The Way I Heard It with Mike Rowe - 242: Coming Out Blue Collar

Episode Date: March 15, 2022

Owl Vans owner, John Willenborg talks about the six, six-figure welding jobs he has open, his stint on season 2 of The Apprentice, and the difficulty in telling his white-collar parents that he wanted to leave Berkley to weld. 

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I'm not sure exactly what to call it yet, but that and among other things will be determined in mere moments as Chuck weighs in as he is wont to do. First of all, was I right? Was he all that in a bag of chips? Yeah. For the record, you know, when you first mentioned this guest to me, I said, I don't get it, man. I don't really get it. But honestly, I've listened to the conversation now a couple times, and it's so dense. It's so filled. It's probably one of our longer episodes, too. And he just knows a lot about a lot of things. He is a blue-collar guy.

He's a white-collar guy. He's a poster child for what we're doing with micro-works. He's everything all rolled up in a bag of chips. Yeah. He's also the son of a buddy of mine. My friend is Jim Willenborg, who I've known for last 20 years or so. This is his son, John, who you're about to meet. John, as you've said, he doesn't fit neatly into a box.

But I wanted to have him on because we're in the midst of a work ethic scholarship push right now. We're giving away a million bucks over the next couple of months. And historically, a lot of people who go through our program wind up welding. And a lot of those people who wind up welding do so because they didn't feel like they were cut out to do anything else. and they wound up getting pushed into the trades because, well, you know, what else are you going to do? You know, I love being able to tell stories of people who latched onto a skill and prospered as a result. And that's what we've been doing. John, on the other hand, really is a guy who could have done anything he wanted.

He got great cards. He got great cards. This is a good-looking kid who came from a great family who went to a great college. and was as lost as anybody you would ever want to meet and found a whole new level of clarity welding. But unlike a lot of people who weld and are happy with their career choice, John's also an entrepreneur at heart. So you're about to hear the story of a guy who made sense of his career by picking up a welding torch, starting a company called Owl, OWL. Owl makes attachments. for sprinter vans.

Now, I didn't know what a sprinter van was, Chuck, really, until recently. In fact, I wasn't completely sure what it was until we started auctioning one off to raise money for this round of scholarships. I'm not completely sure you know what his company is either. Isn't it owl vans? Yeah, owl vans. But OWL is the thing that's hard to discern because he says things like, we're going to talk about owl in a minute. And people are going to think, Al who? I see right. Right. Like Al Capone.

Exactly. We won't be talking about Al Capone. No, not this episode. We are going to wade through some personal stuff because this kid, John, he's not a kid anymore. He's in his 40s. No. The main reason, Chuck, I wanted everybody to meet him was because five, six years ago, I posted a story called the six-figure welder.

And nobody believed it was possible for a welder to make six figures. Well, John is basically a seven-figure welder. His company, Al Vans, has exploded. He employs half a dozen welders right now, all of whom makes six figures. He could hire another half a dozen if they showed up willing to work. He is buried in orders. He is buried in success. He is a welder whose story has to be shared.

And I think, modesty aside, we do a pretty good job of getting it out. Yeah, we spend a good deal of time talking with him. And I think this episode is important for every parent out there who's got a 17 year old and they're wondering what is this 17 year old going to do and do they need to go to college to be successful. I think every 16, 17 year old kid should sit down with their parents and listen to this episode and decide, hey, maybe this is something that I could do as well. And anybody who runs a business, this guy is really smart when it comes to business. and he's learned some great lessons along the way that he shares. I just can't say enough good things about him. Well, it's the perfect mix of a guy who's willing to work with his hands, get dirty, but also learned enough along the way about basic business to understand where the landmines are. And his success over the last three years, it's pretty incredible. The question is, what do we call it?

I wrote, Ride the Lightning, which I like, coming out blue collar, which he said that made me laugh, and things are delightfully out of control. which in fact they are. Well, you know what my favorite one is because I just thought it was so funny when he said it. You know, he said it's almost easier to come out gay than to come out that you want to pursue a blue-collar career. Right. That's my choice.

We should also make the point that John has not come out as gay. John is a married man with two beautiful kids. Not that there's anything wrong with that. Nothing wrong. But John's point, and you're right. And it's well taken. He's like telling your parents that your real self, Your true self is a blue-collar guy who dreams of bending metal and fabricating objects out of metal.

That was a hard thing for him to do. But he did it, and the results have been pretty incredible. So let's do that. Let's call it coming out blue collar. I love it. Let's call it episode number 242, which is because that's exactly what it is. And let me now introduce you to my friend, John Willenborg. I think you're going to like him.

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slash Mike. American Giant, American Made. American Giant, American Made. It's always little things that make the plane crash. It's never won. It's 36 things together, and then you have a dumpster fire. Dude, you know what? It's usually an O-ring,

isn't it? Well, if you're trying to get to outer space, it is. But if it's not a literal O-ring on a spacecraft. It's some unpronounceable little widget in some great convoluted design. It's some 29-cent part. It's a piece of compromised plastic or some improperly bent piece of tin. It's something. It's always something. It's always something. Entropy, my friend, entropy. I got a couple of O-rings that are always failing. And it's really annoying at inopportune times. Well, they make adult diapers, so you'll be good.

as you get older. Thanks for that. Have you guys ever seen a close-up medical view of the sphincter? I don't like where this is going. Of the sphincter on both ends, right? Because there's a sphincter up here, right, at the very top of your esophagus. And of course, there's a sphincter all the way at the other end.

They're basically identical. Sorry, before this gets really good. Fascinating content. How many people are in your office? Is there a party going on or something? I've shut the door. Are you hearing a lot of background noise? I heard some people, yeah. Oh, I'm sorry. We do have people going in and out.

I've got somebody on the other side of this wall. Don't know. People, they walk the earth, Chuck. They're everywhere. Humans. Our listeners are up to speed. I can try to turn the mic down more and move it closer, if that works better. They're going to go for lunch pretty soon. So, John, you actually feed your employees at this point? We do, occasionally.

We're not quite Google. We don't have ping pong tables and bean bag chairs and personal lufas. but we'll throw in an out burger towards their meathole once in a while, towards their upper schvincter. And, you know, as you speak of schvincters, two things come to mind, which is a disturbing comment. But have you ever thought that humans are actually kind of shaped like donuts in the sense that when you eat something, you think it's going inside of you,

but technically that's on the outside of you because the inside of you is what's between the gut and your skin? And so it's passing through your, you like a donut, but is technically the outside of you in some sense. There you go. Mind blown. I'll tell you, the thing that troubles me, John, something I read in a crime novel years ago and something that was repeated to me years after that by a guy at a crime scene cleanup, you know, for a segment we shot years ago. But he just kind of muttered to me under his breath. The stench was horrible where we were unspeakable, really. And I said, what's the word?

thing about the smell for you, thinking we were going to dig down specifically into the nuances of the funk. And he said, the thing that's most troubling is that all smells are particulate. Right. Yes. And if that is, yeah. That's the worst because it's like a man farts and you smell it and you think that's disappointing. I wish he hadn't have done that because it smells bad, But it's really a particle that's gone into your nose, into your bloodstream, and ultimately to your brain. So in the space of seconds, that which was at the opposite sphincter, aforementioned, is now not only in the air, it's in your body and in your brain in the space of seconds. It's in your brain, man. Thank you for that tidbit of knowledge.

The next time I enter a well-used pilot truck stop bathroom and breathe in the medley, the bouquet that is, Outer Tracy. You're not just breathing it in, John. It's in your brain. Yeah, that's awesome. That is, that's the smell of freedom right there. You are assimilating. Thanks for that.

As Chuck knows, there are many kinds of guests on this podcast, but my favorite kind are the people with whom I have a history. That history allows us to talk about things like smells being particulate and dueling sphincters and so forth before we get to the meat of the thing. Yes. But we have to establish some other things, assume for the record, that I've said many glowing and mostly true things about you in the preamble. So we don't need to get bogged down in that.

Sure. But how are you, my friend? I haven't seen you face to face in a month of Sundays. Things are good. Things are crazy. You know, it's one of those times with us as a company that, you know, you kind of burn the candles at both ends. When you're at kind of the sharp end of an industry that's growing rapidly,

it's very much kind of a fight to get to the forefront. And in my opinion, as a business owner, once you can establish that beachhead within an industry, it's much harder to unseat you. And so we're just kind of all hands on deck to offer the best possible solutions to get on top of the heap. And that sounds kind of like corporate speak, but it is just kind of swimming like.

It did a little bit. What happened you, man? The old John I knew, the guy that raced motorcycles and played rugby and stayed up all night doing back flips off of ridiculous walls high above Fallen Leaf Lake. I mean, what happened to that crazy devil-may-care

welding son of a gun? Did you go completely corporate? Pretty corporate, pretty soft. Things break and they don't heal like they used to. That part sucks. You reach an age where you wake up with injuries. Like you go to bed and you're fine and then you wake up and you're like, well, that didn't hurt when I went to bed.

How did that get hurt while I slept? Like apparently 16 inches of down comfort and mattress are too brutal for my aging skeleton. So anyway, that's a big reason to not do stupid things. That slows me down. But yeah, I don't know. I guess the bigger this place gets, the more I kind of have to be assimilated by the Borg and talk to talk. But, you know, at the end of the day, we got a great group here. And we sneak in some fun when the mics and cameras aren't rolling with cancel culture around.

