine. I don't have to be right. But it's a little dangerous because I have to think now, do I want to express this opinion? Because I might hear a lot from a lot of people that it's unpopular. And of course, they would say, well, if you're hearing a lot, then maybe you should change your thinking. Maybe there's something to that. You know, if I say, in fact, I said a long time ago, oh, that's retarded. And someone goes, hey, this is me and my mentally disabled sister.

And like, you know, it's not really nice and you should be more woke, but I still like you and I like your show. That's okay. I can take that kind of correction. Another time, I said, this guy was just having a complete spasm on the show. And somebody wrote in and went, how dare you? There are people that can't help but have those. Well, he's having spasms on purpose. I mean, that's a good point. Nobody schedules in, you know, a spasm in the midst of an otherwise hectic day.

I got to leave time. Right. You know, somewhere between two and three, I like to have a good Twitch. Yeah. And warm up those letters, people. He said Twitch, copywritten. I know you do a lot of the shows in one take. just listening to you work doing the way I heard it coincidentally, the title of your new book.

There are no coincidences. Not coincidentally, the title of your new book, the way I heard it. And I was like, oh, is you going to do it all in one take? And there was a couple little, hey, let me re-record this, let me re-record that. But are you rehearsing what you've written before you get here? No. No. No.

I write the stories on planes, usually three or four months prior and really just to pass the time. That's how the podcast started. I was just looking for a way to compress time and do something on planes aside from read the same books. I keep rereading, you know. And so I just started writing. And then we started throwing the stories out there and people dug them. And so I started writing more. And then it became a thing.

But no, to answer your question. I'm familiar with the stories because I wrote them. But I don't. The problem with rehearsing anything is that the minute you do it a second time, it's a performance. And that's great if you're making a movie or selling a movie. performance. And to some degree, books are intentional things, podcasts are deliberate things. You don't want to completely Forrest Gump your way through it. But I think the thing that's... Excuse me. How dare you? That man was mentally to say it. You know what? And he twitched several

times, poor Forrest did. Them's was my magic shoes. Come on. It's a great moment. I'm rehearsed. I look at it like this. If authenticity is really the thing that's for sale, then the question becomes, what things do we do to get in the way of an authentic moment with our audience? Typically, in production, it's production itself that gets in the way. It's the placement of the camera. It's the placement of the mic. A plane flies over. The take gets busted.

It's makeup. You know, when I see newscasters slathering on the makeup and then sitting down to pretend that they're not reading a prompter when they clearly are. All of those things make me trust you less. That's interesting. Yeah. I mean, it's unintentional, but I think we've just been fed such a colossal heaping, helping of bull crap that the reptilian part of our brain is looking for signs of truth and signs of artifice, which is why the cognitive dissonance with a cappuccino and Dirty Jobs guy is kind of jarring because it makes you go, well, which one of those things is real? Is he a guy that drinks Perrier and cappuccino and narrate stuff? or is he a guy who actually goes out there and truly seems to believe that his foundation exists for a genuine purpose, et cetera, et cetera?

But I think it's the difference between skepticism and cynicism. We ought to be skeptical of things that make us look twice. We should always look twice, but we've just become utterly cynical now with everything. Yeah, I can't disagree with that at all, mostly because I don't want to get a letter, but also because I'd like to think of myself as skeptical. and I look at things and I investigate things and I want to get the truth and I want to examine how our brain tricks us but at the same time

it seems like every time I have a guest on the show someone will say oh well you know if you think that schmuck had something to say you've got to find somebody else or you know you should fact check this and have you looked into his charity how much of his money is he skimming off the time and it's like I don't know I can't you can't move

you can't do anything and that's why I think right now it makes your work even more interesting because you do have like a feel good show with returning the favor where you're giving money away to people that theoretically really deserve it and doing a lot of that, I would assume, in one take. Oh, yeah. Yeah.

Look, I mean, that's very important. It was a dirty jobs lesson. I think it was maybe the second season of dirty jobs. I was done. It was so hard and it was so dangerous. But mostly making it was such a pain in the ass because we were still, the production company and the people involved were all still bringing. with them the inertia of their last gig.

Most TV production is the same. Very, very deliberate, placed, careful, rehearsed. I didn't want that. I didn't want to do second takes, for one thing. And I also wanted to chronicle the making of the show. That's a warts and all thing. And that's hard for a network or a production company to agree to. Happily, we kind of compromised the first season.

The numbers were good enough so that I was able to say, if we don't bring in a documentary camera to essentially, you know, chronicle the making of the show. And if we don't cut that in to the next season, so we can see the crew and see the business of doing it, and I don't want to do it anymore. And so they said, okay, that's become, obviously, breaking the fourth wall is something everybody talks about, but we never broke the fourth wall. We just ignored it. And that's what we're doing on returning the favor, too. And that's why I'm able to do such an, a sickeningly sweet, saccharine show about bloody do-gooders. Right. On the one hand, I really do admire these people, and I'm glad they're out

there better than me making the world a nice place. I'm not really comfortable building statues to them and turning them into heroes and venerating them, you know. But at the same time, I want you to know that the people I meet on this show, we look at very, very carefully and answer a really simple question, are they better or nicer than me? It's not a very high bar, but the people we met by and large are. So the trick that becomes, how do you interact with these people? How do you give them money? How can you make it less? precious. And the answer is to not rehearse. Let the production company do what they do. But then I come in, let the producers bring me up to speed on camera, let me meet the people for real the

first time, capture all that on camera, and cut the warts and all reality of making the show into the finished product. That to me really was the promise of reality TV. Now we totally screw the poop. Now it's all scripted. It's as scripted as an episode of friends. And if somebody tells you differently, they're lying. That makes sense. Yeah. And you can tell that dirty jobs returning the favor, those can't be scripted. I mean, one thing, who's going to go, hey, refill the dump truck full of tilapia poop and dump it out again and make sure it splashes on us? Yeah. It's not going to happen. There was one episode where this sewer rat, the size of like a dog, runs across your foot, which I thought was really funny because you actually go, ugh.

And I'm like, you're in a sewer. Two episodes prior, you're in a tilapia, I don't know, hole full of poo. And this dog-sized rat runs across your foot. And that's what causes you to lose the veneer of Mike Roe cool. Well, that actually just opened a Pandora's box of insanity on all kinds of levels. When that, the rat ran across my foot after it jumped off my shoulder, landed in my crotch, sent me leaping into the air, hitting my head on the roof of the sewer, and then driving me face first into a river of crap. And when I pushed myself up and spit something out of my mouth that never should have been there, my exact words were, holy crap.

Now, the censors, standards and practices at the network were like, you can't say crap. I'm like, guys. It's actually crap. I'm covered in shit, surely. But the problem was I got all kinds of letters from people who thought I said. Holy shit. Yeah. Now, because they bleeped crap.

