What 300 DIRTY JOBS Taught Mike Rowe About TRUE SUCCESS | Kevin O'Leary

If I were in a seat, I'd be on the edge of it. All right, here we go. [Music] You are watching yet another episode of Mr. Wonderful. I'm not him; I'm just a guest. I might grow your questions; we answer them. It's gonna be great.

Hi, my name is Monty. I'm 22. I'm a big fan of both Kevin and Mike. My question is about young people and the perception of success. It seems like for people of my generation, if you are a hard worker and you are interested in doing great things in life, it's almost the default path for you to go to university, get really good grades, and everybody wants to be a professor, everybody wants to be a doctor, everybody wants to be an investment banker. It seems like simply getting a well-paid job in the trades, investing your money, running your own business—these things are swept under the rug and are seen as being less prestigious. And obviously, that's a big misconception. How can we address this misconception amongst youth, and what do you think are the best methods to reach out to young people with this message that following the path laid out for you is not necessarily going to be the right path for everybody? Thank you.

Mike: That's a big question, and he's got multiple levels in there. This idea of prestige, you know, I've always been intrigued with that. That you take a path and take a history degree instead of becoming a plumber sounds like a pretty stupid thing. Prestige—what is that? Let's try to find that issue. Well, let's start with his name, Monty. First thing I heard was Monty Hall. Let's make a deal. All right, and you're the man who makes deals, and what he's talking about fundamentally is a proposition, and it's a transactional proposition that will lead to some level of prestige. The answer is how much.

So what we've been told for the last 45 years is that the best path for the most people happens to be the most expensive path. But if you never get a college degree, does that make you a lesser person? Well, depends who you ask. A lot of people would say yeah. What we did with college was we gave it a PR push, and it needed one back in the 60s and 70s, but we pushed at the expense of all other forms of education. So college became a cautionary tale. If you don't get the four-year degree, then you're gonna wind up turning a wrench or being a welder or some such vocational consolation prize. We set the table long. We jacked with the very definition of prestige and thereby made it impossible for anyone who didn't have a degree or at least very, very difficult to compete for that prestige on a level playing field.

Look, I think my view of this, and I've been trying to get lots of people in their 20s to think this way—the hardest job in the world is to break free from the family that gave you a cocoon and helped launch you. Sure, and then you finish whatever level of education you get. That could be high school. But at some point, you're on your own, and you've got to go to work. You've got to make a living and then eventually, maybe support a family or a significant other, whatever it is. And it doesn't really matter at the end of the day whether you're welding a car together, or whether you're teaching in a high school, or whether you're a doctor. You still have the same challenge, and I think great prestige is being someone who can actually successfully raise a family. That's what I tell people because I don't really give a [ __ ] what you do as long as you do it well. Right? So get paid well.

Well, speaking of [ __ ], I mean, Dirty Jobs was an homage to a willingness to get dirty. The first season of that show, I affirmatively looked for sewage workers, sewer inspectors. I looked for septic tank cleaners who became good at doing something most people didn't want to do and then found a way to love it. Right? So for me, it's always—the prestige thing is fundamentally backwards. We tell kids today the way to be happy is to first of all correctly identify that which will make you happy, then borrow whatever money it takes to get happy, then get your magic ticket, then punch the clock, then pay your dues, and then finally—because I like happy, I like that theme—the idea that you can find a career where you actually want to get up in the morning and do it is a dream come true. A lot of people don't get there. They take jobs that really don't make them happy. But I have to eat, so they gotta work.

I think the real objective here in answering Monty's question—circling back to what he's asking—is, you know, if you really think being a doctor or getting post-secondary education is going to make you a better person and make you more employable, you should do it. But the beef I have with everybody that thinks that way is, remember, you're gonna get yourself 60 to 80 thousand dollars in debt, so you better do something where you can actually get a job. And what are those things? Well, I think there's the top three are engineering, engineering, and engineering. Sure, but engineering is a perfect example of a job that's both blue and white collar. There are so many facets of it, and it doesn't fit neatly into one vertical. But it's so wonderful because it doesn't matter where on that spectrum you are. Most engineers get employed, which is the goal. Sure, 'cause you don't spend four years doing it, and you're going to accrue debt, as you mentioned.

