A Journalist's Journey into the Skilled Trades

May 18

*This episode is part of our Skilled Labor Series hosted by MCJ partner, Yin Lu. This series is focused on amplifying the voices of folks from the skilled labor workforce, including electricians, farmers, ranchers, HVAC installers, and others who are on the front lines of rewiring our infrastructure.

Nathanael Johnson has spent the past 18 years as an award-winning journalist who has written features for Harper's Magazine, New York Magazine, Wall Street Journal, and produced stories for the likes of NPR and This American Life. Recently, Nathanael has switched career paths and now is training to become an electrician.

In the past, we've chatted with folks on the show who've spent decades in the trades, but we wanted to hear the story of someone who's earlier in their journey in the field. More interestingly, we wanted to understand the motivations behind someone's decision to make the switch from a computer job to a skills trade job, and the joys, misconceptions, challenges and rewards that come with it.

Get connected:
Nathanael Twitter
Yin Twitter / LinkedIn
MCJ Podcast / Collective

*You can also reach us via email at info@mcjcollective.com, where we encourage you to share your feedback on episodes and suggestions for future topics or guests.

Episode recorded on March 28, 2023.

In this episode, we cover:

[01:26]: How Yin and Nathanael got connected
[02:37]: Nathanael's early exposure to nature and the “aesthetics of environmentalism”
[05:13]: His liberal arts education and cutting through jargon in academia
[07:43]: Starting his career as a newspaper reporter in rural Idaho
[13:13]: Nathanael’s journey to becoming a climate reporter for Grist
[15:01]: Falling out of love with journalism and discovering electrical work
[17:51]: The clear and immediate impact of electrical work vs. uncertain impact of writing
[21:18]: Fears about switching careers and dealing with internalized class stigma
[25:29]: How we can “dewire” cultural stigmas about skilled trade careers
[28:26]: The need to rebuild the educational pipeline and infrastructure for trade careers
[30:33]: The issue of representation and redefining what an electrician looks like
[32:20]: Nathanael’s advice on testing new career paths
[35:41]: Pay, schedule, job security, and work-life balance as an electrician
[41:47]: Nathanael's favorite moments as an electrician so far
Recommended Resources: Scott Brown Carpentry (YouTube Channel)

Yin Lu (00:00):
Hey everyone. Today's guest on the My Climate Journey Podcast, skilled Labor Series is Nathanael Johnson. Nathanael spent the past 18 years as an award-winning journalist who has written features for Harper's Magazine, New York Magazine, Wall Street Journal, and produced stories for the likes of NPR and This American Life. Recently, Nathanael has switched career paths and now is training to become an electrician. In the past, we've chatted with folks on the show who've spent decades in the trades, but I really wanted to hear the story of someone who's earlier in their journey in the field. More interestingly, I wanted to understand the motivations behind someone's decision to make the switch from a computer job to a skills trade job, and the joys, misconceptions, challenges and rewards that come with it. Stay tuned. This conversation was chock full of insight, but first,
Cody Simms (00:54):
I'm Cody Simms.
Yin Lu (00:55):
I'm Yin Lu.
Jason Jacobs (00:56):
And I'm Jason Jacobs. And welcome to My Climate Journey.
Yin Lu (01:03):
This show is a growing body of knowledge focused on climate change and potential solutions.
Cody Simms (01:08):
In this podcast, we traverse disciplines, industries, and opinions to better understand and make sense of the formidable problem of climate change and all the ways people like you and I can help.
Yin Lu (01:21):
A nd with that, Nathanael, welcome to the show.
Nathanael Johnson (01:24):
Hey, great to be here.
Yin Lu (01:26):
Just to give some context as to how we got connected, we've been doing the Skilled Labor series for a while now, and we've talked to electricians, but I really wanted to talk to someone who was transitioning as maybe a second or third chapter of their careers into the job versus having started off in it. And when I put the ask out on LinkedIn and Twitter, we'd heard from a few people, one of whom was another Nathanael. Nate the House Whisperer, who said, "Hey, there's another Nate out there who you should talk to", and we found you. And in my research of you, I was delighted to have already heard you on two of my favorite podcasts, one being 99% Invisible, talking about something completely unrelated to being an electrician, talking about a book that you wrote. And then the other was How To Save a Planet, hosted by Alex Bloomberg, who we had on the show a little bit earlier. I'm freaking stoked to chat with you today. Well, I would just love to get to know you a bit more as I'm sure many of our listeners would. Maybe let's just get started. Tell me a little bit more about where you grew up and what interests you had as a kid. Ultimately we're going to talk about your role transitioning into the electrical worker space. Yeah, so let's get started.
