206. Success, Security, and Skilled Trades: A Conversation with Ken Rusk

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In a crude laboratory in the basement of his home. Hello, everyone, and welcome back to the show.
Today we have a tremendous episode for you, a conversation with businessman Ken Rusk. He's also the author of Blue Collar Cash, a tremendous book breaking down what is going on in our blue collar industries and why now may be the time to consider a career or investment opportunities inside blue collar industries and blue collar jobs.
And the reason for this has to do with a trend that's changing. And I think we're seeing this in the white collar world where those jobs are no longer safe.
There was a time when all you wanted to do was get educated to get out of the blue collar trades so that you would have an easier, more comfortable day to day. You'd have more sustainability, more consistency in your career.
And while there are still spaces

inside the white collar world where that is very true, certainly in the insurance industry,

in some of the financial advising industries, et cetera, when you build up enough of a book,

your life does become very sustainable. It becomes very hard to kind of knock you off that mountain.

But for most white collar workers, we're looking at 10,000 employees will get fired in a day from Facebook or Google will just let 25,000 people go because there's a downturn in the market. And these positions that were so sought after for so long are now losing their safety and security.
And I think that's a big reason why entrepreneurship has taken such a rise is we don't look at these mega companies anymore as harbors of safety. They are just as risky.
Your job is in jeopardy, you know, and it is just as likely that you could be let go or position changed or you could have your salary or comp structure impacted as it would be in a trade position, an artisan contractor position, a blue collar position. And many times we're looking at blue collar careers that are making more than some of the most educated individuals in our country.
At one point, Ken talks about how plumbers are now making more than doctors in many cases. That's an incredible statistic and something that we just need to think about and keep our eyes on.
And as we're trying to understand peak performance, we're trying to understand where the market is going. We're trying to understand where the world is going through this podcast and through our pursuit of our own excellence.
It's important to have individuals like Ken on to have these conversations. I think you're going to love it.
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Let's get on to Ken Rusk. You are the 200 of the podcasts I've ever done in the past year and a half.
So you're number 200. Well, I don't know if that's, that means I got a lot of work to do to outdo the previous 199, I guess.
No, you're good. You're good.
We'll have a good time. Good.
Well, let's get right into it. You know, I'm incredibly interested to chat with you for a bunch of different reasons.
Referred by mutual friend, which is always a great way to get new guests on the show. And in digging into your work, one of the things that I immediately related to is the focus on, obviously, you've written the book and it's a lot of your life's work, but the Blue Collar Jobs, Main Street America, Small Business USA.
I know you probably don't know a lot about me, but I'm the founder and CEO of a national insurance brokerage, which focuses specifically on small business contractors, blue collar jobs, and bringing enterprise level service down in the insurance industry, at least, to that type of business. So we're caught from the same mold in terms of where we focus our energy, who we like to work on, and the environment that we're working in.
I guess my first question for you really has to do with, it feels to me like there is a blue-collar renaissance happening in the United States, or at least the early stages of one. Do you think that's a fair assessment? Do you think that I'm reading the tea leaves? Do you think you're seeing similar things, or how would you position that? Well, I think there's talk of one.
and the reason I say that is because, you know, whenever you have a good economy, you tend to produce a lot of things and then you tend to overproduce things. And then you only learn later what the ramifications of overproducing something is.
And that in this case is unusable college degrees, you know, ones that aren't specific. So I think you have people that are starting to wonder out loud if that's the best way to go.
The only issue is you still have parents that think they've done a poor job parenting if they don't have a kid that has a degree hanging on his wall. So that's still there.
Colleges are still really good at shaming you into thinking that's the only path to take. And even further than that, kids don't have shop class in their high schools anymore, so they can't accidentally learn how cool it is to be your own boss in either a mechanic shop or a carpenter shop or a welding shop or, you know, whatever it might be.
So until kids get back into running around the yard and using rakes and shovels and hammers and, you know, that kind of thing to build stuff and learn how to do that early, you know, we got to get them away from these screens that are, you know, just rotting their bodies and brains. It's going to be a while.
But I do hear what you're saying because people are starting to talk about it. The change of behavior is something that's going to take a little longer, I think.
Yeah, I agree with you. I like a lot of the conversations that are coming out of, you know, there's more, I mean, I hate this term, but we'll call them thought leaders or just in general individuals like Cody Sanchez who's talking about how to buy small businesses I think that's interesting I think that well I like some of I like a lot of what she says I think we have to be careful that if you haven't lived the life buying the business is going to be more challenging than you necessarily understand, and I've seen that a lot.
I have some friends who've done roll-ups in the insurance industry and then tried to then parlay that into roll-ups into some of the artisan contracting, and it's a completely different monster like, I like the fact that people of influence are starting to talk about in a broader scale, uh, artisan contracting work, contracting work in general, uh, blue collar jobs, main street jobs, right? These, these things that have to get done. It does feel like there's at least more conversation, which to me feels like a step in the right direction.