The Borg or the Willenborg? Oh, I see what you did there. Please tell me you've used that before because if you haven't, well, you're welcome. I will say this, Mike, resistance is futile. Very nice. Very nice call back. First of all, I met your dad when he was my age right now. He was 59 when I met Jim.

Wow. And he's sneaking up on 80 now. I know. And we've nearly got two decades behind us. Point being, you were just a lad trying to figure out what in the world to do with your life. Yeah. You were very fortunate in that you had lots of options. But like so many, forgive me if I'm wrong.

But you seem plagued by the possibility that you could do anything. And it's the fact that you picked up a welding torch and started taking your cue from that that led me to call Chuck and say, look, I really want to talk to John. He is my friend. But I want to talk to him because our foundation is giving away another million bucks next month. And we help a lot of people who want to weld. And there's this belief in our country, as you and I have discussed, that welding is the thing you do if you can't do anything else. Absolutely.

And that is upside down. I know that you don't feel that way. I know that you're struggling to hire welders as we speak. So if you just talk to all of that, if you could, that weird nexus of skill and entrepreneurship, et cetera. Yeah, the best way to kind of go through the journey. And thank God you have the ability to edit what will be probably a longer and less interesting story. But going back to life as a kid growing up, it's one of those unique things. Yes, I had a lot of opportunity.

and you talk about being paralyzed by choice. But it was really, there is a path that society sets for certain people. And maybe an analogy I would give is if you grow up in a family full of football players and Hall of Famers or baseball players, whatever, and you're the little kid, the odds are you're probably not going to grow up to be a concert pianist. You're probably going to grow up throwing balls around. And that was kind of the scenario. If you're born in San Francisco, Jim, as you mentioned, my father, you know, smart guy, electrical engineer,

Stanford MBA, started tech companies. And so he was very much that Bay Area world, you know, the era of Steve Jobs and that kind of Wild West tech side of things. And then here I am a kid going to a good high school and working hard, trying to get good scores for the SAT and getting into a school like Berkeley, mostly because that's what society told me I needed to do, right? These are your parents' friends and these are their kids and they're going to go to the right schools and they're going to get an internship at Goldman's.

sacks, and then they're going to go from there to Bain Consulting, and then they're going to go into, you know, venture capital, private equity, and that's the path. And the pressure, John, the pressure to stay on that path. Talk about that too briefly, if you would, because I don't think most people truly appreciate it. Yeah, I mean, you're 100% right. I mean, anyone that is, God, you look at the competition these days to get into these universities, and, you know, it's really interesting. There are a few things that Malcolm Gladwell, I've read over the years that have really stuck with me. And one of the things that he said that was fascinating was one of the worst things you can do for your child is to

send them to a school that has the best of the best, right? So I'm a living example of that. My dad was an engineer. I gravitated towards engineering. I went to Berkeley for mechanical engineering. And what did it do? Well, Berkeley has one of the top engineering schools in the country. And I say that not to toot a horn, but to say it was one of the stupidest things I could have done as a student. Because what happens is you get down into this filter where it is the top students from around the globe, and you end up going from being good at something and passionate about something to where you get really insecure. And you're like, maybe I can't cut it doing this. Because look at how much smarter.

Look at half the class I'm in here got perfect scores on their SAT. I didn't, you know, I was no slouch, but I didn't get a perfect score on my SAT. And so do I deserve to be here? Can I not hack it? And as a result, I ended up stepping away from engineering because I didn't feel like I was good enough. And if you were able to take a step back and say, hey, if I had gone to a different university that wasn't filtering down the best of the best, could I have stayed in that field? And I think the answer is absolutely.

And so what ended up happening is I graduated and I gravitated right back towards the field that was my passion, which was engineering and product design. So you talk about those pressures to always follow the path that society says is the way we succeed. And I don't agree with that path anymore. And this country was built on the backs of folks that used to be respected for putting in a hard day's work and being proud of what they've done with their hands. And now society says, unless you go to a four-year university and possibly get an MBA and then go work for a tech giant that you have somehow failed. And what a horrible thing to be telling students and what a horrible thing to do to our economy because, you know, case and point, and we can get into

Al later. But we have a complete inability in this country and most people don't know it. We're kind of the canary in the coal mine. We have a serious labor problem above and beyond. John, just jumping in quick. Chuck, are you hearing him? I'm not hearing him. I thought maybe you were. I was pretending to. You were doing a great job. Well, it was. just going in and out a lot. Yeah. And now he's frozen. I don't know. Why don't you give him a call, put him on speaker. So I know the piece you're talking about that Gladwell really dove in too. And the same is true for me. He's basically saying what's really determinative is not what school you went to, but where in your class you finished. Yeah. Right? Because the graduating class of Harvard in

2021 in that class are 25% of people who are the worst. Right? There's somebody always in last place. Yes. And it's something that people don't think about, but I killed it in my community college. And then I did really good in a state school. So by the time I went to work, I had a pretty healthy sense of what I wanted to do. But it was a wake-up call for you at Berkeley then, huh? Yeah. Very quickly at Berkeley, I got really insecure about where I fit into. is in relation to some of the other students there in engineering and then step back from it. And like I said, after I graduated, I realized that was really where my passion was. And I learned pretty quickly that even working with engineers that graduated the top of their class,

you know, I was able to do certain things. They had aspects that they did better, but there were other aspects that the way my mind worked seemed to work for that. And so I went back to that as a passion. And I think that the push for students to go to the right schools and so on, is very serving of society and their parents. And I'm not saying this is my parents' fault for wanting the feather and the cap, but that's how society views it, right?

Sure. I want to be able to tell people that I went to X school and parents are proud of their child going to X school. Nowhere in any of this. And this is my huge problem with the way society views education these days. It's a cost-benefit analysis. What's our end goal? What are we trying to do?

Are we trying to gain information or skill that's going to allow us to be successful in life? Are we trying to get a piece of paper for the wall to impress people at a cocktail party? What's the end goal here? And I feel like society has done a disservice to students by putting this pressure on them to hit these levels that society deems is right. And you end up in a scenario where you've got someone like myself who's passion is very much in product design and much more hands-on blue collar. It's where I'm happiest. And working for one of these tech companies or working for a consulting firm is kind of, a nightmare for me. I've had those opportunities. Before I started ABLE, I was considering

taking a job with Google or Apple because I had worked with their engineers on a company I had previously knew them quite well and was looking at a position there and then I thought about it and I go, I don't want to do that. I don't want to be part of that machine and I'm going to take a risk and I'm going to go and I'm going to start bending metal and creating things with my hands and I think I can make something out of that and I know I can be successful and so I took that risk and looking back three and four years later, it's the best decision of my life. I think that what held me back from that was that societal pressure to follow the path, especially in Northern California, where it's like if you don't, it's like social capital.

You know, you meet people at a dinner party or something. And what do you do? Oh, I'm XYZ for Facebook. I'm blah, blah, blah for Google. I'm this and that for Salesforce. And that is how people interoperate, especially in Northern California. And to sit there and tell someone that's an executive at Facebook that you bend metal for a living, they look at you like, how the hell do you get to this party?

And that's fine. I'll take that sympathetic condescension. In the background, I'll know that likely I'll be more successful than they are. And I can laugh all the way to the bank with my dirty hands. You won't remember this. But speaking of dinner parties, I was at your folks' place. This must have been 15 years ago. Your sister was there, and then you came in from somewhere.

And we had a brief conversation. and you told me about an uncle, Jim's brother, I guess, or maybe his Barb's. I don't remember which one, but he was an underwater welder. And the enthusiasm, dude, the enthusiasm you had when you started talking about what that guy did, right? When I look back at that, I'm like, oh, well, this is what John's supposed to be doing. He's supposed to be welding something somewhere. Have you ever heard anyone have that kind of enthusiasm for a consultant? Because that resonated with you.

Uh-oh, frozen. Great googly-moogly. So let's start with the industry, because I didn't know it existed. I didn't know there was this group of people who were crazy obsessed with sprinter vans. I didn't know what a sprinter van was, and I still don't entirely understand how large the community is. I just know that you identified it, and now you have a company, and you need welders, and things are delightfully out of control. I like that term.