Nathanael Johnson (02:37):
Yeah, the first thing that springs to mind when I think about interests as a kid is the environment. I was really sort of preoccupied with maybe not saving the planet at that point, but my family would take trips. We'd go backpacking up in Yosemite every summer, and we moved from Berkeley up to Nevada City, which is this little town in the foothills of the Sierras that's really gorgeous. And so early on, I had this appreciation for the aesthetics of environmentalism. We'd be up backpacking in Yosemite and would just be gorgeous. And then we'd come back and you're driving down and you get to Lee Vining maybe, and you see that it's not quite as pretty. And then you get down into the Central Valley. I guess that's going the other direction from Lee Vining, but nevermind. There's multiple ways into Yosemite. You get down into the Central Valley and it's big agriculture, and it's another step down.
(03:42):
And then you get into miles and miles of strip malls, and it's just getting progressively uglier and uglier. And so early on, I think like many white environmentalists from developed countries, the entry point for me was why can't everything be as beautiful as it is when I'm up in the high country, when there's fewer people around where this sense that the world is really beautiful and then people come along and make it ugly. And my thinking has really developed since that. I think there's a lot of problems with the entry point, focusing on aesthetics, but it's also an entry point. People care about beauty. That's an important thing, and it really led me to start thinking about how do we do better with it and start thinking beyond aesthetics, how can we live more in harmony with the natural world? As a kid, it was just, I'm reading Ranger Rick Magazine and I started perk Up when someone starts to mention interesting ideas in this space and all through school, I'm like, "Oh, this idea that we could generate our energy in a different way that's interesting. Oh, could we do farming differently? That's interesting." That was always there along with, I was excited about reading books and riding my bike around the gravel roads of my small town and playing baseball, that sort of thing as a kid.
Yin Lu (05:15):
And you mentioned all throughout school, what did you study in school?
Nathanael Johnson (05:18):
I went to a liberal arts college and I wasn't really sure what I was doing, and I ended up with a media studies major, which is sort of reading postmodern French philosophers, which was, I feel like a bit of a misstep. Maybe it was useful just in that I ended up in media and I was vaccinated against those. I, no, I've read Althusser. I don't have a ton of respect for post-modern philosophy after really diving into it. Yeah, there's something there, but it's also a lot of very simple ideas dressed up in very complicated language that's not that accessible. And if you really take the time and get to the bottom of it's like, "Okay, yes, here's this." Anyway, I sort of wish that maybe I'd studied something else in college and it was, I just hadn't gotten feedback from teachers that I was as a good communicator. I was good at writing and I didn't really know what to do with that. And so I just kind of stumbled into that.
Yin Lu (06:29):
I wonder, what if that desire to really simply communicate versus doing it in more complicated prose? A la, the philosophy that you were exposed to led you to doing stuff in media. I know that you spent years as a journalist. Maybe if you could talk to us about that and how that journey had progressed from when you started to right before you decided to transition to doing something else.
Nathanael Johnson (06:51):
Yeah, for sure. You may have really hit on something there that this idea that, okay, yeah, I can communicate in such a way. I can take these really basic ideas that are kind of dressed up in complicated jargon, and this ember has no clothes effect, where it's kind of like, "I don't really understand this, so it must be something truly profound." And I felt like, "Okay, I can get to the very bottom of this and see what the kernel of wisdom is there and translate it in more simple words for my classmates or for my audience." And just this idea that it's not that hard. Everybody can really understand these things if it's simply communicated well. Yeah, that really is something that I still care about a lot to this day.