Yeah. And again, I think, you know, parents are kind of like the traffic cops here.
OK, they're the they're the gatekeepers between their kids, their child's youth and their future. And they have to come to grips with and I get this all the time.
So, you know, I said this in a group of parents the other day. Okay, so you have your child that goes to college.
Let's assume he or her spends $40,000, $50,000 a year all in with everything, fuel, gas, everything all in, travel the whole nine yards. That's $200,000 at the end of four years.
And you better hope they have an exacting career when they come out the other side hopefully you didn't borrow that money as well whereas you know just the other day the national average for construction jobs top 30 bucks an hour so you know that's 75 grand a year right there so after after four years there, that's $200,000 on the positive side of your asset base. That is a $400,000 swing potentially in your net worth by the time you're, what, 24, 23? You at least need to think about that before you automatically just dump them into school to make you feel better about it, right? Yeah, and the other thing too is with the access to business, leadership, sales, marketing, information on the internet, I think some of the soft skills are more business-related skills that maybe you wouldn't have picked up by swinging a hammer the first three or four years of your life.
You can now on your own time and as needed find that information on demand and learn how to become not just a craftsman, but actually a business person as well. And that to me is a game changer for these types of industries, is that you don't need to go get the MBA to know how to run a successful, profitable, growing HVAC business.
Well, you know, when we started in 86, we were still using long form graph paper and pencils and calculators to do our accounting with, you know what I mean? And yeah, I mean, now if you have a pickup truck and a cell phone, you can run a whole business. I mean, think about it.
You can run payroll accounts receivable. You can run accounts, you can billing, you can do it all, right? So, you know, and to your point, one of the things that I did to help people, the very people you're talking about, is I built a really inexpensive course that goes along with my book.
And it teaches you, A, how to think about what you want your life to look like, B, the different paths there are to getting there and see if you're a business owner how to surround yourself with entrepreneurial thinkers that drive your company way further than you can drive it yourself so i mean it's 129 bucks for for eight 45 minute sessions you could literally learn how to how to figure out what you want your life to look like without spending four years and hundreds of thousands of dollars to learn how to play beer pong. I mean, it just is really, there's a million of them out there to your point.
I'm not trying to sell a course because I donate most of the money from my courses anyway. But there's a lot of resources out there to exactly what you just said, where if you need to find a certain, let's say you want to find a certain course on accounting or a certain course on business software or payroll software or selling or whatever.
I mean, there's a lot of stuff out there that you can just pick up and learn while you're doing that other stuff and get paid while you're learning rather than paying to learn. Yeah, I know even in our industry, the insurance industry, we find there was a big debate and I was on one side of it and got a lot of pushback.
We do not require a college degree to work for our agency. Obviously, you have to be licensed because that's a state and federal regulation to sell insurance.
But the actual, you don't need a college degree to do this work. There's nothing you're going to learn in college to sell insurance, to service people well, to care about them, etc.
And when we took down, being that we're national and fairly high profile, when we took down a college degree as a requirement, it technically never was, but then we kind of made it a point to say to people, hey, you don't have to be. That actually caused a huge stir.
And now when I go out and do speaking in the insurance industry, I speak in other industries too, but when I do speaking in that specific, it's one of the questions I'll always get is like, well, how do you know someone's a good candidate if they didn't go to college? And to me, that seems like, I mean, you are just missing the forest through the trees with that question, right?

I mean, I couldn't, I, I almost like the first time someone asked it to me, I was like,

uh, are we, so have you seen recent college graduates?

Like, are we assuming that somehow these people are geniuses when they come out?

Like, I don't understand.

I love that because literally it's like, oh, so every college degree person is going to be an awesome candidate is that what you're saying i mean by default yeah no i i heard this i heard this funny thing the other day in fact it was in it was an industry in you it was in your industry it was in the insurance industry where um the the interviewer said to the interviewee now listen i want you to know that everything you learn in college, you don't need to know any of that to do what we're doing because here we teach you how to do exactly how we want you to do it. And the interviewee said, well, that's good because I didn't go to college.
And then the interviewer said, well, then I'm sorry that I can't hire you. It's crazy.
And here's the other thing that bothers me about college in general. So I have two young kids, soon to be 10 and 8.
But they're not too far off. I mean, five years, we'll be thinking about what that next step is.
And I don't think that we're going to be in any less clear a place probably in five years than we are today. Although I do think that there'll be more foundational resources that aren't classic college available.
And literally, I've got my son. I'm training him to be such a good little independent thinking conservative.
But he's already saying, Dad, the only way I'm going to school is if I get a good Division I scholarship it, if I'm not playing sports in college, I'm just going to start working. And I'm like, if that actually happens, I'm going to be, if that's the decision-making process, if you don't get a division one sports scholarship, then you're just going to go into business.
Like, I feel like I'll have done something right as a parent. Like I'll have at least put two solid conservative, independent thinkers back out into the world to kind of go against this conformist, you know, liberal mindset that we've been infected with.
If you go to my website, you'll see that I wrote I wrote an open letter to parents. And I'm sure I cheesed some people off when I did this.
But I said, you know, I get it. I'm a parent.
You birthed your child. You clothed your child.
You fed your child. You raised your child.
You protected them. You taught them as much as you could teach them.
And now somehow you think that the only way you're going to be considered a good parent is if they have this degree hanging on their wall. And it's never been true.
I mean, it just has not ever been true. So it's especially now with the supply and demand part of what you and I do, you know.
So I look at them and I say, is it your goal to have an educated child or a financially independent, you know, self-reliant, goal-oriented child? And those are not mutually exclusive. So the point I'm making is if you were to, when your child is in their mid-30s or 40s and your friends see how they're living, that's the ultimate win, is the fact that they found a good way to live.
They found a way that they could see their future. They drew it out for themselves very clearly.
They planned to get what they've drawn, their life brochure. They took one step at a time and they put that puzzle together.
That's the ultimate prize as a parent, okay? Because a lot of parents are waking up and they're going, wow, you know, that kid's got that $150,000, you know, black laminated degree hanging on the wall, but they can't find a job or they're finding a job in something that had nothing to do with their degree. And somehow I put them into debt and now they're going to be, they're going to be blowing their first house on paying off debt that they're not even using.
I not even using. I could have actually done the wrong thing for my child by pushing him into a degree that he or she didn't want or can't use.

