Bonus Episode: Jim Farley & Mike Rowe on the Essential Economy

I think that things are changing real fast and people understand that and they want to see how real leadership is pivoting and there's no sin in changing your mind. You know, the sin is in seeing a thing that demands a verdict and not passing a judgment on it.

Well, it has to go splat unfortunately. Yeah. Many things do in the course of a correction and what we need is a correction. There weren't a lot of silver linings to COVID but one of them was a reminder of where our bread was buttered and who was doing the buttering. And the essential economy, the essential worker began to re-emerge during the lockdowns. And that opened up a really interesting conversation. I got thousands of letters from people reminding me that Dirty Jobs was the original love letter to those vocations and why wouldn't we reboot it? And so we did. But we did a lot of other things too. My foundation, Mike Rowe Works evolved very organically out of Dirty Jobs back on Labor Day of 2008. And that happened in part... this was a very different environment but just real quick so your listeners understand what was happening that we were entering a recession in 2009. And I was at the... Dirty Jobs is at the height of its popularity. Yeah. And I was living in hotels going all over the country doing these jobs and every morning I'd get up and I'd see another headline and it was always about unemployment. It was always about the number of people who weren't working. And you know, from 7, 8, 9, 10 up to 11 and a half, 12%. But everywhere we were going, not everywhere but most places on Dirty Jobs, I was seeing help wanted signs. And so there was this narrative it seemed in the country that no one was paying attention to and that was rooted in the existence of at the time 2.3 million open positions that no one seemed to give a damn about. So, I started Mike Rowe Works simply as an ad hoc PR campaign for a few million good jobs, dirty jobs but jobs that required training and skill. And just kind of took it upon myself to go to Congress and start being noisy about the fact that even though 12 million people were out of work we've got a few million good jobs that was it a skill gap? Was it a will gap? Like what was the problem? So, that's how this started and to answer your question in those days the whole conversation about reskilling had to do with the fact that you had a bunch of people who needed the skills and a bunch of companies who needed the people. So, why couldn't these two groups... Right. But your question is important because it talks about the 300 million other people who are typically not a part of the conversation. And those people don't care about a shortage of plumbers until their toilet doesn't flush. Yeah. And then the question becomes how long do you wait? You know, a day? An hour? A week? You know, you flick the switch and the light doesn't come on. How long do you wait for the electrician? So, that has started to happen and people are starting to say, 'Well, wait a second.' especially with the lockdown, right? I mean we can't have this conversation without the fiber optics in the ground and suddenly you realize again, my whole business for a couple of years was down to a fiber optic line and I didn't even know the guy who was responsible for maintaining it. Yeah. And so what has to happen in general I believe is we have to get reconnected as a country to that part of the workforce upon which we rely most profoundly. And that's a hard thing to do because there's some fault in our stars that leads us to resent that which we rely upon. Right? Like when I see someone who's incredibly gifted, maybe an electrician and let's say I need one. Yes. Well what's going on with me? Like why am I angry that I'm waiting? Why do I feel put upon? Why am I upset with a shortage of electricians? The macro economist in me would say, 'Well, because a healthy economy can't have this shortage blah blah blah blah blah.' But really what's going on with me is that I hate the fact that I can't fix this damn thing myself. Yeah. I hate that. I've become... I'm not competent the way I wish I was and the very competence that exists within the electrician is a reminder of my own shortcoming and so I start to resent that guy and I want to keep him at a distance. I really don't want to hear about his problems or his dreams or his hopes or his frustrations, right? So I wrote a book years ago called Profoundly Disconnected and it was really a rumination on my own weird journey of being a kid and being utterly gobsmacked by my granddad's ability to fix or repair anything to this 40-year-old in Hollywood who had become, you know, not maliciously indifferent but just I just lost my wonder for where my food came from and where my energy came from. I see. I see. And that happens. It's not a... it happens to everyone. So, Dirty Jobs reconnected me on a very personal level to all the things in my life that I really depend on but can't do for myself. And Mike Rowe Works was an attempt to tell that story through something a bit more philanthropic.