(07:43):
I finished up college and I still didn't really know what I was doing, but this idea of journalism was kind of attractive because it seemed like, "Okay, people tell me I'm a good writer. Here's a way that I can write and not have it be just a complete gamble trying to be a artist, trying to be a novelist." Journalism seemed like something that you could actually get paid for back at that time. I applied to all sorts of small town newspapers and got hired by one in a tiny little, I was in the bureau, I was in the Twin Falls Times News, which is a small newspaper to begin with in southern Idaho. And then I was in this bureau in Burley, which is a even smaller town. If you imagine the bottom of Idaho makes a T with the border between Nevada and Utah, and the bottom of Idaho is the top of the T. It's just north of there in the middle of huge potato farms and bee farms and corn and soy, of course.
(08:50):
I went out to this little town and was the Daily Beat reporter, and it was kind of a miserable place to be as a young person fresh out of college. Now I'm sort of excited about like, "Oh, I'm going to be this young person who has a job and has free time and I'm going to meet other people and I'm going to date." And instead it's this tiny little town where everybody is very religious, mostly Mormon, everybody's married by the time they graduate from high school it seems like. And church is really the main form of social mixing and capital. I got involved in that a little bit. I sang in a couple church choirs. I got involved in a theater group that was a bunch of Mormons hanging out and making theater. This is probably more detailed than you want, but...
Yin Lu (09:44):
I'm just waiting for an entry to make a joke about being a beat reporter and then being a beet reporter.
Nathanael Johnson (09:53):
That's true. I did have a nice opportunity to make a headline about the beat going on during the Beet Harvest one time, but the point is that I started writing about agriculture and writing about the way in which people were interacting with their environment, and I was able to do that in a very daily newspaper fashion, just like people are a little worried, even in this super libertarian conservative environment, people don't care about the environment or the kind of aesthetic environmentalism that I was interested in was just almost completely absent there, but people were worried about their property rights, and when there's a giant dairy that's going to be built right next to them, they know that it's going to make life a little bit different and it's going to be smelly. And then there was this really interesting thing that would happen where the property right libertarians are wondering, "Do I protect the property rights of the people who have houses right here? Or do I protect the property rights of the people who own this land that want to build it dairy on it?" It was kind of a fascinating entree into seeing how those systems of social politics, capital and environmental sustainability played on one another.
Yin Lu (11:23):
It's quite interesting because I was going to ask this a little later, but I'll ask it now. Well, I guess more of an observation. I'm getting into your book, the book that you wrote on Scene City, which is about the majesty of the urban nature that's around us that we often take for granted. For instance, why don't you see baby pigeons walking around the city? Which I found out why in the book I was going through it and looking at your background writing for Grist as an environmental journalist, I was just thinking, why is Nathanael now focusing on electrical work? Why not something more in the conservation biodiversity space? What I'm realizing now is this intersection of nature, infrastructure built environment has been something of a theme throughout your career, which now I'm like, "Oh, maybe that's why the electrical work makes sense as where you're focused on in this next chapter of your career." Yeah. I wonder if you had thoughts on that. Am I off base?
Nathanael Johnson (12:16):
No, that's a really incisive observation actually. I don't know if I've necessarily made that connection, but yeah, absolutely. It's sort of a cliche to say that everything is connected, but that's kind of where I was always interested in things, is working at the intersections, figuring out how to make those nexuses work. If you're sort of focused purely on conservation or purely on energy or purely on wildlife, you can't get very deep into it until you have to start dealing with those other issues or you're dealing with wildlife and then someone wants to build a bunch of wind turbines in that area. Then you're all of a sudden, which is something I reported on while I was working at that newspaper. You're thrown right back into that dealing with those trade-offs and asking which is more important and how you weigh those things.
Yin Lu (13:13):
We'll talk about your transition. Were there a few key moments along your journey doing writing and doing reporting that when you look back now, were moments where you had maybe an aha to say, "Actually, what I want to do is spend my time doing X instead of doing writing and reporting?"
Nathanael Johnson (13:36):
Doing electrical work, you mean?
Yin Lu (13:38):
Yes. Thank you for making that work.
