YouSaid · the spoken record

Mike Rowe

lines on the record: 140
first: 2016-05-04
most recent: 2016-05-04
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Yeah, I'm most impressed nowadays by the guys and the women, but mostly men, you know, the men are dominant in the business. And it's the ones who can hide. It's the ones who Really don't get in the way of the story itself. And it's really a balancing act. Most of the stuff I narrate now has a level of spectacle to it. So I get to, you know, I get to butch it up a little bit. And it works for deadliest catch and some other shows. But how the universe works, for instance, which I've been doing for five years now. It's a totally different proposition Morgan Freeman has one of the most wonderful recognizable voices ever, but it's impossible to listen to a show and not constantly know you're listening to Morgan Freeman. Right.”
2016-05-04 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #157: The Importance of Being Dirty: Lessons from Mike Rowe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Quixotic character, who is really a philosopher, he's a knight errant, who, like I said, comes out of retirement to do these quasi good works. He keeps fifty percent of what he recovers, of course. That's how he lives. But MacDonald put McGee so far ahead of his time. And it's just a wonderful, these books are all time capsules. There's a color in every title. So the deep blue goodbye, pale gray for guilt, bright orange for the shroud, a lonely silver rain, a tan and sandy silence, cinnamon skin, nightmare and crimson, all these great books. And it's just great trash. It's the best pulp I've ever read, and I've never had anybody read them and say those weren't good. They're offensive in the sense that they're politically incorrect and Out of step They're”
2016-05-04 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #157: The Importance of Being Dirty: Lessons from Mike Rowe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Travis McGee is a boat bum, created by John D. MacDonald, who lives on the busted flush, which is a barge he won in a poker game, and Travis takes his retirement in early installments, and when he works he busies himself recovering that which has been stolen or conned away from people, who he is your last best hope. So the Travis McGee mysteries are really adventures that are told through the eyes of this”
2016-05-04 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #157: The Importance of Being Dirty: Lessons from Mike Rowe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“How many people do you think are buried there? What you're looking at is the history of many, many years and all the anonymous people who have been buried here. And it looks like the church is sinking, but it's not that at all. And that's when Bill Bryson decides to write at home, a look at the history of the world as told from all the different rooms in his house. So in his bathroom becomes the history of plumbing, in his great hall becomes the history of entertaining. That's the cool premise. It's a great premise. And now that I hear myself talking about it, that's a book I would recommend.”
2016-05-04 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #157: The Importance of Being Dirty: Lessons from Mike Rowe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“isn't sinking, but the graveyard around it is exactly what a graveyard is. It's doing what a graveyard does when a graveyard is filled up. And Bill says, what do you mean? And he said, Bill, how long do you think that church has been here? I was like, about seven, eight hundred years. It's more like eleven hundred. How many people do you think have lived in this little hamlet during that period of time? I don't know. A few thousand. Actually, it's closer to a million.”
2016-05-04 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #157: The Importance of Being Dirty: Lessons from Mike Rowe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Kind of thing. So anyway, he's in this old house, this ancient house, and he walks up to his attic one day to get something. It's a huge attic, and he goes down a corridor, and then he makes another turn, and he finds a door. He didn't think he had, and he opens the door in his attic and he walks through it, and it takes him out between two dormers onto his roof. So he's standing on his roof, having walked through a door he didn't know he had, and he's looking around at the church next to him, and he sees that the church is sinking into the ground. And he's like, what in the hell is going on? Not in real time, but he see that it has sunk. So he calls the local historian, brings him up into his house, into the attic, through the magic doorway, and out onto his roof, and he says to him, What the hell's going on with the church? It's sinking, and the historian laughs and says.”
2016-05-04 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #157: The Importance of Being Dirty: Lessons from Mike Rowe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And the lost continent, which is one of my favorite. At home, real quickly, I won't give it away. This is what you read in the preface, but he lives in this little English Hamlet up by the ocean and he lives in a vicarage next to an old church.”
2016-05-04 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #157: The Importance of Being Dirty: Lessons from Mike Rowe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I just made that up. I can't read any of these titles. But judging from the color over there. What does that say? The magic of thinking big? No.”