Yeah, it's a 60, 70 grand a person. That's a personal tragedy. But add it up—it's one point six trillion right now, and we hold the note on that. Yeah, you know, well, maybe not up there in Canada, but you know down here.

Oh, it's worse up there. It's basically education—it's free up there, but you're paying for it as a taxpayer. How secretly? Nothing is free. Exactly. But my point is, if you're gonna spend four years, you're burning your own time—that's your own equity. Right? Don't waste it.

But Monty has a good question there, but I think my idea is find what makes you happy. I like that. But you get paid because you're not getting paid; you're not gonna eat. Or find what pays the bills and then figure out a way to be happy doing it. The people on Dirty Jobs didn't follow their passion, but they were passionate about what they did. That's what struck me. Which is—there's nothing dirty about making dough, that's what I say.

I think a lot of people say, but the way you say it, Kevin, it just sounds too damn credible. I think we nailed Monty's question. Hit us with another one.

Thank you for answering my question today. My question is, what would you do or what would you advise someone to do if they're spreading themselves thin with too many projects or ideas? I've currently am working for the hours at my job, I'm getting ready to step into my dad's business that's online, I'm trying to run my own business which isn't taking off very well, and if I fall back on one or the other and they seem to fail, I've got a third plan of running my own restaurant type deal in the works, between that and trying to remodel my house that I've had for a year and I'm not even living in. What would you advise for someone who's trying to juggle too many things at once and how to make it work? Thank you.

Okay, that's too crazy; there's too much stuff going on there. Well, he's shooting with a shotgun. It needs a rifle. Yeah, it's brutal. I—you know, my advice to him, Mike, is pick the top three on the hit parade, and even that's almost too much. But running a restaurant is—and I did that once—that is an 18-hour-a-day job, and so I'd kill that thing. Like that, that is so hard to make money and really as a time killer. I like the idea of the leverage of maybe taking over his dad's online business because it's probably working and then figuring out a way to get more customers at a lower cost. I like a little focus. What do you think?

Well, he's got to figure out what he wants to be, I think. I mean, for me, I figure there are two basic types of people when it comes to getting something done: there are those who can truly multitask, and there are those who are many—not many yet. And that was my point: multitasking gets all the glamour, and people talk about living in a nonlinear world and the necessity of being able to juggle and spin the plates, and all the metaphors. I'm a slave to chronology. The number four only makes sense to me when it comes after three and precedes five. I do one thing, and I go to the next thing, and then I build as best I can on that thing. But I don't know how people—I mean, I know how they do it; I can't do it. But to have these different branches coming off of the same tree and tending to them all contemporaneously, it's out of my pay grade.

My take is you get a core gig that you know you're good at and is your baseline. It's the thing you feed and maintain and make sure it works. You try and make it more efficient, whatever that is. And then if you're an entrepreneur and you want to explore something, you can use an example like an Elon Musk, who's a uber entrepreneur. Sure, Tesla probably eats up 60% to 70% of his week, but he's also in the battery business, and he's shooting stuff into space. I get all that, but the one that he cares about the most is the one that's having the biggest challenges of growth, which is Tesla right now. I know this because it's my son's an intern for him, and he's focused.

Yeah, he hasn't wasted his time; he comes in, he works like hell, and I think everybody should find their Tesla. Make sure that they're staying focused on that, and then if you want to shoot rockets into space or make batteries or do something else, that's cool. But unless you're a multitasker—a proven one—I think getting one thing right proves that you can do it is very important.

