THE BEERS HAVE BEEN flowing for a while now, and the evening crowd has started to fill the bar. I ask Rowe to expand on something he wrote last year in the business magazine Fast Company: "Never follow your passion, but by all means bring it with you."

"'Follow your passion' is the worst advice you can give someone," he says. "Exhibit A: our 200 dirty jobs—Rene the fish gutter, or the guy who makes flowerpots out of cow shit. Once they found a thing they could make a living from, they figured out how to get great at it and how to love it. If you bring your passion with you, you can apply it to anything that makes sense. If you follow it, you're going to be miserable until X, Y, Z happens, which might be never."

A better example is Rowe himself. He's gone from the guy who stayed in the opera just to get laid to the QVC host who sold lava lamps at midnight because it beat real work to discovering that he was a great TV host, and now to people calling him a hero. "Had I followed my passion, had I ever even bothered to define what that was," he says, "this never would have worked out."

About a year ago, after his appearance on Leno, Rowe took his first two-week vacation since Dirty Jobs started, holing up at a spa in Napa Valley with his longtime girlfriend, Sandy—an executive at a data-management company—and a case of wine. The bookshelf in their room came with a copy of Working, Studs Terkel's 1974 celebration of laborers.

"The girl read me a few chapters in the hot tub," Rowe says, "and the next morning I wound up picking grapes with some good-natured Mexicans. The symmetry struck me as significant. I canceled the next shoot, and by the end of the second week I'd finished the wine and formed a plan."

That plan became MikeRoweWorks.com, a self-funded Web site that Rowe calls "an apologetics for the trade and the infrastructure." Launching in full this summer, the site is a robust and growing collection of information on vocational schools, trade associations, job resources, and skilled labor in general. "What I'm hoping to do mainly is say that we can't keep associating drudgery with these kinds of jobs," he says. "It's a place where parents can go with their kids, who, like me in high school, have no idea what they're going to do, and say, 'Hey, before I give you 140 grand for that art-history degree, let's just check some other things.' Look, Obama doesn't want to create four million lawyers or investment bankers or actuarial accountants or, sorry, writers. That's not where the action is right now."

Rowe then slides a two-page document across the table and asks if I'll edit it for him. It's a letter to Barack Obama. (Note to the president: My apologies for any errors in spelling, grammar, or taste. I was four beers deep.) In it, he offers his site as a means of connecting people to the jobs at the heart of Obama's economic-stimulus package—a "call to arms" for skilled labor. "He wants to create jobs that are shovel ready," Rowe says, thumping his finger on the table for emphasis. "These are the exact jobs. He needs a PR campaign. Work needs a PR campaign."

We walk over to the studio where Rowe records voice-overs for the show, then to a quieter bar for several last drinks. There, an attractive, thirty-something blonde in business attire sheepishly approaches to say that her father is a construction worker and that they both love Dirty Jobs. No autographs, no photos. Just a thank-you. "Thanks," Rowe responds. "I'm just doing what I can." He turns back to me and shrugs, slightly embarrassed.

"You fell ass-backward into meaning, didn't you?" I suggest.

"Honest to God. You said it, not me. But yeah."