2016-05-04 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #157: The Importance of Being Dirty: Lessons from Mike Rowe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No. That's a good one. That's John Hendricks. But John D. MacDonald wrote the best pulp fiction that I've ever read. I'm a big fan of fiction, by the way, and I know, looking around here, I have a lot of the same nonfiction books that you do. Which one?”
2016-05-04 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #157: The Importance of Being Dirty: Lessons from Mike Rowe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“God, that's great too. I tend to recommend whatever I'm reading just because it's obviously in the random access memory. But the book I've given most frequently is actually I mentioned it earlier. John D. MacDonald”
2016-05-04 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #157: The Importance of Being Dirty: Lessons from Mike Rowe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“extraordinary. And sometimes past the salt is the simplest thing you can say if you would like somebody to hand you the salt, but it's also fun to ask them to slide the white crystals in your general direction with all due speed.”
2016-05-04 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #157: The Importance of Being Dirty: Lessons from Mike Rowe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Um, although I don't read as much now as I used to, I used to read a lot, and I I think reading, but I also think weirdly a plays. I did a lot of plays when I was a kid. And I just think there's something really elegant and maybe indulgent about finding a different way to say a thing. And so I think often in an attempt to turn a phrase, I'll play with the language a lot and stumble across words that I wouldn't otherwise use. And so look, I mean, I've read Elmore Leonard and Hemingway, and I understand how important it is to be simple and brief. I really do. In fact, that's probably the most important thing, which is why I think it's a little indulgent to go the other way, but I do, just because it pleases me, I think the lexicon is.”
2016-05-04 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #157: The Importance of Being Dirty: Lessons from Mike Rowe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I don't contend with them. I acknowledge them and I try and stay in on the joke. I mean, I know when I'm bullshitting myself. I don't always know when I'm doing that with other people because you get caught up in a conversation. But I've lived long enough now to know that it's possible to distract myself from important things by doing other important things that aren't just as important, right? I mean, I call it virtuous procrastination. And it's no different than wasting time, but it's an elevated form of doing it. And that to me is the trap that a lot of otherwise intelligent people fall into.”
2016-05-04 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #157: The Importance of Being Dirty: Lessons from Mike Rowe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'm really pleased by that in a way that might sound a little self-important, but I'm also pleased that a thing that wasn't on my list to do has triggered a conversation that a million people are a part of. And it happened not as the result of a plan, but as the result of this sort of suspicion I keep talking about, that pushes me.”
2016-05-04 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #157: The Importance of Being Dirty: Lessons from Mike Rowe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Once I see the routine, it frightens me, and I don't know if it's a sabotaging thing, or I don't know what it is. But, you know, this morning I woke up and I had a lot of things I wanted to do before I came over here to talk to you. But I grabbed my laptop before I got out of bed, which is always a mistake, you know, and I hopped over on the Facebooks and I saw something on the wall and I wanted to respond to it. Somebody had made a list of the worst jobs and it pissed me off. And I posted their list and I wrote something and then I messed with a little bit. And then it turned into like a $500 word thing. And then right before I came over here I hit I posted it and now five thousand people have shared it and a million people have read it.”
2016-05-04 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #157: The Importance of Being Dirty: Lessons from Mike Rowe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Look, I'm afraid the honest answer is I don't know, but I have patterns, like anybody else, except I'm suspicious of my patterns, if that makes sense. This is my own psychosis, right? It's kind of what I meant before. I'm wary of earnestness, I'm suspicious of protocol, and I'm just”
2016-05-04 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #157: The Importance of Being Dirty: Lessons from Mike Rowe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's how Les Swanson from Wisconsin wound up with three honey wagons, a former psychologist and guidance counselor, is now sucking the shit out of people septic tanks full time. He's in his sixties, he loves his work, he can work whenever he wants. I'm having this conversation with Les Swanson and he's saying look this is not my wish fulfillment, except for the fact that I love what I do, and I'm very good at it. And my question to him was well which one of those came first, and he said neither came first was the fact that nobody was doing this. What came second was my own hard headed commitment to be very good at it, and then I did the thing that is the hardest thing to do, and that is figure out how to love something that you didn't think you did.”