And what about, once you get the one thing right, then you can be duplicative by simply taking that thing like I was fired three times from QVC back in 1990 as my first job in TV, and I learned some lessons there. And those lessons translated into Dirty Jobs twelve years later. That show wound up in 200 countries. Since Dirty Jobs, I've done Somebody's Gotta Do It, Returning the Favor, and the way I heard it—it's all the same basic show that all require me to apply the same basic lessons that I learned once upon a time.

So if you glanced at my resume for what it is, you see a bunch of stuff that looks disparate. In fact, I just changed the name of the show every five or six years. I keep doing the same thing. It's great advice, and I think successful entrepreneurs have that common element because I worked for three months once making cat food, and the guy who taught me how to do it was Dutch, and he said all cat food is is either sea fish in a pan tuna with different flavors in it, or it's beef lips and renderings of, you know, chicken heads boiled down to a broth and then flavor added to it.

And the reason I like that story is decades later when I was a co-founder of the learning company, we taught math and reading skills to sell consumer software. And we went to the same model of cat food. We had one courage, and then we just added another character to it. So you're reading with Rena Rabbit or Carmen Sandiego or any of the titles we did. They were just taking the same paste and adding and adding. Right?

And I like those analogies. Once you understand what you're doing and you leverage it, I think there's a lesson for everybody in that, actually. Well, and it goes to identity too. Like how do you see yourself in your chosen field? How do you see yourself in your vertical? You know, for me, the thing—because I felt a lot like that guy once upon a time, I just felt scattered, like just spread way too thin—you can, in his voice, hear his desperation and the indecision.

Yeah, I don't think he knows who he is. So right up until 2002, I made a decent living impersonating a host. That was my stock and trade. I could—you don't want to hear that—like I guess I could hit my mark, I could say my line, and I got paid for it. But on Dirty Jobs, I learned how to be a guest. And I still hosted shows, but I did it through a kind of—the Greeks would call it a parapet eeghh, right?

Yeah, and Edgar Issa. So I said, wait a second, what if I'm still a host in the credits, but what if I act like a guest, like an avatar or a cipher and let somebody else be the X? Well, if you're honest about it—and because I've learned over time people can smell [ __ ] a mile away; they're more so today than ever, especially kids. Yeah, and they get it.

And so the—you know, if you're trying to be something you're not, it's not gonna work. But getting back to this guy, I think our collective advice is pick one thing and make it happen. Yeah, and then prove you can do that, and once you've got that humming and efficiently working and you've nailed it, then add to your dilemma, as I like to say, do something else.

But the one core there I heard was the dad's business, my bet. That's working. He could get focused on that, maybe enhance it, eventually take it over. That's what families are for. Maybe that works. But interesting question raised a lot of issues we discussed.

Just because you can do something doesn't mean you should, right? Particularly if it makes no money. All right, next on the hit parade.

"Hello, Mr. Wonderful. Thank you for having this opportunity for all of us to ask questions and learn from somebody successful as you are. I have recently become a director of operations for a business, and I have never had a position of this scale before, and I really need some feedback from you to help me become a better leader—to become somebody that has enough empathy and understanding for people, but somehow has enough toughness to be able to put the business first. I find myself struggling between being humane and being a leader, and I really would want to find that balance, and I would appreciate your input, and I thank you very much."

Kevin: I like that question. This is a question about leadership, and I'm gonna take a stab at it, then I want to hear your view of this. So Jazmin is trying to figure out how to manage people, and that is tough. There's no question there is no one perfect way. Part of it's your personality, part of it's how people respect or don't respect you. My take of it and what I've learned works for me because I've worked with a lot of teams; I've been both a leader and an operator and an employee, and you name it. Yes, you sit down with your team one at a time; you know, go out for coffee, whatever. Say, "Look, what can you do in the next three months for me? What can we agree on as a goal that you buy into that right here and now? What is it going to be? You're gonna do X, whatever it is, and we shake hands on this thing, and I get out of your way. I'm not gonna be all over you for the next three months. You're either gonna make it or you're not. So don't sell me something you can't deliver."

