499: Ted Decker & Ian Cinnamon—Orbiting Home

[upbeat music] Hey guys, I'm Mike Rowe, this is The Way I Heard It, and this episode is called Orbiting Home.

Orbiting Home, because I have two guests.

And the first guest, Ted Decker, the CEO of The Home Depot, and the other guy is Ian Cinnamon.

You might not know that name, but he's the CEO of a company called Apex that's mass producing satellites.

And both of these men are going to impact your life, if they haven't already.

I met them at the Reagan Library.

I was there a couple weeks ago for the Reagan Economic Forum.

Regular listeners will recall I went there to listen to Scott Bessent, and then interview him.

And I'm so glad I did.

His episode was very well received.

I learned a lot, not just from him, but from lingering and crashing a few of those breakout sessions and listening to some other luminaries hold forth as to what was vital and critical about the future of our economy and our workforce and some other issues that are interesting to me and relevant to my foundation.

So since I had the cameras there, I invited them over for a chat.

Chuck wasn't there, so I guess maybe that's the trade-off, right? Two guests, no producer.

[laughs] I'll do my best without him.

Uh, Ted Decker is up first, the CEO of The Home Depot.

Why should you listen to this? Because Ted knows things you don't.

He sees things coming, in fact, before a lot of economic prognosticators, uh, anywhere, because he's got a front row seat to massive amounts of consumer behavior.

It's so interesting the way he looks at the world through the lens of this company, which by the way, is bigger than many cities.

They employ close to half a million associates.

So he's uniquely positioned.

He has a great take on the economy.

But more importantly, to me anyway, he's doing something to help reinvigorate the skilled trades on a national level.

Home Depot does a lot of great stuff in this way, and incidentally, the episode's not sponsored by them in any way, shape, or form.

In fact, Lowe's is doing a lot of great stuff as well in this space.

And I only point it out because we need the government to close the skills gap.

We can't do it without them.

But the government alone is not enough to make it happen either.

We need companies like Home Depot with programs like Path to Pro, which you'll learn about in just a couple of minutes, with a whole bunch of other stuff as well.

So strap in.

It's a normal length episode, but it's two conversations.

Ted Decker's first from Home Depot, and then [laughs] you're gonna love Ian Cinnamon.

Very spicy he is.

In an episode called Orbiting Home, right after this.

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