“Time and time again, after talking with septic tank workers and bridge builders and skull cleaners, and just this endless variety of odd jobs, I found people who didn't follow their passion into that career, but rather followed opportunity,” says Mike Rowe, an Emmy award-winning TV host and producer who is best-known for hosting the TV series “Dirty Jobs.”
In this episode, he breaks down the biggest lessons from his career.
“Right now we have 7.2 million men, able-bodied men, in the prime of their working life, who are not only not working, but affirmatively not looking. What they're looking at are screens,” Mr. Rowe says.
In the post-COVID era, why are so many jobs seemingly impossible to fill?
Watch the clip:
What has gone wrong with our society? And how do we turn things around?
🔴 WATCH the full episode (1h 1 minutes) on Epoch Times: https://ept.ms/S1123MikeRowe
FULL TRANSCRIPT
Jan Jekielek: Mike Rowe, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders.
Mike Rowe: Nice to be here.
Mr. Jekielek: Mike, you said something that a lot of people would find very controversial. I want to start with this. You said that you shouldn't follow your passion.
Mr. Rowe: Yes, people hated that. I didn't say they shouldn't be passionate, I just said that passion is so important that you should take it wherever you go and not just follow it around like a dream. This was one of the big lessons from Dirty Jobs. There were many lessons from that show, but the first one and the big one was the day that I realized that so many of the people we profiled on that show were passionate.
They were very happy. These people were having a weirdly good time and that confused people. We featured 350 dirty jobs and at least 350 dirty jobbers, and probably 40 or 50 of them were multi-millionaires. Nobody knew it because they were covered in filth or something disgusting, and because we never made a big deal about it. People didn't equate success with that, nor did they equate it with joy or fun or lightheartedness or passion.
Time and time again, after talking with septic tank workers, bridge builders, skull cleaners, and this endless variety of odd jobbers, I found people who didn't follow their passion into that career, but rather followed opportunity. Once they got the opportunity, they figured out how to be really good at it. Then after they figured out how to be good at it, at some point they figured out how to love it and how to be passionate about it.
It's a small thing unless you really step back and look at it. We've told a whole generation of kids that if you want to be happy in your work, if you want job satisfaction, the first thing you have to do is identify in your mind the thing that's going to satisfy you and then you embark on this plan of satisfaction pursuits.
You borrow lots of money and you take lots of tests and you do whatever you have to do in pursuit of this thing you believe is going to make you happy, as opposed to just looking around and seeing where everybody's going and then going in the opposite direction and following opportunity instead of passion.
I started to say, "Look, we all want to be passionate, but rather than follow it, let's just take it with us and figure out how to be passionate regardless of what we're doing." That was a message I gave in a commencement speech at PragerU. Yes, YouTube restricted it. They wouldn't let anybody over 18 watch it.
Mr. Jekielek: That is so interesting, isn't it? That is such a bad message.
Mr. Rowe: It's a threat. I hadn't thought of this before, but why restrict it? There was no profanity in my message and there was no obscenity. I kept my clothes on for most of it. There was nothing that would make you say, "That's inappropriate," except that the point of the speech was to pivot and say, "Look, there are a lot of great jobs out there that are open, and that don't require a four-year degree.”
“If somebody told you that your passion is going to require you to borrow $250,000, and that you're going to have a hard time paying back in order to pursue this thing that may or may not make you happy, then you should possibly think a little differently about what your educational path should be." That, I believe, was seen as a threat.
Mr. Jekielek: We're here in California. I was just interviewing someone that's leaving the state. She’s a serial entrepreneur and owns multiple farm-to-table restaurants. She built a beautiful farm, a little paradise just north of LA, which services those restaurants. It’s an incredible thing.
But at this point, she just can't make it work and the business doesn't work anymore. She had her best quarter ever prior to the pandemic. She took in more than $1 million herself, nevermind paying everybody well. Now, she has to leave and she's heading out to Texas.
One of the elements of this perfect storm is that people are not working as well since the pandemic. Is this something that resonates with you? Have you heard about this?
Mr. Rowe: Anecdotally, yes. In my own organization, I haven't noticed it. But my own organization is very unique and everybody subscribes to a thing called ROWE [Results Oriented Work Environment].
Mr. Jekielek: I feel like your ethos and your organization is very similar to The Epoch Times. We have ROWE principles, we just never called it that.
Mr. Rowe: It's difficult because I'm very suspicious of any cookie cutter advice. I'm very suspicious of painting with too broad a brush, regardless of what the topic is. I know we're going to talk about a lot of different things here, but I think you're alluding to working from home. You're alluding to a kind of work ethic or a certain set of expectations that might dictate an employee's behavior or an employer's behavior.