2016-05-04 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #157: The Importance of Being Dirty: Lessons from Mike Rowe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It was a rainbow. There might have been a unicorn in it. Butterflies, happy people. And it said, follow your passion. And I took the position on dirty jobs that so many of the people I met who at a glance were not enviable in any way. But in fact, seemed to be better balanced and happier than most of the people I knew in real life. I began to ask myself, what in the world do these people know that the rest of us don't? Regarding passion, I started asking around and I heard the same thing from everyone. The happiest people I met, the people who were most passionate about their work, were people who looked around, watched where everyone was going, and simply went the opposite direction.”
2016-05-04 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #157: The Importance of Being Dirty: Lessons from Mike Rowe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Choke on the sacrinicity of it if there is such a word. The thing that chat my ass more than any of them was follow your passion. I remember seeing one of these platitudes. What were the successories they call them?”
2016-05-04 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #157: The Importance of Being Dirty: Lessons from Mike Rowe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Eagles, a lot of eagles. Yeah, and, you know, teamwork. And then some thing about teamwork or determination or persistence. That's what I meant before when I said I'm wary of earnestness. You know, I think it's so easy to serve up a good idea, but then...”
2016-05-04 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #157: The Importance of Being Dirty: Lessons from Mike Rowe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Sure. One of the best things to come out of dirty jobs after we did a couple hundred of them was a new level of permission from the network to basically do whatever I wanted. And what I wanted to do on occasion was look back and try and glean some lessons from the dirt. I wanted to take some of the many experiences we had from the show and make a case for what I called alternative platitudes. I've always railed against those bromides that hang in panelled conference rooms that have pictures of guys and like kayaks or rainbows or”
2016-05-04 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #157: The Importance of Being Dirty: Lessons from Mike Rowe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And it worked, the campaign became something called swap your ride. There was one called Spread the Word. There were all these different campaigns that relied not upon storyboards or scripts, but real people. And all I did was get out of the way and just have conversations with people. Go figure.”
2016-05-04 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #157: The Importance of Being Dirty: Lessons from Mike Rowe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“with Ford and their agency, and it took about a year and a half, but my basic pitch was the same thing it always is. I said, you guys, if you guys want to put some dude in a shearling jacket and let him hit a mark and say a line, there's a long list of guys who can do that better than I can. But if you want to shoot quickly, and if you want to make your customers the hero of your brand, let's experiment. A year and a half later, in the course of one day we shot twenty two commercials.”
2016-05-04 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #157: The Importance of Being Dirty: Lessons from Mike Rowe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'll tell you where it was even bigger than both those two combined Ford. Ford hired me in whatever it was two thousand six, and I did a commercial for them for the Super Bowl. It was a truck commercial. It took a day and a half to shoot and it was 30 seconds long. It involved a giant centrifuge hooked up to the bumper of a truck, and we dug a giant pit, and the centrifuge spun the truck like a giant carnival ride, and I stood right next to it talking very heroically about the construction and the reliability and the durability of the truck, and I were a shearling jacket and my hair had product in it. And I hated it. The commercial did fine, but I hated it, and that opened a dialogue.”
2016-05-04 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #157: The Importance of Being Dirty: Lessons from Mike Rowe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, aside from QVC, discovery, you know, again, because they had so firmly entrenched in their viewers' mind a set of expectations. When I came along as the non-expert, just, you know, going around the country, looking under the rock, it was, it seems so obvious now. And I'm not saying this because I'm taking because I want to take credit for it. I just mean. Wow, one of these things is not like the other, and all of a sudden I got a lot of attention. Not'cause I was good,'cause I was different.”
2016-05-04 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #157: The Importance of Being Dirty: Lessons from Mike Rowe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“All that subversive in hindsight, it just looked that way because I had such clear parameters. And really, when I look back at every other good thing that I think I've done, it's always been because there's an antagonist in the room.”
2016-05-04 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #157: The Importance of Being Dirty: Lessons from Mike Rowe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A huge solid because if you were a viewer in nineteen ninety, you could turn on QVC any day of the year, any time of the day. And while you might see different people, you would see the exact same process. You would see parameters, you would see graphics that are utterly predictable, you would see rigor, you would see all that stuff that I used to think I hated was actually the very thing that allowed me to be such an anarchist. And in truth, I really wasn't. But when you have that much rigor around you, all you have to do is put one toe over the line, and you look like a complete malcontent, a lunatic, you know, you really stand out. It made it so much easier. I didn't do anything.”