So it's a really serious issue.

This is not something that people just take lightly.

Well, you know, yeah, it's a college debate.

Yeah, the old college debate.

Wrong.

You know, back in the day, you could go to college and blow it and walk out with maybe $20,000 in debt. Okay.
Now it's $150,000, $200,000. It's crazy.
So you really have to take another look at this before you just arbitrarily follow the crowd. In fact, I would say not following the crowd is the most lucrative thing you could be doing right now.
Yeah, if I had any questions about this particular topic, I think the zombie apocalypse, we'll refer to it as, so we don't get blackballed on YouTube. When the zombie apocalypse happened and the people making the medicine for the zombie apocalypse were not held accountable to whether or not the medicine worked or not, that was starting to be the first filter when I said, when you are not held accountable, now in this case the correlation to college is, these people can charge you as much as they want, put as much debt as they want on you, and you can't get out of it in bankruptcy, unlike any other debt that you have.
When I see scenarios like that, I start to question whether that's the path we should be taking because you've set up an incentive plan where there's literally, and all these kids are getting free college, right? Free college. And they're getting this thrown at them.
And these, of course, they're going, that's great. I got $120,000 in debt and they want to give me some amount of that off for free.
Except no one asked the question, when do the prices actually stabilize or come down? And the answer is never because there is zero ramifications to them increasing cost. And I look at the college I went to, which I went to 100% by the same mindset that my son is choosing.
I probably wouldn't have gone to college if it wasn't for sports, mostly because I came from a little shit town of less than 900 people, and going to college was not even an option. And then I got this scholarship to go play baseball, and so that's why I went where I went.
Well, when I went there, it was $27,000 a year this is 1999 1999. And that was like right at the top of a school.
And I didn't pick it. I got a scholarship to go.
That's why I went. But I'm looking at $27,000 a year going, if I even had to pay half of this, I wouldn't be able to afford to go here.
That same school, University of Rochester, is now like $53,000 a year. And like, I look at my college experience and I basically failed into a math degree, like just kept failing until I finally got to like what my guidance counselor said, if you don't pass with a math degree, you cannot graduate.
And like, that's how I got out because to me,

the information was so irrelevant. There was no, what you were learning had no context to what I was experiencing day to day.
I mean, I was part of a million clubs and all these different things. And like those experiences, and I think this goes back to choosing say a trade school or getting right into the workforce and then selectively picking coursework like yours to help educate yourself is so much more valuable because I have all this knowledge, which is completely useless.
It's completely useless in my day-to-day life. I have a degree.
I have a degree from a school that was ranked 28th in the country at the time that I graduated, and I don't use any of it, like literally no part in my day-to-day life. And that to me is more often the case than I think it isn't, right? Doctors, maybe, you know, there are certain professions, certain researchers, physician, physicists, those kinds of people, maybe engineering, they might use their college degree.
Everybody else, anyone who graduated liberal arts, they're not using any of that. Well, you know, it's funny because first off college has increased, I think 50 times the rate of inflation.
I mean, without explanation. Okay.
Now, if you go, if you're, if you're considering going to a school for your, your child going to a school and you go to that school and all you see is construction and brand new buildings and buying up whole blocks of prime real estate, you know there's something wrong there. Okay.
Like they've got too much money in other words. Okay.
Somebody explained to me why Ivy League schools have $80 billion in their endowment fund. Like what are they doing with the money? I asked the question, nobody can answer that question.
Well, you know, we have it for a future. Yeah, but for what? Well, we have it for scholarships.
You could give scholarships to everyone for the rest of the planet's existence and not run out of $80 billion. Yeah.
Okay. Well, you know, we have it for the...
No, I need to know exactly why you are hoarding $80 billion. They can't answer the question.

All of a sudden, they just change it and they talk about squirrels, okay?

And that should tell you right there, there's a problem because a lot of these schools have all these huge endowments.

And for what?

Like, they're not lowering the price of their school.

I mean, they're just hanging on to all this cash.

Are they going to start a new country?

I mean, what are they going to do?

Are they going to open up satellite offices all around the world? No. So what are they doing with all this money that they've collected from all these people and or donors who are, I don't want to say dumb enough, but maybe naive enough to just keep giving them money for no reason? and it's just a really odd scenario for me

because 25, I'm sorry, 40% of kids that go to college don't know why they're going. How about that number? 25% of them, and we did the research, change their mind when they get there and pursue something else.
But the real zinger is only 33% of college degree earners ever use their degree ever. So, I mean, it is a wholly inefficient, horribly expensive enterprise unless you know exactly why you're going.
You know, I'm not against college. If you're going to operate on my shoulder so I can get back out on the golf course, fine.
I want you to know everything there is to know about a knife before you come at me with it. I get that.
But for the vast majority of people who are just floating through life like herds of cattle, and they're just getting, you know, just corralled into this system, and they come out the other side with all this debt, and then they look back at us and go, we want you to pay this debt off. Well, who borrowed this money to begin with you got hoodwinked i'm sorry you got hoodwinked but are we going to let's say pay the debt off to the guy who wanted to start his own hvac company and he had to buy a thirty thousand dollar truck and twenty thousand dollars worth of tools does he get money back? The answer to that question is no.
Does someone who paid their school debt off on time, as promised five years ago, did they get some of their money back? The answer to that question is no. It's just a vote-getting populist program, and it's a shame because colleges are too expensive, and you don't always get something that you can utilize right into the working world.

So you got to be really careful.

