Mike Rowe is the creator and host of "Dirty Jobs," "Somebody’s Gotta Do It," and Facebook’s "Returning the Favor." He is also the CEO of the mikeroweWORKS Foundation, a nonprofit championing the importance of skilled labor and addressing the critical workforce gap, and host of the podcast "The Way I Heard It." www.mikerowe.com www.mikeroweworks.org Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Chapter 1: What is the main topic of this episode?
Joe Rogan Podcast.
Check it out. The Joe Rogan Experience.
Train by day. Joe Rogan Podcast by night. All day.
We got cigars. We got coffee. We got Mike Rowe. Cigars. Carl's over there snoring. So what were you doing on QVC?
What are you selling? That was the greatest line from Blazing Saddles, by the way. When Gene Hackman... Which line? He says, cigars? Remember? Peter Boyle has come. He had just left. And Gene Hackman is there after getting the soup spilled in his lap. And he's basically saying, I had cigars. As the creature stomps off in Frankenstein.
I don't remember that.
Tiny little moment.
It's been too long since I've seen that movie.
Best...
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Chapter 2: What are Mike Rowe's insights on skilled labor?
It's like watching the Beatles at the Ed Sullivan Theater. People are like, what's wrong with you people?
Why? What's happening? Mass psychosis.
Yeah, that's super interesting.
Do you know there's also a disproportionate number of motorcycle victims that test positive for toxo?
Did not.
Yeah, it makes people more impulsive. It makes them more reckless and impulsive. And countries that have high rates of toxoplasma have more successful soccer teams.
I read and I think I got more of these. I don't want to compete. I'm going to lose. But you'll love this. You probably already know it. Homeostatic risk and risk equilibrium and the unintended consequences, especially with motorcycle riders that emanate from safety protocols gone too far. Really? Yeah.
So like every like if you study the way you drive your motorcycle, like you measure every decision that you make in terms of cornering and speed and braking and all that stuff. Yeah. And then you measure the same things with all the safety gear employed, including a helmet, especially a helmet. You drive faster. You corner tighter.
You take more chances because the risk equilibrium that we all have in our brain. is different from one person to the next but what's the same is our desire to compensate for the environment around us so compensatory risk and the subconscious decisions that we might make behind the wheel when we're buckled up versus not buckled up when we have abs breaks As opposed to not having them.
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Chapter 3: How did Mike Rowe get started in entertainment?
And so that begs the question, what happens to a normal person who actually comes to believe either on the job site or just in life? that somebody else cares more about their well-being than they do. And it's like that's when complacency rears its ugly head. So on Dirty Jobs, it was just shorthand among the crew, but it was always safety third, which meant heads up, man.
Keep your head on a swivel. You can be as compliant as you want, but in the end, if you don't want to fall off the bridge, it's kind of on you.
Is there also a factor when you have a person who's the safety officer who's kind of annoying and they're like really like super interested and maybe you kind of like pawn off the safety aspect to them and then you don't think about it as much because someone's supposedly looking out for you?
How much do you think about that? proper driving technique when you're sitting in the back on your laptop or even up front next to it.
Depends on who's driving.
For sure.
If I was driving and my wife was in the back seat, she'd be paying attention a lot.
Shout out to your guy, what was his name? Ashton, who picked me up this morning. Excellent driver, man.
Oh, glad you're happy with it.
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Chapter 4: What were the challenges of filming Dirty Jobs?
What kind of fucking dudes are you hanging out with that were interested in doing this with you?
Well, one of them is basically my producer, a guy called Chuck Klausmeier, who I went to high school with, produces my podcast. And we still write, we'll write unauthorized jingles for our sponsors and sing them in four part harmony. I'm not saying it's cool. I'm just saying it's a thing that I did when I was young and I never really shook it. Cause like way leads onto way.
Right, so you knew how to sing.
I could carry it, too.
So you had some experience singing, kind of.
Yeah.
And then you decided you were going to learn how to sing opera.
Well, what really happened was I decided that my toolbox wasn't going to let me work in the construction trades or do anything my pop could do. And he really was a magician, and I really took his advice seriously. So I wanted to be in entertainment. I didn't want to be in the opera. I wanted to be on TV. But I needed an agent. And I couldn't get an agent unless I had my Screen Actors Guild card.
And I couldn't get my SAG card unless I had an agent. So I couldn't audition for things that I wanted to do unless I found a way around this weird tautology. And a friend of mine, a guy called Mike Gellert, told me, he said, hey, so there's the Screen Actors Guild. At the time, there was AFTRA, and I'm sure you were part of both. The thing you didn't know about was AGMA.
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Chapter 5: How does Mike Rowe view safety protocols in the workplace?
Do you have a script or are you kind of like you have this fax about the pencil? No. Nothing?
Nothing. Here's what happens. Again, it's probably changed today. I think QVC did $8 billion last year. Back in 1989, 1990, it was nothing like that. And if they hired – A salesman, that didn't mean you had anybody who understood really how to behave on TV. And if you hired a TV person, that didn't really mean you. Look at you. Oh, Jesus. That's the cat sack right there, dude.