Nathanael Johnson (13:42):
Well, in a nutshell, when I was working at that newspaper in Idaho in that period, I kind of stepped on the first rung of the ladder in journalism and watched the rest of the ladder kind of crumble around me because I started my career in 2001 and Craigslist was booming, and that was kind of this first threat from the internet to newspapers because all of a sudden classified ads just disappeared and newspapers started downsizing. There used to be this way in which you started at the small town newspaper, and then you went to the regional newspaper, and then you got hired by San Francisco Chronicle or the New York Times and newspapers just downsized and downsized and downsized. And so I saw my path out of Burley, Idaho as, you know, I would do something differently. I went to graduate school at UC Berkeley, and I was like, "I want to do magazine writing. I want to do radio." I spent some years in public radio. I was freelancing for magazines, and ended up writing at this environmental magazine, Grist, covering climate change and covering agriculture among other things.
(15:01):
The idea that I would become an electrician, it wasn't like something that was sort of gradually building up along the way. It was more getting hit by a bus. It was just this random step off the curb and like, "Oh, now I'm going in this direction instead." I was really in love with journalism for most of the 20 years that I did it. And the last couple of years, I just found it harder and harder to get up the gumption to start the new story. And I was kind of suffering every day that I was facing my computer. And I was at the point in my career where it was like I would need to work for another 20 years.
(15:50):
And that idea of doing what I was doing for another 20 years just sounded terrifying and horrible to me rather than exciting. And so there's much more obvious places to turn than completely abandoning all of the storytelling skills that I'd built up and going to manual labor. But I was working on small projects at my house, and I just found I was so happy while I was doing that, and I was kind of fleeing my day job. I'm like, "Okay, I'll take a little time and go fiddle around with this electrical outlet that's acting up." And it was just very different and very easy to immediately access that state of flow where I was just in it solving the immediate problem in front of me. And there was also the sense that, I think part of the reason I was falling out of love with journalism was that I felt like I was doing the same thing over and over again, writing about climate change.
(16:55):
There's a lot of nuances to explore, but basically, we know what we have to do, and you end up writing the same story over and over again, and there's all this stern and drain and fighting about like, "Well, should we do things slightly in this direction or slightly in that direction? What percentage of renewables? What percent should we, is nuclear an option? Are we going to go completely organic or no, that doesn't make sense. There's too much land use. We need some technological options, but we also want to include the aesthetics of organic farm." Like, "No, you, you're using some industrial nitrogen that's just evil." All these silly fights where I would dutifully go back and rehash the old turf and find out what new facts there were and talk to the partisans on each side. I just couldn't get up the excitement to keep doing it. And when I was working with electricity, it felt like instead of talking and talking and talking and talking about things, I was just getting down to work because we have to electrify everything. That's one of those things that everybody sort of agrees on. And I was like, "Well, maybe I could help with this."
Yin Lu (18:12):
That man that hits home. Just the feeling, maybe helplessness is not the right word, but I'll use it for now of, shit's happening. What am I actually doing about it that's making a difference and thinking I'm just writing about it. Am I actioning? Can I action in a more effective way? And what brings me joy?
Nathanael Johnson (18:31):
It's hard to tell with writing. Maybe you're having just a huge impact or creating a podcast, maybe you're changing all sorts of people's life trajectories, but it's hard to tell, right? You don't have that immediate feedback whether you've had success or failure. You're just sort of sending out these messages into the void and maybe it's amazing. Whereas with when I'm doing electrical work the end of the day, it's a very small, I'm just changing one outlet maybe or fixing one light, but at the end of the day, the light comes on or doesn't. A very clear feedback as to whether I've been successful.
Yin Lu (19:08):
My husband was in a similar boat software engineer for a product manager at your Silicon Valley trope companies. And during the pandemic, he's like, "I love doing electrical work." He was actually helping me solder my wedding ring broke a couple of days ago, and I was like, "Mark, can you fix this?" And he was just there soldering with the girls last night trying to fix my ring, but all to say, we have these books lying around the house. I just need to go on this journey has not gone as far as you and ended up doing a homework patient startup. But he felt very similar in kind of calling to do something more with moving atoms, physically touching things and making things change and rewiring.
Nathanael Johnson (19:50):
Yeah. That's fascinating. Yeah, I know that book.
Yin Lu (19:55):
Yeah. I think anyone who's in electrical work knows this book. And actually, and maybe for people that are listening, you can't see. This is Mike Holtz series of books on basically how to become an electrician. Yes. Anyway,
Nathanael Johnson (20:08):
Although you guys have a slightly different electrical code in Canada, I understand.
Yin Lu (20:13):
These, I think, are for everyone in the states.
