August 8, 2023 • 41 mins
Mike kicks off our special series “Supporting Greatness” where we interview those who’ve achieved public greatness about the unsung heroes and normal folks who’ve supported them. He hilariously (and beautifully) pays tribute to his father, grandfather, scoutmaster, and high school music teacher.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
If you're not laughing, the joke's on you. That's a
good point, my grandfather. You say, if you're in.
Speaker 2 (00:08):
A room full of people and you can't figure out
who the stupid one is, you're in trouble. You just
figured it out, gragulations dumb at that voice right there, guys,
is not a normal one. So we'll explain why Mike
Rowe is on an army of normal folks right after
(00:30):
these brief messages from our general sponsors. Our whole podcast
(00:54):
is based on the platform that there's normal folks that
have financial troubles, family troubles, difficulties in life, and they
do extraordinary things in all corners of our culture and society,
and those stories are rarely told because we're dominated by
the press in New York and the division in DC
(01:15):
and the social media coming out of your neck of
the woods that says, if you don't look like me,
think like me, breathe like me, worship like me, or
vote like me, you must be my enemy. And this
decades long division that's been percolating in culture, I think
can largely be fixed or at least mended by the
(01:39):
celebration of normal people doing extraordinary things in their neck
of the woods, because I don't care how you vote,
who you are, what you look like. We can all
celebrate humanity and decency in each corner of the world.
Speaker 1 (01:54):
And so.
Speaker 2 (01:56):
That's what the show is. And we have a an
occasional intermission form our normal folks stories and we will
talk to people who aren't so normal, and really the
not so normal people that we talk to, it's not
really about them, but it's about who helped them when
(02:19):
they were normal. In other words, what normal people helped
them to their success. And we call these special segments
supporting Greatness. And today we have a most normal of
non normal people that you could imagine. He's famed for
his show Dirty Jobs, and his name is Mike ro
(02:42):
and Bro. I can't tell you how much I appreciate
you joining us.
Speaker 1 (02:45):
I can't. I can't think of a time that where
somebody has introduced me is abnormal in such a nice way.
But thank you. I'll take it.
Speaker 2 (02:56):
Well, you are abnormal. So we want to talk about
who supported your greatness, and that's what we're going to
get into real quick. But first, Mike, I want to
know what's up with this thing right here.
Speaker 1 (03:11):
I once had a whiskey made for me back in
a place called Tennessee. The taste was grand, so I
agreed to call my whiskey Noble. The noble Man come
to bring up bottle for everyone take. So that's me
(03:34):
uh singing a very old sea chanty called the Wellerman,
and the Wellerman was dragged back into the spotlight during
the lockdowns when some guy over in Scotland recorded it
in four part harmony and threw it out on TikTok,
(03:54):
and billions of people started a whole sea sea chanty craze. So,
speaking of normal people, I released a line of whiskey
during the lockdowns called Noble, named after the most normal
guy I knew, Karl Noble, who happened to be my granddad,
the guy to whom Dirty Jobs was dedicated and the
(04:16):
foundation that I run today. So to celebrate, or perhaps
mourn the return of Dirty Jobs, I got my hands
on some five year old Tennessee whiskey. I put my
pop's name on it, and I started having virtual drinks
with fans of Dirty Jobs sitting right where I'm sitting now.
I'd send a bottle out to a longtime fan, we'd
(04:37):
have a sip or two and have a conversation. I
started putting those out there into the world, and somehow
or another, we raised a bunch of money for my
foundation and launched a whiskey brand that started with that
very thing you just showed me walking along the beach,
turning the wellerman into the nobleman, and wondering if anyone
would pay.
Speaker 2 (04:56):
Attention, which clearly they did. And it's whiskey I think
has made my home state right.
Speaker 1 (05:03):
Right, it is down in Columbia, Tennessee. Yeah, you know
I'm here, Nashville. Yep. I didn't do like you kind
of look around if you're me and you take stock
in the landscape, and what you don't say is, oh, okay,
I see what our country needs. Our country needs another
celebrity bourbon brand immediately. That's what needs to happen, right.
(05:27):
And I didn't do the whole Matthew McConaughey thing, where
you know, you're walking in slow motion through a wheat field,
sampling and trying all the different possible recipes. I just
met a guy who had some five year old juice
in the barrel and a buyer. Well, it just didn't
work out the way it was supposed to and suddenly
(05:48):
it was available and I tasted it and loved it,
and that's what happened. That's what life is, Bill.
Speaker 2 (05:55):
You know, you could have gone the Diddy version and
done some vodka and like break dancing in some cool
place in the same systems.
Speaker 1 (06:05):
You never say never to these things. But in my experience,
you kind of play the play the cards you get.
It's kind of crawl, walk and then run. Here's the
stuff you're talking about.
Speaker 2 (06:16):
It's it is.
Speaker 1 (06:18):
Yeah, we just did a barrel strength right, it's got
my power up. I keep it down here in the bunker,
you know, to break in case of emergencies. You never
know how these podcasts are going to go. Sometimes, well,
that's on reserve. It's it's always standing by absolutely.
Speaker 2 (06:34):
Yeah, that's that's Noble on reserve. I wonder how it
would go with a little splash of sweet vermouth and
a Maraschino cherry. Because I'm a Manhattan guy.
Speaker 1 (06:43):
It would taste a lot like a Manhattan I dare say,
I dare say.
Speaker 2 (06:48):
So that was a great segue too. I want to
talk about a few people that I've read about and
heard you talk about that did support your greatness and
The first one is grandfather, which you've touched on. But
why you know, I've read that he was kind of
a jack of all trades electrician, could do plumbing. I've
(07:11):
read the story of the toilet exploding, and you know,
I'd love for you to tell that story. But more
importantly for me, Mike, is why did he matter to
you so much? You know, not what he did that
makes him an amazing normal guy. But again, the topic
is supporting greatness. So what is it that you really
(07:36):
deeply defines you that is the piece of him that
lasts in your life forever.
Speaker 1 (07:45):
Yeah, I mean it's a lot to unpack. But let
me first say that as you were describing what your
podcast is, I was I was chuckling to myself because
it sounded a lot like the pitch I gave to
Discovery for Dirty Jobs twenty years ago, which at the
time was pretty revolutionary. You know, there was no reality
TV on the air, per se, and all of the
(08:07):
nonfiction stuff that I'd ever been involved in relied on
abnormal people, right experts. But there there was a moment.
There was a moment there, like they call it the
Overton window, you know, where my little idea for this show,
Forrest gumped its way onto the air and found a
toe hold, and the whole pitch was, Look, what if
(08:32):
what if we treated normal people the way access Hollywood treats.
Brad Pitt's right, right? What if we go into a
sewer with a full crew, and rather than turn the
sewer inspector into the punchline of some joke, or rather
than just revel in the pure spectacle of wading through
(08:54):
other people's crap, why don't we let him be the
expert and let me learn as his prentice, and just
let the cameras be a fly on the wall. And
that's really what the show was. And to answer your question,
the reason that show look the way it looked is
because that's how I grew up next to my granddad,
(09:17):
working as his apprentice, determined to follow in his footsteps.
And of course, the great truth in life one of many.
And I'm sure you've seen this yourself and your exploits.
But just because you just because you love something, doesn't
mean you can't suck at it.
Speaker 2 (09:36):
And it's so true.