So suddenly, I'm in my boss's office having this existential argument over the right thing to say when you fall face first into a river of shit. And they actually had, they had a list of words you're allowed to say, you know, it's effluvium, feces. I'm going to yell holy feces. That's why you talk like that. Right like that, not talk like that. Well, in the end.

Affluvium. I started calling it poo. And they were like, well, that's just absurd. I'm like, well, of course it's absurd. I want the world to know I'm calling feces poo, because if I call it crap, you'll bleep it. And then I get angry letters from viewers who think I'm using bad language. My kid watches this show. So, you know, it's all so odd and fragile and precious.

And brands today are in the fight of their life. And producers are in the fight of their life. And promotional people and marketers, they're in the fight of their life. They're all out there. It's incredibly noisy, and they all want something authentic. But so often they get in their own way and basically doom. They doom their own quest. It's a heck of a thing.

I guess next time you fall face first in crap, you should just, who's got lamb gonads? I got to wash this taste out of my mouth. The world of that story is to stay out of the sewer. You go in, you make your point and, you know, then come and narrate something. Yes, exactly. Life's easier. Yeah. Does anybody have a crap-proof face?

mask that I can wear for this next gig. The fuel goods shows are pretty rare these days, though. Like, returning the favor stands out pretty uniquely in that no one's competing for the money. It's not Shark Tank or something like that. They don't have to impress you necessarily that it just sort of happens. It's got to be hard to get all these small town people usually together. And it's like, keep a secret from the nicest person, one of the nicest people in your town. Everybody else get in on it and make sure nobody texts her, puts it in a thread.

When she wonders wherever one is, lie to them. How do you, I mean, who orchestrates all that? It happens in a couple different ways. The first thing that happens is a small crew goes in under the auspices of making a digital documentary or some modest thing. And, you know, most of the people we feature on the show are involved in some kind of altruistic effort. So they want the press. And so they'll sit down and they'll talk to these people. While that's happening, other things are going on regarding the reveal or the surprise.

And I haven't shown up yet. I literally spend six hours with these people. The advance crew has gone in. They've set up some kind of surprise. I go in and I play it exactly as it lies. If they know me, that's fine. Most of them do it at this point. Some of them think, am I on dirty jobs?

Am I on somebody's got to do it? Some people have just figured it out. They're like, oh, my God, is this returning the favor? And this is really funny. You know, a few years ago, it would be a disaster. And production would stop and everybody would huddle around and they try and figure out what to do. Today, I just say, yeah, yeah, as a matter of fact, it is.

Good for you. You figured it out. Now what are we going to do? Because we still have to shoot the show. And so that gets cut into the show. And it's really not a disaster at all. It simply means that if you really surprise somebody, really get them totally out of the blue, it's because they didn't know it was Christmas morning.

But if they know it's Christmas morning, it simply means they don't know what's under the tree. And they won't until you give it to them. We're not really there to document Christmas morning. We're there because the people we're introducing you to are people that we think you should know, people who are doing something cool in their neighborhood. And because it's on Facebook, you don't have the same weight of network, oversight, and fear, frankly. You know, Extreme Home Makeover was a 60-minute show, and that thing, man, it had to run in a very specific way. there were hundreds of people on that crew.

Jeez. I'm not even, I mean, there were hundreds. I was up in Maine one time fishing for slime meals. It's a great episode of Dirty Jobs. We've been out for a couple of days, and we came back in on the boats. And coincidentally, in this same little small town, Extreme Home Makeover was there, like, building a house. And they were all like, oh, God, can you come over and have lunch with us? Say hello?

And I said, well, sure. Can I bring the crew? And they're like, yeah, well, how many are there? And I'm like, six? I'm like, six. Of course, bring them. They had close to 300. Oh, man.

So, like, you're talking about contractors, people working on a house. You're talking about, you know, multiple live vans because they shoot it like it's live to tape. You know, an episode of that thing probably, it cost millions to shoot. Oh, that's crazy. And an episode of Dirty Jobs, six dudes, four with cameras out in the world, not doing a second take. How much of that cost, are you allowed to say? Do you know? Sure.

I mean, at the time, an hour of Dirty Jobs would probably cost about. $350 to $400,000. Wow. Everything. Yeah. Right. Yeah, that's amazing. It's like a factor of 10 or something like that.

Right. And the shows were equally rated. Yeah. No wonder they liked you so much. Well, it's just, you know, I mean, I got a little expensive there toward the end. But, um, but. We're going to have to cancel this. You're going to have to call it.

Someone's got to do it now. Sorry. That's pretty much what happened. That's what happens with shows. You know, they start small. They're doomed to fail. They find an audience. everybody swoops in to make them bigger and better,

and then they get so expensive and top-heavy that they collapse under their own weight. You're listening to The Jordan Harbinger Show with our guest, Mike Rowe. We'll be right back. Thanks for listening and supporting the show, and to learn more and get links to all the great discounts you just heard from our amazing sponsors,

visit jordanharbinger.com slash deals. Don't forget, we have a worksheet for today's episode so you can make sure you solidify your understanding of the key takeaways from Mike Rowe. That link is in the show notes at Jordan Harbinger.com slash podcast. If you'd like some tips on how to subscribe to the show, just go to Jordan Harbinger. com slash subscribe. Subscribing to the show is absolutely free.

It just means that you get all of the latest episodes downloaded automatically to your podcast player so you don't miss a single thing. And now back to our show with Mike Rowe. Well, was it kind of a thing where you go, I kind of want to keep doing this, but not really that much, and they're like, we'll give you this much, this. And then eventually you just go, if I'm going to come in for another, Tulapia dump truck poop show, you got to pay me this much and they go,

you know what? We're drawing the line. Well, I mean, things go off the rails for a lot of different reasons. In my case, it really wasn't about the money. The money was involved. We went for eight seasons. It's like an ad campaign. You know, even ad campaigns that work, advertising

agencies get nervous if they don't change it. Because if there's no need to change a thing, then why do you exist? What are you doing? Right. And so So I had 10 executive producers on dirty jobs over eight seasons. Yeah. That's how much churn there is. That's more than one per season for those doing the math.

And every time somebody comes in, they kind of want to put their stamp on. And there was nothing to stamp on dirty jobs. It wasn't a show. It was the chronicling of a day on a farm, you know, in a talapia pond, on a bridge. There was no casting. There was no pre-production. There was certainly no script. And there was no second take.

So there's very little you can do as an executive except what finally happened at the end when they just wanted to ramp it up, really ramp it up. And I didn't want to ramp it up. Dirty Jobs was a show that featured people you'd never heard of doing things you didn't know people did in towns you can't find on a map. And so I didn't want to do a very special episode in the sewer with John Stamos or Paris Hilton. I just didn't. I just didn't. That was real. That was a real pitches, weren't they?