I keep trying to tell parents this isn't the end.

This isn't like Z in the alphabet.

You can stop it at R, okay, and just go let them pick up a hammer or a welding torch or open their own bakery or become a hairdresser, an esthetician. So many.
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...things that they can just rock star money with. And again, the goal should be that they live a happy life and not necessarily an educated one.
Yeah, I think some is like silicon valley porn is a big part of the problem that if you're not building some tech company that's going to be trade that's going to be traded for a billion dollars someday that somehow you're not pushing yourself in a position that's worthwhile i mean i i have a lot of buddies who deal with this and that like that when is enough conversation what do you want out of your life kind of thing um and you know I know you deal with some of that but before we get there you know one of the things I wanted to mention too just in this whole college conversation uh I was interviewing someone the other day and we were talking through this and my feelings on a lot of these things you know we hire uh hire younger people, we interview them all the time. You know, I'm a sports coach, different things, you know, so I'm involved in interacting with these.
My belief is we treat young people like children way too late in life. Like we have 25 year old people who are two, three years removed from college and we're still talking to them like they're children.
And I don't mean like when my dad calls me a kid, you know what I mean? I get it. I'm 25 years younger than him.
And he's, that's not what, that's not what I'm talking about, right? That's just a, a, a phrase, you know, terminology for whatever I'm talking talking about we literally treat them like children at 25 years old. The hand-holding, the safety, the, oh, their frontal lobe wasn't developed.
They didn't understand what they were doing when they took out this debt. Now look, I think that there is predatory things happening and it's why the kids don't actually understand.
But to your point, they're hammered over the head so hard with the need to have this degree to be worth anything at the next level that they're making that decision. I don't think they're making that decision because they're dummies.
I think they're making that decision because they're being told so strongly, as you said, by parents, by peers, by companies, by the people they follow online, that if they don't have that degree, that they somehow are unworthy. But we can't treat them like children.
They still made that decision. We have to start, we have to start, you know, I don't know, at 16 years old, I had two jobs, paid for my own car, paid for my own car insurance.
I got myself to practice every day to the different sports that I played. Like, I basically took care of my life.
Like, it didn't happen. Other than my home, which my mom paid for, everything else in my life I paid for.
So like, I look at that and growing up that way, completely self-sufficient through the entire thing. And then you see people who are in their late 20s and they can barely make it through a day.
And that seems to becoming more the case than like that's an exception. That seems to be more like what's happening day to day.
And these independent thinkers and these independent people are more the exceptions. I don't know.
Well, yeah, you know, you make a good point because I had seven jobs by the time I was 18 years old. Now, some of them were part-time, but I still had them.
Okay. And, um, you know, if you think about it, you can, you can put someone who's 16 into a car and that car can do a hundred miles an hour in a very busy space with a lot of other cars that can all do 100 miles an hour potentially.
And you're willing to let that person go out on the road by themselves when they're 16. You're also willing to let someone, let's see, fly an Apache attack helicopter in Afghanistan or drive a tank or, you know, go on to an aircraft carrier for at 18 years of age.
Okay. So let's not, let's not kid ourselves when it comes to protecting our, I mean, again, I'm glad that, you know, we're having this conversation because I don't get to do this very often, but let's not kid ourselves that we're allowing these people to go protect the freedoms of our asses over here and putting them in any number of harm's ways.
Dodging bullets, launching missiles, dodging missiles, flying helicopters and airplanes, doing all that stuff. and yet you're going to coddle these little people when they're 23, 24, 25 years old and call them woke and call them concerned and call them all this fragility and blah, blah, blah.
I mean, we get what we – what do you say? You reap what you sow, okay? Get these kids out. Get them working.
Get them off of these stupid screens. You can't compare building a tree fort for real with building a house on Minecraft, okay, on your screen.
We just have to – I mean, I fear – I really fear that it's only going to get worse because now those same soft kids are becoming, guess what?

Teachers, college professors, right?

And media people, right?

So that perpetuates itself because between teachers, college professors, and the media,