I'm going to keep that for my own daily business experience, delightfully out of control. Yeah, this little niche kind of adventure vans, people also use kind of the term hashtag van life, but when you're in the kind of adventure van world, they're almost two different customers there. You have the hashtag van life folks who are, I have to be. be careful because your audience is so much bigger than people I normally speak to, but we call them kind of crunchy, you know what I mean? You know, they're close and a little stiff from lack of being able to wash them. But then you have the other side, which is actually pretty cool. It's where in the kind of wulf of Wall Street days, you had someone that was successful and they went

out and did the D-Bag move. You know, you get the yellow drop-top convertible Corvette or, you know, a few years ago it was the yellow Lambo or something obnoxious and look at me. And I think that folks have kind of changed. That whole look at me of the 80s and early 90s has changed as a dynamic. And now people that have, you know, enough income to be able to spend it on things that they like to do, they're much more into hiking, biking, getting out in the outdoors and using this beautiful country that we have. And so that is really kind of our focus. And folks now, instead of buying those sports cars are buying sprinter vans and adventure vans. And, you know, in business, you have selling and sell through. And the reason I'm so bullish on this industry, and maybe I'll do a better job describing

those, for those people that haven't had a company that sells on a wholesale level, sell in is, if you sell a thousand widgets to Walmart, and two weeks later, they call you and say, yeah, we haven't really sold any of them. Well, guess what? You're going to get those thousand widgets back. But if you sell a thousand widgets to Walmart, and two days later, they're like, hey, we're out of widgets, we need more. That's sell through. That means those things are moving. And that is when you're you know you have a business. And the way I relate that to the van world is a lot of times people were getting these vans a little bit unsure of whether they were going to like it or whether it was really going to be what they wanted it to be. And you look at them a month later and they cannot

wipe the smile off their face. They are like, this is absolutely fabulous. And they are so much more excited after having used it for a month. And that for me was everything as a business owner. I'm like, all right, foot on the gas, this market is going to be huge because if I talk to 10 people that bought vans and all 10 of them become like vegan crossfitters where they can't stop talking about it, that's a market. And it's been on fire ever since. But to your second point, having demand is great. Being able to fulfill that demand is where the chaos happens. It's a problem of success. But when Walmart wants the thousand more widgets, you know, you need to build them.

and we have really in this country lost the ability to manufacture things domestically. It's disheartening and you look at what's transpiring geopolitically and it's good. You look what about COVID and masks and all these things. Like we didn't manufacture any of that stuff in the US anymore. We've pretty much lost the ability to do any of those kinds of trades and it makes you reliance on other countries, other countries that may be friends today and maybe foes tomorrow on a micro level for someone like owl vans, I've had open job listings for welders that are making six figures for three years now.

Wow. And we can't feel it. It's incredible and we're taking the path of actually fostering our own workforce. It's so hard to get welders that we're kind of starting ground up where we're taking folks that are in apprenticeship programs for anything and bringing them in the welders that are there are sharing their knowledge and we're trying to train these folks up and, you know, I take a kid that's a a packer shipper, but he's a hard worker, which these days, that's another topic we can talk about. But, you know, if you find someone that's committed and they're a hard worker and they show up on time and they're not drunk, you know, you can make something out of that person.

And so we then get them in kind of the welder pipeline and we take them aside and we say, look, let's train you, let's teach you a skill. And it's a win-win. Selfishly, it gets me a welder. And for them, they go from a job that's slightly above minimum wage to being able to earn six figures. That's life-changing. Do do-do-do-do-do-do-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-dum. Is it weird to love people but despise human resources? If so, well, color me weird.

It's not to say I don't respect the millions of people who work in HR departments and companies all over the country. I do. It's just that I don't envy him. That's why MicroWorks doesn't have an HR department for better or worse. And it's also why I use ZipRecruiter whenever we need to expand. ZipRecruiter has proved. themselves a million times over by helping countless employers get through the hiring process

faster and more effectively than ever before. And now they have a new feature that instantly shows you the most interested, the most passionate, and the most qualified candidates first. This is a huge time saver, hours and hours of save time. And it helps people like me find the people who can function in a non-traditional work environment like Microw. works. In other words, ZipRecruiter works for me, and they'll probably work for you, too. Post a job for free at ZipRecruiter.com slash row. And watch what happens. Odds are, you'll find a human resource that just happens to be a great fit for your company in 24 hours or less. ZipRecruiter.com slash row. ZipRecruiter.com slash row.

The smartest way to hire. I want to talk a lot more about that, but I also want to circle back a little bit because aside from discovering an industry that a lot of people didn't even know existed five years ago, you also identified an opportunity around the sprinter vans themselves. So for people who really just don't know what we're talking about, the add-on market, right? Like, I'm not even sure I completely understand what you did vis-a-vis a welding torch, some bent metal. You started attaching these things to the vans that you bought because the manufacturer for some reason wasn't doing it. And then all of a sudden there's the social component. People start talking about it, right? And it seems like all three of those things.

A weird industry I didn't know existed. an opportunity within the industry that the manufacturer wasn't paying attention to and the ability to tell a story on social media somehow conspired to bring us here. Yeah, and I'd almost back up one step further and say that all of this opportunity, and I'm going to sound like I'm on my soapbox this whole time,

but it's because it's so drastically changed my life and what I've had an opportunity to do. And that is experience in the trade. you know, we touched on it briefly. We had some internet issues, but I had an uncle early on that was an ex-Navy seal about as tough as they come. And he figured that wasn't hard enough. And he decided to become a deep sea underwater welder. So he would weld the footings of bridges and oil tankers, or not tankers, but the offshore water. May I just jump in to say the balls on these guys. I mean, I've met a few, Chuck. I've done this. And whatever it is, you think you know about risk,

reward, courage, and so forth. Next level stuff. Go ahead, John, sorry. You're spot on. And I think one of his things was coming back, his entire life being in training and serving in the SEAL team and underwater demolition, then coming back to normal society and saying, what do I do?

Do I push papers? What do I do? And we have a lot of veterans on staff because, you know, finding a home for veterans when they come back from combat and so on. And we can talk more about that later. But for him, he always pushed the envelope. but he was also so willing to teach what he had learned. And I always just kind of, you know, you're a little kid, right?

You're 12 years old. Your uncle's a Navy SEAL, and he's just bad to the bone, and you're just fan-boying out. Like, you just have eyes this big for this guy. And he said, hey, why don't you stay the summer with me, and I'll teach you out of Weld. And so I went down there, and he taught me enough to be proficient. And then I worked on a few jobs with him,

building railings and these kinds of things. And I learned a lot. I learned how difficult it is to be a good welder and how it is a legitimate skill in the same way that someone practices to be a surgeon and so on. And then I also learned what a hard day's work is like. And I think that that is something that is lost a lot these days,

that when you're trying to keep up with a guy who's a former Navy seal and then welds things a couple hundred feet under the ocean in freezing, temperatures with his life on the line, what he considers a hard day's work and what my doughy, 12-year-old cartoon watching self considered a hard day work, well, those were not on the same plane. So I tell that story because he instilled a skill in me that allowed me in the future to create this thriving business. And we never knew how those dots were going to connect. And it's something

where when I decided to do something for these vans because I needed it for myself, I could never have paid someone to prototype the number of iterations I went through to get here. You know, it's like you look at these people that have been successful in the past, people like Bill Gates or, you know, Elon Musk, they didn't hire people to write their first bits of code. They coded. And they had someone, they sat in their mom's basement and had coder friends and learned that world. That's not my world, but the analogy is true that I had a skill set that allowed me to test and practice and refine what I was doing in my garage, you know, classic American entrepreneur story in my garage, and then it started to have some success. And now nobody will let me near

a welding torch because I have people that are much better at it than me. But the point is, without that foundation, I had all the white collar schooling I could ever want. I read all the book, in school, the literature and the English class and all of this stuff, and my passion was working with my hands. And without that altruism from him teaching me that skill, I would not have this business today. And so at the heart of the business are a number of products, all of which you first conceived of in your mind, and then began to fabricate and then basically tested in terms of, well, what do the people in this community think? Do they want more? Do they want less? I mean, you literally started with like a prototype and then a couple more. And then a couple more after

that. You know, I said earlier, I haven't talked to you about this in a while, but your dad is so proud of you and your mom too. But honestly, they share my bafflement. They're like, John didn't apply for a job. He kind of created an opportunity and he didn't, you know, use the education that we got him. He didn't ignore it by any stretch, but it started with bending metal. Yeah. And so, I don't know. I'm hoping people are listening to this who have no idea what they want to do and think that bending metal isn't worth their time or maybe a poor place to start because you can already tell the story. But one of these days, you're going to write a book because Al Vans is going to sell for a gazillion dollars and people are going to be asking you years from now. How did he do it? I just want to do it. I just want to be.

to be one of the guys to ask you first. You know, I think early on, it was me prototyping. And then at a certain point, you reach out to folks that are really good. And, you know, going back to talking about hiring welders and building your team, early on, I had some guys that were really, really talented. And I look back on it and realize how good they were. And those guys allowed, they were as critical in the formation of this business and getting it off the ground and filling that demand.

and those were the folks that I relied upon. But yeah, I mean, it's a unique opportunity. I think that, you know, there's that old cliche, right? The harder you work, the luckier you get. I think we've had a lot of luck with our timing, but the team works really, really hard. That schooling is coming into play now as the business gets bigger. And there's aspects that are hard for me as I move away from the hands-on stuff, which I like. And so that schooling, like you said, it's not unused, but it wasn't my passion.

And what I'm passionate about is being able to talk to the next kid that's in school right now that's getting told that he has to go down this path that society has deemed is success. And, you know, we talk about all these kids that have, quote, unquote, ADD. And do they have ADD or are they just not someone whose idea of a good time is sitting in a chair all day and reading a textbook? You know, maybe their idea is going out and being hands on with stuff. And they're going to be the next person that invents, you know, this product. or that product and is successful with it, and they find a niche. I so wish I could take folks that don't understand this world on a tour of what we do and to see their mind blown as we go from initially it's a welder, and then we get to a point

where we've got all these computer-operated machines who are not there to replace people. They're there to assist people, which I think is an important distinction. But the skill and expertise that is required to run these things, I would put the folks that do that stuff up against the smartest people I've met in my life. Working with these CAD models and figuring out the angles and how to laser cut these things and how to prototype parts. I mean, it is an entire world of complexity that is very blue collar, but it is incredibly skilled. It has some of the most intelligent people I've met. And I don't think people that work in, you know, what I would consider more white-collar jobs, lawyers, doctors, these kinds of things, have any appreciation for how good these folks are. And it's sad that they look down upon them.