It was all real. I mean, we want you, like, cleaning up in New York City after New Year's. I'm like, look, everybody knows what that looks like. It's just, it's New York City. Wouldn't it be more intrad, blah, blah, blah. So that conversation was going on. And we settled on international. Like, let's just see what it looks like overseas.

So I went to Australia for a month, and those episodes were terrific. But again, Dirty Jobs was supposed to be, and it was, at its best, a celebration of American workers. doing what Americans do without artifice or pretense. It started as a tribute to my pop, and it finished looking a lot like it did when it started. We went to all 50 states. We did 300 jobs, and it felt like a good time to say, okay, maybe. Yeah, there was no, like, jump the shark.

Like, oh, that episode where Tom Arnold and Mike Rowe are cleaning out garbage trucks or cement trucks is really. That was not my favorite. You know what I did? I literally jumped a shark. During Shark Week on Dirty Jobs, we were doing necropsies, you know, autopsies on sharks, basically. And we had a nine-foot gray shark down at a taxidermy place down in South Florida somewhere. And the way it works is you catch a shark and this place makes a big fiberglass mold of it.

And then when you catch the same basic shark, you can throw it back. That's good. It was actually a really big. idea and I wanted to profile it because it was like, you know, Shark Week. We wanted to do something that was a great dirty job, but at the same time something that had some decent environmental heft to it. For Shark Week, we're killing a bunch of sharks and putting them on the wall. It's just, right? Talk about getting a letter from PETA. Talk about cognitive dissonance. But you do have to kill one in order to make the mold. And when you make the mold, you have to get the

shark out of the mold. And that involves tearing it in half. And they're chains involved in tractors. And I mean, it's just an ungodly mess. And what was left of a shark was at my feet. And I looked at the crew and we all kind of looked at each other. We're like, you know something? This is just not going to really play in the heartland. And I just backed up and did the only thing I could, which was get a good running start and jump over the shark, which we filmed in high speed and cut into the promo. It looked pretty terrific. So yeah, I'm proud. I'll just say I did jump a shark at a time when I felt like there was simply nothing else to do. Yeah, jumping sharks with John Stamos and Mike Roe.

It's a very special episode. Stay with us. It's going to be great. Your book, the way I heard it, your parents, some of the stories in there about your parents, genius level reframing techniques. I need to learn this stuff. You met my son in there, Jaden. The neighbors came to show off hundreds of photos from Yosemite.

You're just like, when are we going? And your parents are like, isn't that sad? What are they doing here? What's the psychology here? We didn't have a lot of money. We didn't have much at all. My dad taught public school. My mom wasn't working at that point.

She was raising three kids. What we had was access to about 80 acres. We didn't own it. We had a couple acres on a small farm on a hill in Baltimore County living next to my grandfather. And so we were isolated. You know, I mean, obviously, I was in contact with kids at school. I certainly didn't feel poor. And the reason I didn't feel poor is because my parents,

figured out a way to make me feel sorry for people with money. Envy the rich is not, you know, we pitied the rich because the story I tell starts with me watching an Orioles game. I'm like eight or nine, and a commercial comes on for Ocean City, Maryland, the boardwalk, you know, and all these amusement rides, and then all these kids my age, and their boys and girls are holding hands and eating cotton candy and the rides. I've never seen rides before. Sure.

before. And it was a roller coaster called the Wild Mouse. And everybody on the Wild Mouse looked like they were having such a great time. And my parents are sitting behind me watching the same ad during the Orioles game. And they see me watching the ad. And so they would start these conversations, just loud enough for me to hear, but not directed to me. Conversations. That would have been too obvious. And they were very, very sly about it. But it was like, gosh, John, look at those kids on that roller coaster. Isn't it sad that kids have to stand in line to be entertained like that? My dad would be like, look like you're going to puke on each other, Peggy. Look at that poor kid.

And I'm listening to them and I'm looking at the ad and I'm like, I guess, I don't know, it looks kind of fun. But then they would just keep going with, you know, of course, they don't have a big woods behind them to go back and be entertained. It was the same thing with our neighbors, right? They come back from Yosemite with pictures as they're driving off. Gosh, isn't it sad? Isn't it sad that people have to fly all over the country to have fun? Just to go for a walk in the forest, we have one right there. I never had any new clothes.

I had two cousins who were both bigger than me. So every time there's like a fashion conversation or, you know, it was talk of the mall, it's like, isn't it sad? These kids have to walk around and these jeans that aren't broken in to not have nice, worn, comfortable clothes? I was just like, yeah, you know, it's pretty bad. It's pretty bad. That went on for years. Yeah. Yeah. And at what point were you like, I don't really pity the people that are wearing the latest fashions in school. Maybe it's me who's the sucker here.

Yeah. Like 40 years old. Yeah. It's recently. Like last Thursday, it became clear. Yeah. There are still times in my life where I'm like, wait a minute. That's not even true. And I'll call my mom. And she's like, you believed that even then? They told me carry out food was for families whose mothers couldn't cook. Yeah. And that movies were for kids who couldn't read. It was so, I mean, it was really, it was ingenious. It not only worked in the short term, it inspired in me a level of superiority.

I'm sure. Arrogance. That was completely unfounded. But it allowed me to be in on the joke. Yeah. You know, which I still, to this day, is a metaphor I use. I'm not sure what it means entirely, but it just allows you to be comfortable, you know, with your own circumstances, whatever they are. And they were great at that.

It was actually my brothers to answer your question who ratted them out. Oh, yeah, that makes sense. Because I was on the front line of it. But they saw more, you know, they were like, dude, we've been to movies. They're amazing. Yeah, like. You're going to want to see one. Mike, if you've seen Batman?

No, Timmy. I can read. And one day I'll teach you. I just don't have time right now. And besides, costumes are for girls. Yeah. So right now, well, as of December, 2018, there's about 7 million job openings in the U.S. 7.3.

7.3, if we're counting, which we are. Not enough qualified workers to fill these up. And I got a haircut a long time ago, as you can tell. And the hairstyle is her husband's a roofer. And I said, oh, how's business? It's really hot outside. And she's like, actually, that's part of the problem. He works pretty slowly and it's really hot out.

And, you know, he really needs help. said, well, there's a lot of people who don't have jobs. And she's like, nobody will take this job. Right. Nobody wants to stand on the roof and in the hot sun. He goes through a new person. Once a month, he'll hire someone that lasts about four days. They don't show up on Friday.

He's got to finish the job himself. That's like the story of this guy's life. Yep. And on the other side, college is super expensive now. People are having trouble getting jobs after they graduate. I was one of those people. I went to go get a job at Best Buy. And they were like, you can sell CDs with Norman.