(20:17):
Hey everyone, I'm yin, a partner at MCJ Collective here to take a quick minute to tell you about our MCJ membership community, which was born out of a collective thirst for peer-to-peer learning. And doing that goes beyond just listening to the podcast. We started in 2019 and have grown to thousands of members globally. Each week we're inspired by people who join with different backgrounds and points of view. What we all share is a deep curiosity to learn and a bias to action around ways to accelerate solutions to climate change. Some awesome initiatives have come out of the community. A number of founding teams have met, several nonprofits have been established, and a bunch of hiring has been done. Many early stage investments have been made as well as ongoing events and programming, like monthly women in climate meetups, idea jam sessions for early stage founders, climate book club, workshops, and more. Whether you've been in the climate space for a while or just embarking on your journey, having a community to support you is important. If you want to learn more, head over to mcjcollective.com and click on the members tab at the top. Thanks and enjoy the rest of the show.
(21:18):
Back to our regularly scheduled programming, what fears did you have about the switch?
Nathanael Johnson (21:23):
Oh my gosh. I was in a very dark place. I think in our culture, it's really pretty conservative about our careers. If you're just kind of giving something up that you've spent a lot of, if giving up a job that you've spent a lot of time in, there's a lot of cultural baggage that goes with that. I felt like, "Am I one of those midlife crisis men that's just running off to be like, I want to be a filmmaker. Am I just going to lead my family into ruin because of this?" I just needed to fix my head where I was and just buck up and deal with my dissatisfaction rather than blowing up my career and doing something totally different. It wasn't like I was completely miserable every day. It was just kind of a drag to do the work, and I was procrastinating and I was when I should have been working. I was watching YouTube videos about carpentry and electrical work and then feeling crappy about myself because I shouldn't be doing that. And it just wasn't good. It wasn't like I was waking up every morning and being excited and energized about what I was doing. I think my big fear was just, am I just not being tough enough with myself and I just need to sort of up and deal, and this is a phase and I'll get over it.
Yin Lu (22:57):
I'm curious on the switching from a career in journalism that is considered very white collar, needing a college degree, et cetera, et cetera, to a career path in skilled trades that is blue collar. Was there any thought in your mind around the perception that people might have of you in making that switch? And if so, what was that like?
Nathanael Johnson (23:25):
It was less about other people, the external perception and more about my perception of myself. I think you become a journalist, or at least I should say, I became a journalist because I wanted to have some of that external validation that I could be known. My name would get printed in places. People would want to have me on podcasts. People would ask me to come speak at conferences and I'd win awards. And I wanted that external validation that I was special in some way. I don't think I ever really cared. There's a few certain people, maybe rivals from high school early on in my career. I want someone to be like, "Oh, wow, he's really successful." But I think I got over that by the time I was in my mid-twenties or so. It was just really about myself, and I don't think I really cared what other people thought of me.
(24:31):
But there's still moments, I think, where I've got my tool belt on and I'm drilling holes and studs to run electrical wires, and I kind of look at myself and I'm like, "I'm a construction worker." There's this kind of class stigma that I feel myself, or I'll be doing a really dirty job. I'll be climbing through an attic and see a pile of rat droppings and the insulation and just be kind of like, I should not be doing this. This is not for my type of person. And it's less about the discomfort that I'm feeling in that moment and more about this sense of class that I should be, I just shouldn't be doing this sort of thing, which is, it's just in the ether, it's in the air, it's in the food that I was eating and the lessons that I was taking in from family and teachers, whether they meant to pass that along or not.
Yin Lu (25:29):
I think it's a bit of unwiring that we have to do.
Nathanael Johnson (25:32):
I like the verb 'wiring'.
Yin Lu (25:36):
Knowing that we are going to be faced with the need for more and more electrical work, and there's a dearth of new electricians coming into this space. How can we most effectively help us as a, I guess, collective society, do that dewiring to help electrical work have the clout and the reputation of being a really amazing career trajectory on par with being a software engineer, being a journalist, being fill in the blank. Yeah.