Your work experience may vary. There are a lot of different ways to work and there's a lot of different ways to think about work. There are unions, there is the right to work, there's work from home, there's flex time, and there's the gig economy, which tragically is under assault here in California and in other places. I don't know how much you've read about AB5, Assembly Bill Five.
There are real interests that don't want people to freelance. They don't want people to drive the Uber that brought me to you here today unless they can become employees. These are big complicated conversations that are happening all over the place. I don't know how it impacted the person you're interviewing, but I do believe that we're in a time right now where an employer's expectations and an employee's expectations, and I'm speaking broadly, are wildly out of whack. There's a real disconnect going on.
I've never ever seen recruitment be this challenging for so many. It's not just the skilled trades, it's also in the restaurants. Everybody watching this program has been to a restaurant in the last year-and-a-half and seen a certain sign on the door. It’s not the sign that says, "Help wanted."
But it’s the sign that says, "We're sorry. You're going to have to wait longer than we want you to wait, because we can't hire enough people to be fully staffed. The ones we do have, they came in on their day off to pick up the slack. Thanks for your patience."
I've seen that or a version of that everywhere, and I've read books on this. Nick Eberstadt wrote a book called Men Without Work, and you would love this conversation. He wrote it in 2015 because he was very concerned with what was happening in the male population regarding employment. He had a lot of theories on it. The data went crazy during the lockdowns, so he republished it.
Among other things, right now we have 7.2 million able-bodied men in the prime of their working life who are not only not working, but affirmatively not looking. What they're looking at are their screens. They are home 2000 hours a year looking at screens. That's new, and certainly in peacetime we've never seen anything like that before.
Your friend is not alone. Something is afoot and something is amiss in the wide world of work. As people grapple to define or maybe redefine what a good job is, a lot of businesses are just grasping at straws and clutching their pearls and very uncertain about what's going to happen next vis-a-vis the workforce.
Mr. Jekielek: I don't want to rag on the service industry too much, but there seems to be less enthusiasm around providing service. Does that make sense? Again, this is anecdotal and something I have personally observed.
Mr. Rowe: It doesn't make sense that there would be a lack of enthusiasm, but I agree with you, there is a lack of enthusiasm. I can hypothesize, but you would probably need a social anthropologist to really dig in to try and explain all of the effects, not just of the lockdowns, but of so many other things. I don't even know what generation we're in now. What is it called?
Alpha is coming, and Z is here. We have millennials, X, and boomers. They're all treated as if they're a different species. Maybe they are, I don't know. A lot of people my age are scratching their heads trying to figure out how to motivate, how to inspire, and how to encourage. Again, I don't want to paint with a broad brush, because I still think people are unique and individual and different.
But yes, there is this sense that people think, “Here I am, I'm alive, I'm walking around, I went to school, and I got my degree. Now, that dream job we were talking about, where is it? I've been waiting now for six months and I don't really want to do this other stuff.” We've lost our patience with the lower rungs of the ladder. A ladder without lower rungs is not a thing you can climb.
I don't know what it is, Jan. Maybe it's social media, maybe it's the rise of the influencer, or maybe we're just surrounded by so many examples of instant gratification that we've forgotten about the virtue of delaying such things. I don't know. In my own organization, and in my own foundation, we talk a lot about this. Our scholarship program is called a Work Ethic Scholarship program.
What is work ethic? It's a mix of things like the enthusiasm you just mentioned that is so conspicuously absent. It's delayed gratification. It's a positive attitude. It's all of those things that a lot of kids today look at with suspicion. They're suspicious when they are told they have to pay their dues. If they are told they have to start at the bottom, that rankles them and I'm not sure why.
Maybe it's because it sounds like a lecture. Maybe it's because somebody like me is shaking their finger. Maybe it sounds like a sermon. Lectures and sermons aren't persuasive, that much I know for sure. If you want to understand the lack of enthusiasm in the younger generation, then I don't think you and I are in a position to do it, to be frank.
Mr. Jekielek: The Smithsonian had this infamous graphic that they created that was also on their social media. They described whiteness as a pejorative. It listed these white traits that we should be suspicious of, which included hard work, being on time, and other things related to a good work ethic.
Mr. Rowe: Right, soft skills. If you tell somebody, "You ought to tuck your shirt in," somehow that becomes an insult. If you tell somebody, "Maybe you shouldn't look at your cell phone during the interview." They reply, "Why? What do you mean? You're infringing on my rights. I've got a lot going on and I can multitask." They might not see multitasking as a sign of rudeness. It's part of the current disconnect.