that's the way you poison brains right there. It's that simple.
Yeah, I completely agree with that. And that's where everyone wants to know, why is the media so one-sided? Well, look where they're getting their people from.
I mean, they get them from these weak, soft farms of people that there's no accountability there. All there is is, you know, tattletailing without accountability.
It's crazy. And to your point, the good news in all of this, and that's why I'll always love to come back to this because there is such an amazing silver lining in blue-collar work right now.
Because all these potential softies are out there not willing to do this stuff the people who are are making a killing yeah okay and what's funny is i was probably i'm going to go out on a limb here and say i was probably one of the first people five ten years ago to say plumbers are making more than doctors and they were looking at me like i was out of my mind right oh that's crazy you're out of your mind well now that's a pretty popular sentiment around our our industry plumbers and carpenters and electricians and HVAC and all that kind of stuff so yeah that tights it that tight is turning and and the only reason why people are going really wow? Wow, that's shocking. How come I didn't know that? Is because blue-collar people don't talk about the money they make.
Nobody ever asks them how much money they make. There also isn't a blue-collar mainstream media channel.
There's no, you know what I mean? Like the blue-collar guys are working all day. They're not sitting at home in front of the TV watching CNN.
CNN's got to stroke those people that are home, that are in offices, that are have CNN up on their second screen or whatever. Right.
And, and so there's no market there for that message to, to be reinforced. And, you know, it's why I think, and I try to, to, to push, you know, some of these guys messages so hard, you hard, like Andy Fursella, Ed Milet, David Goggins.
These are top-level thought leaders on one simple idea that I think we've completely lost and it's something I try to instill in my kids and my employees and everybody that I talk to with this show. Somehow we forgot that life is supposed to be hard.
Not that it is hard. It's supposed to be hard.
Like it's not supposed to just be this series of checkboxes where, you know, you just get perpetually fatter and more wealthy and everything gets easier and the couch gets more comfortable until you, until you die. Like that's just not the way that it works.
And we like lost that somehow. Like we forgot that it's supposed to be hard.
Like that's how you get better. That's how you grow.
That's how your life has meaning and purpose. And, and, and you have any kind of influence is by going through these hard, tough challenges.
And we have just completely and utterly lost that concept, in my opinion. Well, I completely agree with you.
I will add like a caveat to what you're saying. I think life is meant to be hard, but play is also meant to be hard as well.
So I have a sign in my hallway that says, work hard, play hard. I don't think that we live to work.
I think we work so that we can live. And both of those should be hardcore.
I mean, you should work really hard, bust your butt so that you can go out and enjoy all the cool things that this world and your life have to offer. It should be intense on both sides.
And yeah, so I'll just throw that in in there life is meant to be hard but the rewards are pretty cool if you if you do that so yeah i agree work hard and play hard as well and it's something that we've lived by for a very long time around here yeah and uh you know this just came to me as you were talking but i think another one too is is is your relationships and your connection to people. I think that the internet has created this very light touch relationship.
I might text you once a month and somehow we're like, but we try to pretend like we have a relationship. I'm very open about the fact that I have tight circle of friends I don't I don't have a lot of friends and it's not because I don't like people I have a lot of people who are probably on the next level out of friends that I love seeing I'll bro slap up it's all good but like but those people on the inside I try to go very very deep with and try to connect with them and I feel like we have the internet in particular has created this veil between us where, where we now try to put more on relationships and is actually there or that we're actually giving because everything is through a screen.
We're not sharing space. We're not, you know, there's something about seeing someone in real life and giving them the slap and the little bro hug and the, Hey, how's it going, man? And it's great to spend that time with them.
We've, we've just removed all this connective material. And I think you see somebody doing something online.
You're like, Oh, I'd love to have that. When you see somebody in person, you're like, I get how hard it was to get there.
You can, you can sense it. You can feel it when you share space with them.
When you're just watching them through a screen, you have no, there's no, our brains and our sensory mechanisms are not set up to understand how hard it was for that person to get there through a screen. Well, you know, and, and one of the things you're getting at is the, the source of gratitude.
And what I mean by that is, you know, and one of the things you're getting at is the source of gratitude. And what I mean by that is, you know, when you first figure out what you want your life to look like and you draw that out in perfect clarity and then you go after it one step at a time, you will begin to gain on those things.
You'll begin to do the things that you wanted to do. You'll be able to build that puzzle, okay, that is your life.
And you will start to enjoy the process. And you'll also create a lot of awesome memories along the way.
And when I think of memories, I think of all the photographs I have around my office and all the photographs I have around my house that remind me of the very cool things that I have done. People I've been with, places I've gone, things that I have done.
And that builds an enormous sense of gratitude, okay? I don't have jealousy of anything. I don't have, I don't have like, you know, this wanton, you know, FOMO of anything.
I'm living my life the way I wanted to live it with the people that I wanted to live it with. And we're having a blast.
Okay. And I have an enormous amount of gratitude.
Try creating a memory through a Facebook friend. It's impossible.
I mean, a real, true, meaningful memory.

You can't do that. Again, to your point, you can't put all of this plasticity, I think, you can't put all that through a screen and try to get something wholesome out of it.
It just doesn't work.

And so when I look around and i

think well if you're missing to your point that real organic genuine you know interaction with someone you're missing the ability to create memories and you're missing the ability to be grateful. And so I just cautioned people, you know, the other day, now I got to tell you, I do a lot of work on my phone because I'm out a lot.
So I use it for emails. I never used to do that before.
I was against putting emails on my phone for years because I knew I would get caught up in it. Well, then I realized I was getting a lot of emails when I got home.
So I'm going to try and knock some of them down when I'm out. When I saw that I was on my screen for four hours in one day, that blew my mind.
I mean, I almost freaked out. I was on my screen for four hours.
Now, mind you, I was working some of that time, but even so, it just blew my mind because if I was staring at the screen i wasn't driving my boat or playing golf or taking my dog for a walk or going out to dinner with my wife i wasn't doing any of those things so you know i i think that's got to be the beginning maybe yeah is to try to find a gas tank or a fuel gauge for that stupid screen time and get people to realize well i don I don't have my screen. So now what am I going to do? Well, there's a whole freaking globe out there.
Go figure it out. Go do something.
Yeah. I'll tell you a good place to start for people.
And this is going to sound silly. Read a frigging book.
And I don't mean listen to an audio book and I don't even mean read it on Kindle. I mean, have a physical, I mean, you, I'm not going to try to move this thing because it follows my face and I've made the mistake of moving over here and then it doesn't come back.
But like right over there is just stacks and stacks of books. And people say you're freaking crazy.
You'll never get to those books. And I'll be like, if I, I'll be honest with you, the stack is aspirational.
If I get to half the books in the stack and I never read the other half in my lifetime, cause I'm, I have like a problem and I'm always adding more, I'm doing something right. Like I'm reading and I'm touching and you're feeling and you're marking.
And like, to me, it's a good first step for people who feel like they're screen addicted is just the physical paper, the getting off the screen, getting out of the audio and having to focus your attention on a book is a really good way. And even if it's just 10 or 15 minutes of reading, you know, you catch yourself on this for a second, like, I'm going to put it down, pick up a book that that habit will build very quickly because I think I think today we as a people are so hungry for deep, rich, meaningful information because we get so much shallow.
I hate this term

that people use snackable content like, oh, gross. Like it just to me, it's like, I get it.
I get what

the marketing term is, but like it just to me, it feels so shallow. And then you get into some of

these deeper works or a book and it's meaningful. I feel like people are hungry for that.
And I've

seen a lot of friends who've kind of reestablished a reading habit here the last few years coming out

I call it. works or a book and it's meaningful.
I feel like people are hungry for that. And I've seen a lot of friends who've kind of reestablished a reading habit here the last few years coming out of COVID

and all the screen time that came with that. And hopefully we're in a renaissance back to

experiencing more of the real world and not the world that comes to us through our screens.

