Mike Rowe joins John Bickley to share the stories behind his new feel-good series People You Should Know, spotlighting ordinary Americans doing extraordinary things—from forging second chances to redefining the value of skilled work in today's economy. Get the facts first on Morning Wire.
Chapter 1: Who is Mike Rowe and what is his new series about?
In his newest project, Rowe is turning the camera on what he calls the real heroes of the country, ordinary people doing extraordinary things.
In this episode, we sit down with Mike to discuss his new series, People You Should Know, as well as the cultural and economic shifts that are putting blue-collar Americans back in the spotlight. I'm Daily Wire Executive Editor John Bickley with Georgia Howell. It's Sunday, May 11th, and this is a weekend edition of Morning Wire.
Joining us now is Mike Rowe, who has just launched a new show that we want to talk to him about, as well as some other issues that he holds near and dear to his heart, including plumbers. So we'll get to that later. It's good to talk to you again.
Likewise. Thanks for having me back. We're virtually back or whatever we call this these days.
Chapter 2: What inspired Mike Rowe to create 'People You Should Know'?
We'll take virtual Mike. We'll take in-person Mike, whatever Mike we can get. So your new series, you call it a feel-good series, and it focuses on real heroes of the country. Its own phraseology describes it as focusing on the ordinary, which I find very interesting. Tell us, what was the idea behind this series? What sparked it? And what are you trying to accomplish with this series?
It's really the making of a feel-good show. There's certainly a feel-good component at the heart of it, but what I've always tried to do, whether it's Dirty Jobs or Somebody's Gotta Do It or any of the projects I work on, is bring the viewer along for the ride and really try and make them a fly on the wall. We spent a lot of time...
Chapter 3: How does 'People You Should Know' relate to Mike Rowe's previous work?
admitting our mistakes and sharing the frustrations with the viewer that come along with making content. I've always done that, and so I'm certainly doing that again here. The project itself... will be familiar to anybody who saw my last project, which was called Returning the Favor.
And this is kind of interesting because I don't think it's really happened in entertainment before, but Returning the Favor aired exclusively on the Facebook Watch program. And it was one of the first things Mark Zuckerberg did in an attempt to decide if he wanted to compete with Netflix.
So we had this idea to elevate and reward the neighbors that most people wish they had, regular people doing something nice in their community. We'd show up under the auspices of making a documentary about the topic. And then surprise them with an elaborate gift at the end. And the talent would come out and there'd be a parade and people would cry.
Chapter 4: What challenges did Mike Rowe face with his previous show on Facebook Watch?
And it was just really a fun, honest celebration of basic decency, right? So we do 100 episodes of this thing. I win an Emmy for it. And the show's canceled a week later when... When Facebook decides... I'm sorry. Well, look, I mean, it's extraordinary because they decided, look, they spent a billion dollars learning that they didn't want to compete directly with Netflix.
But that's what they needed to do to get to that place. And so for the first time in my life, and certainly with everybody involved in the project, a hit show was canceled at the height of its popularity. I've just never seen it happen. And so... It took me a couple of years, but there were a couple million people on a Facebook page who were just rabid supporters of this project.
And they've literally been nagging me, bugging me, threatening, I dare say, for the last two years to get this show back. So I don't own Returning the Favor, but the format is anybody's. And so we changed the title to People You Should Know. We're picking up where we left off, and it'll be on YouTube. It's on my YouTube channel as we speak. And yeah, I'm entering a brave new digital world.
Late to the party, perhaps, but nevertheless, I'm in.
Maybe too inside baseball. Maybe you can't reveal this, but are you getting any blowback legally?
And honestly, I don't expect to because, you know, Mark was super decent with me about this. We had really candid conversations at the beginning of it. And one of the things I said was, look, there are no new ideas, right? I mean, we can all agree on that. TV is just TV. And this kind of format, it's... It's really dirty jobs.
It's a crew and I going out into the world to meet a real person without a script, without casting, without any writing, without any second takes, and a documentary camera that films the whole thing. I've been doing that for 22 years. In fact, every seven years or so, I just changed the title of the show. I've been doing the same show for my old my old career. And I'm not kidding about that.