Do you think the color of collars has, I mean, for a time, you know, there was great pride in blue-collar work, and there was something aspirational about the big white-collar brains. And these two parts of our workforce seem to complement. each other. Now they seem to confuse each other and one exists at the expense of the other in many cases. To my way of thinking, the color of collars doesn't matter and your business proves it because if you're exclusively one or the other, you're probably not hireable. It brings me back and I don't want to keep talking about Gladwell, but he has some pretty cool takes on things and what I love is he looks at something that on the surface is taken for granted, and he digs a layer deeper. And one of the things that stuck out with me, I talk about before when I was working with my uncle and him teaching me what a hard day's work is,

Malcolm asked the same question about lawyers and what makes for a good lawyer. And he was talking to, I guess, a firm, and I apologize if I'm getting any of this wrong, but the sentiment is true, which was they were one of the top firms at placing lawyers and being incredibly successful at placing those lawyers. And he went through and he asked his firm, what is your secret sauce? Is it scores on the LSAT? Did they go to Harvard? Is it, you know, what is it? And they said, well, we can't give away the whole secret sauce, but there's only one aspect that we find in a lawyer that translates into their success. And Malcolm said, what is it? And they said, it's having a background in blue collar labor. So as a kid, if you spent summers laying bricks, if you

your family didn't have a lot of money and you had a paper route or you cut lawns and you knew what a hard day's work was. And you combine that with a little bit of horsepower above your collar. And then you go get a high school education or you go get a trade. And then you decide that, hey, I want to go into law. I'm passionate about law. Those are the people that are successful. LSAT scores don't matter. What law school you went to doesn't matter.

Who you knew doesn't matter. All that matters is that you have grit. And I think by focusing so much on the textbook scholastic education side with our children, we are doing them a disservice because Malcolm, he was talking about successful lawyers, right? Exactly. Not just lawyers, lawyers, no, not lawyers. Anyone can be a lawyer per se. We're talking about the top of the top.

That's right. Like, oh, I don't know, Abraham Lincoln. I mean, widely acknowledged to have one of the greatest. legal minds of all time. And who came up harder than Abe Lincoln, the wrestler, the rail splitter? Split and rails, yeah. You know, it is so interesting to me how we've managed to separate real intellectual curiosity from brute labor. The idea that these two things, you know, have to be separated is a big part of the reason why I started my foundation. And like I told Chuck the other day, it's like, look, I want to talk to John because a lot of people that we've helped, maybe 1,400 people so far, a third of which are welders, they're living in this world where welding is still considered to be some sort of consolation prize.

And you briefly mentioned earlier that you have been unable from the start to fill your complement of welders even though you've got a path to six figures. That's not hyperbole, is it? Not at all. And it's mind-blowing. And it really frustrates me when people say, you can't hire someone, pay them more. And it's like, it's not that simple. You know, I'll pay $100 million for someone that can fly. They don't exist.

And so at some point, it's not the wage. It's the person. I need something that doesn't exist. And, I mean, it's insane. I compete directly with Tesla for welders. I mean, we have welders that bounce back and forth between me and Tesla. and a couple other companies in the area. And as I grow, one of the things holding me back

is finding staff that are skilled and competent. And Mike, I know because of what you do, you know this, but I tear what little is left of my hair out sometimes. Wanting to scream from the rooftops, stop telling kids they can't be successful without a four-year education. I want to explode because of, there's so much opportunity and you have these kids getting all the student loan debt.

They're swimming in it by the time they graduate with a, oh, I don't know, an interpretive jazz dance degree, which lifetime earnings are going to be $8,500 with that degree. And I'm sitting there going, dear God, come wealth for me, starting salaries close to 100K, no student loan debt, health care, you know, you have to put up with me. That's not exactly easy, but not every job is perfect. And I'm like, by the time that other person is out of school with their hundreds of thousands of dollars of student loan debt, you could be 20 years old with no dependents, no kids yet, no major mortgage, making $100K a year, putting $50K away in the bank every year. Now you've got a couple hundred grand in the bank. You've got a skill that's infinitely usable no matter where in the country or world you go.

and you don't have any loan to pay off. It's mind-blowing to me. Again, I go back to it's like no one ever did the cost-benefit analysis. Nobody is sitting down with our kids and saying, hey, what do you want to do with your life? Society aside, what do you like doing? Remember when they used to talk to kids about what they wanted to do? That doesn't happen anymore. Right, right.

Or it happens to the extent where they say you want to be happy in your job. That's the end result. The question is, how do you get there? And there was a time, and this is a big dirty jobs lesson, and Chuck's heard me rant about this a lot, but there was a time when what you did was you looked around, you identified an opportunity, oftentimes by seeing where everybody was going

and going in the opposite direction, volunteering to do a thing that nobody wants to do, getting really, really good at it, and then learning how to love it. Today, we seem to say, in many cases, let's first identify what you love. Imagine the thing that will make you happy. Now, let's go on the path to get you there. And next thing you know, you're signing on the dotted line. You're borrowing money. You're never going to be able to pay back. You're ignoring opportunities that are right

in front of your face because you're chasing this thing that you've been told will make you happy or that you've determined will make you happy. And it's too damn late to course correct. So many kids once, you know, you were there. You were halfway through Berkeley. Real money flown over the transom. It's hard to change the road you're on. Well, and Mike, I'll take it a step further. There is an unwritten, what's the right word I'm searching for?

It's not, it's a little bit of condescension, but it's like it's looked down upon. You know, it's so sad to think that the people that are at the backbone of this country are viewed in a way that is like less than. It's like if you don't have a college degree, you're less than. And so for me to not use my education in the typical manner by going down this path into some sort of finance, venture capital world and whatever contribution that makes to the world, there was societal pressures. It's almost like coming out to your parents and being like, mom, dad, we have to talk. I don't want to sit at a computer all day.

And will you still love me? You know, kind of like one of those things. And I see it all the time. Like I said earlier, I'm in the Bay Area. I'm surrounded by people who make massive amounts of money in tech. They're high up. And when they ask what I do for living, I don't sugarcoat it. I don't say, oh, we have a big company that does this.

So that I say, I bend metal and weld metal. And this look of almost pity, like, oh, you know, you couldn't hack it in the real world. And I'm like, you got to be kidding me. Like, I'm doing just fine. Don't worry about me. Yeah. I wish we could change that sentiment. I think that there are some kids that don't choose this path because they feel like they will be letting someone down.

We can. And I think we will. And I think you're going to be part of the conversation. You know, it's got to start somewhere and it's got to get a lot bigger than us. But how many welders could you hire right now if they showed up at your mod? Your operation is three years old. It started with you and a torch and a little bit of curiosity. How many do you employ right now total and how many welders could you hire?

if they showed up ready to work. You're talking about a world that doesn't exist, Mike, but I'll play the game. I mean, we've got six welders right now. I double it in a heartbeat to like 12 welders. And in fact, I was on conference calls all yesterday and so on, trying to see if we can get robots because we need to expand. And again, I come back to, I don't look at automation to replace workers.

I look at automation because I can't build what I need to build. And I'm sitting there talking to these guys. They're like, oh, yeah, you can get this robot. each one of these robots is 30 grand a month, blah, blah, blah, and I'm sitting there going, I'm looking at the bill for this. If I need to add six of these, you know, you can do that math in your head. That's not cheap. $180 grand a month, $2.43 million a year.

That's an expensive workhorse. That's expensive. And then you've also got to hire additional people. People think when you automate something that there's no people involved. No, you've got to have people that do the maintenance on the machine. You've got to have someone that runs the programs. So now for each one of those, I'm hiring three additional people, all because I can't get a welder. And all of this expense is because I can't get someone

that shows up, flips their helmet down, puts on some gloves, and, you know, as they say, rides the lightning. This is what I need. And it's, and I'm not the only one, Mike. I am fighting, like I said, all of these other companies. Look at Tesla and what they've been able to do from changing the automotive industry, what they've been able to build. They are freaking out because they can't get welders. This is an opportunity for someone who just has to raise their hand and say, I'll do that. And you essentially get to be treated like a rock star.

You're like a top-level draft pick. You get to choose where you work, how you work, how much money you make. I mean, it is absolute roll out the red carpet. It's insane. These guys are rock stars and gals. We've got some women that absolutely kick butt for us. And so this is something where it's, you know, historically. male, but it doesn't have to be. Our poster child for welders in the foundation this year is a woman

named Chloe Hudson. She's in her late 20s. She was this close to signing on the dotted line for a big, fat student loan because she thought she wanted to be a plastic surgeon. She walked at the last minute. She was looking at $400,000 in debt, John. So she comes to microworks. She applies. We didn't even give her everything she needed. We just kept her in the game, five, six grand maybe. She works for Joe Gibbs racing now. Yeah. Oh, I mean, mid-six figures, crushing it, zero debt. And she's beautiful.

Like she doesn't look like the welder that the people are having their mind's eye right now. And sometimes you need that. Sometimes you need someone to break that mold of who they think that person is. You know, whatever their mind's eye tells them that that greasy person is. And, you know, sometimes if we change the face of it,

we can change the attitude. Tell me if you agree with this. the main things keeping you from hiring the workforce you need, just in the welding vertical, are stigmas, stereotypes, myths, and misperceptions about the opportunities that exist in that world. 100%. 100%. And also, you forget, too, that not only is it a fantastic job, but as you get older and you start worrying about your heart and your strength, level and all these things. Now, it ain't easy work. I'm not going to sugarcoat it. Being a

production welders hard work, but it's a low stress job. You know what doesn't happen is people who weld don't go home a night and go, oh my God, I wonder if that metal's going to weld to the other metal tomorrow. And yeah, geez, it's one of those awesome opportunities. Every actor that's ever made it in Hollywood and I can't stand these blowhards that are like, oh, I wrote a check to myself when I was 20 for $10 million and I cast it five years later. What about the 5,000 people that wrote that check and became waiters at the Grove? But what was I going with this? I know, but I liked it.