2016-05-04 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #157: The Importance of Being Dirty: Lessons from Mike Rowe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's a great question, man. Because I used to be enamored of the idea that I can do anything I want. I mean, it's kind of like owning a business, right? If you ask the average person, hey, would you like to own your own business? The average person says yes. And then a year later, the average person doesn't have their business anymore. Creatively, it's not so different. I think it's very Roman. What's good's a protagonist without an antagonist? What good is a story, you know, without all these zigs and zags? The blank page is very scary to me because there's no antagonist on it. And it forces me to be both. For all of the grief and derision I've leveled toward QVC,”
2016-05-04 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #157: The Importance of Being Dirty: Lessons from Mike Rowe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'm not even going to say I was wrong. I just realized I couldn't spend the rest of my career with so much contempt for the very industry upon which I relied, you know, and so I just wore myself out being glib. And then it was suddenly time to be something else. You know, I'm wary of earnestness in and of itself, but I wanted to be authentic. And the only way I could do that on the Discovery Channel was as a fan without access.”
2016-05-04 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #157: The Importance of Being Dirty: Lessons from Mike Rowe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I just don't think there's a I'm suspicious of playbooks. Because once you write down the thing, then it becomes dogma, and pretty soon it's morals and dogma, and pretty soon you're Alfred Pike and it's the Masons, and now there's a secret handshake, and oh my God, this is the way you're supposed to do it. I was so certain for so long that I had cracked my own little Rosetta stone, and then I became so utterly humbled by the fact that I was”
2016-05-04 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #157: The Importance of Being Dirty: Lessons from Mike Rowe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so as a viewer and as a host, you know, I had always been a little fraudulent. You know, I tried to be transparent about it, but I always felt a little icky, you know, memorizing a bunch of things the night before and then pretending to have always known them. I used to call it the plaque phenomenon. You know, you walk up to a statue and there's always a plaque on it. And you read the information on the plaque and suddenly you get a snapshot of the biography of whoever the guy is. Well, for years, you know, everything I did on TV was based on information gleaned from a plaque moments before someone said action. And I didn't want to do that on Discovery because I knew they were hiring people who were genuine. So the question became, How can I be genuine and authentic and still embrace my inner ignorance?”
2016-05-04 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #157: The Importance of Being Dirty: Lessons from Mike Rowe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And anyway, I just always wanted to not just work for them. I wanted to work with them somehow. And again, I didn't know how I could possibly do it because It was a landscape populated completely by experts, and, you know, you and I are different in the sense that you, I think, get comfort and meaning from mastering a thing. I get anxious by the prospect of mastering.”
2016-05-04 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #157: The Importance of Being Dirty: Lessons from Mike Rowe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A little of both when I was I think I was nineteen eighty six I guess so I'd been out of college a couple of years I was flicking around and in those days when you flicked around you got up and walked over to the TV and turned the dial. So I'm flicking around and I saw a documentary on the Discovery Channel and it was the first time I'd seen it and I was utterly enamored. Of the brand, the idea, the notion, the idea of satisfying curiosity. I said, I'm going to work for these guys one day. And so that was the first thing in the back of my mind. And as a viewer from 86 until 2002, I was with him all the time. And that geo and all the usual suspects. But I love discovery and I love the story of John Hendricks, one of the greatest entrepreneurs who ever lived.”
2016-05-04 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #157: The Importance of Being Dirty: Lessons from Mike Rowe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“of Cousteau and David Attenborough and now, you know, a smart Alec covered with other people's crap is making dick jokes in a sewer. You know, that was scary. But at the same time, we were paying a genuine tribute. To the worker. So it was the right mix of subversion and earnestness.”
2016-05-04 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #157: The Importance of Being Dirty: Lessons from Mike Rowe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The answer to your first question was it happened through some weird mix of serendipity, me far scumping my way once again into this. This weird area, and being called on my own bullshit, honestly, I had been making fun of TV, and suddenly I'm doing a show where I'm getting thousands of letters from people who were genuinely grateful to see their job, to see their vocation presented not as a punchline, but as an honest way to make a decent living. And so we touched on something that was really real. And, you know, remember too, in 2003, there's no deadliest catch, ax men, ice road truckers, there's no gold rush, there's no work on television. So it was a very, very, I understand my discovery was, you know, tiptoeing around this thing.”