Speaker 1 (09:41):
And conversely, and maybe even more importantly, just because you
don't love something, just because you're not really into something,
doesn't necessarily mean you might not have a great facility
for it. Right. How many running backs did you meet
in your career that turned out to be a better
tight end? Maybe this or that, right, You don't really
(10:02):
know necessarily, But when I was fifteen or sixteen, I
was pretty sure I was going to follow one of
my pop's footsteps. Who, to your point, could take apart
your watch and put it back together blindfolded, could deconstruct
a combine put it back together a combustion engine, could
build a house without a blueprint. He only went to
the seventh grade, but he was a magician built right.
(10:23):
He was a magician in the sense that every day
I remember seeing he and my dad would they'd wake
up clean, go out into the world to fix some problem,
to build a barn, to put in a waterline, to
dig a well, whatever it was, and come home dirty,
and somehow in between, magically a thing got fixed, a
(10:47):
problem got corrected, a thing was built right.
Speaker 2 (10:56):
And now a few messages from our general sponsors. But first,
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(11:21):
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You get all that cool stuff, and we're going to
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(11:41):
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(12:02):
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us and click on premium if you're down to help.
If not, just keep listening. We'll be right back. How
(12:40):
old Mike were you when you woke up to the
fact that you should revere your father and grandfather for
the hard work they were doing. When did that click
for you that they were special.
Speaker 1 (12:55):
That's a great question, because there's no answer. I never
had a real liation or a parapetea. I never had
a big aha moment where I suddenly realized my dad
and my granddad were each great in their own way.
I had a front row seat to their greatness, right,
And if the point of this conversation is really to
(13:16):
elevate that component, right, then I got to tell you
I got the best cards in the world. We didn't
have much money, but one of the genius things my
pop did, my grandfather I'm talking about Carl Noble, was
years ago when they put in ninety five, you know,
the big interstate up and down the East Coast. His
(13:38):
little farmhouse was right in the way of an off ramp,
and so the state gave him the option of either
writing of a check or relocating his home right someplace
of his choosing nearby. My granddad chose to put his
home on the top of a hill, an isolated hill
(14:02):
that was flanked on one side by Stemmers Run Creek,
on the other side by about one hundred acres of
lowland marsh and thick woods, and on the third side
the off ramp to ninety five, which would be built
about one hundred yards down a steep grade filled with
pine trees. It sounded like the ocean. In fact, my
(14:26):
mother told me it was for the first twelve years
of my life, and I believed her like a fool.
But my grandfather very strategically put his home in a
place where he knew no one could develop. But he
also knew that the power lines back in the woods
had to be maintained by the state. So the state
(14:46):
put in this gravel road, built a wooden bridge over
the creek, And I wound up growing up next to
my grandfather in a place that you just couldn't well,
you couldn't dream up up. It was completely isolated. It
felt like the middle of Colorado, somewhere we didn't actually
(15:07):
own all the land we had access too, but we
had access to it exclusively, so we built barns. There's
no one there. There's no one there, and the state
didn't care.
Speaker 2 (15:19):
Where is that where I'm trying.
Speaker 1 (15:22):
This is Baltimore County, Maryland. Yeah, I grew up on
a little farm in Baltimore County, Maryland that most people
would never even think of as farmland because it was
only three miles from the city line. And so I was.
I was. I was in a bubble bill the best
(15:43):
kind of bubble right, because I had a mom and
dad who were devoted to each other and raised my
brothers and me with great love and care. But right
next to them, I had this second set of parents,
my mom's parents, who functioned like this, like this walking
(16:03):
proof of every good lesson my dad ever tried to
drill into my head. So you know, I never I
never felt poor, I never felt bored. I had access
to deep and endless woods. I had chores, I had
(16:23):
horsecrap to pick up every day, I had wood to cut.
Our home was heated by a woodstove. And I had
two men in my earliest memories, two men who were
always there, who loved each other. This father, this man
and his son in law. Right, they were very, very close,
(16:44):
and they raised my brothers and me in a way
that had so much meaning and so much impact that
we didn't have the good sense to know it until
decades later, when we looked back at it and saw
it for the unique situation that it was so.
Speaker 2 (17:02):
Again, if if you can, I'm I'm an I'm a
touchy feely guy. What is the essence of your grandfather?
That is a part of the definition of who you
are today.
Speaker 1 (17:19):
Humility. That's a great word, first and foremost. It's it's humility.
And look, it's sound. It's a very weird thing and
maybe a little ironic to brag about your humbleness. I
would say that, and I don't. That's that's a definition
of irony. Bro Yeah, right, you know what makes me
(17:42):
so great? It's that I'm so damn humble. Mac Davis
had a great song about that. Remember, oh lord, it's
hard to be humbling, Yeah, when you're perfect in every way.
Speaker 2 (17:51):
Yeah, sure, it's a great song.
Speaker 1 (17:54):
So what happened to me was my my my granddad
was the very definition of humility. He affirmatively ran from credit,
and yet he was one of the most competent people
that I ever that I ever knew, and juxtaposed to me,
you know, once I realized that I wasn't going to
follow in his footsteps, Once I learned gently in his
(18:15):
presence that the handy gene was recessive, and that the
things that came easy to him, did not come easy
to me. This was the guy by the way, Carl Noble,
who told me maybe the best advice I ever got.
He said, look, Mike, I get it. You want to
be like me. You want to be a tradesman. You
can be a tradesman. Anybody can be a tradesman. But
(18:38):
you need a different toolbox. And so and so I
got one. You know, I went to a community college.
I learned to do a bunch of things I wasn't
really interested in, like acting and writing and singing and
so forth. And you know, that way led onto a way,
and you know, I'm really summing up a couple decades
(19:00):
for you. But to answer your question, I found success
in the entertainment business, not a ton of it, but
enough of it to become arrogant. I learned that I
could work pretty much whenever I felt like it. I
took many months off every year. I took my retirement
in early installments, and I felt I felt like I
(19:23):
had figured something out that was important. And then one day,
when I was forty two years old, working right across
the bay there I can almost see my old office
at CBS, my mom called me. I was sitting in
my cubicle hosting a I'd been hosting a TV show
in those days called Evening Magazine, and she called to say, Michael,
(19:45):
you know your grandfather turned ninety years old yesterday, and
I was just thinking, wouldn't it be terrific if before
he died he could turn on his television and see
you doing something that looked like work.
Speaker 2 (20:00):
That he actually would respect.
Speaker 1 (20:04):
I mean, it's not that he didn't respect everything that,
you know what I mean? Men like that. They want
to see something that reminds them of work. They want
to see something of themselves in TV shows.
Speaker 2 (20:18):
I own. I own a hardwood lumber manufacturing facility, and well,
you know, it's it's a dirt it's a dirty job.
It's hot when it's summertime, it's cold when it's wintertime.
It's dust flying through the air, hydraulic grease everything. And
sure I have people in the office doing office stuff,
but the vast majority of one hundred and thirty employees
(20:40):
or outside working hard kilns, chains, conveyors, noise, ripsaws. You know,
if you have all one of all ten digits, you're
really not a lumberman. You know. It's that kind of place,
and and I have I have an enormous amount of
(21:03):
respect for each of my employees that show up every
day at seven am and work till three point thirty
in any overtime hours. I ask them to help my
company be successful because those men they work, and those
men respect people that show up and work. And I
assume your grandfather would have had some of the same mentality.
