SAN MATEO, Calif. -- Sean Riley, the host of National Geographic show "World's Toughest Fixes," has a message for kids today: Learn a trade.
Speaking with BoingBoing editor Xeni Jardin at Maker Faire yesterday, Riley pointed out that it takes four to six years to learn a trade, such as plumbing -- about the same amount of time it would take you to get through college.
Yet plumbers, especially in big urban areas, will make far more money than the average college graduate. In other words, if you're smart and ambitious, and you can't get a Thiel Fellowship to help kickstart your startup idea, you might consider another alternate path: Getting your hands dirty.
In Riley's case, his trade -- rigging -- led him to work with a wide range of interesting projects. He mentioned that he recently helped hang the 50,000-pound lighting equipment at the upcoming Rolling Stones show in Oakland, Calif., for instance. But it also led him to become the star of one of television's more amazing reality shows. In each show, he travels to a different part of the world to watch (and sometimes help) as engineers, crane operators, riggers, and deep-sea divers help fix a wide range of massive problems, from replacing the engine on an cruise ship to swapping out the gate in a big dam lock.
Even if you're not interested in the trades, Riley thinks more people should know about the massive amount of infrastructure that it takes to make the modern world possible. There's a lot of redundancy built into systems like the power grid, he says -- but that redundancy is diminishing, since we've spent less and less on upgrading and maintaining this infrastructure over the past 40 years.
Repairability is also a disappearing quality in many gadgets we own today. "If you can't open it up and fix it, you don't own it," was one of the themes Jardin and Riley discussed onstage.
Learn how to fix things, and you'll be more in control of the world around you. And, you will be in a better position to build the next great thing.
Riley revealed that, after four seasons with the show, he would not be continuing for a fifth. "I traveled 350 days out of the year," he said, and said that while it was an amazing experience, it was exhausting, and took a personal toll. Also, he added, "a show like this is incredibly expensive to produce."
Photo: Sean Riley with a young fan. Photo credit: Dylan Tweney/VentureBeat