People You Should Know is a love letter to bottom-up solutions

FREDERICKSBURG, Virginia — Steve Hotz started Black Horse Forge, a nonprofit organization that provides support for veterans, active-duty military personnel, and first responders through the ancient art of blacksmithing.

The retired sergeant, who served 17 years in the 82nd Airborne Division of the U.S. Army, said he started the endeavor to teach the arts of blacksmithing, tool making, and blade-smithing first to heal himself and then others who had brought ghosts home from war.

Hotz’s decision to join the military happened in the heat of an I’ll-show-my-boss-moment: He was an interior designer, and she was giving him the business for reasons he cannot recall now. He walked across the street to get lunch, saw the Army recruiting office next door, and went in there and enlisted. Two weeks later, he was in Fort Benning.

The military suited him well, Hotz said. It was when he was doing special work with the North Carolina Counterdrug program on a counterterrorist team that he got hurt. He was left blind in one eye and required surgery on his back to fuse his spine.

It also left him trying to cope with the effects of PTSD.

Back in civilian life, he found that he was not unlike fellow retired military and first responders who struggled to regain the ideal of purpose. He went to a Wounded Warrior event where there was a blacksmith demonstration.

“When I came back, I made a hook. That is all I made that night. I was so excited about making this hook. My wife’s like, ‘Whatever you’re doing, keep doing it,’” after seeing that thousand-foot stare ease from his face.

It was an interaction with a Marine at another Wounded Warrior blacksmithing event, not long after that, where he realized he had found not only his purpose, but a way to help others struggling with depression and PTSD.

“We were just cutting up really hardcore together, and there was a girl crying in the corner. I was like, ‘Oh, maybe that’s his girlfriend or something.’ I might’ve said something offensive,” he explains.

So Hotz walked over to her and apologized if he had offended her. “She tells me she was his therapist, and that he was in such bad shape he couldn’t go anywhere without her. She said she was crying because the interaction between him and me was the first time he had talked in two years, and there he was talking to me like nothing was wrong,” he said.

Within short order, Hotz opened the Black Horse Forge, a nonprofit organization dedicated to teaching the craft to those who serve and come back looking for purpose. He says he has seen firsthand the transformation the craft has given veterans and active-duty service members. 

All classes are free for veterans, active military personnel, and first responders. All funds raised from civilian classes go back into funding free courses.

Since opening their doors, tens of thousands of veterans have participated in the free classes, with countless saying it saved their lives.

It is that kind of giving back and making the community better that caught the eye of television host, podcaster, and bestselling author Mike Rowe. After the demise of his wildly popular Facebook show, Returning the Favor, Rowe was in search of ordinary people doing extraordinary things for a new series.

Rowe explained he had received a call from Facebook telling him there would be no fifth season. It was an announcement that had surprised both him and his many viewers. Feedback for the show had been overwhelmingly positive, and viewership was through the roof.

Over 10,000 nominations were sent to Rowe for exceptional Americans in four years.

The Baltimore native says he is thankful Facebook gave him the opportunity to do the 22-minute online show, equally grateful for the 100 “bloody do-gooders,” as he jokingly calls them, who were nominated by the people. However, the loss of the show and the community that formed around it wasn’t just felt by Rowe. It left a void in viewers who begged — a lot — for it to return.

So, after four years, he finally did something about it.

Rowe said that, because Returning the Favor is owned by Facebook, he’s not at liberty to simply re-up the series under the same name. “However, celebrating people who have impact, gratitude, and find solutions to society’s biggest problems is not owned by anyone in particular,” he said, adding, “So we are back.”

The new moniker is People You Should Know, and it premiered last Friday on Rowe’s YouTube channel. 

Rowe is candid about not having the financial resources he had under the Facebook umbrella. So in terms of bells and whistles, the new show will be less grandiose. He is doing it on his own dime. But in truth, as an avid viewer of the show, the bells and whistles were nice, but they were never the reason I sat down to watch it. For most viewers and me, it was always about the heart and aspirations of fellow Americans.

The first six honorees include Hotz, and all are extraordinary and command attention. The first episode showcases a single mother who not only overcame her addiction but also found a way to keep her family together and her kids out of the foster care system. The production scale is spectacular, the people real and driven to a life that exists outside of self. 

For Rowe, Dirty Jobs worked for so long because it was one of the few topics that hadn’t been completely owned by one side or the other.

“It’s the dignity of work. It’s the fun of making a buck. We had 2 million people on the Returning the Favor page who were literally watching the show on the edge of their seat every single week. They programmed everything. It was the most engaged group I ever saw,” he said.

When it was canceled, Rowe said it took him a while to accept that fact. But viewers let him know he needed to find a way to bring it back.

“I would receive calls constantly asking to please bring it back. Or ask what am I waiting for because the country needs it. So we changed the name, figured out a budget because there is no big sponsor, or network, or studio behind us, and I called my friend Sarah, who produced the show in the past, and now she’s sort of my co-host on camera,” he said.

Rowe describes her as Pollyanna meets Mary Poppins: “She’s fun and she’s much nicer than me, not nearly as bitter or broken, and she’s terrific to work with.”

The show is a true love letter to the neighbors you wish you had: regular people with big ideas, whether they are taking on homelessness, the foster care system, PTSD, or illiteracy. 

Rowe said of Hotz that there was something appealing about bending metal and making something useful out of something busted.

“I mean, the metaphor itself is huge, and he’s so unassuming. He’s a guy who literally saved himself by going in, figuring it out. And when he saw what it did for other people, it became his life’s work,” he said.

“That’s the show. Great big ideas, really modest individuals trying essentially to prove that they can move the needle. And they do. We’ve done it with foster care, we’ve done it with illiteracy, and we’ve done it with homelessness. So it’s a micro-macro kind of approach. It’s really a love letter to bottom-up solutions.”