(21:24):
When I say respect, I mean they respect, they understand.
There's there's just a there's a there's a shrinking number
of people and our culture that understand what eight hours
on a jackhammer is. And I all right.
Speaker 1 (21:43):
And there's no way to there's no way to teach it.
Speaker 2 (21:45):
Well, there's one way. You get on top of it
and pull the handle.
Speaker 1 (21:49):
That's right. That's it. I mean, it's just experience to
your point and regarding humility, you know, it was a
very uh, it was it was a very humbling moment
for me because after that phone call from my mother, right,
I took a cameraman into the sewers of San Francisco
and I hosted an episode of Evening Magazine down there,
(22:10):
and that footage was so shocking, so inappropriate, and so
delightfully hideous that it actually got me fired from CBS,
but it became the heart. It became the demo tape
that I used to sell Dirty Jobs. And as Dirty
(22:31):
Jobs found its audience and really began to take hold,
two things happened that are relevant to the goal of
your podcast. The first is that I got a level
of feedback I'd never seen before in TV. Not merely
positive feedback, not oh, Mike, that's so funny or that's
so interesting. The feedback I got that shocked me was
(22:56):
you think that was dirty? Way do you see what
my dad does? What do you see what my grandfather did,
my cousin, my brother, my uncle, my sister, my aunt,
my uncle. Right, it's like, way, do you see the
lumber yard where they work? Way do you see this? Way?
Do you see that? And so I realized that there
was a giant world out there of pre built sets
(23:19):
called job sites, and there were a giant number of
people out there, called real people from which we could
learn something. And so once I realized that I once
I realized that I was a better guest than I
was a host in the TV world, then everything changed.
(23:42):
And and to realize that is very humbling. You you
have to you have to let go of the idea
that you're the expert, that you're the host, that you're
the person with knowledge that you're going to share with
your audience. All that goes out the window and you
become an apprentice. And if there's a if there's a
(24:04):
punchline to a joke, if there's a brunt to a joke,
it's on you. Yeah, right. The expert is the manner
of woman you're working with. So that's what my granddad
taught me. It's like, look, I had success in TV,
I was doing okay, I was happy, but things didn't
really blow up for me until I really kind of
(24:28):
re embraced the humility that that my pop had demonstrated
to me as a boy day after day, week after week,
month after month, and year after year.
Speaker 2 (24:40):
So we can say that what supported the greatness of
Dirty Jobs was the lessons and the uh and and
the work done by your grandfather, who you've now named
a whiskey after, which is interesting too. Went Okay, so
we got humility from grand I got it. We'll be
(25:08):
right back. Talk to me about Glendon Huntington.
Speaker 1 (25:31):
Well, you've done some research.
Speaker 2 (25:32):
Good for you, Thank you. So much we can read
in Memphis.
Speaker 1 (25:38):
Glen Huntingdon was a colonel in the army, and he
was probably the first man outside of men who were
related to me, that changed the trajectory of my life.
He was a Scout master in Troop sixteen, and I
(26:00):
was a weirdly shy kid, Bill. I had a bad stammer.
When I was eleven twelve years old thirteen, my dad
and mom decided that the Boy Scouts would be good
for me. They drove me to Kenwood United Presbyterian Church
one Wednesday night, pushed me out of the slow rolling
station wagon with the fake lumber on the side, and
(26:21):
sent me into the church based family.
Speaker 2 (26:23):
Roads where that's a family roadstream.
Speaker 1 (26:25):
Oh, yeah, that's.
Speaker 2 (26:26):
What it was.
Speaker 1 (26:27):
I think it was a I think it was a
town in country station wagon, the wood paneling down the side.
Probably green, yeah, nice, Who knows. At that point everything
was green and beige. I lived in a green and
beige world, you know, including the boy Scout uniform, which
(26:49):
I would confronted that night.
Speaker 2 (26:51):
Mike, you said you had a stammer. Do you mean
what is a stammer? Shy and couldn't gather as.
Speaker 1 (26:58):
Words or like a real life ste I didn't know
at the time. I would learn. I would learn over
the next couple of years. My my condition, whatever it was,
was cured partially by Glendon Huntington and partially by another guy.
I'm pretty sure you're going to ask me about a
high school music teacher, but I didn't. It wasn't a
(27:21):
full on porky pig of ebit to b B to B,
but that's all folks kind of thing it was. It was.
It was a nervous tick uh, brought on I think
by just a weird level of shyness. I didn't like
I didn't like people looking at me, and when they did,
I just froze up in a way that made t's
(27:45):
and s's problematic.
Speaker 2 (27:49):
Given your career, that's almost mel Tillis type story. It's
it's like, doesn't fit, it's amazing. Well, that's where you
came from and that's who you are. Now that's crazy.
Speaker 1 (28:04):
Well, look, I mean, you can change the road that
you're on. You know, I don't think you. I don't
think people can change the fundamental essence of who they are.
But you can act like somebody you'd rather be, And
sometimes that's a big step in the right direction. That's
why we have role models. That's why we have mentors.
(28:26):
You know, you're trying to figure out who you want
to be Glendon Huntington and by the way, the quick Sidebar.
The Boy Scouts of America in nineteen seventy five nineteen
seventy six, at least in Troop sixteen, was a different
Boy Scouts, right. This was not a safe space. This
was basically an organized gang run by a former colonel
(28:50):
who brought extraordinary discipline, extraordinary political incorrectness, an extraordinary sense
of consequence to the proceedings. We were divided into patrols.
We had patrol leaders. There was this senior patrol leader.
There was an oath, there were rituals, there were sacred pledges.
(29:13):
You know, we took all that stuff very seriously. There
was also a boxing ring where, you know, young men
settled their differences in a time honored way. There were
shooting lessons, archery lessons. You know, we were all taught
how to handle firearms. It was it was a whole
new world for me.
Speaker 2 (29:33):
I want I want to be in your Boy Scout troup.
Speaker 1 (29:37):
I want to be in the cap man. I bet,
I bet.
Speaker 2 (29:39):
It was awesome. So how did he help you, how
did he support you? What did he do?
Speaker 1 (29:48):
He taught me that, you know, most most coaches, most
most men who are really trying to instill some kind
of work ethic in their charges, will try and find
a way to help to help the person understand that
(30:12):
adversity needs to be confronted and challenges are not the enemy,
and that you have to be willing to be uncomfortable
in many, many different ways. What mister Huntington showed me
was that that's not quite enough. That's not quite where
(30:35):
you want to go. That'll get you so far, but
if you want to get beyond that, it's not enough
to be willing to endure something uncomfortable. You have to
find a way to like it, Like as the Navy
seals would say, you have to you have to embrace
the suck. You need to enjoy it. So and I
(30:58):
didn't know enough at the time, was just a boy.
But when I look around today, you know most of
the people who have truly distinguished themselves in life have
found a way to not just welcome adversity, but to
look at square in the face and laugh hysterically even
as they spit in its eye. And so the first
(31:20):
lesson I had in a real world was he knew
I stammered, but he also knew you couldn't stammer when
you sang. And for all his machismo, for all of
you know, the boxing and the wrestling and the guns,
he loved poetry and he loved music. And the boy
(31:43):
Scouts at these jamborees, we'd have these fires, these big campfires, right,
and sometimes parents would come and other troops would come
in one hundred people, two hundred people would be gathered
around this giant fire, and we would do these skits
and we would sing these songs. And Glenden Huntington forced
me to sing a song in front of a couple
(32:04):
of hundred people. And when I sang that song, I
didn't stutter and I didn't stammer, And it was the
first time a little light bulb went off in my head.