Well, and again, that's kind of why when I wrote my book, Blue Collar Cash, I made sure

that I'm a course with it that, again, people could change their lives this afternoon with this course. So it didn't become just a book on a shelf.
I wanted people to see that these are very simple things that no one is teaching you. Your parents aren't teaching you this, by and large.
Your schools are sure as hell not teaching you this because it goes against what they want to do. Colleges are never going to tell you this stuff, okay, because they'll lose money doing it.
And they're just simple things that can put your mindset in the right place.

And you'll improve the way you look at life this afternoon by just reading this book and taking this course. Again, I give all the money to charity.
It's not something that I did. My world was really good before I even wrote it.
But to your point, there needs to be that volume of stuff out there that people can access in lieu of four years and learning how to play beer pong really well. You know what I mean? Yeah.
Yeah, it's an interesting dynamic. But I know that the phone companies are winning big time because you walk in the airport and you see people waiting for a flight and 100 of the people are doing this on their you know on their phones i guess that used to be books and newspapers if you think about it 20 30 years ago but um yeah something's got to change i just i'm i'm hopeful that that these kids wake up and go man i wasted a lot of time comparing myself to the perfection of others only to find out they weren't perfect in the first place.
Yeah. So let's take this last section of our conversation in time together today and focus on the book, Blue Collar Cash.
Let's say I'm listening to this. I am younger and, you know, maybe I went to college.
Maybe I didn't. Doesn't matter.
I'm not in a place I want to be. Maybe I work for the state.
I'm coming from Albany, New York. We have 250,000 state workers here.
Every single one of them seems miserable every single day, yet they all go back to work. Let's say I'm thinking about a career change and I've even had that idea hit me.
My dad was a carpenter and I, you know, I said, I don't want to swing a hammer for a living. And now I'm going, hey, maybe he had something.
Maybe his handyman job or he's drywaller or whatever. I'm doing a reno.
So I've basically touched all the artisans in the last four months. Where do you start? How do I figure out, one, is this something I can make a career of two? Do I like it? Like, like how, how would I get invested? Because I can, I know how to go apply on indeed for every single white collar job that exists in the world.
Like that's a very easy path, but sometimes it can be a little daunting. How do I find a good crew? How do I do an apprenticeship? If it's that kind of career, do I start my own?

How would you start to break down making these decisions and starting to figure out where you go?

It's going to be a lot simpler than you think because the first step is you have to draw your life brochure.

And that's the first thing I talk about in the book.

You have to draw what you want your house to look like, what you want your cars to look like, what you want your dog to look like, dog, cat, pet, what color, what would you name it? What do your vacations look like? What's your spiritual moment look like? What's your health moment look like? What do your vacations look like? You have to draw all this out and create a life brochure for yourself and say, you know what, Ken, if I could live like that, that would be really cool. That's my own personal nirvana, what I call comfort, peace, and freedom in the book.
If I can get to that point, if I can see that, then I have a lot of options with how I get there. Because, you know, there's apprenticeships, there's tech school, trade school, there's military career, there's colleges, working right out of high school.
There's all these paths that can start you towards that picture, towards that eventuality, towards that nirvana. And so I think the first thing that you have to do is you have to begin with the end.
Like, what's this look like? What do I want my life to look like in great and unbelievable detail? Okay, so that's number one. The second thing is, if you're talking about taking advantage of the good old, you know, law of supply and demand, then I look at it this way.
You know, I have 200 people in this ditch digging business that we do right now. I've been at it for 40 years now.
And we have a blast doing it. I mean, we've created a culture that's just super fun.
You could take any business.

I don't care what it is. And you can make it fun and energetic and exciting and cultured.
And you can do all that. It can happen.
So don't be so hung up on what you do for a living. Focus more on what you do with what you do for a living.
Because you can create fun almost anywhere. the other thing that i think is really important is, you know, contractors used to go out and fill their warehouses with parts and pieces and things they needed for their business.
Now, a lot of times they go to these big warehouses like Home Depot and Lowe's and those kind of places, and they buy their stuff that they need there. Well, if you go to the commercial desk in those places, all you got to do is ask them, what's in the most demand here with the least supply in this town? Okay? They'll tell you.
Well, my God, you know, we're way back ordered on plumbing parts, and there's no plumbers in this town. Okay? They will tell you what's in demand there.
That's just one way. You can go to your chamber of commerce and do this.
You can go to other supply warehouses and do this, but find, find a business that there's a lot of need for and not a lot of people doing it. Because like I said before, between colleges and parents and screens, kids aren't getting into these businesses anymore.
They're just not. For every 10 electricians that are retiring today, only four or five are coming online.
That creates a supply and demand problem. So go to your local area, figure out what everybody else is not doing.
Go do that, and make a fortune and then use that money to create and solidify

