Rowe ready to shine a light on more ‘Dirty Jobs’ in new version
At last Mike Rowe, the genial host of the series “Dirty Jobs,” comes clean. And though he seems suited to the role, hosting a TV show was never on his clipboard. When he was 19, he says, he looked to his future “and saw nothing but a void, a dark void. I thought, ‘I can’t even imagine myself with a wife and kids. I can’t imagine myself without a wife and kids. I can’t imagine getting a steady paycheck. I can’t imagine working for anybody who would give me one. I can’t imagine wanting one.’ I couldn’t imagine any scenario for happiness.”
It was right after graduating that he began to panic. “I can’t remember a moment when I was more unsettled than when I finished high school and had absolutely no idea what to do, no idea,” he says.
“I was so lucky to have parents who said, ‘Look, we don’t care. As long as you stay curious, as long as you work hard, we don’t care. We don’t care what school you go to.’
“I got a lot of pressure from my guidance counselor at high school to enroll at the University of Pennsylvania ... I took some tests. I did well. But we didn’t have any money, and I had absolutely no idea what I wanted to do ... that was terrifying to me even back then.”
Finally confronting the unknown, Rowe says, “I thought, ‘Hell — on the positive side — I’m free and I can study anything I want.’ ”
So he did. He buried himself in philosophy, English and the arts. “All the things I love to this day,” he says. “They just never existed for me originally as a ‘thing’ to pursue. They turned out to be a thing to look for, to find. I was lucky to go through that horrible period of uncertainty.”
The turning point came one night when he described his day in his journal. “I sat down about 10 o’clock and started writing, and an hour later I looked up, and the sun was coming up. I thought, ‘How … is the sun coming up at 11 o’clock at night?’ Of course, it wasn’t. I had sat there all night writing a couple dozen pages in the journal about what happened that day.
“Now was it any good? Would a publisher take that and say, ‘Oh, my god, you’re a savant!’ No, I don’t think so. But what I learned and what gave me real hope was that when you’re doing something that you’re really enjoying and really focus on, you can compress time.”
Compressing time is what Rowe does on “Dirty Jobs,” which returns to the Discovery Channel in a new incarnation on Jan. 2. Whether he’s neck-deep in a sewer, farming worm dung or collecting alligator eggs, Rowe exposes viewers to the unsung heroes of our society — the folk who make it all work.
“I’m basically impersonating a motivational speaker and the basic message is this idea: I meet people who don’t make a lot of money, who work 12 hours a day. You make $500,000 year, why are they happier than you? Why are they having a better time? Why are they better balanced? Why does the beer taste colder at the end of the day? The dialogue that comes out of those is really interesting. … The ditch digger, at the end of a day, has a ditch. And your desk looks the same as it did.”
The show not only honors the worker, he says. “This was a love letter to risk and entrepreneurship and women, people who prospered as a result of leaning a skill and went on to create a small business and to giving something back,” he says.
“It was also a love letter to people who did hit the reset button. A lot of people we feature on the show, they’re driving, they’re prospering, doing something they had no great dream to do. They followed opportunity, in other words, instead of their dreams, and still managed a way to be satisfied and prosperous.”
At 59, Rowe himself seems satisfied and prosperous. “I think you make your own luck,” he remarks. “I think it’s easy to look back at the things that happen to us and say, ‘Well, let me tell you how I did it.’ For me, I never had a long view. I never had a master plan.”
Whether it was fate or dumb luck, he says, “I don’t really know how to think about fate or destiny. The only thing I know for sure is that nobody’s getting out of this alive, and while we’re here, we do have a massive opportunity to persuade, impact, help or hinder. I firmly believe that all of those things are products of choices we make.”
Pausing, he adds, “I know that’s not popular in some circles, but when I look at destiny, when I look at life as if it has been decided for me already, that just makes me tired. It makes me feel why bother? I’m much more interested in the idea that the past doesn’t equal the future ...”
Though he likes to guard his private life, he’s been with the same woman for 25 years. About that he says, “Neither one of us were particularly desperate, eager or committed to procreating. We were open to it, but it was never really a thing. We met a little later in life, not like we were childhood sweethearts. There were plenty of other sweethearts before her, and vice-versa. But she married early on, the wrong guy, and after that there was never really a great deal of pressure, to be honest, from either side,” he confides.
“She values her privacy, and I respect that. She has nothing whatsoever to do with the entertainment industry. She’s as baffled by my world as I am hers.” Hers, he says, is almost impossible to describe. Finally he tags it “marketing.”
Rowe is also writing a book about marketing. “It’s going to have something to do with the fact that — whether we’re a plumber or a writer — we’re all salesmen,” he says. “We have to be now more than ever.”