Now it was also a deeply inappropriate song that I
never should have sung in a boy Scout uniform at
(32:25):
a jamboree in front of a couple hundred people. The
question was, what's the song? I gotta know what the
song was. Do you remember a famous Harvard mathematician and
musician named Tom Lera.
Speaker 2 (32:38):
I'm sorry, I wish I did, I don't I will
when we finished talking.
Speaker 1 (32:44):
This guy was the ultimate satirist in the sixties and seventies.
He made very inappropriate albums and he sang like in
a Dixieland jazz type style. He wrote all his own compositions,
but all the songs were were parodies poisoning Pigeons in
the Park, the Vatican rag the songs like these. I
(33:07):
sang a song and don't ask me how I went
up with this album as a kid, but I had
it and I loved it. And I sang a song
called be Prepared. And of course be prepared is the
boy scout motto, right, And so Glendon Huntington insisted that
I sing a song. I didn't tell him what I
was going to sing, but I walked out there in
front of the fire. I probably don't remember all the words,
(33:29):
but it went something like, be prepared. That's the boy
scout marching song. Be prepared, follow it, you won't go wrong.
Be prepared to hold your liquor pretty well. Don't write
naughty words on walls if you can't spelled, be prepared
to hide that pack of cigarettes. Don't make book if
you cannot cover bets. Keep that pot well hidden where
(33:51):
you're sure that it will not be found. And be
careful not to turn on when the scout masters around,
for he only will insist that it be shit. Be prepared,
not just the first verse, right, micro everybody would be prepared.
Thank you, take about like that's amazing. So your scout
(34:15):
master hazed you out of stuttering. That's pretty much really
getting from Yeah, but in the most loving way. Yeah. Yeah.
He started the process. And what he unlocked in me
was a realization that music a thing that I had
grown up with but had no interest in. My mom's
(34:36):
very musical, you know, I was always around. I just
didn't care, you know, But I can carry a tune, right,
And so that was the first time I realized, wait
a second, that music could be useful for something other
than merely enjoying. Right. It's a It transformed the physiology
or the physiology of my body. And and and that
(34:59):
was interesting. That combined with the dangerousness of the games
that we played and the stakes and the whitewater rafting
and the mountaineering in Cimarron, Sito in New Mexico and
insane games bill like Swing the Thing. Have you heard
of Swing the Thing? Swing? Jesus, this is Mike.
Speaker 2 (35:23):
This is you know, this is this is a family show.
Speaker 1 (35:27):
Well look not that thing. And besides you look, if
you can swing that thing, good for you. I'm not
swing it and barely find it. But we we played
games like Capture the Flag and British Bulldog violent games,
and this game called Swing the Thing. You would take
(35:47):
up a tent bag and you would fill it with
wet rags, and then you would take a length of
rope about fourteen feet long, and you tie it to
the top of the bag, and one guy would hold
the other end of the rope and start to swing
the bag around right just about maybe maybe a foot
(36:09):
off the floor, no more than that. So he's in
the middle and you jump. So you got twenty guys
all stepping in jumping over this thing that's being swung
at about forty miles an hour, by the way, there's
a lot of physics going on. And when that thing
hit you in the ankles, you went down like a
cheap card table. People went home with contusions, chipped teeth,
(36:34):
broken fingers. Was a blood bath. But you know, nobody died. Right,
All of that combined is my answer to your question.
That's what the boy Scouts did for me. And I
recognized the value early on, and I stayed. I became
an eagle scout. Hell years later I became I think
they call it a distinguished eagle Scout. And to this day,
(36:57):
you know, I look back on those experiences. Is very instructive.
So on this one, the same question. If there's one
word to sum up the essence of what your scout
master buried, built and harvested inside of you, If your
(37:18):
grandfather's humility, what is the scout master. Well, if there's
only one word, you'll forgive me if I employ the
use of hyphens, but I'll go with embrace hyphen the
hyphen suck and embrace suck. Yeah, embrace discomfort, be uncomfortable, Yeah, yeah,
(37:39):
I mean the virtues of discomfort.
Speaker 2 (37:41):
I fear of failures the greatest barrier to success.
Speaker 1 (37:44):
And if you're unwilling to be uncomfortable and get out
of that, you're you're never going to find any level
of growth. Really, well, you've already gone as far as
you're going to go right now. If you go any
further and your goal is to be comfortable. You're only
going to progress through a series of happy accidents, you know, Yeah, Mike.
(38:05):
And you know there's another lesson there, which is, you know,
a comfort zone is I think we all need a
comfort zone.
Speaker 2 (38:13):
You know. It may be a church group, It may
be a foursome of golf. It may be a group
of people you play bridge with. It may be a
little cafe corner table where you share a coffee or
glass wine where you kind of recharge your batteries and
share your most centimate secrets when the world hits you
in the mouth.
Speaker 1 (38:34):
I have one.
Speaker 2 (38:35):
It's my leather chair, and I'm not kidding. If I
die in a fiery accident today and they cannot identify
my body by dental records, they could match my app
to the cushion on that chair and they'd know who
I was, because it's my chair.
Speaker 1 (38:49):
That's forensic science right there, Bill.
Speaker 2 (38:51):
That's what it is. Kids don't sit in at nothing.
But it's my comfort zone. But you know the thing
about my time in that chair, nothing profound has ever
happened in my life for the lives of anybody around
me while I was sitting in it. And I think metaphorically,
that is the problem with the comfort zone is if
(39:12):
you're unwilling to if you have fear failure, or you're
unwilling to embrace the suck, or you're unwilling to get
out of those comfortable places you have hit a human
stops on. Like you say, I think that's absolutely true,
and so embracing the suck makes a lot of sense.
Speaker 1 (39:28):
Well, there's a paradox in it too. You know, as
much as you love the comfort of your chair, if
you never leave it, you'll grow to hate it. You'll
get bed sorece.
Speaker 2 (39:40):
That's profound, Mike. That's really good.
Speaker 1 (39:43):
You have to get up and leave the thing that
makes you comfortable, not because it builds character, but simply
because you won't have You can't even define what comfortable
is until or unless you've been uncomfortable.
Speaker 2 (40:01):
Makes a lot of sense, Mike. Hey, that's so you
can use it.
Speaker 1 (40:05):
Go ahead and take it, man. I'm let's start to
my second book. I'm using it brilliance I learned one
day chatting with Mike. There you get look, and that
concludes part one of my really interesting conversation with Mike Rowe,
(40:30):
and I hope you listen to Part two that's now
available as Mike is not anywhere close to finished celebrating
Youngsun heroes and normal folks who supported him. And if
you have any ideas or know of any folks.
Speaker 2 (40:45):
Who we should consider featuring on our special series Supporting Greatness,
write me anytime at Bill at Normalfolks dot us. I
look forward to seeing you in Part two
If you're not laughing, the joke's on you. That's a
good point, my grandfather. You say, if you're in.