Balance in your life, right? Here's where I think you were going with it. If you have a job that pays you six figures that doesn't send you home stressed out and freaked out, you got time to coach your kids basketball team. Yeah, working at the Grove. And, you know, it's like you don't have the. stress that these people have and this constant concept that you have to love your job to me is BS. You don't want to hate your job, but a job can be a vehicle to make you money that allows you to do

the things you love. So what if you could show up, weld, enjoy the people you work with, have a great job, and then clock out and go get on your brand new pontoon boat and go sit on a lake because you've got discretionary income so you can have a boat and you can enjoy your life. And so this idea, and when I come back, you know, to these actors that talk about, if you don't love what you do, then don't do it. It's like, well, that's not, someone needs to pump the gas, a whole. You know, it's like this is, not everyone is that privileged. And so do something that is low stress, high reward.

Talk about satisfaction. I see it in their faces. When they get done with a day and they see hundreds of these racks that we make stacked up, there's a pride you take home with that. There's a pride with knowing I built that. It's something that's been in human DNA for millennia. The idea that you sent out a bunch of emails into the ethos, congratulations.

Who feels satisfied doing that? You know? And then driving around, these folks, when they get hired on, the first few times that they see our stuff in the wild, they take pictures and they come show me, look at that, check it out. That's a rack I made. Or, you know, I was watching a show on Netflix, and they had a van on it and had our stuff on it.

And the pride they take in that. is fantastic. And I'm sitting there going, who wouldn't want to do this? John, you did that yourself yesterday. Literally. I mean, we're raising money. We're always raising money.

And we've got this Mercedes Sprinter van that we're auctioning off. Look at you all coming in right now. That's probably an order, right? Somebody wants to place an order right now in the middle of this interview. We've got this Mercedes Sprinter van and somebody called a van Smith

put on like $80,000 worth of upgrades and things. And I posted about it yesterday, Chuck. And John sends me a text right away saying, hey man, that van, that's got our product all over it. Is that right? And circle back real quick so people understand you made a product that didn't exist to enhance a van that most people don't know exist to serve a community that most people don't know exists. It's no wonder that so many people think opportunity is dead, but peel back the layers a little bit. Yeah, I should have done a little better job kind of explaining what we do. But with these adventure vans, the core of what these are are allowing people to go out and experience this country of ours and stay out in nature and hike,

mountain bike, paddleboard, all these things that we love doing and getting there and staying warm and cozy. So these vans are so built out now in such an amazing way, full shower. full bathroom, beds that come down from the ceiling. They've got diesel heaters that connect to the diesel tank on the vehicle, so there's no propane. I set a thermostat like my house. I get in my van, I put a thermostat, and it keeps it, you know, it can be 10 degrees outside. It's 70 degrees inside the van. And it's all automated.

It's got, you know, LED lighting. It's literally nicer than most New York City apartments and it's on wheels. And probably bigger. And probably bigger. And I think the key differentiator and why it's so fun, and why it's so fun, and we're why people have gravitated so much to it is the whole concept behind the RV for so long has been it's your house on wheels. It's got a flat screen TV. It's got an oven. It's got a microwave. It's got two beds and all this stuff. Humans don't need all that. We have that stuff because we have giant

houses. The whole point of an adventure van is getting out in nature and spending the day outside the vehicle. And that's where the difference is. And so they've made them more compact, more efficient. in making them more compact, people need places to store things. People are going farther. They're going into remote locations. They need their own safety gear. They need to help themselves. There's no AAA when you're in the middle of Johnson Valley, you know, 40 miles from the nearest actual paved road.

The whole point is to get away. So what we do at Alvans is we created different carrier systems that mount to the van on the back. And I won't bore people with the innovation, but people had not been able to do it previously, I engineered a way to make it work and it grew really quickly. And so now these are on sprinter vans all over the country, all over the world. It's really cool. And I fanboy out sometimes too because, you know, we're looking at locations as we expand and I'll go to these, you know, we were in Arizona the other day looking at a facility

there. And the agent is like, so what do you do again? Because we're looking for a lot of space. And normally you're like, you know, oh, I'm a massive distributor for health care products or something or whatever. Like, what do you do? And I was like, oh, I make parts that go on the outside of adventure vans. I was like, huh?

And I'll be like, we'll see one today. And I was like, yeah, driving around. We'll see a couple of vans with our stuff on it. And like, seriously? I'm like, yeah. And lo and behold, within 15 minutes, there'll be a van driving by. I was like, yep, that one right there. Look at that.

And you'd be like, oh, and there's our stuff all over the back. And so that is, from a small business standpoint, I used to keep my neighbors up grinding and welding in a little alleyway between our houses. So at some point, if I ever sell the company, I'm buying them something nice. Because they put up with a lot of crap. Yeah. And they are very sweet people.

But from welding in a little alleyway between our houses to being able to go to any part of this country and within a given day, drive around and see not just one, but multiple vans with our stuff on it is, I mean, that to me is a little mini American dream. And I think more people need to experience that. This is not a podcast that's necessarily obsessed with celebrity. In fact, we're kind of opposed to it. But Chuck, well, obviously. Look at the quality of the guess.

But it's not just a nichey little underworld of adventure seekers. Chuck, if you, in your mind's eye, don't say it, but three of the top celebrities that would come to mind, if I said A-list celebrities, it's a pretty good chance those guys are in touch with John's company right now, waiting for parts, waiting for their vans to get done. Everybody is buying these things, and none of them have the necessary gear on the outside. And John's on the podcast today, not because, you know, you are kind of a celebrity.

We'll talk about season one of The Apprentice a little later. Oh, boy. Stand by. Well, no, no, no, not here. All the dirty laundry is coming. out. I'm just saying that you've got some of the most powerful people in Hollywood waiting for John to get to their van. Like there's so much opportunity in it. When we were talking the other day, you mentioned awnings on RVs. And it's such a great example of another thing you never think of

that has so much opportunity attached to it. Are those numbers you told me real? Yeah, it's crazy. So as our little niche becomes not so little anymore, and I almost like that it flies under the radar because a lot of folks don't even know it exists. So, you know, you talk about everyone's going one way, so you go to the other. I'll take it all day long. You know, it's like when there's a gold rush and everyone's panning for gold, somebody's making a killing, making shovels and picks and gold pants. And that's where I was called Levi Strauss. He did okay. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. So, yeah, the other day, so there's a major RV manufacturer supplier who, to their credit has identified this industry as being divergent. And, you know, a little bit of business 101 when you're on the top of an industry, when something that isn't what you do starts to be successful, you have two choices. One, buy them and two cover it. So you either make a product to cover it or you buy the company that's being successful. And the reason for that is the only way to get knocked off the top is for someone else to come along that's different than you, you know, otherwise you're going to keep crushing it.

And it's something that I worry about every day. I look out for me on a regular basis. Anyone with an interesting, unique product, the first thing I do is reach out to them and say, hey, why don't you come under the owl wing, pun intended, and we'll get your sales stratospheric overnight because of our web traffic. But now they're part of the owl brand.

And now as they grow, I grow. But if I let them germinate on the side and do what I did to the companies that were already in the van industry, I've got a real threat on my hands. And so to this company's credit, they identified this little industry that's not so little anymore. And they're like, hey, we got to understand this industry. And so they reached out and they wanted to chat with us further. And who knows where that'll go.

But we visited their facility. And this is a company that does over $4.5 billion of RV OEM parts a year. So that's not the sale price of an RV. We're talking about like plumbing fixtures, chassis. axes, axles, showerheads, awnings that you spoke about. And so going there, we have owl, and we produce a lot for our industry, but this blew my mind. I walk into this, you know, multi-hundred thousand square foot warehouse, and they are making awnings.

And I'm looking at these robotic pallet movers coming in, bringing pallets and dropping them, and just sea of people manufacturing stuff, you know, installing circuit boards, running out cloth, cutting cloth, screwing in screws. And then I asked them, I go, how many awnings are you making here? And they go, we make between like $5,000 and $10,000 a day. Every single day. And I know that those numbers just fly over your head. But sit down and think about that. Do anything 5,000 times. And these are awnings with probably 50 or 60 individual parts that need to be screwed together, wired, tested, boxed, shipped, 5,000, 10,000. I mean, it's mind-blowing the size of this stuff. And I guarantee nobody listening to this podcast, if I said this company's name, has ever heard of this company before.

And they're doing $4.5 billion. You have no idea. Somebody who owns that, some family is already quite wealthy. Again, it's these niches. and to see that many people assembling that and to see the breadth of people employed by them, it was pretty mind-bending. The federal government is not going to close America's skills gap.

They have an important role to play for sure, but if we're serious about reinvigorating the skilled trades on a national level, we need more organizations like Skills USA making a real difference on a local level. These guys have been around since 1965, and today they are relevant like never before with hundreds of chapters in schools all over the country and hundreds of thousands of students participating and competing every year. Nobody is doing more to train the next generation of skilled workers than Skills USA.