Mr. Jekielek: Someone is actually teaching that these traits are bad and you shouldn't have them, because then you would be white, or white-adjacent as they call it.
Mr. Rowe: It's worse than terrible. It's stupid and it's self-defeating. Ultimately, when you tell somebody those things, you risk persuading them that you're correct. If they believe that you're correct in that assessment, then you've just handed them a victim card, and those things are fun to collect. We shouldn't be turning the language upside down, but that's what is happening.
It's not just the Smithsonian putting out this thing, every major company in the country has been pulled into ESG [Environmental, Social and Governance] and DEI [Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion], all of these things. I'll give them every benefit of the doubt and assume it's all as well intended as it could be. But it's also just another couple of entrants into the army of angry acronyms. It's just two more things to worry about and one more way to virtue signal in a lot of ways by saying, "Look what we've done. Look at our commitment to this, this and this," and the language gets pulled into that too.
If you really want to be inclusive, then you have to be open to the idea that affirming a positive work ethic is some sort of artifact from the patriarchy. I don't know. But companies where I would have never expected to see this kind of thing, they're all doing it in some way, shape, or form.
I have a buddy who works for a big recruiter, the biggest one. He's way up the food chain, and he's placing people in multimillion dollar positions. The qualifications for those positions now all begin with gender, race, age, ethnicity, and sexual preference. They're looking to check boxes affirmatively.
Further on down the list, they are still going to look at education and experience, but chronology matters. A lot of things are happening in the language that are informing the way companies hire, which is going to alter the way they advertise for opportunities, and it's going to impact everything and everyone.
Mr. Jekielek: You were talking earlier about cookie cutter. This woke ideology very much works that way. It assumes that everyone in a particular group is the same. Let’s switch gears for a moment. You've come out as a big supporter of Walmart. Please tell me about Walmart and why I should be supporting Walmart?
Mr. Rowe: I don't care much if you support them or not. I don't work for them. Eight years ago I reached out to them. I had read an article that said they were going to commit to spend $250 billion over the next 10 years on the U.S. supply chain and U.S. manufacturers—the small guys, the people who are trying to make something in this country. Walmart was going to invest in the factories and the infrastructure that those endeavors need.
I thought that was great. I knew somebody who knew somebody over there. I just said, "For what it's worth, the Dirty Jobs guy is pulling for you." Because really, if we have any hope of reshoring and truly reinvigorating manufacturing in this country, how are we going to do it without the biggest retailer in the world firmly behind it?
There's all sorts of stuff about Walmart that I might quibble with. Obviously, it's the third rail of retail for a lot of reasons. Anyhow, I did the voiceover for a commercial called The Factory, and it aired during the Olympics. It was an inspiring commercial about a factory that had been closed for years. The lights were coming back on and the people were coming back to work. It was really beautiful, and I won some awards as well.
The commercial airs and I go over to Facebook and start looking at the comments, and there are a lot of them. Most of them were good, but a couple of people said, "Hey, what's up Dirty Jobs guy? Don't you know that's an anti-Union shop? Don't you know that big, giant business is killing small businesses?" I said, "Oh, okay."
I wasn't even in the commercial, I just narrated it. I was just minding my own business. It was late at night, I'd had some wine, and the Olympics were on. I was going to bed, but first I sat down at my computer and responded to a couple of people who were the most upset with me. I said to them what I just said to you.
I said, "Look, it is not about how you feel about Walmart. How do you feel about the country? How do you feel about a big retailer setting the bar? Maybe Costco or Best Buy or Home Depot or Lowe's or somebody you don't hate will follow suit. Don't you want all of them to invest in the infrastructure that would allow more entrepreneurship and more made in the USA stuff to happen?"
I put that out there and then I went to bed. The next morning I looked at this post and 7 million people were having this giant knife fight in a phone booth. They were so angry at me, because organized labor had a dog in the fight.
They were very upset with Walmart because Walmart is not a union shop. They saw me as a guy who should be on their side of that argument. I run a foundation and we don't get political. I don't get involved in labor and management disputes, and I don't think I did here. All I said was, “It's Walmart. It's $250 billion. I'm pulling for them. You're not?”
Long story short, it got weirder and louder, faster and faster. That night on CNN, there was my picture on Erin Burnett's show. Under it is a caption that says, "Working man hero? Walmart shill?" All this stuff. I got on a plane, went to New York, and booked myself on all these shows, without Walmart's permission, by the way.
