Mike Rowe has made a name for himself in the entertainment industry thanks to hosting the popular but now-cancelled TV series Dirty Jobs, which ran from 2005-2012. These days he keeps himself busy narrating such programs as Deadliest Catch and Bering Sea Gold, but he also is a storyteller with a new book. While doing promotions for that new project on Veteran’s Day, he actually touched on how military life impacted his work on Dirty Jobs.
In fact, he says being able to meet with and work with people with that “band of brothers” mentality has been really special to him in his own work life, noting,
There’s just a different commonality. There’s really nothing new to say. Shakespeare got it right, ‘We few, we few, we happy few, we band of brothers.’ That’s real. Whenever you find a band of brother mentality in the real world that’s not in the military, it’s exciting.
Speaking on Fox & Friends, the TV presenter spoke out about encounters he’s had with veterans in his work life, which was pretty timely given Veteran’s Day was this week. He took that a step further, though, explaining how the mentality many veterans have can seep into daily life, and came up often in his work on Dirty Jobs. He also noted this mentality was one of the reasons he really enjoyed the Discovery Channel gig.
That’s why I loved doing Dirty Jobs. The people we profiled on that show, they knew something, by and large, that a big part of our society has either forgotten or become disconnected from. You see that with these [military] men and women.
Dirty Jobs was never about the coolest or most exciting jobs people could have; instead, it was a show focusing on the men and women who were willing to get down into the muck and the mire to really get jobs done that needed to be done. You have to have mental fortitude to do some of these jobs, and you have to have it in spades. I'd assume it helps when people can really bond and band together to get the work done.
Mike Rowe has previously spoken out about the worst of the worst among those jobs: a barnacle-cleaning position that is super claustrophobic. Unlike many of the dirty jobs on Dirty Jobs, that one required something a bit extra to power through and accomplish correctly.
These days, Mike Rowe is busy with narrative work that doesn’t get him quite as dirty as it used to, but he still has a deep appreciation for the people he has encountered through his career and the work those people have done over the years. You can learn more with his new book The Way I Heard It, out now. To see what all is coming up for TV, take a look at our fall schedule.