That's a sack for your cat.
What are you selling? Let me hear this. A sack for your cat. What the fuck?
It's just crazy. They just love it. That's why this is a cat toy. I love it.
So the cats play with it? Yeah, they crawl inside it. And they just go nutty because it makes a lot of noise?
That's $25. That's $25?
So this is like sort of just personality, fucking around, having fun with the toy and selling it.
Well, that's what I did. Look, remember.
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Chapter 6: What is the significance of authenticity in media?
I started when I was just driving. So I was in high school still, so I think I started delivering papers when I was 17 or 18, whatever legal age they allow you to do it. So I was probably 17 or 18. I started driving, and I drove until I was – I just started doing stand-up comedy. I drove all throughout my competitive martial arts career. I drove in the morning.
It was good because it gave me discipline because I had to do it seven days a week, 365 days a year. You did not take any days off. It didn't matter if it snowed or rained or fucking frozen rain on the streets, black ice. It didn't matter. You got to deliver newspapers. And if they did delay it, it would delay your delivery of the paper.
So you'd have to call the depot, you know, hey, are we delivering yet? Because they didn't want to be responsible if it was a blizzard for people dying and get lawsuits. So they didn't make you deliver papers if it was unbelievably bad out. But for the most part, you drove every day.
So you had a sense of consequence too.
Yes. Discipline, consequence, you didn't deliver the papers, you didn't get paid. It was very simple. It was a very simple job. I don't even remember how they trained us. I think maybe they trained us for like one day. You were taught how to fold the paper. One, two, stuff it in the bag. You had plastic bags were great because you could chuck them out the window and it never damaged the paper.
Rubber bands are a real pain in the ass because you could hit a corner on the concrete. It would rip the corner of the paper, and then the customer would complain because they're trying to read about what's going on in Syria, and then there's this fucking broken piece of paper. I delivered the New York Times only because it was cool.
Like I delivered the Boston Globe because that was the biggest distribution. Like I could get the biggest route. And then the Boston Herald because I wanted more papers to deliver. So I would do two papers. And then New York Times. But New York Times is a pain in the ass because it would be like one every 10 blocks. You'd have an enormous route.
If you had 150 New York Times, that's an all-day excursion.
Did you start to equate the type of home you were delivering the type of paper to?
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Chapter 7: How did Mike Rowe's career evolve over the years?
That's only just the hardest thing there is to do.
But it's not really.
Then why don't more people do it?
Because they don't enjoy it. They don't enjoy it like I enjoy it. Like some people genuinely don't like talking to people. You know why? Because they're interested in themselves. You have to be interested in other people. I think we're all connected. I really firmly believe this in a non-hippie way. I think it's like a scientific concept.
reality i mean if i think if we could figure out a way to study it we would recognize that we were psychically all connected in some strange way and i i am curious as to how someone from with a different biology uh different life experiences different geographic location in which they were raised like how are they navigating the world and why are they interested in opera when What is it?
What got you to be a beekeeper? Why are you so fascinated with painting? What made you start writing music? I'm interested. I like talking to people. So for me, it is easy. It really is. It's just talking to people like I would talk to people. You and I could have the same exact conversation if we were having dinner somewhere.
For sure.
Same conversation. Yeah.
But again, it makes perfect sense. And it's not that it's difficult. It's just that very few people do it. And if your explanation is because very few people genuinely enjoy it, I can't disprove it. You're probably right.
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Chapter 8: What lessons did Mike Rowe learn from his experiences?
Yeah.
Because I kind of got him into it. And then his wife really got him into it. But he started going to the UFC. His wife was training in jiu-jitsu. And she got really into it. She was really loving it. And then she was like, let's go to the UFC. And he's like, this is fucking great. And then he came to one of my comedy shows. We became friends.
Started going to dinner, by the way, with Anthony Bourdain. It's the coolest fucking thing. It's gotta because you go to dinner with him and all the chefs freak out. Yeah, and so they just want to feed you Yeah, they just want to like don't touch the menu.
We got you and they come over and bring food and you know, I wrote a eulogy for him that crashed my website It's really funny I only I met him twice and Each time it was fairly brief But there was a time when he was doing No Reservations, Dirty Jobs was early on. I bet you Fear Factor was still in production then, too.
Yeah, Fear Factor was maybe. Fear Factor stopped in 2007, and No Reservations, I think, was around that time.
Yeah, he was on in six. For sure, Dirty Jobs went on in 03.
Yeah, and then the CNN show, which was, I think, like CNN's highlight of their time. And I think he really changed that network because all of a sudden that network was this fucking cool show where this guy had this brilliant narration and he had this wanderlust. But also with this like real fascination with people and cultures and just really loved it. He just loved going to Vietnam.
He loved going wherever he could go. He loved to eat their street food. He loved to talk to them. He really wanted to know what these people were all about, you know.
I've never, this will sound vainglorious, and I don't mean it to, but with the possible exception of me on Discovery in 2010, narrating half their shows and hosting Dirty Jobs, which was a thing, you know, I felt really triangulated then. But then when I met Tony, and I had a show on CNN at the same time. Actually, it was a companion show.
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