Now Walmart is freaking out because the Dirty Jobs guy is on Hannity and Tucker and CNN and all these different shows defending them. Actually, I was really defending myself because these issues are important to me. Whatever you think about Walmart vs. the little guy or union vs. non-union, I still believe that we don't have any hope of turning the ship around without big blue chip companies betting on this country.
By the way, I was in Bentonville again just a couple of weeks ago, because Walmart is doing this thing called Open Call where they invite hundreds of small U.S. manufacturers, it's exclusively U.S., to come and pitch to them. Hundreds of them get deals, and they get their product on the shelf. They've spent all of the $250 billion that they promised to spend, earlier than they promised to spend it, and have pledged another $350 billion. Everybody talks about this issue, Jan. Everybody says, "We've got to bring manufacturing back. We've got to get China under control. We've got to do this. We've got to do that." This is a step in that direction.
Mr. Jekielek: Are you sure you're not getting paid by Walmart here?
Mr. Rowe: If I am, I don't know about it.
Mr. Jekielek: I am being facetious, because you are very convincing.
Mr. Rowe: Honestly, that's what I mean by cookie cutter advice. I am not out in the world saying, "I need to make everybody think differently about Walmart." I understand that the people at the top of that food chain are very wealthy, but they employ over a hundred thousand people. There's just no way you can sum up the totality of their existence in a binary conversation.
Mr. Jekielek: We were talking about the work ethic earlier. You're offering scholarships under your Work Ethic Scholarship program. Please tell me about this. What are you doing?
Mr. Rowe: Dirty Jobs has been on the air every day for the last 20 years. It is the reason I'm sitting here with you now. Whether you know it or not, that's the thing that gave me permission to mouth off and weigh in on a lot of different things. Back in 2008, the show was everywhere. It was the number one show on cable.
Then the country went into a recession. Everywhere I looked, I saw headlines talking about massive numbers of unemployed people, but everywhere we went on Dirty Jobs, we saw help wanted signs. It seemed odd. How can so many people be out of work as the country's going into a recession and yet, there are so many opportunities?
Mr. Jekielek: That's mirrored in our current situation in a lot of ways, as you alluded to earlier.
Mr. Rowe: Mirrored and amplified, unfortunately. In 2008, there were 2.3 million open jobs, most of which didn't require a four-year degree. That's what the skills gap looked like. Today, it's close to 11 million open positions, most of which don't require a four-year degree. There was $900 million in student debt. It's now at $1.7 trillion in outstanding student loans.
Today, we're still doing the same thing we were doing then. We're still stubbornly arguing for a four-year degree for everyone. We're still warning parents that if their kid doesn't go in this direction, they're going to wind up turning a wrench as some sort of vocational consolation prize.
Look, I get it. There are always going to be social stigmas, but this is different. These stigmas and stereotypes and myths and misperceptions that are keeping kids out of the trades are not rooted in social climbing. Some of them might be, but the Varsity Blues stuff was another story.
These are just straight up misconceptions that people don't understand. People don't understand that you can make six figures welding with no college debt, within a couple of years of getting your certification. I know that because we've trained about 1700 of those people. In 2008, I started a foundation to shine a light on those 2.3 million open positions that didn't require a four-year degree, but required a skilled trade. That's what started mikeroweWORKS Foundation, it was just a PR campaign for opportunity. Then the fans of Dirty Jobs helped me build a trade resource center online.
Now, I've got this big resource center with thousands of job openings all over the place. They are good jobs; electricians, steamfitters, pipefitters, mechanics, heating, and air conditioning. That freaked people out because all we were hearing was that opportunity was dead. The average person, when they see 11 million unemployed people, they figure, “What we have to do to fix that is to just create more jobs.”
We already had the jobs, but we didn't have the skills. Then it turns out we also didn't have the will. The skill gap gets a lot of press, but the will gap is also there. It just brought me back to the PR challenge. A big reason we have so many opportunities open today is because the companies in charge of those opportunities, to be candid, have done a poor job of promoting them.
There was a time when we did need more kids going through the Ivy League or higher education. We needed more engineers, doctors, and scientists in the '60s and '70s, so college got a big PR campaign. It was a pretty good one.
But like all PR, the push for college went too far. We weren't content to simply make the case for higher ed. We had to do it at the expense of all other forms of education. We had to turn all those dirty jobbers that I had worked with for all those years into cautionary tales that said, “If you don't get the four-year degree-
Mr. Jekielek: You'll end up like this.
Mr. Rowe: Exactly, but no one even understood what this meant. Because the big lesson from Dirty Jobs was that these people are happy and living balanced lives. Not everybody is a millionaire, obviously. Some people work their 40-hour weeks, they come home, they coach little league, they go to the PTA, and they go to their church. They live a life that looks a lot like prosperity because they have mastered a skill that was in demand, not because they went to college. Maybe some of them did, but most of them didn't.