Nathanael Johnson (26:08):
Well, I don't think there's any one answer I can tell you. For me, I was watching YouTube videos of trying to figure out, just trying to figure out how to do the little home repairs that I was working on. And I came across this YouTuber named Scott Brown, who's a carpenter in New Zealand, and he was this very clearly upper middle class carpenter, and he was spending a lot of time making beautiful videos of his work. And he was proceeding in his work in this kind of placid step-by-step manner, which was very different from the kind of construction work that I'd been exposed to where it's this kind of like, "We got to go, we don't concern yourself about personal health. We've got to move faster." Or he was just taking the time to put on his face mask before he cut something and creates sawdust. And he was just doing everything carefully, but very precisely and actually being very efficient because he was moving carefully.
(27:15):
And I think that was really transformative for me because I was like, "Oh, here is someone I can see myself in who's doing this work. I could do that. That could be me. I could have this really fun career as the middle class person that I want to be." I think that there's a lot of media work that needs to be done, that people have to see representations of themself in these roles. That'll happen on YouTube and on TikTok, and hopefully that'll happen in Hollywood at some point where instead of in the romantic comedy, the boyfriend is always an architect. That's the classic thing, which is another terrible job. It's so much competition and relatively low pay. And a journalist is another one. People are often journalists and those, and imagine the romantic comedy where the love interest is a HVAC air conditioning technician.
(28:17):
That's kind hard to imagine. And it wouldn't be a big thing where it's like, "Oh, he's this blue collar guy", but that's just, that's the generic role. Then there's just much more practical stuff. We've kind destroyed the pipeline for creating these types of workers where there's an education system. There used to be shop classes in every high school, and a lot of those, all these beautiful machines got sold off in the eighties and the nineties, and those classrooms got turned into something else. And even after high school, there's really not the education infrastructure available. It's very tricky to figure out, I'm doing a community college program to get my certification. It's something that's very underfunded. It's sort of a chaotic place. There's constantly not enough materials. Right now we're working in a classroom which is an improvement from the old classroom, which was way too crowded for us, but this classroom is new, but they didn't finish building it.
(29:23):
There's exposed insulation everywhere. We have to wear face masks because there's like fiberglass filtering down. There's not enough teachers. People have a hard time getting into classes. And then even after the next step on the ladder is also difficult. A lot of my classmates are having a hard time getting the entry level jobs because the real gap is at the journeymen level where you enough to be able to lead your own group of people and the existing electrical contractors out there can say, okay, yes, we can take this new job journeymen, go lead that, hire a couple apprentices to train from the community college and make that job happen. That's really missing. We've got all of these sort of older contractors that can do a little bit themselves. They have maybe one guy that they've hired that they're training up, but there's not the ability to scale up because there's not the number of people out there that can pull in a bunch of trainees.
Yin Lu (30:32):
Interesting. Yeah. I'm reflecting on something that you said at the start of your answer, which is you can't be what you can't see. And it's so interesting because you're a white dude, and when I think about electrician, I think about a white dude. And so imagine what we need to do on the kind of public awareness level for people who look like me, people who identify as female, people of color, et cetera. It's a real non-trivial issue to solve for. And in addition to that, it sounds like there's these infrastructure, operational infrastructure gaps in getting more people into the door.
Nathanael Johnson (31:05):
Exactly. It's also the whole issue of representation and just knowing that that's an option for you, it's also an opportunity. The fact that there's, right now it's wide open, what is the electrical worker of the future look like? Just because there's this giant gap there right now. It's kind of on us to define it. It's definitely a lot harder to see women in the trades that used to just not exist at all. Right. But that could be, I mean, electrical work is a great, I think that's a really good job for women, and it's kind of exciting to think about how that could be totally redefined.
Yin Lu (31:52):
A hundred percent agree. Yeah. I think the government has a big role to play in it, to incentivize more capital, to be moved into the building PSA space, as well as how do we get more trainee programs up and running faster. So yeah. Maybe this is a good place to jump into with the remaining 15 minutes that we have on that journey for you, and maybe getting more pragmatic, tactical on when you decided, "Yes, I'm going to do this", what was the first step that you took in getting on that journey?
Nathanael Johnson (32:26):
I think I took my first step before I committed. One thing for people who that might be useful for people who are listening to this podcast is just in finding my way out of that dark place of "What do I do with my life? Do I just stay here?" I got some really good advice, which was instead of trying to project and figure out, "Okay, if I do this, then I'll do this, then I'll do this, and here's my master plan. I figured it out." You can never anticipate how things are going to work out or how they're going to feel. And so I got some really good advice to stop trying to future cast in that way and simply to take small steps in different directions and then see how I was feeling. It was very clear I was not feeling so good trying to do the work that I'd been doing every day.