Make sure as we go through this little meeting, then you can deliver on this. I know you might try and sandbag me. That's okay too. But I just want to know what are you committing to now, I'm gonna write it down, and we're gonna meet up again in 90 days, and you're either gonna have made it or not.

Yeah, I found that works, Jazmin. I think you're gonna be fine. I think she's gonna be fine because she used the magic word in her question, and the magic word is empathy. You don't hear it much today; your sympathy and of course you hear leadership and you hear authenticity. Right? There are a lot of buzzwords, but empathy—like real empathy—is impossible to fake, and the only way your people will empathize with you, in my view, is if they see you doing their job or at least trying to. And that—that's all I do. That's all my brand is.

I get—if I did one smart thing looking back, it was figuring out how to get paid to try, not succeed, but try. It's not easy to see it all the time; it's impossible, but it's easy to try all of the time. And so, if you want someone's respect, in my opinion, then the best thing you can do for them is to show an interest in the job you hired them to do. Let them see you trying to do that. That's when real empathy goes back and forth, and I, you know, I look at people differently who—who I've seen tried to do my job, and I think vice versa.

So, I mean, it's such a fluid marketplace today, and work looks different than it used to. You know, looks different. I found the biggest impediment to getting people to do great work is you're in their face too much. You over-manage them; you don't let them find other ways and paths you never thought of. So, you know, Jazmin sets up a goal for some one of our team members and says, "Look, go make it happen," and stand back; let them do their thing, and you'll find out what they're good at and not good at. And look, if they consistently can't deliver, well, you got to take them up behind the bar, and you know what has to happen.

But generally speaking, people will find their own ways to get things done if they believe it's a fair deal that you've let them buy into something and you both agreed they're going to do it. But doesn't—I mean, that if you're in an outcome-based environment, often what work is, right?

Except when you sit down with the handbook and the protocols, and there are many institutions today that still say, "Look, this isn't the result we need." They're saying, "This is how we need you to behave in order to get the result we want." I'm not a fan of that. I find it creates a lot of inefficiency. Sure, I'd rather have a maverick renegade get something done without looking at the rulebook because, at the end, getting the results is what I covet, particularly as an investor.

So, you know, most of my companies are small; the average is 26 people in size. Yeah, I don't care how they do it, just get it done. And at that size, maybe that's what matters. At most, you're talking about big institutions—that is a big problem when you're a renegade and you piss everybody off. Even if you're successful, they don't like you, no. But, on the other hand, getting stuff done is always rewarded in every culture, in every business. You have to balance it.

I don't see a lot of people getting whacked that gets stuff done unless they've really broken the rules, and in these days, that involves a lot of stuff that didn't use to matter in the 60s, but now there's issues. But that's a great question; I'm glad she asked it. I think we gave her some good advice. Look, I don't want to overstate it, but maybe the best advice ever, really.

Yeah, both you and Mike have partially achieved your success through show business, so what can you say to convince the youth of today that show business, YouTube fame, movie fame, any kind of fame isn't the only answer? What can you say to convince them that there's more than just being famous?

Heather asks a really great question because I have a new perspective on fame, and I'll tell you a great story. When Shark Tank first started, nobody watched it. There was a cat and a dog watching it for three years; it got canceled three years in a row. And every year, there'd be a new executive at ABC network that said, "Let's give it another chance." And then the fourth year, for reasons nobody really understands, it goes from zero to ten million.

I was watching it. You know, stuff happens. And that's one of the first times ever—I went into a washroom in Boston Logan Airport, and no one had ever recognized me before anything. And I'm doing my business in the urinal, and the guy keeps looking over at me. After like three gazes, he says, "Are you that guy on Shark Tank?" I said, "Wow, somebody's watching Shark Tank." That's what I was thinking.