We award Work Ethic Scholarships today because that PR campaign called mikeroweWORKS was effective, to the point where it moved the needle enough so that a lot of big companies noticed. They came to me and said, "How can you help us make a more persuasive case for the opportunities in our company?"
I said, "I'm not an expert, but I'll tell you what I've learned and I'll tell you what I know." For me, it started as work, and then people started to give me a fair amount of money, really. I've never hosted a fundraiser or done a chicken dinner or a celebrity golf dinner—I don't do that. I let people know what we're doing and I'll take their money. If you want to contribute to mikeroweWORKS.org, I appreciate it. I then award it in the form of a Work Ethic Scholarship.
Why? Because there's a scholarship for everything else. We have academic scholarships, we have athletic scholarships, we have artistic scholarships, we've got all that. This scholarship is for the young man or woman who says, "You're right, I'm not going to follow my passion, I'm going to take it along with me. I'm going to get up every morning. I'm going to show up early. I'm going to stay late.”
“I'm going to cheerfully lift with enthusiasm. I'm going to make myself indispensable. I'm going to volunteer for every crappy task at hand. I'm going to make my boss love me." You show me that person and I will train them. That caught on and we started the foundation on Labor Day, 2008. Today, we've given away close to $8 million and assisted nearly 2000 people in learning a skill that's in demand.
Mr. Jekielek: What you're describing is music to my ears.
Mr. Rowe: You just said music, and that always makes me smile. The handy gene for me is recessive, tragically. I just didn't get it. We're sitting here today because my granddad was a tradesman in the '40s, '50s and '60s. He was an electrician by trade, but he could do anything. He could take your watch apart and put it back together blindfolded. He had that chip. He only went to the seventh grade, but the guy could build a house without a blueprint.
I was so sure I'd follow in his footsteps, but my passion didn't match up with my skills. When I was 16, he was the guy who told me, "Look, you can be a tradesman, just get a different toolbox." That gets me into entertainment, which gets me into Dirty Jobs. All these years later, the foundation is an homage to him. He was happy in his work, but he would be invisible today. People would look straight through him.
A big part of what we do in the foundation are the Work Ethic Scholarships, but the other part is to challenge people like me who are addicted to smooth roads and affordable electricity and indoor plumbing, and the rest of us, the 300 million people in this country who are addicted to chewing and swallowing things.
When I can, I like to point out that one-and-a-half percent of our population are farmers who are feeding 330 million of us three times a day and a big chunk of the world to boot. That's impressive. I like to point out that our skilled workforce is relatively small and we entirely depend upon them.
Mr. Jekielek: Some of us, especially the laptop class, almost forgot about those people during the pandemic. There was the 15 days to slow the spread and you just isolated yourself.
Mr. Rowe: Two weeks to flatten the curve, I believe it was.
Mr. Jekielek: Right. But what about the people that are bringing you the food and the people that keep things running?
Mr. Rowe: No two weeks for them.
Mr. Jekielek: Exactly. It's almost like we forgot those people even existed.
Mr. Rowe: Can I tell you a story about that?
Mr. Jekielek: Sure.
Mr. Rowe: I don't tell this story a lot because it's embarrassing. I became very disconnected from the most fundamental things I had been very connected to as a kid; where my food came from and where my energy came from. I had a great appreciation for that.
20 years in Hollywood will round those edges off, but Dirty Jobs got me honest again. That's really where my education started. But years later, we locked down. To your point, I was stunned when it happened, like everybody else. I was trying to get my head around it and said, “Okay, two weeks to flatten the curve. Got it.”
I was asked by the network to participate in a public service announcement. I basically sat in front of a camera and said, "We're all in this together.” For two weeks, let's all do this, let's all do that." Actually, the expression I said was, "We're all in the same boat."
Which I thought was really clever because I was doing this PSA with crab boat fishermen from the show, Deadliest Catch. It was, "We're all in the same boat. We're going to come together for two weeks." Then two weeks comes, two weeks goes, and you know the whole story. At some point, I realized that we're not all in the same boat.
We're all in the same storm, but your boat might be a hell of a lot different than mine or his or hers. This idea that somehow, for a while, we were all in this together was sort of a merry, cheery, weird kind of silver lining that brought people together. In my community, every evening at eight o'clock, people would walk out on their balconies in their yards and they would howl. They would all howl together as an expression of solidarity for the healthcare workers.
Mr. Jekielek: Yes, I witnessed that as well.