And I'm encouraging you to at least consider being a part of this movement. Skills USA advisors and volunteers aren't just teaching trades. They're launching careers and strengthening the backbone of our country by mentoring the next generation of industry leaders. In high school, you could be among the people who are making this movement explode. Join the skilled trades movement. Support career and technical education programs through Skills USA. There's no better way to do it. You can volunteer at a local chapter.

You can start a chapter in your own town. Or you can just go to their website and see the impact for yourself. And see too how easy it is to get involved. Thousands of kids are being introduced to the trades in a way that's absolutely positively moving the needle. The goal is a million members by 2030. I think it's doable. I'm doing what I can to help them. Learn more at skillsusa.org slash mic.

That's skills, USA.org slash mic. I'm talking skills, U.S. Skills, U.S.S. Skills USA. Part of the reason that I think so many people in our country have come to the erroneous conclusion that opportunity is dead is because they never had a chance to tour an RV company. They haven't had a chance to walk through a manufacturing facility like yours because nobody really takes the time to have an in-depth conversation about an awning or about an attachment. or about an attachment on the back of a van.

They didn't know existed. But these stories, John, they're everywhere. And part of punching through to the other side of our lopsided economy right now, I think has to involve telling them. As you were saying that, it made me realize, you know why I took the phone call from this company? You know why I went and met with the CEO? Guess what his first job at this RV company,

back when they were a few million in revenue, guess what his first job was? Welding. Yep. He started as a welder. And what I love, CEO of a four and a half billion dollar company, he started as a welder. And you know what he did when they reached out and they emailed me?

He said, I started as a welder because he knew that would speak to me. Because he knew that I started as a welder. Now, he's on a different plane. But CEO to CEO of successful companies. and both of us shared that we started as welders. And that was everything to me. I knew that we would then speak the same language. He wasn't somebody installed by Goldman Sachs

after they did a big fund round for this company and put in a CEO that was from Wall Street. This dude had his hands dirty, and I said, I'll take a meeting from that guy any day. And this is the tricky thing, John. There are two things about mastering a trade that we don't talk about enough. and perversely, or maybe conversely, they tend to cancel each other out.

The first is what you were saying before. People don't understand the opportunity that exists to live a balanced life by becoming really good at a stress-free, a challenging and an artistic pursuit, by the way, but largely stress-free. They don't understand what a good life you can have by combining those things. However, on the other hand, there's something else that people don't really appreciate or recognize about your journey. And that is when you combine the mastery of a skill like welding with an entrepreneurial spirit, then you unleash something that is absolutely fundamental to our country's success. you unleash something that you can't learn in Berkeley that's not going to come with the MBA.

It's difficult to articulate because one seems to cancel out the other. But you just kind of have to pick the story you want to tell. Is this a story about a guy who learned to weld and went on to become a master of the universe? Or is it a story about a guy who learned to weld and spent the next 30 years becoming the Michelangelo of Welders? who loved his wife and loved his family and lived a completely balanced life. These are both really important upsides, but we have to decide, or each individual, I guess, has to decide which upside is most appealing. Yeah.

That's a long way of saying it's tough to tell two stories at the same time. It is. And honestly, I look at some of my welders, you know, clocking out and going home when I still have 87 emails to get through. And you envy them. You end up. I do. I watch them getting in their brand new trucks and I watch them jumping on the phone with their wife or significant other or whomever and driving away. And they start early. So this oftentimes happens, you know, three in the afternoon. They're done. And they still got half a day to go do whatever it is they want to do. And I'm sitting there balancing payroll and stress and emails. And I look with a little bit of longiness. Now,

I look at it as I'm going to burn the candle at both ends. and make this company as successful as possible, and hopefully someday I'll be able to have a more mellow schedule, but you hit the nail on the head. It's where do you want to take it? Do you want to continue to weld and have a stress-free life and make good money? And if you're comfortable with that, that is fantastic,

and there is nothing wrong with that. Or if you want to take that skill and leverage it and continue to ascend and become the CEO of a $4.5 billion RV company, that's absolutely possible too. You're right, that story is lost. In fact, before Alvan started, as I mentioned, I was interviewing with these companies, Google and Apple and all of these tech companies, right?

And so I'm at Google. You know what? No one ever asked me where I went to school. They said, I don't care if you even graduated. In fact, the guy interviewing me dropped out of high school, right? And they said, no, tell me more about, this and that they wanted to know exactly what you wanted to know which is oh I see that you have this welding certification or oh I see that you went in your summers

you went to auto shop school which I also did I took full ASC certified mechanics courses in the summers instead of just pissing off my summers like a lot of kids and that was what made Google the most interesting because there is a saying that I first heard there that was really fascinating, which was, you know, the old saying, everyone says he's a jack of all trades and a master of none? Well, that is said as a negative. If you look at the full quote, it's a jack of all trades and a master of none is better than a master of, God, I wish I had it exactly, and I'll have to look this up. A jack of one trade. Basically the sentiment is a jack of all trades

master of none is better than a master of one. That was it. So it's a jack of all trades and master of none is better than a master of one. And what it's saying is it's not that a jack of all trades is a negative, meaning you haven't mastered something. What it's saying is you have all these different skills and you bring them together and you are vastly more successful than someone who deeply masters one thing. And so that's why Google, when they were interviewing me, they didn't care where I went to college. They said, tell me about welding. Tell me about when you were racing. Tell me about, you know, how you've taken auto shop classes. Tell me how, because to them, that allows you to bring an outside of the box thinking because I was going to work in hardware

design there. And so they were wanting me to bring in a skill set that didn't exist there. They have plenty of computer science majors. They have plenty of mechanical engineers, circuit board engineers. They want someone who goes, you know how they solve this in the automotive industry? They do this. And then I incorporate that into Google's mobile phone. And then they win. And that to me is everything. The fact that society has taken that quote and twisted it to mean the exact opposite of what it actually means. You know what? You basically just made the argument for the generalist as opposed to the specialist. Now, polite society and civilized life needs both. If I'm going to get my brain fixed or have somebody correct an aneurysm or something, then I'll take a master.

Yeah, right? Yep, I'm with you. But if you're talking about a farmer, right, that guy's got to be good at about 50 different things. So it's a great point. It's Dirty Jobs 101. On that show, we often try to make the case for the generalist, but not at the expense of the specialist. And I talk a lot about the language and the perversion of those old adages is really interesting. Here's another one. Tell me if you knew this. You've heard the expression, he got the lion's share?

Yeah. Well, most people think if you get the lion's share or something, it means it's unfair because you got most of it. Yeah. But that's not what that expression means. The lion's share means you got all of it. because the lion doesn't save anything for anybody. It's not like, oh, no, this isn't quite fair. It's like, no, the lion takes it, all of it.

That's what the lion's share was. So the language is constantly evolving, and our old adages are important. And I'll land this particular plane here because Marco Rubio said something. I don't know if you caught this back in, I guess it was 2016. He said, when he was running, he said, look, What this country needs are more welders and fewer philosophers. And my Facebook page blew up with people going, hey, this guy's singing out of your hymn book, right? And I had to say, actually, not really, because to your point, when you set the proposition as binary, you're going to lose a lot of people.

It's true we need more welders. but we don't need more welders who have no interest in Nietzsche or Kierkegaard. And philosophers are interesting, but it would be nice to have a few that could run a straight bead. I would love that. I would love that. Someone's seen opera from under the welding helmet while they weld. This is great. This has been my whole journey, John.

My misspent career began in the opera. And you, look where you are. today and look at the crap you've done. I want to talk about your failures. I want to talk about objects in a minute. Sure. Let's start with showbiz. You were on The Apprentice.

You were right there. Was it season one? It was season two, and it's so different now because we're going back, oh gosh, 20 plus years ago. And reality TV is such a staple now, and you go back 20 years. I think there was the real world Survivor had started the year before.

So I say that based on my own instance. securities, that there was no deep-seated drive to be one of these kind of quintessential reality people that are all over the world now. But for me, it was really just, I've always been a really competitive person. And obviously, Trump is a loaded subject these days. So let's take President Trump and all the politics out of it for a moment and just rewind to the early aughts. We had just passed Y2K. None of the world didn't cease to exist. I think some terrible Robbie Williams song was probably a hit on the radio. Don't look it up. It'll be stuck in your head all day. But I was watching the Apprentice, season one, and I said, that's fascinating. I want to compete in that. And so I looked at it

as the ultimate job competition, the sense that here they're assembling people from around the country that have unique skills and have unique backgrounds, and then you want to do some sort of job competition with them. And yeah, so I was like, where do I sign up? This is awesome. I probably don't want to bore you with the entire story with how the apprentice auditions went, but I think it was over a million people auditioned for those spots. And the only reason I sent in my final audition was I was actually watching a Dateline NBC at the time. I had pretty much given up on the process because it'd taken so long. Watching a Dateline NBC, and the guy on it was the head casting for the apprentice.

And they were talking about how the casting of The Apprentice was this really huge popular thing. And he said, yeah, we're down to kind of our finalists, but we haven't notified him yet. And he goes like this, and there's a stack of tapes behind him. And I literally see, this is VHS. People who listen to this, I have no idea what VHS is, right? There is my hand scribbled chicken scratch of my VHS tape. They made you write a number on it, not your name. But I recognized my handwriting.