(33:17):
I'm just dragging myself by the scruff of my neck to my desk. And then I was doing my own work, and then I just asked my wife, I was like, "You know what? If I just signed up, there's this class at this community college. What if I just signed up for that and tried it?" And she was totally supportive of it. Again, it was more of my fear of, is it okay if I take this tiny step forward? And so that was kind of my first step. And then I started talking to people about it, which felt scary too. Like, "Oh, I'm kind of thinking about changing careers." I was just like, "Is this really coming out of my mouth?" And one of my friends, just a neighbor kids at the same bus stop said, "Oh, I have, one of my friends is an electrician, and he, he's mentioned recently that he's starting to feel like older and a little creaky, and he doesn't want to be spending as much time in the crawl spaces as before."
(34:13):
And so I called this guy up and sent him a text and said, "Look, I'm kind of interested in this, and I've been taking this class at community college, and I don't know why, but they gave me the opportunity to get this official trainee card so I can actually work." That turns out to be, the process in California for becoming an electrician is you start going to classes and you get this trainee card, and then you're supposed to work as you go. And he called me right back and said, "Come out and try it. Spend a day with me." And then I started taking a vacation day every week from my job and doing electrical work with him, and I really sort of eased my way into it. And every step of the way, it was like, "This feels fun. This feels exciting." I'm waking up and I'm like, "Ah, this is my electrician day."
Yin Lu (35:05):
Oh my God, I'm feeling your excitement in telling the journey. That's amazing.
Nathanael Johnson (35:09):
And then at some point, I had another conversation with my wife and was like, "I think maybe I want to do this. I can start working for this guy full time should I quit my job?" And she's like, "Absolutely. And you should do it sooner rather than later if this is what's making you happy." We're fortunate that she has a really good job and was making more money. She's a union nurse practitioner with the city of San Francisco, but we had a little wiggle room.
Yin Lu (35:41):
And it helps you that you were being paid as you were training too.
Nathanael Johnson (35:44):
Exactly. My boss, John Sarkasden immediately started paying me, and then when we went to full-time, he figured out the book work to really get me on and get the workers' compensation and liability insurance going. And it wasn't actually that much of a pay cut for me to go from the senior position as a journalist to the most junior of junior positions as an electrician. The practical steps felt not that crazy and not quite getting hit by a bus, just more like, "Okay, take this first step and then this second step."
Yin Lu (36:26):
I was originally going to ask you things that you've had to adjust to on mindset. We talked about that and we just talked about pay. What about schedule and just career growth expectations?
Nathanael Johnson (36:35):
Yeah, there's a lot of allowance for work-life balance in my schedule because my wife was making more money than me and she was interested in continuing to work. It made sense for me to be the main childcare person, to be the guy that gets the kids out the door in the morning and be the guy that's available to run and grab them if they're sick in the afternoon. I think this is not universally true for electricians, but I work for me and my boss. It's just the two of us. We really never go further than the five mile radius of my home. It's very easy for me to stop and go get the kids if I need to. And he also really understands that he was in a similar position when he was starting his electrical work.
(37:37):
And when I have that kind of family conflict, he says, "Go, just go. No worries." And that's definitely not true for union electricians who, if you're in the union, you have a lot less choice over where you're working and you're probably taking longer commutes. There isn't the opportunity to simply leave the job site and go pick up your kids. As far as I understood. I think that's probably true if you're working for a non-union, bigger company as well. And I think there's plenty of the jobs that I'm in out there. There's a lot of small electrical contractors where, and the work is really sort of fungible. You can do it on a different day or go to a different job site.
Yin Lu (38:26):
And then on career growth expectations, any commentary there?