Speaker 2 (00:08):
A room full of people and you can't figure out
who the stupid one is, you're in trouble. You just
figured it out, gragulations dumb at that voice right there, guys,
is not a normal one. So we'll explain why Mike
Rowe is on an army of normal folks right after
(00:30):
these brief messages from our general sponsors. Our whole podcast
(00:54):
is based on the platform that there's normal folks that
have financial troubles, family troubles, difficulties in life, and they
do extraordinary things in all corners of our culture and society,
and those stories are rarely told because we're dominated by
the press in New York and the division in DC
(01:15):
and the social media coming out of your neck of
the woods that says, if you don't look like me,
think like me, breathe like me, worship like me, or
vote like me, you must be my enemy. And this
decades long division that's been percolating in culture, I think
can largely be fixed or at least mended by the
(01:39):
celebration of normal people doing extraordinary things in their neck
of the woods, because I don't care how you vote,
who you are, what you look like. We can all
celebrate humanity and decency in each corner of the world.
Speaker 1 (01:54):
And so.
Speaker 2 (01:56):
That's what the show is. And we have a an
occasional intermission form our normal folks stories and we will
talk to people who aren't so normal, and really the
not so normal people that we talk to, it's not
really about them, but it's about who helped them when
(02:19):
they were normal. In other words, what normal people helped
them to their success. And we call these special segments
supporting Greatness. And today we have a most normal of
non normal people that you could imagine. He's famed for
his show Dirty Jobs, and his name is Mike ro
(02:42):
and Bro. I can't tell you how much I appreciate
you joining us.
Speaker 1 (02:45):
I can't. I can't think of a time that where
somebody has introduced me is abnormal in such a nice way.
But thank you. I'll take it.
Speaker 2 (02:56):
Well, you are abnormal. So we want to talk about
who supported your greatness, and that's what we're going to
get into real quick. But first, Mike, I want to
know what's up with this thing right here.
Speaker 1 (03:11):
I once had a whiskey made for me back in
a place called Tennessee. The taste was grand, so I
agreed to call my whiskey Noble. The noble Man come
to bring up bottle for everyone take. So that's me
(03:34):
uh singing a very old sea chanty called the Wellerman,
and the Wellerman was dragged back into the spotlight during
the lockdowns when some guy over in Scotland recorded it
in four part harmony and threw it out on TikTok,
(03:54):
and billions of people started a whole sea sea chanty craze. So,
speaking of normal people, I released a line of whiskey
during the lockdowns called Noble, named after the most normal
guy I knew, Karl Noble, who happened to be my granddad,
the guy to whom Dirty Jobs was dedicated and the
(04:16):
foundation that I run today. So to celebrate, or perhaps
mourn the return of Dirty Jobs, I got my hands
on some five year old Tennessee whiskey. I put my
pop's name on it, and I started having virtual drinks
with fans of Dirty Jobs sitting right where I'm sitting now.
I'd send a bottle out to a longtime fan, we'd
(04:37):
have a sip or two and have a conversation. I
started putting those out there into the world, and somehow
or another, we raised a bunch of money for my
foundation and launched a whiskey brand that started with that
very thing you just showed me walking along the beach,
turning the wellerman into the nobleman, and wondering if anyone
would pay.
Speaker 2 (04:56):
Attention, which clearly they did. And it's whiskey I think
has made my home state right.
Speaker 1 (05:03):
Right, it is down in Columbia, Tennessee. Yeah, you know
I'm here, Nashville. Yep. I didn't do like you kind
of look around if you're me and you take stock
in the landscape, and what you don't say is, oh, okay,
I see what our country needs. Our country needs another
celebrity bourbon brand immediately. That's what needs to happen, right.
(05:27):
And I didn't do the whole Matthew McConaughey thing, where
you know, you're walking in slow motion through a wheat field,
sampling and trying all the different possible recipes. I just
met a guy who had some five year old juice
in the barrel and a buyer. Well, it just didn't
work out the way it was supposed to and suddenly
(05:48):
it was available and I tasted it and loved it,
and that's what happened. That's what life is, Bill.
Speaker 2 (05:55):
You know, you could have gone the Diddy version and
done some vodka and like break dancing in some cool
place in the same systems.
Speaker 1 (06:05):
You never say never to these things. But in my experience,
you kind of play the play the cards you get.
It's kind of crawl, walk and then run. Here's the
stuff you're talking about.
Speaker 2 (06:16):
It's it is.
Speaker 1 (06:18):
Yeah, we just did a barrel strength right, it's got
my power up. I keep it down here in the bunker,
you know, to break in case of emergencies. You never
know how these podcasts are going to go. Sometimes, well,
that's on reserve. It's it's always standing by absolutely.
Speaker 2 (06:34):
Yeah, that's that's Noble on reserve. I wonder how it
would go with a little splash of sweet vermouth and
a Maraschino cherry. Because I'm a Manhattan guy.
Speaker 1 (06:43):
It would taste a lot like a Manhattan I dare say,
I dare say.
Speaker 2 (06:48):
So that was a great segue too. I want to
talk about a few people that I've read about and
heard you talk about that did support your greatness and
The first one is grandfather, which you've touched on. But
why you know, I've read that he was kind of
a jack of all trades electrician, could do plumbing. I've
(07:11):
read the story of the toilet exploding, and you know,
I'd love for you to tell that story. But more
importantly for me, Mike, is why did he matter to
you so much? You know, not what he did that
makes him an amazing normal guy. But again, the topic
is supporting greatness. So what is it that you really
(07:36):
deeply defines you that is the piece of him that
lasts in your life forever.
Speaker 1 (07:45):
Yeah, I mean it's a lot to unpack. But let
me first say that as you were describing what your
podcast is, I was I was chuckling to myself because
it sounded a lot like the pitch I gave to
Discovery for Dirty Jobs twenty years ago, which at the
time was pretty revolutionary. You know, there was no reality
TV on the air, per se, and all of the
(08:07):
nonfiction stuff that I'd ever been involved in relied on
abnormal people, right experts. But there there was a moment.
There was a moment there, like they call it the
Overton window, you know, where my little idea for this show,
Forrest gumped its way onto the air and found a
toe hold, and the whole pitch was, Look, what if
(08:32):
what if we treated normal people the way access Hollywood treats.
Brad Pitt's right, right? What if we go into a
sewer with a full crew, and rather than turn the
sewer inspector into the punchline of some joke, or rather
than just revel in the pure spectacle of wading through
(08:54):
other people's crap, why don't we let him be the
expert and let me learn as his prentice, and just
let the cameras be a fly on the wall. And
that's really what the show was. And to answer your question,
the reason that show look the way it looked is
because that's how I grew up next to my granddad,
(09:17):
working as his apprentice, determined to follow in his footsteps.
And of course, the great truth in life one of many.
And I'm sure you've seen this yourself and your exploits.
But just because you just because you love something, doesn't
mean you can't suck at it.
Speaker 2 (09:36):
And it's so true.
Speaker 1 (09:41):
And conversely, and maybe even more importantly, just because you
don't love something, just because you're not really into something,
doesn't necessarily mean you might not have a great facility
for it. Right. How many running backs did you meet
in your career that turned out to be a better
tight end? Maybe this or that, right, You don't really
(10:02):
know necessarily, But when I was fifteen or sixteen, I
was pretty sure I was going to follow one of
my pop's footsteps. Who, to your point, could take apart
your watch and put it back together blindfolded, could deconstruct
a combine put it back together a combustion engine, could
build a house without a blueprint. He only went to
the seventh grade, but he was a magician built right.
