#319 Mike Rowe - What Happened to the American Dream?

**Mike Rowe** (0:01)
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**Shawn Ryan** (0:31)
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Mike Rowe.

**SPEAKER_3** (1:07)
Guilty.

**Shawn Ryan** (1:07)
Welcome.

**SPEAKER_3** (1:08)
Thank you for having me.

**Shawn Ryan** (1:09)
Thank you for coming. Like I was saying earlier, this is pretty surreal for me. I don't know how many episodes of Dirty Jobs I've watched, but it's been a lot of them.
And outside of TV, when you chime in on certain topics, you always just bring a very well-articulated sensibility to the topic that I think that everybody seems to rally around, and it's good to see.

**SPEAKER_3** (1:41)
Well, as Steve Martin said, when it comes to communication, some people have a way with words, and other people not have way.

**Shawn Ryan** (1:55)
Nice.

**SPEAKER_3** (1:55)
Well, look, we're in the communication business. You can call it whatever else you want, the entertainment business, whatever it is, TV show, podcast, influencers, journalism, whatever it is, we're in the business of trying to articulate an idea in a way that is credible enough to be taken seriously, but not so credible that it's douchey. And it's impossible to articulate and really know when you get it right.
It's kind of like a fat girl on a balance beam, you know? It's just like you're all over the place, always trying to find your equilibrium, you know, not wanting to go too far, say too much, not overreach, not sit the fight out, stay in the middle. All that stuff is challenging to navigate, but fun. I mean, look, the whole thing is a kick, and if you're not in on the joke, well, you lose.

**Shawn Ryan** (2:59)
Nice. How do you like podcasting?

**SPEAKER_3** (3:04)
I guess I love it. You know, I was late to the party. We were talking earlier about the...
So much of what you do, I think, is dictated by when you started. And I started in entertainment a long time ago, and I got very lucky to have some success at a time when podcast wasn't even a word, and traditional media was still traditional. And so, you know, I got some breaks early on and eventually got a show on the air that I was proud of, and then had a network behind me that supported it, and then had a bunch of spinoffs that magnified it. And so, I just came around at a time when I could have a...
God, I hate to say brand, because that is douchey. But I could have a point of view, and I could be consistent with that point of view in a way that the broad media was okay with. I couldn't do that today. I couldn't get Dirty Jobs. I couldn't sell that show today.

**Shawn Ryan** (4:18)
You don't think so?

**SPEAKER_3** (4:19)
Never in a million years. Couldn't sell it, couldn't film it, couldn't do anything like the way we did back in the day. That show literally Forrest Gumped its way onto the air.
It was deemed off-brand. I shot the pilot myself.

**Shawn Ryan** (4:41)
Did you really?

**SPEAKER_3** (4:42)
Three of them. Yeah. Yeah, I was working for CBS at the time, hosting a local show called Evening Magazine. It was just a little segment that I was doing, and it was very inappropriate for that show. But the viewers really, I was going to say the viewers loved it, but that's not entirely true either. Every time I put up a segment, I was calling them, somebody's got to do it. And it was just like Dirty Jobs, but it was an honest look at work through the eyes of the worker. Unscripted, no second takes, nothing like that. And the feedback from those segments way back in 2001 was, you think that's dirty? Where do you see what my dad does? My brother, my cousin, my uncle, my sister, where do you see what they do for a living? And I'd never seen feedback like that before around anything I had done. And I'd been freelancing in entertainment for 20 years before that. I was 42 at the time. And so I was like, wow, these are viewers who want to program this segment. And I thought that would be cool if it translated into a larger platform. And so that's kind of how it started with this idea that I work for the viewer. So to answer your question, do I like podcasting?