- Highly skilled writer and storyteller who knows how to both write and read out loud for dramatic effect
- Great chemistry with his producer and longtime friend Chuck
- Absolutely fascinating life story — you probably didn’t know sang in barbershop quartets, or in the opera, or that he became a millionaire and lost it all over 20 years ago in a Ponzi scheme
- His personal fictional hero is Travis McGee from the John D. McDonald book series
- Cool parents with their own interesting stories and Mike talks about them and their influences on him growing up, and has had them on the show, and his mom just wrote a bestselling book in her 80s
- He started it as an homage to Paul Harvey’s legendary radio series The Rest of The Story
- Aesthetically pleasing voice and let’s face it, that makes podcasts more compelling
But wait, there’s more: he started the Mike Rowe Works Foundation over ten years ago to award $1M in scholarships annually to students seeking skilled trades careers, and over that time he has “written extensively about the country’s relationship with work, the widening skills gap, offshore manufacturing, infrastructure decline, currency devaluation and several other topics for which he has no actual credentials.”
In short he is one of the most interesting people in 21st century America, and actively working to make it better.
But mainly: interesting.
One thing to note: the first couple years and 150+ episodes are short form storytelling, typically 5-8 minutes in length, and then somewhere around episode 180 they started doing chapters from Mike’s book “The Way I Heard It” with Chuck. Those are much longer, around an hour and sometimes more.
Go to mikerowe.com/podcast/ or your favorite podcast app and try a couple of episodes.
Podcast tip: I always listen to podcasts when I’m on the move, either walking or biking, freeing my mind to go wherever the podcast wishes to take it. In the car would also work, I just don’t get much time there.