WHAT’S RIGHT WITH AMERICA
Mike Rowe learned a lot about life listening to Paul Harvey and celebrating unsung working-class heroes. Now he’s got a book, a podcast, a new TV show—and some big ideas about America.
When Mike Rowe was 12, he was painfully shy and struggled with a stammer—a couple of things you might not expect from the wisecracking TV star who’s hosted eight seasons of Dirty Jobs and narrated Deadliest Catch for 15 years and who this month is releasing his first book,
The Way I Heard It (Gallery Books, Oct. 15). His book is half a collection of his favorite episodes from his podcast, The Way I
Heard It, and half a memoir of his own life—somewhat by accident. He’d merely set out to link the best stories of his podcast with personal stories of his own until… “Crap,” he says, “I wrote half a memoir anyway. Didn’t mean to.”
Rowe’s podcasts—true stories about people, places or things, all with “surprise endings”— began in homage to broadcaster Paul Harvey, host of the iconic radio program The Rest of the
Story from 1976 until his death in 2009. “Splitting wood with my dad, the radio was always on in the background, and it was Paul Harvey,” he recalls. And as much as he tries to steer away from all things earnest or sappy, Rowe, 57, can’t help but feel a pull to a bygone era, drawn to vintage books and songs from the 1920s and ’30s (including those he learned in his high school barbershop quartet). “I found a word somebody used once,
weltschmerz. As I understand it, it’s a kind of nostalgia for a time you didn’t actually live in,” he says—and he’s certain he has it.
Rowe’s idea to revive Harvey’s format with a short-form podcast (episodes of The Way I Heard It average around 10 minutes) “was purely an experiment” when he launched the show in 2016. He’s since recorded more than 136 episodes—inspiring the book— and in August, it hit 100 million downloads.
Later this fall, Rowe will also finish filming the TV version of
The Way I Heard It, with half-hour episodes offering alternative explanations of how things actually happened in real life.
A Baltimore Childhood
Raised on the outskirts of Baltimore with two younger brothers, Scott and Phil, by their father, John, and mother, Peggy—both public-school teachers—Rowe and his family lived humbly on the same land as his grandparents. He and his brothers would help their dad and grandfather, “Pop,” clear land to build a horse stable or chop wood for fuel for the wood stove that heated their house.
Though shyness and his stammer caused him to struggle in school, Rowe had strong mentors. He was shaped by the Boy Scouts and Eagle Scouts and by his high school chorus teacher, Fred King, a former U.S. Navy man and a barbershop-quartet singer. King kept Rowe “well and truly outside of my comfort zone,” pushing him to audition for shows that scared him or to sing solos out of his range.
“He literally took me by the scruff of the neck and changed the trajectory of my life and career,” Rowe says. And while Rowe had been sure he’d follow
in Pop’s footsteps, able to build a house without a blueprint and live off the land, it turns out “the handy gene is recessive,” he says, laughing. “I didn’t get it.” Instead, “I kind of Forrest Gump’d my way into a lot of things I didn’t intend to do.”
As a young man, Rowe became a door-to-door salesman and joined his father, who was performing in local theater. He auditioned for the Baltimore Opera Company in order to earn the union card he needed for acting jobs—and surprised himself by making the company. He sang baritone in the chorus of 30 operas over six years, then dazzled his way onto the graveyard shift at the QVC cable shopping network, selling collectible dolls, cat toys and karaoke machines.
Getting ‘Dirty’
A few other local Baltimore shows later, Rowe notched up his game with a CNN segment about odd jobs and hobbies, called Somebody’s Gotta Do It, that would alter his career forever.
In 2003, he spun that segment into pilot episodes of the show Dirty Jobs for the Discovery Channel, a role that struck him as a golden opportunity. “What if we treat a sewage worker like
Access Hollywood would treat Brad Pitt?” he mused. For eight seasons, beginning in 2005, he brought around 300 unsung working-class jobs to light, apprenticing alongside a sewer inspector, camel milker, scrap metal recycler, chimney sweeper, worm dung farmer and many others. (See “The Dirtiest Jobs,” right.)
He also began narrating reality shows, including American Hot Rod, American Chopper, Ghost Hunters and Deadliest Catch. He’s embraced his role of championing real people and everyday heroes ever since.
What America Needs
Rowe was so moved by the strong work ethic he continually featured onscreen, he founded the mikeroweWORKS Foundation in 2008 to build an online trade resource center that connects people to job opportunities in their towns and awards work-ethic scholarships to hardworking young people. And now, his current Facebook Watch series, Returning the Favor, gives back to those who are serving their communities by surprising them with help and donations in return. While the show has covered the gamut of selfless do-gooders in 60-plus episodes so far, many of its stories focus on veterans and those working to combat PTSD.
“I’m a sucker for vets and cops,” Rowe says. “I just think they’re so unassailably heroic.”
Why such an earnest, feel-good show now? “The country’s a tad divided—people’s news feeds are full of bad news and anger,” Rowe says, “so I thought, well, it’d be nice to do a show that isn’t any of that. America needs it right now.”
The problem, he says, is that our negative news feeds are making us so anxious, “pretty soon we start going around, ‘Are we doing anything right at all?’” He answers his own question: “We’re doing the same things right that we’ve always done right.” That’s rooted, he says, in his belief that there is no better place or time to be alive than right here, right now. “I mean, if you look at every measurable metric—if you look at health; if you’re gonna be sick, where do you wanna be sick? Do you really think the Renaissance was all that and a bag of chips? They got dysentery and died horrible deaths!”
If he wishes anything for America going forward, he’d like to see more skepticism, whichever side of the news feed we’re on. “Not cynicism—these are two very different houses on the same street. Cynicism is the last house on the left; nobody’s gettin’ out of there,” he says. Skepticism, on the other hand, “begs curiosity. You know,
to be skeptical of the MAGA hat, the antifa mask, to be goodnaturedly skeptical.”
Rowe also wishes we’d value the invisible workers who keep this country running. “I wish more people were properly gobsmacked when they yick the switch and the light comes on; when they yush the toilet and the poo goes away. I wish more people saw those things as the miracles that they are.”
The Simple Life
When Rowe has rare downtime, he throws balls for his dog, Freddy, and spends time with his girlfriend, Sandy, who he’s been dating for 23 years. He returns to Baltimore to see his parents and get his old barbershop quartet back together. He’s also working with the tourist board for the city he loves. “Baltimore is the dirty job of cities,” he says. “It’s being defined by a couple dozen blocks that are admittedly truly bad, but they can’t throw the whole town down the drain. So I’m doing my part to say, look, there’s more to the elephant than the tusk.”
He lives simply. “I’m not acquisitive. I’m inquisitive.” He collects stories and experiences, and if he believes anything above all, it’s that we’re not a product of our circumstances, but a product of our choices—and he points to his own life as proof.
“I was very clearly a stuttering, shy, backwards kind of kid who
got lucky and met some people who suggested a different path”— and he wants people to see the possible paths available to them too.
He’d say choose to make the most of what you have. “It’s a
Dirty Jobs lesson—the cognitive dissonance [that occurs] when viewers see a sewage worker covered in somebody else’s crap, having a good time.” So while Rowe works much more than he plays, he truly feels “everything I do is fun. God, that’s so ridiculous, but I mean it. I don’t really look to do things because they are fun. I look around to figure out how to have fun doing whatever I have to do.”