461: Danny Combs—TACT, The Future of Workforce

The Way I Heard It with Mike Rowe

Society & Culture, History

4.8 • 39.1K Ratings

🗓️ 2 December 2025

⏱️ 88 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Mike sits down with Danny Combs, founder of TACT (Teaching the Autism Community Trades), a program that teaches people with autism skilled trades ranging from welding to woodworking to IT. With equal parts heart and hard data, Danny walks Mike through how TACT is helping fill critical labor shortages while giving thousands of gifted, detail-driven students a path to meaningful, good-paying work. It's a conversation about talent, potential, and the untapped workforce hiding in plain sight. Danny's book can be found here. Learn more about Stand Together at StandTogether.org

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey guys, it's me, Mike Roe. This is the way I heard it. My guest today is my old friend
0:07.9	Danny Combs, who is currently living in Colorado and changing the world from the bottom up.
0:16.1	That is true. He is doing it himself. He's not waiting for the government to write him a big check or whatever.
0:22.0	He's got an organization that he created and he is getting stuff did.
0:27.3	The organization is called TACT, T-A-C-T. It stands for teaching the autistic community trades.
0:37.0	In fact, the title of this episode is tacked,
0:39.3	The Future of Workforce,
0:41.3	because I think it very well might be,
0:43.3	not to bog you down with too much exposition,
0:46.3	but I'm friends with an organization called Stand Together.
0:49.3	We've been working together for years.
0:51.3	They support MicroWorks, full disclosure.
0:53.3	And every now and then,
0:55.7	they will call me and say, hey, we've got another bottom up solution that we think you're going
1:01.4	to love. That's what they look for. People like Danny Combs. Well, in this case, I called Stan
1:07.0	because I met Danny on an episode of returning the favor about five years ago, I guess.
1:14.1	It was the first episode we did after the lockdowns.
1:17.9	So it was a remote episode of this show.
1:21.9	And the reason I was so interested in doing this is because Danny has built a trade school of sorts
1:30.6	inspired by his son Dylan, who was diagnosed with autism when he was two.
1:37.8	And what Danny learned from working with his son was that the autistic community,
1:43.8	not to pain with too broad a brush,
	...

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