And so I go, oh, I'm going to take that phone call because I had really kind of like pulled myself out of the competition. So it was only because I watched that Dayline NBC and saw my tape in the finalist pile that I continued with it. Was this like 2003? Yes. Yes. So I'm going to blow your mind here in a minute. I'll just do it now.

Why wait? In 2003, I had pitched a show called Somebody's Got to Do It to Discovery. And like everybody else in Hollywood, they didn't want it. But unlike everybody else, they eventually changed their mind and agreed to do three episodes if I changed the title. They wanted to call it Dirty. jobs. I wanted to call it the apprentice. Interesting. We went with 30 jobs, which was probably a better choice. I just realized as I was slogging through that conversation, you were filming season two of that show. You didn't win, but you got close. You know, I look back on it and

here's where your Hollywood knowledge would have been beneficial. Here, my naive 20, three-year-old self is going in there, assuming that this is actually a competition. And in reality, I didn't realize how TV shows worked. They care about the drama, and it has to happen on screen. And who wins is basically irrelevant to them. It's very relevant to me. And I'll give you an example. One of the tasks was to sell ice cream, to sell ice cream on the street.

Immediately, we're sitting there going, well, standing there and hawking ice cream at two bucks a cup is the stupidest way on earth to try to win this, because it's a crapshoot. If enough people walk by your little ice cream stand, you might win, et cetera. So what we did is on a previous task, we had done some work with Toys R Us. And again, like a VHS tape, these things no longer exist. But because we couldn't tell people, one of the rules was you couldn't tell people you're on the apprentice, right? because obviously you could get anyone to do just about anything you wanted. Well, we knew that Toys R Us knew we were on The Apprentice because they were a participant in one of the previous tasks.

We still had the phone number of the CEO. So we'd call them up. We said, hey, we want to sell you the most expensive pint of ice cream in history. And we're going to donate all the proceeds to St. Jude's Hospital. You're going to buy a pint of our ice cream for $1 million, and all of that money is going to go to St. Jude's. And we're going to win this competition by about $990,000 and crush them. And you're going to get some amazing press.

And best of all, we're going to help some kids. And NBC goes, they didn't like this. I don't know why they didn't like it, but I think they wanted us on the street. And they said, nope, can't do it. They didn't say that. They said it has to be in cash. Transactions have to have to have any cash. I need a million dollars in cash.

Great. I'm not joking. I call them back. And I'm like, all right. So we're greenlit, but we need cash. And they got the response that any business would get. Yeah, we don't keep piles of cash under the giraffe. You know, it's like, I mean, we're not the drug dealers or something.

And they actually scrambled to try to see if they could get the cash, but then finally, the producers didn't want it anyway. So they basically said no. And unfortunately, those are the things that aren't seen in. So we end up on the street hawking our ice cream for $2 a cup like everyone else. But those were the kinds of things that we brought into the, the competition and really wanted to kind of take it to the next level. And honestly, I think the show would have been better. If you had a team that thought that far outside the box and crushed the

competition by almost a million dollars, that to me is more interesting than finding out someone won by $2.75. That's good TV. Did you come in, what, third or second? No, it was further back than that, unfortunately. But I don't know. I'd say I'm winning in the end. I thought your dad told me you came in second, but that's so classic of Jim, isn't it? Well, as everyone that deals with my father has learned, we call him Jimbellishments. And so you take the truth or you take what Jim says, you divide by two and subtract four. That is how you get to an actual answer. So let's kind of start to land the plane then in this way. You had options. You weren't sure. You race motorcycles. You race cars. You think maybe you'll get a

on the TV, you get on the apprentice, you try all sorts of things, you chat with your uncle, he's an underwater welder. It reminds you of what the joy can be had from working with your hands and hard work and Way leads on to way, and you start welding stuff, and now here you are. That's not a path that anybody can follow, but it is a mindset that's at everybody's disposal if they'd embrace it. Yeah, you're right. It's not a logical path, and it's one where it took me a little while to find out what I was passionate about.

Along the way you learn, we just talked about being a generalist. You learn something every step along the way. And for me, I learned that I can't sit behind a computer and push emails all day. It's just not me. I'll go insane. I like to work with my hands. you learn things I've had other companies that I've started, some successful, some not. And I think one of the most important learnings I had there for anyone thinking about doing their own company

and not trying to give away the secret sauce to my competitors, but a lot of folks have heard of GoPro. In fact, you've probably used many of them that I wouldn't want to touch now after being on... Detroit, more than a few. Got one inside a cow once. Yeah, that's a GoPro that for me, after the footage is downloaded, that's a write-off. that thing. That GoPro went. So a lot of people have heard of GoPro

and being in racing in Northern California where GoPro was started, I was kind of on the tip of that in the sense that I had seen GoPro's very early on. So there were two companies. There was GoPro and there was Contour. Contour made the better product. Sorry, GoPro.

It was better engineered. It was sleeker. It was better. It shot better pictures. And the guy that started contour, Mark Barros, was convinced as I was that if you engineer the best product, you will win.

Now, on the other hand, Nick Woodman, GoPro, said, he who tells the best story wins. So Contour was first to market, had the better product. Fast forward, I don't know, 10 years. GoPro is a multi-billion dollar company. Contour's out of business. And I read an article with Mark after contour went out of business, and he said, I will never make that mistake again.

I will never concentrate solely on the product and assume the customer will know how much time I spent on it. He goes, I've got to tell the story in addition to the product or I've got nothing. And I'll never make that mistake again. So what does he do? The jerk starts a competitor to me. And so I watched in real time. Now, granted, I didn't not tell the story, but I watched him so artfully and tactfully put into motion what he said he was going to do.

And it's like going up against an MMA fighter when you don't know what you're doing. You see things happening and things are bending in ways you don't want them to bend, but you are merciless to stop it. It's going to happen. You're going to learn what the back your calf smells like, and there's nothing that's going to stop that from happening. And that's what he started to do to me. And I said, son of a bitch is right. And so after I sold that company when I started Owl. Excuse me for a sec, just so people know.

Chuck, it was Optrix, right, John? Yes. It was optics. It was an action lens camera for iPhones. Basically another add-on. It was ingenious. You could take your iPhone and you could put this lens over the existing lens and you'd have this wide angle or this tele-a-line.

or this telephoto. There's so many of things you do with it. I mean, it's just a great idea. But the other guy told a better story. Exactly. Well, anyone that has an iPhone with these lenses on the back, right? That was us. So we worked on all of those lenses,

and I always wondered why the Apple engineers were so fascinated in learning the details behind how we developed all of our lenses. Thankfully, I sold the company about a year before I found out why they wanted so many meetings with us. Yeah. So I learned from that scenario in real time, you know, who's someone who tactfully and artfully did to me what was done to him. And I will never make that mistake again.

So with Owl from day one, I said, I'm going to engineer the best product. That I'm confident I can do. But I'm going to tell the story. So from day one, thank God for YouTube and social media, I started recording every iteration of what I did. And what happened is people came in droves because for the first time they saw. the R&D process from behind the curtain. And they realized that, A, how much work goes into it,

B, how many mistakes are made until you get to a real live product and it gave people an appreciation for it. And C, it allowed people to trust my company because they saw the way I did things and that I wasn't cutting corners. And so from then on, foot on the gas with sharing the story of owl. And that has been the biggest, I would say,

change between us and the other companies in the industry. There were other people that did what we did, but we made sure that people knew how and why we did it, and that has done everything. So my hat is off to you, Mark Barros, for getting your butt kicked by Nick Woodman and then kicking my butt so that now I can have this success. The only show that I ever worked on up until the year we met, actually there was no show that ever worked. Dirty Jobs was the first genuine success I had. And And the reason that it worked was because we did the same thing you just described. I gave up being a host. I embraced the transparency of making the show.

And we dedicated one camera to making sure the viewers saw everything that happened behind the scenes. And we took a little bit of that. And we stretched it through each episode. That's what you did with your company, John. You focused on the business of making the best. product you could, but you let people see behind the curtain and into the cracks. And that, in my view, anyway, in this day and age anyway, is an essential ingredient to telling the stories you have to tell. So whether you forest gumped your way into it, we did it on purpose, you did it

right. Congratulations. Well, thank you. Hindsight is so hard to go back before something becomes ubiquitous and well-known. Dirty jobs, and here's where I'll blow a little sunshine your way, that has shaped so much of modern TV that I don't even know if you could quantify it. At the time, it was incredibly novel. People didn't do that. People didn't focus a camera at these industries. People didn't focus a camera at some, you said you focused it at the cracks. You focused it at different cracks, but any crack, any crack up door. That was novel. A couple of O-rings, too. And nowadays, people go behind the curtain, I would say, and again, not trying to get people on one side of the fence or the other, but I would say that the people that have done that

throughout history, you know, someone like a Howard Stern, someone who takes the radio industry that is so candid, hey, how you doing? Welcome to WNBC. What can I do for you today? Just very fake, very canned. And he's like, you know what? I'm an intelligent, disturbed, creepy nerd, and I'm going to lift the lid on this and give you all the behind the scenes, the good, bad, and the ugly. And that's exactly what you did from a TV standpoint, is you lift the lid and you said, I don't know how this is going to play out, but I'm going to let you experience it with me. And if I end up with a little bit of cow dung in my eye, well, I'm going to make sure that you know what that feels like, too. And that's so commonplace today. And it didn't exist then.