and build that puzzle out that is your life. Because at the end of the day, we don't live to work.
We work so that we can live. I want to know what the live part looks like, okay? And your pursuit of living is really the ultimate prize.
Not necessarily how you got there. No one ever rolled into my driveway and said, holy cow, Ken, how did you do all this? What degree do you have? That's never happened.
But they might ask me how I ground this life out one goal at a time, and I'll sit there and talk to them about that all day long. The point is, get that picture in front of you, leave it out there, let that reticular activating system and the law of attraction and the firing electrodes of repetitive seeing of something work in your favor.
Let that put your body on kind of an autopilot towards the completion of those things. And then just go find a business that will pay you well to do all that stuff.
It's unbelievably simple. I hate to say that, but it really is.
And I don't have any college degree. I don't have any letters after my name.
I've been digging ditches since I was 15, but I knew one thing. I knew that in this type of business or in any blue-collar company, you can control your input, you can control your output, the pace and the quality of that output.
You can control your day, your time, your schedule, and in most cases, your financial gain. You don't get that on the 15th floor of some office building in a cubicle selling medical supplies, okay? So just be conscious of what's available around you.
What's not available. Go plug yourself in there and have a great life doing it.
So at some point in your journey, you had to hit a moment. Well, I shouldn't say had to one, I guess, did you? And if it, if you did, then I would love for you to explain where it didn't feel like it was working.
You know, one of the things we talk a lot about on this show, because I see this a lot in my own industry, I see it a lot with the different people that I mentor, etc., is that when shit starts to get hard, all of a sudden they start looking for, well, this might not be the right path. Or they immediately want to question the decisions that took them down the path in the first place.
And oftentimes to me, and I firmly believe this, it's been the story of my career. Oftentimes success is just outlasting everyone else who pulls the ripcord.
Like how, one, do you think that's true? Two, did you face that moment? And three, when you're in those types of moments, what is your advice to people to keep going? How do you persevere through those moments of entrepreneurship or in your career when you feel like you made a decision for the right reasons, but you've hit a hard patch and now you're starting to question? Okay. So that was four amazingly good questions.
And I appreciate them a lot. So first off, one of the things I talk about in the book is there's about nine characteristics of being an entrepreneur.
Persistence, resilience, faith, courage, humility, initiative, vision, all those kinds of things. Generosity, all those kinds of things.
Every one of us has those characteristics within us. We just need a reason for them to come out, okay? I don't care if you're the first one who started the Cabbage Patch doll or you started your own bakery or you started your own anything.
All entrepreneurs have one thing in common, a great vision for the future for what they want for themselves, okay? They see very clearly what they want to go to next, next, and next. And what that does is it creates, I must win here.
Not I should win, I hope to win, I wish I win, I dream that I win. It's I must win.
And that makes you outlast all the times that you fall to your knees or, you know, you get knocked around or you get spun around or off the path. And that puts you right back on the path.
A very clear, unbelievably solid picture of what you want your life to look like will outlast all of those problems. Okay.
That, that to me is, is number one. Number two, I knew that I'm not a lazy person, but I knew I didn't want to be that 70 hour a week guy.
I just didn't. I didn't want to go home every night and say to my wife, oh man, you should have seen me today.
I answered this and I fixed that and I built this and I changed that and I yelled at this guy for this and I created. No, I didn't want to be that guy because she should have turned back and looked to me and said, wow, you're not the most effective leader in the world, are you? Okay.
Instead, I started saying I need to build other like-minded people around me because I firmly believe this next statement. I couldn't get what I want for myself, nor can my company get what it wants or needs until everyone within it gets what they want for themselves first.
It's absolutely true. We have a linear thing here.
There's input, there's work, and then there's output. And I, as the owner, am always on the output side.
So everybody else has to win first before I win. So why don't you focus on building them winning themselves because you're always going to win in the end of that.
It's called entrepreneurship. Surround yourself with people who will say to you, Wow, Ken, I think I can get what I want for my life with and through your company.
I'm going to be a little selfish here. I'm going to work for me first and you second.
Okay? And we're all going to win that way. And one of the ways you do that when you hit those plateaus is you just get them in a room and say, okay, we're at this level.
If we get to a level higher than this, I'm willing to share some of that level with all of you. So where do you guys think we can go? I did this and their answers were way

higher than I had written down. So was I my own limiter? Was I the one who was holding us back

maybe? Because I was trying to do it all? The minute I unleashed the power of them sharing in

the gains that that company made, man, get the hell out of their way because they're going to