He's 15. and his mom just dropped him off. He's his freshman in high school. I was like, I got a four-year degree in econ from Michigan. I am above this kind of work. And they went, great. You want to start on Monday? And you know, you get to stand next to Britney Spears.

It's fine. You know, that was graduation. So I'm wondering, where do you think about free tuition for everybody? You know, that's kind of the solution that people are posing now. I've got my own opinion on it, but I think I can probably guess what yours is. But I'm curious. Look, of all the four-letter words, words that start with an F, free has got to be the most alarming.

Mm-hmm. Because I've never found anything that is. Yeah. It gets political fast. Yeah. Everything does these days because everything is binary. But part of what frustrates me in a very general way with the way a lot of people think who are coming out of school right now is that there really and truly is such a thing as

fill in the blank, free blank. There is no such thing as a free lunch. And there's certainly no such thing as a free edge. education. And if anybody were to seriously want to talk about it, then my first comment would be, okay, just so we understand, the professors have waived their salaries. The administrative staff has waived their salaries. The football coaches waived their salaries. The custodians, all the people who take care of the institution. None of these people are being paid because they are working for free. Therefore, I can attend and not pay them since nobody anywhere is paying anybody.

That's what free is. If you mean a version of free that involves somebody else paying instead of you, that's not free. So, you know, the first thing that I would try to do if I were really getting sucked into a political diatribe on what to do about the rising cost of tuition is I would say set the table properly. And let's not use words that mean something other than what they truly mean, or let's at least agree to some shared definitions. Otherwise, we're just going to talk past each other. Yeah, I think for something like STEM or some job that's really in demand, but even then, you've got to pay it back. Like, I'll happily send you to plumbing school if I'm going to get a return. Then it's an investment.

It's not a donation to your English degree or your anthropology degree. Well, you also have to look at why college got as expensive as it is. And this shouldn't be political. But if you go back to 1982, when I graduated from a community college and took a year or two off. and I went back to a university, but in 1982, well, let me say it this way. The cost of two years at a community college and two years at a university for me was just under $11,000. The exact same degrees today, an AA and a BS from the exact same places are just under 90. So, wow. I'll say it like this. Nothing since 1982 has increased in cost faster than the cost of a four-year degree,

not health care, not real estate, not food, not energy. Nothing. That's saying a lot. Nothing. So you can't just look at that as some do and say, well, that just proves how important it is and how critical an investment it is. Because that's what we've been sold, right? We've been sold. It's not an education.

It's not a commodity. It's an investment. Okay. So why did the investment increase exponentially? And I'm not an economist by any stretch, but I think the biggest reason is because we embarked as a society on a concerted effort to tell a generation that the best path for the most people was a four-year degree, which is also the most expensive path. And then we started showing them pictures of people who didn't get a four-year degree, who were laboring. in all kinds of other vocations that looked like some kind of consolation prize. Yeah, the old work smart, not hard, and the guy welding or something.

Yeah, no, that literally was one of the first posters in a PR campaign for the big push for college. It was in my guidance counselor's office in 1979. You know, work smart, not hard is what it said, a picture of a graduate standing next to a guy holding a wrench, looking like he won the booby prize. So the tropes, bromides, and platitudes fueled the belief that if you didn't get a four-year degree, you were screwed. So it's very different. You know, college, higher education did need a PR campaign, and it got one. Unfortunately, it came at the expense of all other forms of education.

And so we turned all of these other pursuits into cautionary tales. Then we freed up a limitless supply of money. And then we put an incredible amount of pressure on kids to borrow whatever it took to get the magical paper that would ensure their happiness. So when people say, Mike, why did college get so expensive so fast? I say that for a lot of reasons, but the big thing behind it was this societal push that gave college permission to charge whatever they wanted. And so they have. and because it's couched as an investment, we just keep borrowing more and more and more. And it's amazing what comes back to me.

When I make this argument, people will sum it up and basically conclude that I'm anti-education or anti-college. And I'm not. But I am anti, this is so important that we can charge whatever we want. That's just bull crap. And that's what we've done. And look, it's one thing not to be able to find a job. It's one thing not to be sure what you want to do with the rest of. rest of your life. But to be unsure and untrained and in debt, five or six figures, very, very,

very difficult for people to crawl out of that hole. It's especially because it's really not a function of there not being any jobs. It's a function of not having enough qualified people to fill jobs that already exist, right? So the roofer, who doesn't want to hire somebody who's off the books and can't find somebody who'll do the job, we're building a house pretty soon. And there's a, my wife's brother built a house. And he was saying and the drywall guy can't even find somebody who's going to hold up the drywall. He's offering like 50 bucks plus an hour, I think. And he just can't find anybody to do it.

You don't need that much special training. It's just that there's a perception issue where people go, well, I went to college. I'm not going to put up drywall. I'm waiting. I'm waiting. Yeah. Where's my magic job? Right.

I paid my dues. They punched my ticket. Now I'm ready to. People, they seem to have stopped looking at jobs as rungs on a ladder. and started looking at all of the rungs as a destination and concluded that, well, just because one rung is down here and the other rung is up there doesn't mean there should be a difference in pay.

Well, of course there should. Your buddy who has a roofing company didn't always have a roofing company. He started roofing. He started working in the sun, and then he got good at it, and then he moved up. This idea of working in a workforce

where there's no mobility, it's just not true. But it also informs a lot of the misperception, I think, that makes people look at jobs in this way. This just happened. I don't know if you saw this article. It's amazing. It's an article in last month's Atlantic. And it's called Welding Won't Make You Rich.

That's one of the examples I have that's definitely not true. Well, I mean, funny. It's in my notes. Well, hundreds of people came to my Facebook page and said, Mike, are you going to comment on this? And I'm like, I mean, it's a big article. It's almost 3,000 words. But I read it. I read it a couple of times.

It's fascinating. And so I not only commented on it, I wrote 3,000 words going paragraph by paragraph, explaining as politely as I could why the author may have gotten his head up his ass. And it was amazing, right? Facebook, it's a 6,000 word post. Nobody's going to read this, right? I mean, you know, on Facebook, if you put something with three or 400 words, people just aren't going to, too long didn't read.

This thing was shared over 10,000 times and reached 3,000 people, not because. because I'm such a swell writer who are so engaging, but because people are desperate to have this conversation. And they want a rational back and forth because a couple of years ago, articles began to appear saying, meet the $150,000 welder. And people started realizing that you could actually make a lot of money welding. Well, the guy that wrote this article basically said, wait a minute, the people who make that kind of money are at the top of the profession. you're not going to make that kind of money. I'm like, what in the world is the point of your argument? There are lots of actors who don't make what Brad Pitt makes.