Literally, if you boil it down, all I do for a living is tap the country on the shoulder and say, what about him? What about her? Get a load of that. And, you know, where where Dirty Jobs was a rumination on vocations and somebody's got to do it was a rumination on avocations. People you should know and returning the favor. Those are ruminations on decency, on decency.
on kindness, on bloody do-gooderism. And all of those things, in my view, are apolitical. They're agnostic. I don't think anybody can hold a copyright on them. I'm not a lawyer, obviously, but who in the world is going to object to a show that elevates and celebrates the neighbors that you wish you had? It's impossible to object.
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Chapter 5: How does Mike Rowe define authenticity in nonfiction media today?
Indeed. I think the artifice... is a turn off now, slickness, polish. Yep. We want authenticity, like you said. And this idea of manipulation, you have a camera, you have a mic, on some level there's artifice and manipulation there because of where you choose to point the camera.
But if you can have another camera showing the other camera being pointed, showing the decision-making going on about why we're choosing to highlight this, There is a sense of more openness about the transparency about the process.
I love it. You process it, your brain processes it in a completely different way, whether you're conscious of it or not. I think, you know, it's got something to do with the Heisenberg principle, the uncertainty principle, right? The act of observing a thing changes the thing. But the act of observing the observers observe a thing somehow reorients the the equation.
And what comes out the other end, I think, is some some new version of authenticity.
So you you noted that there's no scripts there. And you're choosing to highlight, you say, you know, ordinary people in some ways, but they're not just ordinary people in the sense that they do some extraordinary things. Can you talk about some of the people you've chosen to highlight in the show?
Sure. The episode that's up right now features a woman named Lindsay Phillips. Lindsay was hopelessly addicted to methamphetamine. Somehow she beat it. She nearly lost her kids, but the reason she didn't is because she accessed an incredible organization called Care Portal. This is a virtual portal that anybody can go to on the internet and see at a glance who in their neighborhood is struggling.
There's a lot of connective tissue, sometimes churches, sometimes civic organizations, but be that as it may, it's a virtual network of bloody do-gooders who want to help. And the real goal behind it is to keep families together. Our foster care system is busted in any number of ways.
But if study after study proves if you can somehow keep a family together, it's going to be so much better for the kids. Anyhow, Lindsay goes through this. She comes out better for it. She's utterly rehabilitated. And now she's working full-time for Care Portal. We show up under the auspices of making a documentary. Lindsay doesn't really know why we're there.
And in the end of the episode, we surprise her with a pretty elaborate gift that allows her to do more of the good work she's already doing. So you can see what I mean, how that... Like, if I were pitching you this project, it would sound impossibly earnest, and you would hear, move that bus in your mind, and it would be some version of Extreme Home Makeover.
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Chapter 6: Why does Mike Rowe emphasize transparency and behind-the-scenes content?
All they're doing is changing the world. And it's, you know, like you say, you can point your cameras at anything you want. I'll tell you another one that's coming up that really got me. The Black Horse Forge. PTSD is a horrible thing. You've heard the stats. Right now it's 17, 18 people a day, service people, kill themselves. This guy, Steve Hotz, hit rock bottom.
He was an interior designer who volunteered, joined the 82nd Airborne, broke his back as a paratrooper, lost an eye, came home, rock bottom, opened up a forge, started making knives, and realized the therapeutic benefits of bending metal into something useful were enormous. So he opened his forge to other vets who were struggling.
22,000 vets have gone through the Black Horse Forge with zero suicides. Wow. This is, I think, headline news. It's incredible. It's an absolute game changer. So, yeah, to go meet that guy, to see what he's doing, to make some knives with him, to hang out, to spend a day in Fredericksburg, and then to put that out there into the ether in an honest way...
You know, what else am I supposed to be doing with my misspent career other than point people toward these stories?
