487: Blake Scholl—Making Supersonic Travel Real
The Way I Heard It with Mike Rowe
Release Date: 06/02/2026
487: Blake Scholl—Making Supersonic Travel Real
The Way I Heard It with Mike Rowe
Mike Rowe sits down with Blake Scholl, the former Amazon software engineer turned aerospace entrepreneur who walked away from Silicon Valley to revive supersonic passenger travel. As the founder of , Blake explains the century-long pursuit of faster flight. From the Cold War race to break the sound barrier to the rise—and fall—of the Concorde, Blake explains why supersonic travel disappeared just as it seemed destined to change aviation forever. He also shares how Boom Supersonic is working to make high-speed passenger flight practical again, and what it will take to shrink a 12-hour...
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486: Jason Ladanye—Nothing Up His Sleeve
The Way I Heard It with Mike Rowe
Mike sits down with master card mechanic and sleight-of-hand expert , whose impossible demonstrations of gambling moves and psychological deception have earned him a reputation as one of the best card handlers working today. Jason explains how a childhood obsession with cards—and an influential mentorship with legendary magician Darwin Ortiz—shaped his career performing around the world. Along the way, Jason shows Mike how magicians secretly track cards through a shuffled deck, demonstrates the art of bottom dealing, and reveals why the real secret behind great magic isn’t fast...
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485: Josh Smith—Made FOR America
The Way I Heard It with Mike Rowe
Founder and president of Josh Smith sits down with Mike to discuss his unlikely path from working as a lineman to becoming one of America’s premier master bladesmiths. The conversation dives into the grit, craftsmanship, and obsession with quality that helped turn a small operation into one of the fastest-growing knife manufacturers in the country. The two also talk about the grand opening of MKC’s brand-new 50,000-square-foot manufacturing facility in Missoula, where Josh explains why controlling his supply chain matters now more than ever—and what “Made in America” actually...
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484: Tom Albanese—The Metals at the Bottom of the Ocean
The Way I Heard It with Mike Rowe
In this episode Mike explores the growing race for critical minerals hidden deep beneath the Pacific Ocean with mining executive Tom Albanese, Chairman of and former CEO of Rio Tinto and Vedanta Resources. Tom has spent more than four decades in the global mining and metals business, overseeing some of the largest resource projects on earth. Now he’s focused on something even more ambitious: harvesting polymetallic nodules from the ocean floor—potato-sized rocks packed with nickel, cobalt, copper, manganese, and rare earth elements that are critical to batteries, AI infrastructure,...
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483: Peggy Rowe—Mother’s Day with Mom… LIVE!
The Way I Heard It with Mike Rowe
In this special LIVE edition of Coffee with Mome, Mike heads home for Mother’s Day and sits down with the woman who taught him everything worth knowing — his mom, Peggy Rowe. Recorded in front of a live audience at the place Peggy refers to as The Home, this episode is filled with the warmth, wit, and wonderfully sharp observations fans have come to expect from America’s Grandmother. From family stories and hard-earned wisdom to laughter that only comes from decades of shared history, Mike and Peggy talk about motherhood, growing older disgracefully, and the strange adventure of becoming...
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482: Xi Van Fleet— Don't Be a Shiny Little Screw
The Way I Heard It with Mike Rowe
Mike sits down with author and Cultural Revolution survivor for a conversation that’s equal parts personal history and cautionary tale. Xi recounts her childhood under Mao Zedong’s China, where conformity wasn’t encouraged—it was enforced. As a schoolgirl, she watched teachers publicly humiliated, neighbors turn on each other, and young people mobilized as ideological foot soldiers. Education gave way to indoctrination, and individuality was crushed in favor of collective obedience—the kind that produces "shiny little screws.” Drawing from her first book, , Xi lays out how mass...
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481: Jason Altmire—Trade Up
The Way I Heard It with Mike Rowe
Former congressman has spent years in Washington—and even more time outside it—making the case that America’s biggest opportunity isn’t behind a desk, but behind a welding mask, a set of tools, or the wheel of a big machine. Now leading , he’s on a mission to close the skills gap and reconnect hard work with real opportunity. In this episode, Mike and Jason dig into why millions of good jobs go unfilled, why the stigma around skilled labor refuses to die, and what it’ll take to convince a new generation that “college for all” might not be the answer. Along the way, they unpack...
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480: Matt Ebert—The Billion Dollar Car Wreck
The Way I Heard It with Mike Rowe
Matt Ebert didn’t set out to build a billion-dollar business—he just wanted to fix cars the right way. Today, he’s the CEO of Crash Champions, one of the fastest-growing collision repair companies in the country, valued in the billions and trusted to bring wrecked vehicles back to life. Mike sits down with Matt to unpack what really happens after a crash, why the skilled trades behind collision repair matter more than ever, and how a kid with no grand plan or college degree wound up leading a national powerhouse. Along the way, Matt tells how he got his start in the business, proving...
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479: Evan Voyles— The Connoisseur of Irony
The Way I Heard It with Mike Rowe
Neon lights aren’t supposed to be profound. They’re supposed to buzz, flicker, and sell you a cold beer or a bad decision. But Evan Voyles—founder of —has made a career out of bending that expectation into something stranger… and maybe a little wiser. Evan is a self-taught craftsman who works with fire, gas, and fragile tubes of glass to make signs that don’t just glow—they say something. His work has been commissioned by brands, collected as art, and—on more than one occasion—made people stop and wonder if the joke is on them. In this episode, Mike sits down with a guy who...
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478: Nicholas Eberstadt—The New Misery
The Way I Heard It with Mike Rowe
Numbers don’t lie—but they can obscure significant information. In this episode, Mike sits down with economist, demographer, and Harvard-educated brainiac Nicholas Eberstadt to explore a different kind of arithmetic—one that measures not just how many Americans we have, but how we’re actually living. In his latest book, America’s Human Arithmetic, Nick digs into three uncomfortable truths: first, the steady decline in prime-age labor force participation that persists even in strong economies. Second, the growing imbalance between those producing and those receiving—an economic...
info_outlineMike Rowe sits down with Blake Scholl, the former Amazon software engineer turned aerospace entrepreneur who walked away from Silicon Valley to revive supersonic passenger travel.
As the founder of Boom Supersonic, Blake explains the century-long pursuit of faster flight. From the Cold War race to break the sound barrier to the rise—and fall—of the Concorde, Blake explains why supersonic travel disappeared just as it seemed destined to change aviation forever. He also shares how Boom Supersonic is working to make high-speed passenger flight practical again, and what it will take to shrink a 12-hour flight into just a few hours.
Along the way, Mike and Blake discuss innovation, risk, engineering breakthroughs, and why some people refuse to accept that getting somewhere faster is a problem already solved.
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