Mr. Rowe: There was this moment where people of goodwill on both sides of the divide were galvanized in a moment of being okay. Obviously, that didn't last. But while it was happening, we were figuring out Zoom, which is entirely held together by fiber optics and wires that live in pipes underground, which are maintained by people whose names you don't know, but who were out there working. At the same time people were working to keep the lights on.
This whole army of essential workers got back in the headlines. That's why I rebooted Dirty Jobs. As soon as that two week period was up and I realized we weren't coming out of this, I called the network and got my old crew together and we started filming that show again, because we had to. But there was a moment where I realized, "Yes, I was wrong. I got it wrong."
Mr. Jekielek: The pandemic policies resulted in what many people describe as the largest upward transfer of wealth in history.
Mr. Rowe: If we were divided before, we're now certainly entering into what feels like a dual economy. I'm not sure exactly what's dividing the economy, maybe it's politics. But yes, that didn't help it. That was a lot of money going in one direction for a long time. Look, if I'm being honest, I prospered. I didn't prosper because I stayed home, but I was very fortunate to have a crew that was willing to work with me.
Mr. Jekielek: To be honest, The Epoch Times grew during that time, because of people seeking honest information which was very difficult to find. You started talking about manufacturing. We gave away our manufacturing for all sorts of reasons, some perhaps well-intentioned, and some of them were definitely not well-intentioned.
The point is that we've turned into much more of a service economy. In order for these countries to have a future, they actually have to bring back manufacturing. Let's talk about that. How do you view bringing back manufacturing in a serious way to America?
Mr. Rowe: I don't think there's a switch we can flip. I wish there was. Bringing manufacturing back is going to require us to do half a dozen other things really well and all at the same time. We have to rethink education. We have to rethink the definition of a good job. We have to confront the stigmas and the stereotypes and the myths and the misperceptions that are keeping people from pursuing these careers that don't require a four-year degree. All of that is part of it. We have to elevate the dignity of the job itself.
I'm not talking about cello music and looking for the union label and all that stuff. It's more than that. It's guidance counselors, it's parents, and it's honest conversations around the kitchen table. We talked about shop class being gone from high school. That just means a whole generation of kids didn't even get a look at what those kinds of jobs are like.
What more persuasive thing could you do to tell a kid that a job doesn't matter than removing wood shop, metal shop, and auto shop from sight and not talking about it? We're still reeling from all that. It's not a coincidence that the push to offshore coincided with the death of shop class and the rise of the service economy and Walmart to some degree.
Mr. Jekielek: Do you remember the phrase, learn to code? I thought this was so insulting back in the day.
Mr. Rowe: Yes. Sure, I'll do that tonight. I'll learn to code. Look, it's all oversimplified, including the conversation we're having right now, honestly. We know in our gut that it doesn't make sense to depend on China so completely for our medical supplies. We know that. All I can think of is the frog in the boiling water. It wasn't so bad when we hopped in, but the temperature went up a little bit more, and then a little bit more, and now we really have forgotten how to make a great many things.
It's not just a matter of the economy, there is something else baked into this. It's our identity. It's feeling self-reliant. We want to feel independent. Yes, we want to be partners in the global community, but we want to do it on our terms. We don't want to do it because we have to. We want to do it because it makes sense for us to do it. That starts with being able to create whatever we need internally. Honestly, it starts with energy independence.
We can talk about all the things in this room that matter to us; the rug, the chairs we're sitting on, my smartphone over there. They all come from different parts of the globe and we all need them to different degrees. But if you distill it down to what really matters, this country is going to be fine, unless gas goes up to $15 a gallon, which it could.
If that happens, every single thing is going to change. The trucks aren't going to run, and the food is not going to get onto the shelves. So many things are going to be impacted by that. It doesn't even have to go up to $15. It could go up to $10 a gallon in six months. Then who knows what's going to happen?
What I do know is that we're sitting on about 100 years of oil and natural gas. We're sitting on it. We can have this whole conversation about alternatives, fine. I want alternatives too. I don't want to get stuck in the present any more than I want to get stuck in the past. But who are we kidding? If we're going to import oil and gas when we're sitting on it, that's not just bad economics, that's a kind of hypocrisy that I don't know how to respond to, except to say, “Shame on us.”
Yes, the energy conversation is a sticky wicket, but I don't think we can have it until we first acknowledge that there are 3 billion people on the planet right now who are relying on wood and dung as their primary sources of energy, and that's having a huge impact on the environment. Those people need to prosper, Jan. They need to be shown a way forward, and they need their own industrial revolution. If we're going to tell them no coal, no oil and no gas, what do we expect them to do?