(10:23):
He was a magician in the sense that every day
I remember seeing he and my dad would they'd wake
up clean, go out into the world to fix some problem,
to build a barn, to put in a waterline, to
dig a well, whatever it was, and come home dirty,
and somehow in between, magically a thing got fixed, a
(10:47):
problem got corrected, a thing was built right.
Speaker 2 (10:56):
And now a few messages from our general sponsors. But first,
we're now offering premium memberships for the Army of normal
folks for ten bucks a month. You receive special benefits,
such as being invited to a private yearly call with
other premium members and me access to monthly Ask Me
Anything episodes and occasional bonus audio. If you're interested in this,
(11:21):
I hope you go to normal Folks dot us and
click on premium. But guys, that's really not what it's about.
You get all that cool stuff, and we're going to
provide all that stuff. But the truth is we're trying
to grow the Army of normal Folks and have a
greater impact on the country, and with the premium memberships,
(11:41):
we can fuel our marketing efforts to grow it. This
podcast peaked at number ten on Apple's podcast chart and
all of the US, which is absolutely crazy, and it's
not about me. It's about the guests, and it's about you.
So we've decided to set an exciting new goal of
trying to be on Apple's Top Shows chart for our
(12:02):
entire first year, which will mean more attension, more listeners,
more Army members, and most importantly, more impact. But we
need you as always, so go to normal Folks dot
us and click on premium if you're down to help.
If not, just keep listening. We'll be right back. How
(12:40):
old Mike were you when you woke up to the
fact that you should revere your father and grandfather for
the hard work they were doing. When did that click
for you that they were special.
Speaker 1 (12:55):
That's a great question, because there's no answer. I never
had a real liation or a parapetea. I never had
a big aha moment where I suddenly realized my dad
and my granddad were each great in their own way.
I had a front row seat to their greatness, right,
And if the point of this conversation is really to
(13:16):
elevate that component, right, then I got to tell you
I got the best cards in the world. We didn't
have much money, but one of the genius things my
pop did, my grandfather I'm talking about Carl Noble, was
years ago when they put in ninety five, you know,
the big interstate up and down the East Coast. His
(13:38):
little farmhouse was right in the way of an off ramp,
and so the state gave him the option of either
writing of a check or relocating his home right someplace
of his choosing nearby. My granddad chose to put his
home on the top of a hill, an isolated hill
(14:02):
that was flanked on one side by Stemmers Run Creek,
on the other side by about one hundred acres of
lowland marsh and thick woods, and on the third side
the off ramp to ninety five, which would be built
about one hundred yards down a steep grade filled with
pine trees. It sounded like the ocean. In fact, my
(14:26):
mother told me it was for the first twelve years
of my life, and I believed her like a fool.
But my grandfather very strategically put his home in a
place where he knew no one could develop. But he
also knew that the power lines back in the woods
had to be maintained by the state. So the state
(14:46):
put in this gravel road, built a wooden bridge over
the creek, And I wound up growing up next to
my grandfather in a place that you just couldn't well,
you couldn't dream up up. It was completely isolated. It
felt like the middle of Colorado, somewhere we didn't actually
(15:07):
own all the land we had access too, but we
had access to it exclusively, so we built barns. There's
no one there. There's no one there, and the state
didn't care.
Speaker 2 (15:19):
Where is that where I'm trying.
Speaker 1 (15:22):
This is Baltimore County, Maryland. Yeah, I grew up on
a little farm in Baltimore County, Maryland that most people
would never even think of as farmland because it was
only three miles from the city line. And so I was.
I was. I was in a bubble bill the best
(15:43):
kind of bubble right, because I had a mom and
dad who were devoted to each other and raised my
brothers and me with great love and care. But right
next to them, I had this second set of parents,
my mom's parents, who functioned like this, like this walking
(16:03):
proof of every good lesson my dad ever tried to
drill into my head. So you know, I never I
never felt poor, I never felt bored. I had access
to deep and endless woods. I had chores, I had
(16:23):
horsecrap to pick up every day, I had wood to cut.
Our home was heated by a woodstove. And I had
two men in my earliest memories, two men who were
always there, who loved each other. This father, this man
and his son in law. Right, they were very, very close,
(16:44):
and they raised my brothers and me in a way
that had so much meaning and so much impact that
we didn't have the good sense to know it until
decades later, when we looked back at it and saw
it for the unique situation that it was so.
Speaker 2 (17:02):
Again, if if you can, I'm I'm an I'm a
touchy feely guy. What is the essence of your grandfather?
That is a part of the definition of who you
are today.
Speaker 1 (17:19):
Humility. That's a great word, first and foremost. It's it's humility.
And look, it's sound. It's a very weird thing and
maybe a little ironic to brag about your humbleness. I
would say that, and I don't. That's that's a definition
of irony. Bro Yeah, right, you know what makes me
(17:42):
so great? It's that I'm so damn humble. Mac Davis
had a great song about that. Remember, oh lord, it's
hard to be humbling, Yeah, when you're perfect in every way.
Speaker 2 (17:51):
Yeah, sure, it's a great song.
Speaker 1 (17:54):
So what happened to me was my my my granddad
was the very definition of humility. He affirmatively ran from credit,
and yet he was one of the most competent people
that I ever that I ever knew, and juxtaposed to me,
you know, once I realized that I wasn't going to
follow in his footsteps, Once I learned gently in his
(18:15):
presence that the handy gene was recessive, and that the
things that came easy to him, did not come easy
to me. This was the guy by the way, Carl Noble,
who told me maybe the best advice I ever got.
He said, look, Mike, I get it. You want to
be like me. You want to be a tradesman. You
can be a tradesman. Anybody can be a tradesman. But
(18:38):
you need a different toolbox. And so and so I
got one. You know, I went to a community college.
I learned to do a bunch of things I wasn't
really interested in, like acting and writing and singing and
so forth. And you know, that way led onto a way,
and you know, I'm really summing up a couple decades
(19:00):
for you. But to answer your question, I found success
in the entertainment business, not a ton of it, but
enough of it to become arrogant. I learned that I
could work pretty much whenever I felt like it. I
took many months off every year. I took my retirement
in early installments, and I felt I felt like I
(19:23):
had figured something out that was important. And then one day,
when I was forty two years old, working right across
the bay there I can almost see my old office
at CBS, my mom called me. I was sitting in
my cubicle hosting a I'd been hosting a TV show
in those days called Evening Magazine, and she called to say, Michael,
(19:45):
you know your grandfather turned ninety years old yesterday, and
I was just thinking, wouldn't it be terrific if before
he died he could turn on his television and see
you doing something that looked like work.
Speaker 2 (20:00):
That he actually would respect.
Speaker 1 (20:04):
I mean, it's not that he didn't respect everything that,
you know what I mean? Men like that. They want
to see something that reminds them of work. They want
to see something of themselves in TV shows.
Speaker 2 (20:18):
I own. I own a hardwood lumber manufacturing facility, and well,
you know, it's it's a dirt it's a dirty job.
It's hot when it's summertime, it's cold when it's wintertime.
It's dust flying through the air, hydraulic grease everything. And
sure I have people in the office doing office stuff,
but the vast majority of one hundred and thirty employees
(20:40):
or outside working hard kilns, chains, conveyors, noise, ripsaws. You know,
if you have all one of all ten digits, you're
really not a lumberman. You know. It's that kind of place,
and and I have I have an enormous amount of
(21:03):
respect for each of my employees that show up every
day at seven am and work till three point thirty
in any overtime hours. I ask them to help my
company be successful because those men they work, and those
men respect people that show up and work. And I
assume your grandfather would have had some of the same mentality.