Nathanael Johnson (38:29):
Yeah, the potential for making more money in this career is higher than in my career as a journalist, I think, because unless you become really famous, the journalists that really make tons of money are the people who gain a strong partisan following, whether it's liberal or conservative. Those are the people that just make millions and millions of dollars. And then if you actually want to be a journalist journalist and go out and find new facts that other people haven't learned before, instead of repackaging the facts that are out there to please your audience, you're going to top out around a hundred thousand dollars a year, I think, at the current inflation levels, and you can make more as an electrician. And there's also a very clear progression where if you get to the level where you're fully certified, you're basically also at the level where it makes sense to split off into your own business.
(39:35):
There's one more sort of businessy test that you're supposed to take in my jurisdiction. If you're interested in being a little bit more of an entrepreneur and running your own business, there's this very clear pathway to doing that. Both in terms of money and I'm kind of interested in maybe being a teacher and a mentor at some stage and figuring out how to build systems, maybe that'll be an interesting next step for me. If this tinkering with my hands and solving very concrete problems ever gets old, there's a lot more that I could do if I wanted to.
Yin Lu (40:17):
Yeah, it sounds like the options on where you take this training are pretty wide.
Nathanael Johnson (40:24):
Pretty wide, yeah.
Yin Lu (40:25):
Entrepreneur, teaching.
Nathanael Johnson (40:27):
And pretty fertile too, because I wouldn't feel as confident if I was like, "Okay, you know what I want to do? I want to be an entrepreneur in journalism. I'm going to have a media startup." It's just like, "What am I going to do that's going to be successful?" It's so hard to figure out a profit model, whereas with electrical work, it's just like there's way too little supply of electricians and way too much demand. And what you need to do to be a successful entrepreneur is to just figure out how not to drop the ball and how to be competent and to develop a little bit of a pipeline to train people up and communicate well with your customers. And I think you'll make money. It just feels a lot more secure.
Yin Lu (41:19):
And I'm taking the through line from what got you started in journalism is really good at communicating and applying that to the electrician world, to whatever path you choose. Choose your own adventure. I think that skillset comes in real handy as well. Two more questions. I know you got to head to a job site at nine o'clock.
Nathanael Johnson (41:36):
Yeah, today I have to make sure that this house is ready for a family to move into. So there's a-
Yin Lu (41:42):
Okay. Okay. I don't want to be the thing that holds you up to get there. Real quickly, of all the electrical projects that you've done, say in this past year was been your favorite?
Nathanael Johnson (41:52):
Oh, geez. It's hard to pick favorites, but I'll try and think of something that's been-
Yin Lu (41:56):
Most memorable.
Nathanael Johnson (42:00):
Yeah, exciting. There's specific parts of the job that I find really exciting. On every job that I have to fish wire, which is pushing wires through places that you can't see from an attic down to a light switch in the room below or from a basement. Here's a good example. There's a house where there was all this old wiring that's falling apart in the attic, and we needed to go get a new wire to replace that from the basement up through the first story, up through the second story and into the attic. My boss, he deserves the credit, found this pathway pushing up these fish rods, these fiberglass rods all the way from the basement all the way into the attic, and we're able to pull, just when you see the wire emerge or your fish rod, you're like, "Oh my gosh, it's coming out of this tiny hole that we made and we're traveling through these arcane spaces in the walls and getting through it." It always just feels like a miracle. That's always really exciting. Just that experience of laying on the joist in the attic and then seeing that red fiberglass fish rod emerge and be like, "Ah, I got it. I'm pulling." We pull all these wires up is really fun.
Yin Lu (43:25):
Thank you for sharing that example. Again, it's just so physical and so satisfying to be able to say like, "Oh, I did something, and here's the result." Very cool. Okay. Well gosh, this has been such a joy to chat with you, Nathanael. Thank you for letting me pepper you with all these questions and I can feel the sense of joy that you get from doing the work that you're doing and just really appreciative of your taking the time to focus on this very important area within our labor force that needs more people to be in it and sharing your story with us. Thank you for your time.
Nathanael Johnson (43:59):
Absolutely. Thank you for your interest.
Cody Simms (44:01):
Thanks again for joining us on the My Climate Journey podcast. At MCJ Collective, we're all about powering collective innovation for climate solutions by breaking down silos and unleashing problem solving capacity. If you'd like to learn more about MCJ Collective, visit us at mcjcollective.com. And if you have a guest suggestion, let us know that via Twitter at MCJPod.
Yin Lu (44:28):
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Cody Simms (44:37):
Thanks, and see you next episode.