Yeah, and he says, "I say, yeah, I'm that guy in Shark Tank." And he says, "You're an [ __ ]," and he gives me this hour—this diatribe about how I was unfair to somebody or what they deal was too rich or whatever. And my wife and my daughter, Savannah, are waiting outside for me, and he storms out. I didn't know this till later, but he says to my wife, "Hey, that [ __ ] Kevin O'Leary's in the men's room," and she says, "I know." But that, to me, was the beginning of the journey of entrepreneurship in terms of fame.

Because the guy that was running the network at that time said to me a year later, "How are you loving this celebrity? Tell me the truth, how are you really loving it?" And there is downside to it. I've always thought the best part of it was, for me, is I can use this fame to help somebody acquire customers at their business at a lower cost, which is all I do now. Sure, I got 50 companies, I spend most of my day using my celebrity to help them get into Walmart, get into Target, get into Best Buy, or beyond because I can call the CEO and they return my call, which is great.

Yeah, that's the benefit of it, and there's some downside to it too. So, Heather, I mean, yeah, everybody wants to be famous, but nobody quite knows how to do it. There is no playbook, and I think that's a good thing because fame isn't supposed to be a goal. It's supposed to be a symptom. It comes from being respected, or from doing a good job, and it's easy to confuse fame with celebrity.

I talk to your kid about why do you want to be famous? Why do you want people to know you? Because I can make a long list of people I know who I don't respect. Would you rather be well-known and not respected? Or simply known because you did something like maybe embarrass yourself on American Idol? Or were on Shark Tank? Maybe you're famous because you went on Shark Tank and all the Sharks laughed at you and now the whole country knows who you are. You don't really want that, right? You don't really want fame. What you really want, I bet, is something like self-respect.

So, Heather, I'm going to tell you something you have to tell your child because they're old enough to understand this. In life, it's extremely difficult to try and set goals on an attribute you can't control. You can't control fame. You can't make yourself famous. It's a derivative of something you did or achieved or that you could control that went well. And so, if you really want to set up your child for a—I'm gonna say a good life—make sure they don't start worrying about things they can never achieve because they can't control them, and that would be fame.

So I—and the thing about fame is it shines the light on some and sets the others free, and there's nothing you can do about it. I would tell that to your child: do not set them up saying you're gonna be famous no matter what happens because that just isn't true. But you can have a great life achieving the things and the goals that you can actually control.

"Hey, Mr. Wonderful, I'm from Paris, so excuse me for my accent. I heard you saying that you should be ruthless in business. Also, Mark Cuban said that. It's like a sport, but it's a 24/7 competition. So I know that I am not that competitive, and I care about others' feelings. Also, I don't like to make people not love me, so I never experience how my personality would be in the business world and entering an entrepreneurship because I'm just starting this path. So my question is this: should I change my personality in order to succeed in the business world?"

Kevin: Shawn, bad news—you can't change a personality. You can try, but people will smell the [ __ ] a mile away. You are what you are. And the truth is business is competitive; get over it. It's a form of war, in some ways, and you will never, ever, ever get everybody to like you—ever. And if you spend your time worrying about that, you will fail for sure. You can't care about what people think as long as you think you're doing the right thing. They'll end up respecting you; they may not like you.

That's certainly my situation. I don't care if you like me; I care that you respect me and that I am being honest with you about what I expect you to do for me if you're working for me or if I'm investing in you. If you want to be an entrepreneur, you gotta get up in the morning understanding there's some guy in Mumbai or Shanghai or somewhere in China that wants to kick your ass, and it's coming for you 24/7 because it's true. But if you can deal with all that, you'll be okay.

It's a great question. It is a great question. And listening to you talk about it, it really goes back to authenticity, right? Your people like you because they don't like you. There's truth. You've been very consistent with your brand and your persona. This guy sounds—he sounds like a sweetheart; he sounds, you know, very empathetic. He sounds like probably who he is. That doesn't mean you can't function in the deep end of the pool. That doesn't mean you can't compete.