go full force and take you to places you never even dreamed of. The revenues we're doing now compared to the revenues we were doing before I started this program, we were incrementally growing a little bit every year, blah, blah, blah, you know, sometimes plateauing, sometimes backwards, sometimes plateauing, sometimes going up.
I unleashed these people these people. I'm getting a piece of the future.
Bam. It went crazy.
And, and again, it didn't cost me a nickel because I was spending money. I didn't even have yet.
Right. So yeah, it's a, it's a long winded answer.
I could have spent an hour just on those four questions that you had, but it's, it's, it's really important thing to get, you get your people involved in, and, and have them all working for themselves first and you second in pursuit of the picture that is their own nirvana. Yeah.
The hubris of entrepreneurs and business owners, I think who feel like, well, part of it is fear. Part of it is hubris that they need to have have all the answers to every question.
I've found, you know, even in my own business and all the different businesses that I'm part of, the less is more, while trite and cliche is so, you can get so much more out of a well-thought-out, short amount of engagement with someone where you actually come at them with the proper questions understanding empowerment etc versus what I see most often is we're going to meet every day uh I'm going to just tell you what to do and what you're training your people to instead of salt be problem solvers you're training them just well this is what the boss says so this is what I'm going to do and then they go down that path and you're like hey you saw that that wasn't the right thing to do and they're like yeah but that's what you told me to do why why would I do anything else and it's scary but we're not supposed to have all the answers you could have had one really good idea a long time ago. And that, that got you in this position where now you're the CEO or the, you know, a high ranking somewhere in a company.
And it's okay that like that idea and things associated with it are your primary value. You don't need to know accounting and HR and everything that has to do with the onboarding process and how you do your Instagram mark.
Like you're, there's nobody knows all those answers. Um, but that's a very hard thing I think for people to do.
You know, when you see that, what is your advice? Because that to me seems like one of the most limiting factors after someone kind of reaches escape velocity, right? They do the grind to reach escape velocity. And then this next thing is like the next barrier they have to get past.
Well, I'm going to take it one step further. And when I say this, I have to duck because people want to throw things at me.
But you have to make yourself irrelevant to your company. And I don't mean irrelevant to where you just go out and play golf all day and don't ever show back up again.
I'm saying you need to make yourself irrelevant to the day-to-day workings of that company if you really want to grow. Because you should be hovering in a helicopter, a virtual helicopter, above the roof of your building by 300 feet.
You rip the building's roof off and you look back down and you just observe what's going on and have the luxury of plugging yourself in where you want to, not where you have to. You have to let go of this thing where me, boss, you, employee, and all the ego crap that goes along with that.
You know, if you lined up, I'm staring at a parking lot outside my window. If you lined up all 200 people in my parking lot, including me, shoulder to shoulder, I wouldn't want anyone to be able to pick me out as the guy.
Okay? Oh, there's the boss. That's the guy.
Because in order to do that, I would have to be so different and so, like you said, hubris and so maybe cocky and obnoxious that they would go, oh, that's got to be the guy, right?

All I'm saying is allow yourself to become irrelevant to the mechanical day-to-day.

Put people in place to do the things that you used to do that were those mechanical things.

Set a new level or goal of success with them guiding the level of that success. And then unleash the power of those people and watch your company go crazy.
It's the only way to really grow. You are the one that's limiting the growth of your own company.
I guarantee it. Because I thought I was pretty progressive when it came to this thinking.
I was like, man, I'm going to build myself entrepreneurs. I'm going to do all these things.
And I had a great culture. And we did a lot of fun things here, work hard, play out everything else.
And then when I asked them to where we go on the next level, their answers were way higher than mine. And I owned the place.
I was literally limiting the future of my own company without even knowing it. So, yeah, you got to be careful with that.
And, you know, sometimes I go home and my wife says, what did you do today? I go, nothing really. But, but I did a lot of things.
You know what I mean? I did a lot of things. But no, I, it's, it's a, it's a very interesting dynamic because to your point, you really have to divorce yourself from your own persona in order to make this happen.
But once you do, you're going to be the happiest person in the world because finally your business is going to – you're going to kind of run your business instead of it running you, right? And it's just the greatest thing in the world. The book is Blue Collar Cash.
You can get the course at KenRusk.com. That's K-E-N-R-U-S-K.
As well as learn more about you, your work. Like I said, the course, you can get the book there.
You can get the book on Amazon. I'll obviously have all these links in the show notes for everyone listening as well.
But Ken, if someone just wants to connect with you, follow along. I know you have Instagram, et cetera.
Where's the best place to connect with you and kind of get your thoughts on an ongoing basis and connect with your work? Yeah, you know, so we have a blog on KenRusk.com, which is pretty good. But you know what? We do a lot of content on Instagram.
It's at KenRuskOfficial. And we have that same thing with TikTok and Twitter, I should say X, and Facebook and all that.
So we do a lot of content on there that's kind of fun, and you'll kind of see where we're up to there. But, yeah, in my book, I look at it this way.
It's incumbent upon me as a successful entrepreneur, okay? And, again, that's a series of characteristics like I talked about before but we all have those and it's incumbent upon me now to turn around and shorten the learning curve for the next guy or gal who wants to do that behind me. I think that's my duty I've been given I've worked hard, I've achieved a lot of great things, I'm very grateful there There is people that will say, well, there is a gift.
You get this gift. That's vision.
But we all have that vision. We all have the ability to do that.
But for me to teach somebody how to do that is now my life goal is to turn around and say, hey, come on along with me. I want to see you live the best life that you can possibly live as well.
And that's why I do all these things with the book and the course, just to try and carry that, carry that thought. Well, I'm glad you do.
There are more people, we need more individuals talking about what the world is really like. And I think cutting down this curtain of, uh, what it should be, right? There's this idea of what it should be and what life is really like.
And unfortunately, we are pumping out an entire generation of people who have no clue how the world really works. And that being born in a coastal elitist community in the United States is a very small minority of what the world is actually like.
And outside of that, there are skills, there are mindsets that you must have to be successful. And I think the more we can have conversations like this one and the more people who read your work and connect with you, the more they're going to see what's happening.
And I think it's a wonderful thing. So I appreciate your time.
I appreciate the book. And for everyone listening, obviously you've heard where to go.
I will also have everything we've talked about linked up in the show notes, whether you're watching on YouTube or listening on the podcast. Make sure you check out Ken's work.
Ken, appreciate the hell out of you, man. Yeah, thanks to you as well.
I love everything that you're doing. Keep up the good work.
Keep up the fight. Keep spreading the word around because it is a very necessary

and needed thing. Anything we can do to help

those behind us. Thank you.
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