Mr. Jekielek: We're consigning them to not developing and not flourishing, basically. That is what you're saying.
Mr. Rowe: I'm saying that. At the same time, we're also pointing at the one thing that I know of, with the possible exception of cold fusion. We're pointing to nuclear energy and saying, "No, we don't do it. We learned our lesson from Three Mile Island." What? Do you know how many people died at Three Mile Island? What about Fukushima? Yes, people died at Fukushima. Most of them drowned as a result of the tsunami.
During Chernobyl, I remember looking at a map of Europe, and a quarter of it was just dark, gone. They said, “This is what could happen. All these people could be gone.” A couple of dozen people died, I believe, many fighting the fire at the reactor. My point is, we've got it in our head that nuclear power is nothing but certain death.
Mr. Jekielek: Based on the numbers, it's by far the safest.
Mr. Rowe: By far.
Mr. Jekielek: It is by far the safest form of energy. The energy independence discussion is very important to me. I want to touch on the supply chains. You said there's a kind of hypocrisy where we don't want to do some of the dirty jobs. You were also pointing out examples of dependency on China in the supply chains, and medical precursors are a big problem. The way you make some of those medical precursors is very dirty. It's much easier and cheaper to make them in a place where regulation doesn't exist. This is a reality we also have to confront.
Mr. Rowe: It's a bargain and it's a deal that we make. Honestly, I'm not sure it's such a great deal, in general. It's like we put our gifted and talented kid into a really troubled school in the inner city and said, "At least everybody's all together." Now we're in the global economy, we're dependent on all sorts of other things, and we're no longer relying on ourselves. What's happening to our kid? This metaphorical kid is our manufacturing base. It's our national identity.
We've decided that we want to be an active participant in the global economy. We did it in a really general way, because there are more people in this country who are consumers than workers. Everybody's a consumer, but half the country is working. We put our thumb on the scale in a way that gives us the lowest possible price every day. What would that iPad cost? Even if we had the ability to make it here in its entirety, what would it cost? Just factor in all of the pensions and all of the union stipulations.
Mr. Jekielek: It would cost more.
Mr. Rowe: You would still have it, but you would pay more. Look, we all have skin in this game and it's not just our elected officials. It's how much do you want to pay for your sweatshirt, your socks, this rug, this chair, and that iPad? That's the question that's been put to all of us, and I've been down this road a lot. Years ago I worked with a jean manufacturing company and they didn't make their jeans here. It was a big national brand, one of the biggest. I said, "Can't we just do one little vertical of purely American-made, just so we could put it out there and say that we're trying?"
They said, "We have tried." I said, "What happened?" They showed me the research and it's hard to believe. If you put this pair of jeans that's 100 percent made in the USA next to the others, and you charge $2 more for it, you'll sell zero. If you charge $1 more, you'll sell zero. If you charge 50 cents more, you'll sell zero.
This big, giant textile manufacturer, one of the biggest in the country, showed me the data. It went all the way down to a penny. If you charge one penny more, that's when they started to see some people buying the U.S. version. Only when it was dead equal did you see people-
Mr. Jekielek: Choosing the American product?
Mr. Rowe: Correct.
Mr. Jekielek: Fascinating.
Mr. Rowe: And apocryphal and powerful. There is a lot of pontificating and proselytizing and saying, "Yes, we've got to make it here. Why can't we make it here?" Back to Walmart, why do you think they're Walmart? One, they're everywhere. They're in the small towns, and they're big, and it's low prices every day. We can hate them and we can look at them and we can shake our heads at them, but we are them. We are all consumers.
Whether we abdicated consciously or subconsciously, we sat back and gave it all away, we put it all out there. Now, we're dependent and we don't want to do the dirty jobs. To your point, we don't want that part of the supply chain, and we don't want to see it. So, we're going to have to rethink some things.
Mr. Jekielek: Maybe we've lost faith in ourselves as Americans.
Mr. Rowe: Nevermind your nationality. When you feel competent, feel like you can fix the busted toilet, correct the electricity problem, and feel like you can fix your own garage door, that's a different kind of existence than knowing I got a guy for that and he's in this phone that I don't even know how to barely operate. If you're reliant in 1000 little micro ways, then of course you're going to be reliant in just as many macro ways.
We expect the food to be on the shelf, we expect the light to come on when we flip that switch, and we expect the mess to go away when we flush the toilet. When it doesn't happen, then we're laid bare. We have no choice but to come face-to-face with the depth of our own incompetence.