It's not only that it didn't exist. When it did come into its own and the network put it on the air and it rated well, this is the thing that really blows people away, the network took it off the air and put it on the shelf for nearly a year, not because it didn't work and not because people didn't like it, but because it didn't comport with what they wanted their viewers to like. Ah. And the cognitive dissonance that comes, right, whether you're trying to. to entertain a viewer or a listener, or trying to make a product for an audience or a consumer

base that you think you understand, when you get the undeniable truth, which I'll just call feedback, you either ignore it or you embrace it. It's really hard to do. It sounds like an obvious thing to do. Yeah. But the biggest thing that I think you did right, aside from identifying a better Mousetrap was showing people the process of making it. And you're right. Without YouTube, without social, your business probably doesn't work. But you play the card you get. What a kind of advantage today. Because if you were to do dirty jobs today and that network tells you, I'm putting this on the shelf, you tell them where they can stick there on the shelf and you go do what you darn self. And that's the amazing thing. And it's so wonderful and so

empowering. It's also scary because you don't have an excuse, right? But people along the way told me, oh, you'll never make a company out of that single product or there's huge players, you know, 40, 50 million dollar revenue companies in the space, they'll squash you like a bug, blah, blah, blah, or that's not going to work. And I go, great, you know, you can feel that way and I'll do it my way because no one gets to tell me I can't now because I've got my outlets of YouTube and social media and, you know, you can be your own content creator. I don't need to convince anyone else it's right except my customer. And you can do that too because you have a direct port. So today, if you were to run that life cycle back, you'd own all of dirty jobs. It

would probably be twice the size that it was at the time because you would be able to keep doing what you knew was connecting with that viewer. Well, you know, maybe, maybe even probably. But all of this is a bit like nailing jello to a tree because the thing you're certain about and 2003, you could be right. But everything around you is moving to. Everything under you is constantly shifting. This impacts welders. This impacts producers. It impacts everybody. And so I'm really curious to see where your business goes, how it evolves. I'm curious to see if you're going to sell it. I'm curious to see if AI is going to come in and fundamentally transform it. Mostly, John, I'm curious to see if the story you tell is going to attract the welders that you need.

And part of the reason, full disclosure, I have an agenda. I was hoping you said something really, really inspiring and compelling for potential welders, and you have. But go ahead and bring it home. What can people do who would like to work for you who might happen to be in the Northern California area or anywhere in the country? Who should they call? Where do they start?

I mean, it's one of those things where I hope those people are out there, Mike, because we've turned over a lot of rocks looking. We've got a website. You can obviously go there. That's pretty easy. Reach out to us. But if you really believe in this, if you're not a welder today and you believe in this, we have so many amazing people on our team. And they take pride in what they do. And they want to pass that on.

I mean, these folks see the kids these days not going into what they have become very good at. And for people, I wish I could show people what a good aluminum welder looks like when they're welding if you haven't seen it. You ever seen these buskers on the side of the road where they've got a drum under one foot, you know, a tambourine under another foot? They're playing the guitar. They got a harmonica in their mouth and some sort of like spinny hat on the top. And they're playing an entire band by themselves. That is the talent of a welder. Now mix it with an artist, which I guess still translates to music.

and they've got a foot pedal under one foot that's controlling the amperage. They've got a torch that has to be held the exact right amount distance away from the metal. They're welding aluminum, which has an oxidation layer and a low melting point. So essentially, you have to heat it up enough to burn the oxidation layer off, but a little too much and the metal vaporizes. And then they've got essentially like, who is the, is it Louis Armstrong, the guy with the giant cheeks that could like breathe through his nose? Satchmo.

And then out through his mouth cycle breathing. They're essentially doing that with this stick of aluminum they're using to bond the aluminum where they're like forefinging this thing, sliding it down their hand constantly so it never stops. And then add all that to the fact that they're now rotating around an object as they weld. And it has to be perfect. And people don't get, if you stop halfway through, you can't restart that. It's going to look like crap. And for what we charge and the quality we have,

that entire part gets thrown away. So you have a ladder that costs us massive amounts to weld. And if that welder gets a spark of hot metal, and every welder's had this happen, where it travels down, it burns through the top of your shoe, through your sock, into your foot, and starts burning through the layers of the time. This is not a good ad for welders, I guess,

but it builds that toughness because that welder knows, yes, there is a molten blob of metal currently traveling to the center of my medicate, tarsals and I have to continue this bead because I'm not going to let that stop me. And that's a welder in a nutshell. And someone that is proficient at that is a thing of beauty. And for someone to look down upon that bothers me to my core, but for that to be lost bothers me to my core. I want that guy that's welding for me that's 60 years old and can literally pick up any machine, any metal and weld it like it's going on a NASA space shuttle. And he is absolutely willing to teach

the next generation. That kid that's in packing and shipping, he's on his own dime. I see him after work showing these kids how to weld off the clock. He could go home, you know. And so this is my call to action for folks out there that want this. If you're not in my area, that's fine. but find a shop that does this or a company that does this, I guarantee they have a path for you to become a welder because they'd be a moron not to, because I guarantee they have five open spots they can't fill. So if someone is in the area and they want to come talk to us, talk to us,

we can help them train. We're currently taking some students out of like College of Marin locally and trying to get them up to speed. But because this is a national thing, I guarantee there are places in your local area, And welders make six figures all over the country, Mike. This isn't a Northern California thing. This is anywhere in the country that are $4.5 billion RV company.

I talked about, all their welders are six figures. They lay down something like 10 football fields of beads a day. And they're in the Midwest. So if you're making $150,200K in the Midwest, that's a different scenario. Absolutely. I'll take it. That's a good life right there, Mr. Roe. It's not bad.

What's your website, John? Owlvans.com. Owl like the bird and then van. And if you can't spell that, then at least I hope you can weld. Then you're not going to be weld. Where'd you get that name? Where'd owl come from? My son, his nickname is owl.

Because like a tiny little sociopath, when he would wake up from his nap as a child, instead of crying like a human being, he would hoot like a bird. And so my wife and I, for the longest time, kept looking at our window for the owl that apparently lived in the tree by our house, only to learn that it was coming from the baby monitor. The owl was in the crib. Yes. And so we would say, like, is the owl up?

Oh, the owl is up. And so when I was looking for names for the company, it felt outdoorsy. It was easy to spell short, has an icon. So I felt it an appropriate choice. I try, John, with all these things, to entitle every episode, something that the guest says, right?

Yes. Early on, I wrote Ride the Lightning because I think it sounds pretty awesome. But I also just wrote, the owl is in the crib. I think it might fascinate people. Chuck and I will ultimately decide, but do you have a preference? I'm fine with either. Okay. There was a third one, too.

I wrote down that was coming out as blue collar. Oh, we're talking about. Oh, not bad. I like that. I really like that. It's probably easier. in this current climate to come out to your parents as being gay or bisexual, than it is coming out as a woman. Yeah, Dad, we have to talk. We have to talk. I just love these plumbing pipes.

This was really great. Congrats on the business. It's been so fun to watch it explode over the last three years. I don't have to tell you this, but your pop is so proud of you. And I talked to him a couple months ago. I've been meaning to do this for a couple years, so I really appreciate you making the time. Well, thank you guys for shining a spotlight on this beyond us, just everything you do for making blue cool, letting people know that this is an absolute path of success and how much it's going to help the country. So my hat's off to you. And if there's any way that owl can help with microworks and creating a home for folks that want this kind of career, reach out. We'll make it happen. Look, in the spirit of storytelling, one of these days, I'm going to get over to your facility with the crew.

and you can give me a tour. Kids have to see it. They have to see it with their own eyes. You're already doing a great job on social, but yeah, the offer's mutual. There ought to be a way. There has to be a way to make a more persuasive case. There are 11 million open jobs right now.

A lot of them are in your world. It's a crime that they're not filled. Mike, if I knew the solution, I'd be a wealthy man. I don't know the solution. All we can do is try to change the talk track. I know the folks that put in a hard day's workout at Owl, you're the blue collar Jesus, so they will be very excited to see you. When they found out I was doing this podcast, they were blown away.

How the heck did they find you, meaning me? And then they were also like, is he coming here? Is he coming to our facility? And I'm like, no, it's going to be remote. And just it looked like we told them that Santa wasn't real. It was very sad. Well, look, I'm flattered. I promise I'll get out there one of these days.

In the meantime, tell them all that they're better at welding than I'll. ever hope to be and congratulations and don't hang up we need to see the little upload thing on your thing otherwise we don't have the thing we're at 99% i'm no j leno but hopefully you got something you can work with oh my god that was so horrifying that episode for the record the uh the original jesus was blue collar as well i believe a carpenter as i recall yeah that's true i like that yeah there wasn't a lot of welding in palestine back in the day it went oh god Crap, there's another great title. Say goodbye, Mike.

On every episode, you should just have at the end. Here are the seven title options we had. That's what's happening. That's what seems to happen. Yeah. Chuck is just waiting for me to officially say goodbye so we can stop the recording. So until next week, my friends,

big thanks to John Willenborg, all the excellent welders at Alvans and the man, the myth, the legend, who continues to impersonate a producer Chuck Klausmeyer. See you that week. The ocean delights us. Some marvel at the colorful world below the surface.

The ocean feeds us. Others find nourishment in its bounty. The ocean teaches us how our everyday choices impact even the deepest places. The ocean moves us whether we're riding a wave or soaking in its breathtaking beauty.

The ocean connects us. Find your connection at Monterey Bay Aquarium. org slash connects.