(21:24):
When I say respect, I mean they respect, they understand.
There's there's just a there's a there's a shrinking number
of people and our culture that understand what eight hours
on a jackhammer is. And I all right.
Speaker 1 (21:43):
And there's no way to there's no way to teach it.
Speaker 2 (21:45):
Well, there's one way. You get on top of it
and pull the handle.
Speaker 1 (21:49):
That's right. That's it. I mean, it's just experience to
your point and regarding humility, you know, it was a
very uh, it was it was a very humbling moment
for me because after that phone call from my mother, right,
I took a cameraman into the sewers of San Francisco
and I hosted an episode of Evening Magazine down there,
(22:10):
and that footage was so shocking, so inappropriate, and so
delightfully hideous that it actually got me fired from CBS,
but it became the heart. It became the demo tape
that I used to sell Dirty Jobs. And as Dirty
(22:31):
Jobs found its audience and really began to take hold,
two things happened that are relevant to the goal of
your podcast. The first is that I got a level
of feedback I'd never seen before in TV. Not merely
positive feedback, not oh, Mike, that's so funny or that's
so interesting. The feedback I got that shocked me was
(22:56):
you think that was dirty? Way do you see what
my dad does? What do you see what my grandfather did,
my cousin, my brother, my uncle, my sister, my aunt,
my uncle. Right, it's like, way, do you see the
lumber yard where they work? Way do you see this? Way?
Do you see that? And so I realized that there
was a giant world out there of pre built sets
(23:19):
called job sites, and there were a giant number of
people out there, called real people from which we could
learn something. And so once I realized that I once
I realized that I was a better guest than I
was a host in the TV world, then everything changed.
(23:42):
And and to realize that is very humbling. You you
have to you have to let go of the idea
that you're the expert, that you're the host, that you're
the person with knowledge that you're going to share with
your audience. All that goes out the window and you
become an apprentice. And if there's a if there's a
(24:04):
punchline to a joke, if there's a brunt to a joke,
it's on you. Yeah, right. The expert is the manner
of woman you're working with. So that's what my granddad
taught me. It's like, look, I had success in TV,
I was doing okay, I was happy, but things didn't
really blow up for me until I really kind of
(24:28):
re embraced the humility that that my pop had demonstrated
to me as a boy day after day, week after week,
month after month, and year after year.
Speaker 2 (24:40):
So we can say that what supported the greatness of
Dirty Jobs was the lessons and the uh and and
the work done by your grandfather, who you've now named
a whiskey after, which is interesting too. Went Okay, so
we got humility from grand I got it. We'll be
(25:08):
right back. Talk to me about Glendon Huntington.
Speaker 1 (25:31):
Well, you've done some research.
Speaker 2 (25:32):
Good for you, Thank you. So much we can read
in Memphis.
Speaker 1 (25:38):
Glen Huntingdon was a colonel in the army, and he
was probably the first man outside of men who were
related to me, that changed the trajectory of my life.
He was a Scout master in Troop sixteen, and I
(26:00):
was a weirdly shy kid, Bill. I had a bad stammer.
When I was eleven twelve years old thirteen, my dad
and mom decided that the Boy Scouts would be good
for me. They drove me to Kenwood United Presbyterian Church
one Wednesday night, pushed me out of the slow rolling
station wagon with the fake lumber on the side, and
(26:21):
sent me into the church based family.
Speaker 2 (26:23):
Roads where that's a family roadstream.
Speaker 1 (26:25):
Oh, yeah, that's.
Speaker 2 (26:26):
What it was.
Speaker 1 (26:27):
I think it was a I think it was a
town in country station wagon, the wood paneling down the side.
Probably green, yeah, nice, Who knows. At that point everything
was green and beige. I lived in a green and
beige world, you know, including the boy Scout uniform, which
(26:49):
I would confronted that night.
Speaker 2 (26:51):
Mike, you said you had a stammer. Do you mean
what is a stammer? Shy and couldn't gather as.
Speaker 1 (26:58):
Words or like a real life ste I didn't know
at the time. I would learn. I would learn over
the next couple of years. My my condition, whatever it was,
was cured partially by Glendon Huntington and partially by another guy.
I'm pretty sure you're going to ask me about a
high school music teacher, but I didn't. It wasn't a
(27:21):
full on porky pig of ebit to b B to B,
but that's all folks kind of thing it was. It was.
It was a nervous tick uh, brought on I think
by just a weird level of shyness. I didn't like
I didn't like people looking at me, and when they did,
I just froze up in a way that made t's
(27:45):
and s's problematic.
Speaker 2 (27:49):
Given your career, that's almost mel Tillis type story. It's
it's like, doesn't fit, it's amazing. Well, that's where you
came from and that's who you are. Now that's crazy.
Speaker 1 (28:04):
Well, look, I mean, you can change the road that
you're on. You know, I don't think you. I don't
think people can change the fundamental essence of who they are.
But you can act like somebody you'd rather be, And
sometimes that's a big step in the right direction. That's
why we have role models. That's why we have mentors.
(28:26):
You know, you're trying to figure out who you want
to be Glendon Huntington and by the way, the quick Sidebar.
The Boy Scouts of America in nineteen seventy five nineteen
seventy six, at least in Troop sixteen, was a different
Boy Scouts, right. This was not a safe space. This
was basically an organized gang run by a former colonel
(28:50):
who brought extraordinary discipline, extraordinary political incorrectness, an extraordinary sense
of consequence to the proceedings. We were divided into patrols.
We had patrol leaders. There was this senior patrol leader.
There was an oath, there were rituals, there were sacred pledges.
(29:13):
You know, we took all that stuff very seriously. There
was also a boxing ring where, you know, young men
settled their differences in a time honored way. There were
shooting lessons, archery lessons. You know, we were all taught
how to handle firearms. It was it was a whole
new world for me.
Speaker 2 (29:33):
I want I want to be in your Boy Scout troup.
Speaker 1 (29:37):
I want to be in the cap man. I bet,
I bet.
Speaker 2 (29:39):
It was awesome. So how did he help you, how
did he support you? What did he do?
Speaker 1 (29:48):
He taught me that, you know, most most coaches, most
most men who are really trying to instill some kind
of work ethic in their charges, will try and find
a way to help to help the person understand that
(30:12):
adversity needs to be confronted and challenges are not the enemy,
and that you have to be willing to be uncomfortable
in many, many different ways. What mister Huntington showed me
was that that's not quite enough. That's not quite where
(30:35):
you want to go. That'll get you so far, but
if you want to get beyond that, it's not enough
to be willing to endure something uncomfortable. You have to
find a way to like it, Like as the Navy
seals would say, you have to you have to embrace
the suck. You need to enjoy it. So and I
(30:58):
didn't know enough at the time, was just a boy.