There are lots of writers who don't make what James Patterson makes, including the guy who wrote this article. But the country's not suffering from a belief that everybody who welds makes six figures. They're suffering from a misperception that nobody is prospering and that there's only one kind of welding. and people Google welder salary and see $41,500. Okay, so that's it. But that's so fundamentally wrong and mistaken. We were just talking about writing books.

95% of the books in Barnes & Noble sell less than 5,000 copies. The entire industry is propped up by the bestsellers. The podcast industry exists because of about 20 podcasts that are pulling the train. Yours among them, I'm sure. Yeah, I think so. I hope so. So in this binary world where everything is black or white or this or that, blue collar, white collar, good, bad, right, wrong, smart, stupid, in comes a guy that says, nope, welding won't make you rich. And, you know, he goes to a town to meet a kid who tried to weld and it didn't work out for him. Now, he was also a kid who was divorced at 21 trying to raise two kids and living in his mother's basement. Now, could those circumstances have had anything at all to do with the proximate cause? of his inevitable failure.

I don't know, but it's never as simple as anybody makes it out to be, including me. You're listening to The Jordan Harbinger Show with our guest, Mike Rowe. We'll be right back after this. Thank you for listening and supporting the show. Your support of our advertisers keeps us on the air. To learn more and get links to all the great discounts you just heard so you can check out those amazing sponsors, visit jordanharbinger.com slash deals. And don't forget the worksheet for today's episode.

That link is in the show notes at Jordan Harbinger.com slash podcast. If you're listening to us in The Overcast Player, please click the Little Star next to the episode. We really appreciate it. And now for the conclusion of our episode with Mike Rowe. What about the idea? And I think I touched on this the last time we talked, but this is something that I hate this trope, this bromide. Follow your passion. It's the worst advice I've ever heard.

It gets people, now it's just a rampant industry. Like, hey, you don't like your job? Sign up from my mastermind. Sondit from a mastermind, I'll teach you how to be an online influencer. Look at this Mike Rowe guy. He's making tons of money writing Facebook posts that people probably only read the headline they shared. He's making hand over fists, this guy's making me.

Take my master class. That's right. Masterclass, yeah. You don't have one of those yet? Nope. Nope. Well, I mean, I'm giving it right now. This is it, everybody.

Welcome to my master class. I mean, where do you have to get in your life when you can seriously look earnestly into the lens and say, the time has come for me to destroy. gorge all of the information in my enormous brain. It's going to take a while because I'm very smart, but you bought a ticket so sit down and relax. Are you kidding me? How do people do that? I don't know. They get a big check and they're like, all right, I'm going to make this look good. Look, that might have sounded a little holier than now. Make no mistake. I get accused of selling out every month and I have no defense. Of course I sold out. I sold out in 1980.

when I took my first job at QVC. I was literally selling things in the middle of the night. I sold out before I had anything to bargain with. Yeah. You know, it's just amazing, you know. We give so much more credence to the struggling or starving artist than we do somebody who has actually succeeded in some financial way. We're so suspicious.

I'd have more credibility as a podcaster if I was broke. I think so. Well, you know what? The only sensible thing for you to do with your, brand new family is to give all your money away and watch those numbers go through the roof. Yeah. The roof. Where it's so easy. The roof that you're trying to get fixed.

Yeah. The roof that I don't have because I'm broke now. Yeah. You say take your passion with you, but I think a lot of people go, yeah, that sounds really good. And then they don't do that. They don't know what that means. No, it's kind of like, you know, stay the course. Yeah. Persistence. You know. Your head down.

Yeah. Staying the course is terrific advice if you're going in the right direction. Following your passion is terrific advice if the passion is taking you to a place where opportunity and your own set of skills will be able to coexist. But follow your passion as a bromide is precisely what 98% of the people do who audition for American Idol. They follow their passion. And then at 22 years of age, they realize for the very first time in their life that they can't sing at all. Not even a little. And they learn this on national television. And they're lined up.

Thousands of people who have been told throughout the totality of their short lives that if you believe something deeply enough and if you want something bad enough, and if you truly embrace the essence of persistence and your passion, if you let your passion lead you, I mean, Beyonce said that very thing as she received a Grammy. Just stick with it. Well, I mean, how can you give that kind of advice to someone you've never known? How can you even talk that way to somebody until you at least have an understanding of who they think they are and what they think they want? That's a good point.

Stick with it. I mean, not you. You're never going to make it. You have no talent. But you, you should stick with it because I see something as long as, well, maybe. But I'm not sure. Anyway, just give me the grant. It's insane.

Listen, I'm very busy and I have to get to my master class. So follow your passion and we'll check back. But again, in a binary world, people watch your podcast. They hear Mike say, don't follow your passion. And they go, you know what, what a killjoy. What a schmuck. Who is he? You know, well.

Easy for him to say. He's the dirty jobs guy. Right. Everybody wants that job. Yeah. Well, help yourself. But look, I don't say, don't follow your passion. I say, never follow your passion, but always bring it with you.

Because passion isn't the enemy. it's just not the thing you want pulling the train. Passion is something that most, all of the dirty jobbers that I met, possessed in spades. Now, they just weren't doing anything that looked aspirational. So it was confusing. It's back to the cognitive dissonance of a guy in a plaid shirt, sip in a cappuccino. That doesn't make sense. Well, guess what?

Neither does a septic tank cleaner worth a million dollars who has multiple trucks. That guy had a million dollar business? Oh, yeah. It doesn't surprise me, actually. I actually counted them up once. I could be wrong by a couple, but I put over 40 people that we featured on dirty jobs as multi-millionaires. We never talked about it because the show wasn't really about money. It was about work and good humor and skill.

But when you find somebody who's prosperous, who doesn't look prosperous, it didn't used to be a disconnect. But today it is. We need everything to line up in order for. our brains to believe it. Even then, we're cynical. The first great lesson from dirty jobs was these people are passionate, but they don't look like they should be. So what do they know that we don't? And the first enduring lesson to come out of that was, well, you don't have to follow your passion in order to be passionate. It's kind of like, I think of it in terms of a dream job. That's still a trope that people have to know. And it goes back to college. What do you have to do

to get your dream job? What do you have to do to have real job satisfaction? If that's the question, a lot of kids today will say, well, the first thing I have to do is identify the thing that's going to make me happy. At age 17 or whatever you go to college? Whenever. I have to identify the proximate cause of my happiness. Then I have to get the paper that will allow me to pursue that thing. First, I need to get the money that will allow me to pay for the paper. And then I need to go through X years here, X years here, blah, blah, blah, and so forth and so on. It's exactly backwards, right? What we're really seeing are people going through a process where their passion leads them.

Their hopes lead them to the dream job. And when they get the dream job, now they have permission to be happy. It's really not so different than the idea of a soulmate, you know, the idea that there's one person on the planet. And if you can find him or her, then you'll be happy. Now, how do you do that? Well, here's the plan. You go on Tinder. You got Tinder.

You swipe left, you swipe right. You got the Snapchat. I don't even know what they've got anymore. But, you know, you do whatever you have to do. How do you meet people? You have a significant other at this point, right? Uh-huh. Yeah.

How did you meet on Tinder? Oh, the old-fashioned way. Yeah. You know, it was an inappropriate business relationship. It was an inappropriate business relationship. Totally. Yeah. Yeah, well, I had to avoid this lawsuit, so we're dating now.

I was essentially held up. No, it's, I mean, look, maybe it's a clunky analogy. Maybe romance is different than vocational satisfaction. However, if you confuse the cause with the symptom, as I believe we've managed to do in a thousand different ways, then we are going to be led by something other than practicality, opportunity, and common sense. We're going to be led by hopes, dreams, desire, and passion. And those things are too important to be without, but too fickle to follow around. Yeah, that's for damn sure. Yeah, I think most people meet their soulmate, I don't know, within a few miles of their house.

What are the odds of that? Well, most people meet their soulmate and initially determine them to be a pain in the ass. You know, it's not like people are walking around with a soulmate sign, you know? That's a good point. I mean, it's the movies will tell us that, you know, the popular tropes will tell us that. But look, it's kind of a fact that arranged marriages are more successful than unarranged marriages. That is a weird sort of inconvenient truth for a lot of people who believe strongly in love being the only thing that matters or whatever. Well, take the religion out of it.

If you're simply charged with being happy, you know, you want to be happy. But here are the cards we're giving you. This is the job you're going to have. This is the mate you're going to have. Now, I'm not advocating for this. This sounds dystopian and super creepy. But if the goal is to be happy, a lot of people are going to figure out how to be happy. with the job they have and the person they have,

and they're going to play the cards they got. It's, you know, the cards you get don't determine the outcome of the game. The player does. Yeah. My wife's doing a good job being happy with what she's stuck with now, you know? She seems happy. I mean, there she is out there on the other side of the glass,

taking care of Jaden, that's right. Your young son, man, you've got it figured out. You bring your wife and your infant to work day. Yeah, that's right, yeah. You got to learn the business. Got to learn the family business. Do you got any pets? We have cats.

No hair. I can't believe you didn't bring your hairless cat. I know. He just, he likes to run around. Is it like Mr. Biggelsworth? Yeah, like a gray version of Mr. Biggelsworth. Oh. Yeah, he feels like a shorn and scrotum.

Listen, man. It's so funny you bring that up. Can I tell you a story? Yeah. Yeah. Why not? Listen, any story that starts in a free associative way inspired with the word shorn and scrotum is going to end badly.

Yeah. Let's do it. No, let's not do it. Oh, you don't want to do it? No, no. I mean, you know what? If we weren't recording this on camera. Next time.

I'd show you something. I'd show you something that would inspire a permanent facial tick. How do we – I know you give work ethic scholarships, right? Because we reward athletic talent. We reward academic. We reward need. You reward work ethic, which seems like it's probably a pretty good idea. How do you develop work ethic in people, though?

You can't do it. You can't do it. You can talk about it. I mean, you have to talk about it. You have to try and test for it. And what I found is just simply putting it into the mix is fascinating. Some people really appreciate it. Other people, man, it just really pisses them off.

Did we talk about this last time, the sweat pledge? I don't think so. Hey, Ryan, do me a favor. See one of those things hanging right in front of Jennifer face down. Yeah, it's called a sweat pledge. Bring one of those in here, if you wouldn't mind. Part of our work ethic scholarship requires people to sign a sweat pledge. A sweat pledge is the thing I wrote eight years ago after some beer.

Twelve points that basically, I believe, would help any employee do well on the job. And also, I believe any employer would absolutely love to have. It was just like a statement of purpose. Right? It stands for skills and work ethic aren't taboo. Sweat. Like, number one, I believe I've won the greatest lottery of all time. I'm alive.

I walk the earth. I live in America. Above all things, I'm grateful. It's very, very, very difficult to really feel sorry for yourself and feel grateful at the same time, you know. And so I have a brief explanation as to why I wrote all these, and I did it mostly to amuse myself. But ultimately, I just thought, well, among the other things I ask people to do who apply for the scholarship is I want you to sign the thing. I signed it. I want you to sign it.

And if you don't agree with everything on here, that's totally cool. Don't sign it and don't apply for a work ethic scholarship. Go get a scholastic scholarship. Part of the reason I don't look at grades is because I'm more interested in a kid's attendance record than I am. Oh, interesting. You know, I ask for references. I ask for a video. It doesn't have to be, you know, just use your phone.

But hold up the video and make a case for yourself. I want an essay. I don't care about your spelling or your syntax, but I want to hear what you think about the nature of showing up early. and staying late and learning a skill that's in demand. Those are the things my scholarship tries to reward, or at least encourage. So, no, you can't look into the eyes of an applicant and see their soul or weigh and measure their work ethic. But you can call your scholarship a work ethic scholarship, and you can ask people to do

things that other scholarship funds don't do. What's interesting about this is that it happens every year. Parents will write me and say, how can you ask my son to sign this? Number six makes people crazy. I believe that my safety is my responsibility. I understand that being in compliance does not necessarily mean I'm out of danger. They're like, my kid's not signing that. Like, why not?

Because his safety can't be his responsibility. His safety is the responsibility of the person who hires him. And it's a fascinating conversation. and I have it every month with somebody who's disgruntled. But what's funny, really, is that the ultimate answer to any complaint arising from any of our attempts to reward work ethics to simply say, look, man, it is entirely possible this particular pile of free money is not for you. Maybe free. Yeah. And in this case, it's pretty close to it.

What do you have to do to apply for one of these scholarships? You've got to make a case for yourself. You've got to sign a sweat pledge. You have to jump through some hoops. sense, it's not free. My objective with the scholarship fund is not to simply help people who prove they're worthy of assistance. It's to help people who prove they're worthy of assistance who then allow me to tell their story. Because that's the only thing that really gets people's. Nobody listens to me anymore. I mean, I can make a bunch of noise and I can tell stories

and whatnot. But I was going to say the podcast is a huge hit. Well, thanks. And now you've got this book the way I heard it. Thank you for the podcast. Yeah. Well, you know, it's all of a piece. You know, I didn't think about this until the other day, but a lot of the stories that I wrote in the book and a lot of the stories that are on the podcast actually come out of the sweat pledge. There are stories about people who lived in a way that I often admire. Sometimes it's the exact opposite.

But in general, I'm trying to take a lesson both in the book and the podcast from the late great Paul Harvey, who did a radio show called The Rest of the Story. And this is the same model. It's different. It's me. Paul, you know, told shorter biographical mysteries. These are more biographical, historical ruminations. You know, but it's the same basic idea. Tell stories of people who are interesting and try and tell them in an interesting way.

Was there ever a dirty job or anything that you wanted to do? The producers were like, no way. This is, you're just going to get ground up into little pieces or, you know, it's all these businesses are crooked or something like that? No. I mean, it was really the other way. Mike, you know, are you sure you need a parachute to jump out of a plane? I mean, maybe you don't.

What if you just jumped out of a plane and, like, landed in a net or something, you know? It's like, no, maybe not, fellas. I always wanted to go into a rendering operation. What is that? A rendering operation is a factory of sorts where you would turn, say, a dead cow into chicken feed. Oh, they don't call those slaughterhouses anymore? No. Slaughterhouses and killing floors are places where the dead cow, where the cow is made dead and then turned into food, rendering operations, they'll show up at the farm to pick up the dead animal and then take the dead animal back and then turn it into something very much like a milkshake and then like freeze dry it and then sell it as various kinds of food. As a cow, it could literally be a milkshake. It's just not one you'd want it.

No, it's the worst. It's the most disappointing milkshake in the world. You literally stick a hose in an incision under the skin and inflate it. So the skin separates from the meat. Wow. And then you skin it, and then you winch it up on a giant thing. And that's dropped into a hopper with these giant spinning blades. And the milkshake that comes out is ultimately dried. And that's how you get a lot of chicken food.

Very difficult to get into a rendering factory because a lot of them are mobbed up. Or at least... So owned by like the mafia? Yeah, if you follow many of them back, that's a gross generalization. My apologies to those in your audience who come from a long generation of renderers who are not. Who have taken homage. You can send the letter of complaint directly to me over on my Facebook page. But it took five or six seasons before somebody reached out and invited us to come in.

And so that's something that I wanted to do. And the network saw the footage and they were just horrified, just beside themselves. But it was really important for me to do it because I'm up to my neck and farming issues. And I think it's really important that people understand where their food comes from and where it goes. Yeah. And how, you know, Hakuna Makata, cycle of life and all of that. Rendering's a big, big part of that. It's hard to watch.

And you need a gallows sense of humor to do it. But it's a, it's terrific. Did that change the way you eat it all? Or were you just kind of like, that this is how it's made? Nothing has ever changed the way I eat long term. Everything changed the way I eat short term. No more tilapia until next month. You know what?

I was off tilapia for a while, but I order it now all the time. And I feel bad because apparently that episode didn't do any favors to that particular industry. Oh, man. But I worked on a slime line in Alaska for a while. And what's that? Slime line is just a, you know, it's a fish processing operation. Okay. So I was on a processor, which is a giant ship working about five stories down, shoulder to shoulder,

with people who separate Haddock from cod and skin them. And they just go by on a conveyor belt and the work is very difficult. It's got to be hot down there. It's hot and the knives are razor sharp and you're in a boat that's moving around in big

water and it's dangerous in every way dangerous can be. And when I got off that thing, prior to that, I had been eating sushi twice a week and for nearly a month sushi and cappuccino and Perrier. Oh look, I'm all back. I'm back on the program for sure. But yeah, the same thing happens after a slaughterhouse. It's like, you know what,

I think I'll have fish tonight and maybe for a couple of weeks. But I always go back to, I'm back into meat now in a big way, to be honest. I was off it for, in fact, the last time I saw you, I was exactly 40 pounds heavier than I am today. Well, you look good, man. I'm not fishing for compliments. Well, you were. You had the flu last time. I did. I was sick and fat, which is no way to go through life. No. Jade emailed me and was like, let's make a deal. You don't use that tape. And we'll let Mike come back on your show at some point in the future. And I said, you got a deal. Because nobody wants to, you know, I don't want to have. That tape's not out there? No, she was like, you cannot release that tape. Are you kidding me? Yeah. She would not let me do it.

She's looking out for you. She was right to do it. That is unbelievable. I bet if we looked at that now, you'd be like, thank God that is not on YouTube. You know what? I don't, I'll tell you what. Last thing I want to do is get in trouble with my office manager. Yeah. So if you guys made a deal stick by it. I will. But let's do a split screen. Put up a picture of me two years ago. I wasn't fat, fat. I just come to the point in my life where I just, I just had to stop eating for a while. And yeah, I lost 40 pounds since I saw you last. That's amazing. Good for you. I think I've lost around 30 pounds, too. Well, I got married. You don't want to be the guy in the wedding photos that has, you know. No, you look terrific. Thank you. Yeah, I appreciate. Now that we're both fishing for compliments.

Oh, now that we're both shearing our respective scrotums. That's right. That's right. I want to end with this because, you know, a lot of people ask me, oh, is Mike Roe cool? You know, you had him on the show. Who's the guy that's really disappointed you the most? And obviously, it's not you. I didn't know sure where we were. Yeah, you wasn't sure where that was gone.

But how come with all the fame and the fortune attained through TV, now podcasting, which we all know is very glamorous? You haven't turned into like an insufferable Hollywood Dingleberry. Well, look, opinions vary. I mean, there's a pretty compelling case to be made that I was a Hollywood Dingleberry before I had any reason to be. Yeah, during the QVC days. Actually, you know what?

I write about this in my book. Yeah. But yeah, QVC, I learned everything I needed to know about this industry, selling things in the middle of the night in 1990. It was humbling. It was informing. It was funny. It was tragic.

To sit there for three hours and free associate with an endless variety of products that you had never seen before that looked like. like they had been... Well, these were the products that nobody bought in primetime. The stuff that looks like, you know, it was sourced by one of the claws in the Carnival Midway, the machine that grabs the, you know, just endless nonsense. And I would sell those things. And I learned a lot about myself and I learned a lot about this industry.

And the big lesson was I just learned... I learned if you don't know what you're doing, you can either fake it or you can admit it. Now, if you fake it, you better be really, really good at it. And if you admit it, you better bring some level of charm to the confession that you otherwise might not find. And so when I was handed the health team infrared pain reliever in 1990 and asked to talk about it for eight minutes on my first shift, I just looked in the camera and said, so I'm Mike, I'm the new guy. and this is the health team infrared pain reliever, and I don't know what it does. I'm not even sure it's real.

It says here on the blue card, it relieves arthritic pain with infrared light that's blasted into your joints. If this is true, someone call me and tell me about it. The number's on the screen. Ask for Marty. He's the producer. He'll put you through.