What strikes me about that, the knives, a lot of people, ordinary people, have small ideas that they think, ah, what good will this do? This seems like a very small idea on some level, right? And it's turned into something massive. 22,000 people is astounding. 22,000 people have gone through this and have not committed suicide yet. Like you said, the suicide rates are shocking.
We've done some deep dives on that. And I actually couldn't believe the stats when I first did look into it.
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Chapter 7: Who are some of the extraordinary people featured on 'People You Should Know'?
I can't believe it. How is this not a national scandal that's in the headlines every day?
Yeah.
That's what's shocking, you know. And so, yeah. Yeah, we've highlighted on Returning the Favor, we did 14 different non-traditional approaches to treating this disaster. We've hunted pythons in the Everglades with veterans. We have built motorcycles from scratch with vets who are struggling. And in every case, you see that what...
What moves the needle is getting these men and women out of their heads and focused on a task that involves or requires a kind of platoon mentality. So you've got the camaraderie, you've got the band of brothers, you have a new mission. And then in the end, you've got a motorcycle that works that didn't, or a python that was captured that needed to go, or a knife that...
you know, a day earlier was a railroad spike and a piece of trash. So, you know, the metaphors are steep with this one. And I've just, all of those organizations, by the way, work. I've just never seen one work to the degree the Black Horse Forge has.
That is extremely notable. I'm glad you're highlighting it. Do most episodes, most of the people that you highlight usually have some sort of organization that they're also attached to or a company or something that they've created?
It's really fluid. Sometimes it's just super modest. Sometimes it's just the story of a kid who shoveled the sidewalks after the blizzard that wound up saving the life of the shut-in because the ambulance came when it came and there was a way to get her out. You can tell little stories. There's a story I want to tell of a kid who worked for Ace Hardware up in the Midwest somewhere.
Old man came in. wanted to know where the shovels were. Guy was about 85 years old. This kid takes him back to the tools, gets him to the right shovel, asks him what he needs it for, learns that the man's dog died, his best friend, and now he's alone. So what's the kid do? This 19-year-old clerk says, you know what? Give me your address. I'm going to come by your house. I'll dig your hole.
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Chapter 8: What is the impact of highlighting ordinary people doing extraordinary things?
I'll help you bury your dog. What do you do for that kid? How do you acknowledge that kid, right? So some of the stories are impossibly modest and just rooted in a basic good Samaritan idea. The story I was telling you about with Care Portal, that's big. Care Portal,
came to me through an organization i've worked with for years called stand together that's a stand is obsessed with bottom-up solutions and scaling them and so you know normally i i wouldn't i wouldn't spend time with my crew telling a story about a big successful non-profit that was already killing it but when you hear lindsay's story you realize you can spend the day with her with one person
And then you can tell the story backwards in a way that's good for Care Portal, good for Stand Together, and most of all, good for anybody who watches the show. Because when it's over, people are going to go log on to see how they can participate in their own community. And that's the final point about extraordinary people.
I realize, you know, when I talk about ordinary people, what I mean is extraordinary. Anybody who's watching can relate to the circumstances of the individual we're highlighting. There's nothing extraordinary about who they are. There's nothing extraordinary about their gifts, their skills, their talent, their wealth.
Nothing except for an absolute commitment to give a damn and then do something about it.
One more question specifically about this show, and then I wanted to ask you a broader question. Where can people view it? When do episodes release?
All that good stuff. Yeah, it's on my YouTube channel. It's The Real Mike Rowe, or just Google People You Should Know Mike Rowe. The first episode is up right now. I shot six. We basically bootstrapped this ourself with some help from Stan together. And it's the old Kevin Costner thing, right? If you build it, they'll come.
I know the audience is there, but I'm putting six out there to see what the universe thinks about it. And if the audience shows up, I'll do 60. So yeah, that's where it is.
I hope that's the case. Broader question about plumbers. You've been banging this drum forever, trying to highlight the importance of the trades, of going that route for education, and also emphasizing the trades in general as something that should be more highly valued by the American public. And then particularly by the American elite, like the media, who doesn't give them enough attention.
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