But when I look around today, you know most of
the people who have truly distinguished themselves in life have
found a way to not just welcome adversity, but to
look at square in the face and laugh hysterically even
as they spit in its eye. And so the first
(31:20):
lesson I had in a real world was he knew
I stammered, but he also knew you couldn't stammer when
you sang. And for all his machismo, for all of
you know, the boxing and the wrestling and the guns,
he loved poetry and he loved music. And the boy
(31:43):
Scouts at these jamborees, we'd have these fires, these big campfires, right,
and sometimes parents would come and other troops would come
in one hundred people, two hundred people would be gathered
around this giant fire, and we would do these skits
and we would sing these songs. And Glenden Huntington forced
me to sing a song in front of a couple
(32:04):
of hundred people. And when I sang that song, I
didn't stutter and I didn't stammer, And it was the
first time a little light bulb went off in my head.
Now it was also a deeply inappropriate song that I
never should have sung in a boy Scout uniform at
(32:25):
a jamboree in front of a couple hundred people. The
question was, what's the song? I gotta know what the
song was. Do you remember a famous Harvard mathematician and
musician named Tom Lera.
Speaker 2 (32:38):
I'm sorry, I wish I did, I don't I will
when we finished talking.
Speaker 1 (32:44):
This guy was the ultimate satirist in the sixties and seventies.
He made very inappropriate albums and he sang like in
a Dixieland jazz type style. He wrote all his own compositions,
but all the songs were were parodies poisoning Pigeons in
the Park, the Vatican rag the songs like these. I
(33:07):
sang a song and don't ask me how I went
up with this album as a kid, but I had
it and I loved it. And I sang a song
called be Prepared. And of course be prepared is the
boy scout motto, right, And so Glendon Huntington insisted that
I sing a song. I didn't tell him what I
was going to sing, but I walked out there in
front of the fire. I probably don't remember all the words,
(33:29):
but it went something like, be prepared. That's the boy
scout marching song. Be prepared, follow it, you won't go wrong.
Be prepared to hold your liquor pretty well. Don't write
naughty words on walls if you can't spelled, be prepared
to hide that pack of cigarettes. Don't make book if
you cannot cover bets. Keep that pot well hidden where
(33:51):
you're sure that it will not be found. And be
careful not to turn on when the scout masters around,
for he only will insist that it be shit. Be prepared,
not just the first verse, right, micro everybody would be prepared.
Thank you, take about like that's amazing. So your scout
(34:15):
master hazed you out of stuttering. That's pretty much really
getting from Yeah, but in the most loving way. Yeah. Yeah.
He started the process. And what he unlocked in me
was a realization that music a thing that I had
grown up with but had no interest in. My mom's
(34:36):
very musical, you know, I was always around. I just
didn't care, you know, But I can carry a tune, right,
And so that was the first time I realized, wait
a second, that music could be useful for something other
than merely enjoying. Right. It's a It transformed the physiology
or the physiology of my body. And and and that
(34:59):
was interesting. That combined with the dangerousness of the games
that we played and the stakes and the whitewater rafting
and the mountaineering in Cimarron, Sito in New Mexico and
insane games bill like Swing the Thing. Have you heard
of Swing the Thing? Swing? Jesus, this is Mike.
Speaker 2 (35:23):
This is you know, this is this is a family show.
Speaker 1 (35:27):
Well look not that thing. And besides you look, if
you can swing that thing, good for you. I'm not
swing it and barely find it. But we we played
games like Capture the Flag and British Bulldog violent games,
and this game called Swing the Thing. You would take
(35:47):
up a tent bag and you would fill it with
wet rags, and then you would take a length of
rope about fourteen feet long, and you tie it to
the top of the bag, and one guy would hold
the other end of the rope and start to swing
the bag around right just about maybe maybe a foot
(36:09):
off the floor, no more than that. So he's in
the middle and you jump. So you got twenty guys
all stepping in jumping over this thing that's being swung
at about forty miles an hour, by the way, there's
a lot of physics going on. And when that thing
hit you in the ankles, you went down like a
cheap card table. People went home with contusions, chipped teeth,
(36:34):
broken fingers. Was a blood bath. But you know, nobody died. Right,
All of that combined is my answer to your question.
That's what the boy Scouts did for me. And I
recognized the value early on, and I stayed. I became
an eagle scout. Hell years later I became I think
they call it a distinguished eagle Scout. And to this day,
(36:57):
you know, I look back on those experiences. Is very instructive.
So on this one, the same question. If there's one
word to sum up the essence of what your scout
master buried, built and harvested inside of you, If your
(37:18):
grandfather's humility, what is the scout master. Well, if there's
only one word, you'll forgive me if I employ the
use of hyphens, but I'll go with embrace hyphen the
hyphen suck and embrace suck. Yeah, embrace discomfort, be uncomfortable, Yeah, yeah,
(37:39):
I mean the virtues of discomfort.
Speaker 2 (37:41):
I fear of failures the greatest barrier to success.
Speaker 1 (37:44):
And if you're unwilling to be uncomfortable and get out
of that, you're you're never going to find any level
of growth. Really, well, you've already gone as far as
you're going to go right now. If you go any
further and your goal is to be comfortable. You're only
going to progress through a series of happy accidents, you know, Yeah, Mike.
(38:05):
And you know there's another lesson there, which is, you know,
a comfort zone is I think we all need a
comfort zone.
Speaker 2 (38:13):
You know. It may be a church group, It may
be a foursome of golf. It may be a group
of people you play bridge with. It may be a
little cafe corner table where you share a coffee or
glass wine where you kind of recharge your batteries and
share your most centimate secrets when the world hits you
in the mouth.
Speaker 1 (38:34):
I have one.
Speaker 2 (38:35):
It's my leather chair, and I'm not kidding. If I
die in a fiery accident today and they cannot identify
my body by dental records, they could match my app
to the cushion on that chair and they'd know who
I was, because it's my chair.
Speaker 1 (38:49):
That's forensic science right there, Bill.
Speaker 2 (38:51):
That's what it is. Kids don't sit in at nothing.
But it's my comfort zone. But you know the thing
about my time in that chair, nothing profound has ever
happened in my life for the lives of anybody around
me while I was sitting in it. And I think metaphorically,
that is the problem with the comfort zone is if
(39:12):
you're unwilling to if you have fear failure, or you're
unwilling to embrace the suck, or you're unwilling to get
out of those comfortable places you have hit a human
stops on. Like you say, I think that's absolutely true,
and so embracing the suck makes a lot of sense.
Speaker 1 (39:28):
Well, there's a paradox in it too. You know, as
much as you love the comfort of your chair, if
you never leave it, you'll grow to hate it. You'll
get bed sorece.
Speaker 2 (39:40):
That's profound, Mike. That's really good.
Speaker 1 (39:43):
You have to get up and leave the thing that
makes you comfortable, not because it builds character, but simply
because you won't have You can't even define what comfortable
is until or unless you've been uncomfortable.
Speaker 2 (40:01):
Makes a lot of sense, Mike. Hey, that's so you
can use it.
Speaker 1 (40:05):
Go ahead and take it, man. I'm let's start to
my second book. I'm using it brilliance I learned one
day chatting with Mike. There you get look, and that
concludes part one of my really interesting conversation with Mike Rowe,
(40:30):
and I hope you listen to Part two that's now
available as Mike is not anywhere close to finished celebrating
Youngsun heroes and normal folks who supported him. And if
you have any ideas or know of any folks.
Speaker 2 (40:45):
Who we should consider featuring on our special series Supporting Greatness,
write me anytime at Bill at Normalfolks dot us. I
look forward to seeing you in Part two
Host
Bill Courtney
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