That makes us crazy because nobody wants to feel that way, so we start resenting the very people who we should be celebrating. I saw this just a few miles from here where I live. A couple of years ago, we lost power for five days. In three days, people were shaking their fists at the linemen who were working on the power lines trying to get the power back on. They are so freaked out and frustrated that they take it out on the worker.
Think about it. You've done it. You've been in traffic when you're late. There's road construction. How can there be road construction? Don't they know I'm a very important person and I have to be somewhere? Now, they're working on the road at two in the afternoon. You look at these guys and you shake your head.
It all gets filed under some sort of inconvenience. We can't help it, it's in our stars. We don't look at the cause of our delay and go, "Man, those guys are busting their butt. I'm so glad they're out there working on the asphalt in the heat." As you alluded to before, we are as disconnected about all of it.
Mr. Jekielek: But alongside this change in education, there has been this very overt disdain for the American spirit, where it came from, the Founding Fathers, and civics as a whole.
Mr. Rowe: It's of a piece, Jan. There's a force that pushes us to resent that upon which we rely. Instead of gratitude, we have resentment. Instead of curiosity for what the Founding Fathers did, risked and sacrificed, we're angry with them because they didn't comport with our current belief and understanding of what a virtuous person, an enlightened person, or an awakened person today would do.
We're cherry-picking the past. In many cases, we're being motivated by a guilty conscience, which is brought on by the uncomfortable realization that we operate a great many machines and servo mechanisms that we don't ourselves understand.
We know it. We know we've slowly arbitraged our own involvement out of the daily routines of polite society. We know that we're becoming increasingly dependent on something that isn't us. We're relying more and more on things beyond our own control.
We're doing it in our own zip codes, we’re doing it in our own states, we're doing it in our country, and we're doing it around the world. We're doing it in a thousand ways and in a million decisions. We're abdicating more and more and the heat is going up a little higher and the water's bubbling and the frog is us and we're still in there.
Mr. Jekielek: That's an incredibly interesting view. I hadn't thought about it that way.
Mr. Rowe: That's why I'm a thought leader, Jan. That's why I've been invited on this program, I guess.
Mr. Jekielek: As we finish up, let's talk about the work that you are doing at mikeroweWORKS, which is trying to push back against this reality that you just described. Please tell me more about what you're doing and how you're turning the tide.
Mr. Rowe: I hope so. Look, I'm trying to be super mindful. Humility played a big role in the success of Dirty Jobs. I didn't have it when I started, but I got it along the way. The temptation is to get big, bigger, and the biggest all the time, macro versus micro. I'm micro.
I've learned that there's real happiness and real pride and real accomplishment in helping one person learn a skill that's in demand, and then help them get out into the world and work. I am surrounded by well-intended people who believe that the more of that I can do, the happier I'll be, and the more successful the foundation will become. If one is good, two would be double good, right? Then four would become eight, and so forth.
We're up to 1800 people and we've given away $7 or $8 million. That's still very modest by foundation standards, but the pressure to do more is fascinating to me, and I guess it's better to help more. But the real goal of the foundation is not to impact as many people as possible with money so they can be trained, and so they can go work and live a productive life. That's not actually our big goal.
The big goal is to get them out into the world, and then to share their stories with the world. Because I'm only as persuasive as a 60-year-old white dude can be who has prospered in his chosen field. Some people will listen to me, but most won't. They'll listen to the 25-year-old Mexican kid who's making $140,000 a year in his chosen trade. They'll listen to the 27-year-old female welder who's making the same. These are people that affirmatively challenged their own expectations.
My job is to tell the stories of the people who applied for and received a Work Ethic Scholarship, because those stories, with the help of that device, will reach guidance counselors, many of whom are currently being compensated based on the number of kids they get into a four-year institution. That's happening all over the place, and it shouldn't be happening.
In a good-natured way, without a lecture or a sermon or any finger wagging, I would like for the foundation to continue to give me the opportunity to talk to people like you about challenging some of these stigmas and stereotypes that are still in the way. I know lots of proud people doing lots of jobs that don't seem to have a lot of outward dignity. I also know movie stars who are bitter and broken and feel empty. Success doesn't look like what we've been led to believe, it looks like something else. One version of that is a skilled trade.
Mr. Jekielek: Mike Rowe, it's such a pleasure to have you on the show.
Mr. Rowe: Thanks for having me here.
Mr. Jekielek: Thank you all for joining Mike and me on this episode of American Thought Leaders. I'm your host, Jan Jekielek.
🔴 WATCH the full episode (1h 1 minutes) on Epoch Times: https://ept.ms/S1123MikeRowe
Epoch Original DVD collection:
Comments