And we got overrun with calls, people asking to talk to me to tell me what it was. These weren't testimonials. These were tutorials. These were people calling. calling me, telling me how to do the job. And we just kept it going for three hours. In the middle of the night for three hours, people called to tell me what the thing was that I was supposed to be selling. You know, in nature documentaries, we call it the submissive posture, right? When a small

wolf runs into a big wolf, the small wolf lies down and says, look, you could kill me. I hope you don't. I don't even want to fight, you know. I get it. That's what I did for a year. Rolling over and showing your belly on TV. That's all I did. That's all I did. And I did well as a result. And if you look at dirty jobs, what's the difference? I'm a guy saying, this is an expert. This is a sewer inspector. He does this for a living. I don't. I'm down here for the first day. I'm going to tag along and we're going to learn some stuff together, me and you from the sewer inspector. Again, I'm not saying I didn't turn into a pretentious and sufferable douchebag. I'm just saying that if I am one, I've always been one. And if you don't think I'm one, it probably has something to do with the fact that at the core of everything I try to do in front of other people, it always starts with a confession.

I always try to manage expectations. You know, I think that's important. Some people would say it's fake modesty and maybe it is to some degree, but at least acknowledging it has given me a certain amount of permission to get away with all kinds of things. I like that. I might have to take a page out of that book. Speaking of the book, tell us what's a question. in the book the way I heard it that's maybe not in the podcast of the same name. Well, it's really, you know, I said to you before we started rolling, everybody should write a book.

You know, everybody should write a book and wait tables. You'll learn things about yourself. This was supposed to be a simple collection of 50 of my favorite podcast stories with a little bit of connective tissue. What happened was I started picking the stories and then I started to essentially write about why I wrote the story I wrote in a kind of of a memoir way, like what in my own life rhymed with this biography I just shared with you, what on an autobiographical level motivated me to write it. And so it was a fun writing exercise and a pretty good question. What came out after doing four or five in a row was a kind of back and forth. So the podcasts are mysteries and what I would call tiles. If you look at the book as a mosaic, the podcast stories are tiles.

the grout is the connective tissue, and collectively the grout turned into a memoir. So the book is an accidental memoir interrupted periodically by truish stories that are told in a biographical mystery format about people I've always been interested in, but who have never met. So it's a hot mess of biography, autobiography, mystery, and memoir. It's the feel-good hit of the fall. The feel-good hit of the fall. Available now on Audible, hopefully. It's on Audible.

I sat right here with Isaac, our engineer, like a month ago, and recorded the thing. Yeah, it's wherever people buy books anymore. Amazon, it's everywhere. I was going to say, I don't even know where people buy books, but of course they buy them on the book. You don't have to buy one. I've got one right here. You want to sign it? Yeah, there's a Sharpie right there.

Who do you want me to sign it? Like Brad Pitt? Yeah. I mean, you can sign it as whoever you want, but probably. as yourself and you could sign it to J-D-A-Y-D-E-N. That's my kid. Your son? Yeah. Okay. You don't have to write anything relevant to him. I mean, he can't read. Years from now? Yeah. This is going to be worth literally dozens of dollars. How old is he now? He's two months old. He's two months old. So the only sensible thing to write is keep it dirty.

Yeah. He's got some, probably got a dirty diaper right now. Taking your advice all right. I don't. Thankfully, my scrotum has been shorn. Mike, thank you very much. Anytime. We should do the again in a couple years. That's right. I'm going to drop another 40. That's right. Drop another 40 pounds? Sure. Yeah. No, I'm not. I probably won't do that. No, I'm going like a tick. After this. You kidding me? I'm going right out now and hitting the Krispy Creams. Big thanks to Mike Rowe. The book title is the way I heard it. Same title as the podcast, Fun Podcast, Fun Book. You'll really enjoy both of those. Thanks to Chuck for setting this up. I really appreciate that as well. I forgot to mention, by the way, the septic tank cleaner that Mike and I were

talking about. He used to be a guidance. counselor in a public school, and he left to clean septic tanks, and I quote, because he was tired of dealing with other people's shit. So, good career move there, buddy. Guy makes a million plus dollars a year cleaning out septic tanks. Somebody's got to do it. There's a video of this interview on our YouTube channel at jordanharbinger.com slash YouTube, and of course there are worksheets for each episode so you can review what you've learned from Mike Rowe. Those will be at Jordan Harbinger.com in the show notes. We're teaching you how to connect with great people

and manage relationships using systems and tiny habits, such as the ones I use to get Mike Row here on the show. That course that I have for you is free. It's over at Jordanharbinger.com slash course. It's called six-minute networking, but here's the thing. It takes like four minutes, okay? Just do it.

It's really, really easy. Don't kick the can down the road. Don't procrastinate, or you're going to stagnate, and that rhymes, which means it's clever, which means you should go to Jordan Harbinger. and learn how to network a little bit. Look, if you're old, you need it. If you're young, you need it even more.

Jordanharbinger.com slash course. And by the way, most of the guests on the show, they subscribe to the course. What, you think you're too good for that now? Come join us. You'll be in smart company, or at least fun company. Speaking of building relationships, you can always reach out and or follow me on social. I'm at Jordan Harbinger on both Twitter and Instagram, and I will gladly engage with you on both of those fora.

This show is created in association with Podcast One. This episode was produced by Jen Harbinger, Jason DeFillipo, and edited by Jace Sanderson. Show notes and worksheets are by Robert Fogarty. Music by Evan Viola. I'm your host, Jordan Harbinger. Our advice and opinions and those of our guests are their own. And yeah, I'm a lawyer. Really, because I don't want to clean septic tanks, but I'm thinking about it.

But I'm not your lawyer. So do your own research before implementing anything you hear on the show. And remember, we rise by lifting others. The fee for this show, you better share it with people that. you love and share it with people you hate, I don't care who you share it with, just share it. When you find something useful, that should be in every episode. Share it, that's the point.

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actually happened. You got to subscribe to what was that like? It's real people telling the most surreal moments of their lives and they're not just giving you the highlights. They're walking you through it from the inside as a person who actually lived it, which means you're basically getting a front row seat to the chaos. One episode is about Scott getting locked up in a foreign jail for a crime he didn't commit. Sure, Scott. Another is Sue's parachute failing. Wow, I'm surprised she was around to tell that story. And then there's Michael who was stabbed on a bus, which makes your commute instantly feel a little bit more relaxing. Do what you think? So if you want to hear some wild and inspiring firsthand stories, I invite you to check out what was that like.

Every story is verified. Their site even has photos so you know even the most bizarre stuff you're hearing is somebody's real life. Listen to what was that like on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or whatever app you're using right now. This episode is sponsored in part by Something You Should Know podcast. Finding a new great podcast shouldn't be this hard, so let me save you some time. If you like the Jordan Harbinger show, you'll probably like Something You Should Know with Mike Carruthers. It's one of those shows that makes you smarter in a practical, useful way. Same curiosity vibe we go for here, just in a fast-focused format. Mike brings on top experts and asks the exact questions that you'd want to ask, and the topics are all over the

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