2016-05-04 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #157: The Importance of Being Dirty: Lessons from Mike Rowe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I was able, with the help of my partner, a brilliant woman called Mary Sullivan, we were able to take the basic DNA of the show, the basic guts of it that were, frankly inspired by my granddad, and turn that into a nonprofit foundation called Microworks and turn that into a completely separate business. And so while the show was on the air, I was able to start filtering a lot of other opportunities through this other entity. But sorry, I'm free associating”
2016-05-04 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #157: The Importance of Being Dirty: Lessons from Mike Rowe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“About brand and off brand and everything else. And eventually they just said, look, we'll take three hours of it just to put it on to kind of introduce you. But what we really want you to do is dive in a submersible with James Cameron and go to the Titanic. And then we want you and Zahi Hawas to explore sarcophagi in the largest cemetery recently discovered in North Africa. And then all these cool expeditions. Well, they put dirty jobs on the air, and we got 10,000 letters the first month, and that was that. But to answer your question, no, I don't own dirty jobs. I own me, and thankfully dirty jobs with Mike Row became this thing that ultimately launched thirty one other shows. and so”
2016-05-04 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #157: The Importance of Being Dirty: Lessons from Mike Rowe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“He took the pilot I shot to discovery, and he showed it to them, and that opened a conversation about me becoming the discovery guy. So I made a deal with Discovery to narrate their tent pole specials and to become a kind of de facto avatar. My whole pitch to discovery was you don't need another host and your network doesn't need another expert. The world's full of them. You need a fan. You need a fan of your brand. You need a curious cat to go out in the world and look under the rock with a crew that leaves a light footprint. Just to ask the kinds of questions I would ask if I were watching TV with my friend from home. That's what you need. They bought that idea. I said, can we do dirty jobs? And they said, God, no. And I said, why not? And we had this whole conversation.”
2016-05-04 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #157: The Importance of Being Dirty: Lessons from Mike Rowe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“showed the pilot to a guy named Craig Peligian, who runs pilgrim films and television, and he actually owed me a favor, I think, because a couple years earlier I hosted a complete abortion called Worst Case Scenario, which aired on TBS. And he produced it, and I hosted it. And he said, look, if I can ever help you, you know, so I gave him this pilot. It basically was a pilot of me collecting semen from a bull called Hunsucker Commando. And he showed this to Discovery. And Discovery was like, look, that's weird. It'll never work, but let's talk to that guy. Not even knowing that they had hired me ten years earlier in 1993 to host a show called Romantic Escapes, which turned out to be neither. But anyway, I often say, you know, romantic escapes was me and a pretty girl going around the world.”
2016-05-04 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #157: The Importance of Being Dirty: Lessons from Mike Rowe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Work. Yeah, I'm kind of simplifying and overstating a little bit. I took dirty jobs everywhere and heard no in as many ways as a person can hear no. You know, it was too gross for CBS, not gross enough for Fox, too funny for PBS, not funny enough for Comedy School.”
2016-05-04 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #157: The Importance of Being Dirty: Lessons from Mike Rowe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And it was horrible. And half the people who called, called to congratulate me, and the other half called demanding my head, which of course is exactly what you want in TV. And so even though it didn't work ultimately on evening magazine, I did 20 of those segments, cobbled them together, and ultimately sold them to the discovery channel. And that became dirty jobs. But it all happened fundamentally because I wanted to put something on TV that wouldn't cause my grandfather to throw his crumpled up national Bohemian beer can at the screen.”
2016-05-04 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #157: The Importance of Being Dirty: Lessons from Mike Rowe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“With my boss about a segment that was called Somebody's Got To Do It ultimately took place in construction sites and factory floors. The first one was me in the sewers of San Francisco, hosting a show called Evening Magazine. It was a hugely important moment because it nearly got me fired. It did get my boss fired. early retirement anyway. But, you know, evening magazine, right? It's seven o'clock here in the Bay Area, and you sit down for another heartwarming story about a three legged dog, Marin who's overcome some sort of canine kidney failure. And you get me crawling through a river as shit, you know, with a sewer inspector, you know, covered in the worst excrement there is with rats and roaches. And it was great.”