It just means you shouldn't pretend to be somebody you aren't because look, in my business, authenticity is for sale everywhere—especially in my business. You said it before: people can smell a fake. I think they can smell it in the boardroom just as easily as they can smell it in the sewer. Yeah, so John, you can't change your personality, but you can change the rules of the game you choose to play, in my opinion.

You know, my business model for 14 years was based on imitating hosts, and in this business, you can get away with it, and I was pretty good at it. And I wasn't looking for a hit show; I was looking to take my retirement in early installments so that I could work a month here, take a month off, a month there. Well, in the entertainment business, you can do that, and I figured out how to do that, and it worked for a long time. And then one day, I was 42, and I didn't have a lot of meaning in what I was doing, so I decided to reinvent myself to a certain degree and become more of a host or more of a guest and less of a host, really. And that's when I wound up becoming the person I actually am.

That's just a long way of saying, again, you can't change who you are. It took me 14, 15 years to figure out how. It's the best advice you could give anybody because if you start a career or a path where you think you can morph yourself into something else and be honest about it—it just isn't gonna happen. No, and all the way through, everybody around you is gonna just smell it and know you're just being who you're not.

And if you look at the people who get all the press today, it's not the people who really cut through. I mean, Elon Musk—say what you want about him—he's a known entity now. He's a brand. He is a reflection of his identity. You know, he knows exactly who he is. And John, you can be I think exactly who you are and a complete failure. You can also be exactly who you are and be a wild success, but I like the fact that he wants to take a shot at it, and I think, John, go good—like, give it a shot.

Mike: Is this book, Hansa book? It's very attractive. I like the guy in the front, Microw; the way I heard it—right here. What's this about?

Michael: Well, I started writing a podcast about three years ago, and the style of Paul Harvey, you remember "The Rest of the Story?" Of course. So, short biographical mysteries about famous people, and you get to figure out who I'm talking about as I write. Anyway, the podcast turned into a thing—130 million downloads and a publisher that is a thing. It's a thing! And the publisher said, "You should put 50 of him together; we'll put a hardcover on it."

So you extracted the very best of the podcast and put it—I was gonna do it, and I showed it to my mother. She said, "Oh Michael, what an amazingly lazy way to publish a book." So I said, "Well, what do you suggest?" She's being honest; she's honest. And my mom's a best-selling author, you know, and so I listened to her and she said, "What do you want me to do?" She said, "Why don't you write a memoir of sorts about why you chose to write about these famous people you've never met—and what you know about it—or what you, or is there something in your own life that rhymes with something in theirs?" So, basically, the way I heard it started as a collection of my favorite podcast stories.

It became a memoir that is interrupted every other chapter by a true—true story of a famous person who I've never met.

That's cool! All right, look everybody, I own "Ask Mr. Wonderful." Check this out. This is good advice from a guy that knows what he's doing. I like that. You know, books are tough. They're like—they're really—I've done three of them myself, and I know it's like giving birth. If you—it's not easy. Everybody should write a book, and everybody should wait tables.

Yeah, yeah, because you do—you don't mean to, but you wind up putting yourself on the couch. I have a lot of respect for anybody that gets it done because I know how hard this is. Okay, check it out.

Hey, Mr. Wonderful, this is Sue J. I'm 39 years old. I invested in three entrepreneurship ventures, mostly a lot of my personal time and energy into it—a little bit of my personal money in one of them. Although all three did not cut it, how does one reset and rebound after such failures, especially when such failures get tagged on to your resume and it's hard to find new investors? Does that mean I'm pretty much a dead cockroach?

Well, I'll start answering that question this way: I would personally rather invest in someone who has felt the sting of failure and is motivated by the fear of failing a fourth time than someone who thinks they can never fail because it will visit everybody. It just does. I've had plenty of failures. Sometimes it's luck, Mike; sometimes it's just being in the wrong place at the wrong time three times in a row, and the fourth is the one that's going to work. I'd invest in that guy, sure.

I think he probably has learned something from his mistakes, and that sometimes what they are. But failure, I mean, it is just part of everybody's life. And there's many ways to fail, and it's really easy to fail and very hard to succeed. If you learn something from your failure, it's not a failure. The only real, real failure, of course, is the failure to try. Right? And again, that's Dirty Jobs 101 for me. You know, once I really let go of my ego—right? Fourteen, fifteen years in the business, you get used to looking a certain way and you acting like you know more than you do. Dirty Jobs required me to fail day after day. I was an apprentice. It was—it was Groundhog Day for me in a sewer every day. I'm showing up on a new job site knowing nothing, and not only am I really forced to learn everything I can on that day, I have to do it on camera! I'm getting the pie in the face over and over.

Once I realized that that, in fact, was was a kind of blessing, my career changed incredibly. You know, I think the whole issue of failure people are so scared of it, but it visits everybody. That's what I tell them. And I teach this stuff; I try and teach it. I say it's going to happen—I guarantee you—and it's gonna be miserable when it happens, and even worse if it's your own money. Yeah, which happens a lot.

But at the end of the day, you should know with certainty that everybody around you that's successful has already tasted that sting. There isn't a single entrepreneur I've met that's been successful that can't list a whole bunch of disasters they were involved in. And is there anything more breathtakingly dull than somebody who was born into a fabulous trust and who never really failed at anything?

Yeah, I mean, I—I look at it and say if you're telling me all you've had in your life is success, I know you're lying to me. That's what I know because it just doesn't work that way. That's just the nature of entrepreneurship.

Okay, so Sanjay, let me tell you something. If I worried about what people thought about me as I was going through my journey as an entrepreneur/operator, I would have never done anything. You just can't let that get in your way. You got enough problems just running a business to worry about, "Oh, I wonder what they think about me." You should be saying to yourself, "Who gives a [ __ ]? I'll get this thing done, and people respect me for the way I did it." That's it. That's the end of the day, and not everybody will be your friend or like you as a result.

You know, it's tough, but that's just the way it is, Sanjay. Yeah, you're right; I don't have a lot of experience with investors, but I have a lot of experience in trying to get people to like me. And what I've learned is that you can't ignore them; you actually work for them. The customer is your boss, but the minute they think you're trying to win their favor instead of being who you are, they will eat you alive. Right? Statute out, and then just laugh about it.

I see this on Facebook every day. I fight with people on Facebook. Aye-aye-aye! Welcome negative comments because I engage with them respectfully, and I argue from the middle, and I try and get them to change their mind. But I don't beg them to—the minute anything stink more than desperation—they can smell it on you.

It's interesting too, you know, to let people that criticize you get to you. That is a horrible weakness. You have to get callous; you have to understand you can't please everybody, and they'll be attacking you all the time. But I had a great mentor; he's dead now. He used to be a hockey coach, and Jerry Patterson was his name, and he said, "You've got to shut out the noise. Set the goal every day, focus on that, and everything else is irrelevant."

He was a great coach that way. He really was very good, and I've always remembered that. I always remember Jerry sitting on my shoulders saying, "Don't worry about it; it doesn't matter, it's irrelevant." Your fans are your fans because they don't believe that you're desperate to have them as fans. You gave them a chance to like you or not like you and your—and whatever, they don't—yeah, so what?

What do you do when something terrible happens in your life, and it will happen in life? Poopoo happens; it just does. It happens to everybody. And, you know, I can think about when I was young. My dad died when he was 37 years old. I was, you know, eight. That's not supposed to happen. And it was very—it really had a huge impact on my brother and I. I was two years younger than me, but I remember thinking through that, saying I can't control that; there's nothing I can do about it. I've got to live with it now.

And just even at that young age realize, "Wow, life's tough," and then you die. Like think about that. And if you want to be miserable thinking that way, that's how you'll be. But you've got to realize that everybody deals with it. You are not alone, and there are people around you who love you and want to support you.

But I guarantee you, everybody that's listening to the answer to that—something horrific will happen to you in your lifetime, and you'll have to take the punch and drive on. See, you would never think of it like this, but I swear the parallels between Dirty Jobs and Shark Tank are amazing—using the platform of television to promote something that—people think Dirty Jobs was a love letter to blue-collar work.

It was actually a love letter to entrepreneurship. I'm great—40 of the people we featured on there of the 300 were multimillionaires. Nobody knew it because they were covered in grime. It's great that it's celebrated work. It didn't matter if you had a PhD; that had nothing to do with it. No, not at all. But what you had to be able to do is pivot.

I remember a guy named Matt Freud in New Canaan, Connecticut, at a dairy farm, going down the—just circling the very tough business. The milk costs everything—cost of operating. This guy was heating his entire farm with cow [ __ ]. Right? And that was smart. Then he realized that the petunias in his garden were growing like crazy because he was putting them—he called them cow pots—just these molded, extruded, hardened pots made of cow crap, and you put the flour in there, and when it biodegrades, everything.

Well, I heard about that. I took the crew there, and we looked at the dairy farmer who realized his cow's crap was more valuable than its milk. Told that story. He's in Walmart three months later selling cow pots. So, yeah, on the one hand, we crawled through sewers. Look, you could have renamed it to poop pots. Actually, that's—that's the pivoting idea.

You know, it's a lot of entrepreneurs have shown off at Shark Tank with one idea. It's been wrong for so long that we have them coming back saying, "That last idea I had, just kidding. It didn't work." Yeah, there's my new idea, and we bring them back.

Well, what do you tell 20-year-olds who are like entering the market today and they have their idea, their precious idea, or maybe they don't? Maybe they just have ambition. How do you counsel them to find the right balance that's going to lead to something that looks like success?

I say to them, go get some sales. Go sell some of this to somebody. Right? Prove to me—it's not your mother or your aunt or your father—sell it to somebody you don't know and get a hundred people to buy it. And then listen to what they have to say. Show me that you can actually sell it. That is the beginning of a wild journey for most people because they realize how hard it is, but also when they start to get traction, they know it's working, and they start to modify.

That's the biggest thing for me, are these young entrepreneurs—sometimes they're 18—and they come in, and they've already sold two million dollars worth of something. I don't mean a Kickstarter campaign; I mean they've run around their neighborhood and sold it, collected the money, and collected the money and actually manufactured it and built it. I know kids like that are gonna make it because they know how tough it is. Entrepreneurship is a [ __ ]; it's really hard. I don't have to tell you that, and the ones that get it realize it's a 25-hour-a-day job, and it changes your life, and it's not always to the best for people. But if it works—here we are talking about it—and the road traveled and how interesting it was. And I think it's still the road ahead.

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Hello! I'm Microw. Do you suffer from a curious mind with a short attention span? Are you tired of three-hour podcasts that go on and on and on? I can help! Listeners of "The Way I Heard It" report heightened intelligence, satisfied curiosity, and sudden bursts of laughter. If your podcast lasts longer than two hours, see a doctor. Then spend ten minutes with Microw and watch what happens. In other words, if you like me, ten minutes is all you need.

Okay, so I'm working on a new track I call it a "six-string scrub." I recorded the bass track back on October. You know the way things go today; the technology is so advanced. You know, I've got this little Spyder recording system that picked up the Berkeley auction, and I could take it anywhere, grab a mic cable; I leave some guitars at various hotels that I stay at in New York and L.A. and just to mess around.

You know, you can basically—what all you need is a room with good tone. So, you know, I record it right off the amp. When I use my '61 Strat to lay down the bass track, which I consider a Stradivarius, it's just beautiful. But now I want something really bright on the acoustic side, so I'm using this Hussam Dalton, which I picked up a couple of years ago. I went in to buy a Martin, and I fell in love with this Hussam Dalton, and it's just such a bright instrument. I thought it'd be great for laying down some acoustic lead on top of this electric kind of shuffle. It's had a bluesy, kind of jazzy vibe. You'll hear in a second.

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