2016-05-04 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #157: The Importance of Being Dirty: Lessons from Mike Rowe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Mother called me to tell me my grandfather was fading and I hung up thinking you know goddamn it I never did anything on television that he would look at and recognize as work you know I mean he loved me and he was proud of me and vice versa but I never you know he imagined the guy I just described seeing his grandson singing opera selling things in the middle of the night on QVC flying around the country doing a bullshit TV show for no reason other than mercenary you know and it just for him a guy who built things repaired things fixed things I was just from another universe so I thought before he goes it would be nice to do something on TV that looked like work and that really started a conversation”
2016-05-04 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #157: The Importance of Being Dirty: Lessons from Mike Rowe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I don't know why. I mean, I could theorize, but it happened when my grandfather got sick. He was 92 and built the house. The guy could build a house without a blueprint. The guy could take my watch apart right now blindfolded and put it back together. He had the chip, the chip of knowing, I used to call it. He only went to the seventh grade, but he was a master electrician by the time he was 30, a plumber, a mason, a mechanic, welder, whatever. And I idolized him by nineteen, sorry, by 2001, I was working here in San Francisco impersonating a host over at Evening Magazine. Working really for CBS News in that capacity.”
2016-05-04 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #157: The Importance of Being Dirty: Lessons from Mike Rowe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You are. And I wasn't doing that. I was really enamored of this romantic version of myself, this guy who eats what he kills, who works when he likes, who brings the meat back home, who gets to fly around the world with his magic ticket. And I just was loving it. What I was missing is Obviously, The bargain I had to make was I couldn't be picky about the work that I took, and I was completely sanguine with that at the time. And really from twenty eight until forty two, that's exactly where I was. It didn't, the work didn't matter. What mattered was the quality of life in between the gigs? And of course, keep your tongue in your cheek and have as much fun as you can while you're doing all of the things you have to do, and you win. That was my metric.”
2016-05-04 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #157: The Importance of Being Dirty: Lessons from Mike Rowe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They've got their people. They've got their publicists. They've got their agent. They've got their manager. Start adding up the percentage and then through Sam on top of it, you know, you almost can't afford to work.”
2016-05-04 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #157: The Importance of Being Dirty: Lessons from Mike Rowe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, like I said, the kind that allows you to look around and say, oh, I figured something out that you guys haven't. Right. I mean, all my friends are in the industry. And, you know, all of them at this point in time, 96, 97.”
2016-05-04 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #157: The Importance of Being Dirty: Lessons from Mike Rowe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Really afford to totally punch out, but I knew I had enough time to sit and read, to think, to write, to create, or at least maintain the illusion of fitness, you know, to have a life, you know, at least the life that I imagined was good for me at the time. And at the time it was. But of course, it was built on a very specific kind of fallacy and a very specific kind of hubris.”
2016-05-04 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #157: The Importance of Being Dirty: Lessons from Mike Rowe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I wasted a lot of it, not wasted, I mean it was important time, but it's not time that I planned. You know, so all I knew was most every month started with thirty blank squares, staring back at me, and I would have some anxiety, you know. And then I would look back at every month and always half to two-thirds of them had been X'd out. Once I got used to the fact that I was always going to find enough work, then I had to get used to the fact that I couldn't take big elaborate trips with my off time because I really became kind of like the, this is a terrible comparison, but a doctor on call. I always had a beeper because I couldn't.”
2016-05-04 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #157: The Importance of Being Dirty: Lessons from Mike Rowe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'm flying around the world with this magical thing. And yeah, it went on for a while. And I felt guilty for a while, and then I got over it, and then I completely forgot about it. And then one day, on a random little flight by myself down to San Diego, they called into code, and the woman's eyebrow went up a little bit, and she held on to my D three with both hands and walked back toward me. Obviously, we're on other sides of the counter. And she was so cool. She said, well, mister Row, we had a good run, didn't we?”
2016-05-04 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #157: The Importance of Being Dirty: Lessons from Mike Rowe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT