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Mike Rowe

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140

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2016-05-04

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2016-05-04

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1. “It was Willy Wonka. I was for a year, maybe fifteen months without question, and I say this with all due modesty, but I think maybe the most interesting date. I mean, you're the girl, right? And we have a drink and things are going great. And I say we should get dinner. And she says, yes, we should. And I say, where would you like to go? And she says anywhere. And I say, I know a place in New Orleans. And we go to the airport and we clear security and we walk right on the plane. And she looks at me and says, who are you? And I say, no one of any consequence.”

   2016-05-04 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #157: The Importance of Being Dirty: Lessons from Mike Rowe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

2. “First class, even if they have to pull someone off. Mine was a D3 plus one because I always had a cameraman, and we were on airline business, and we flew last minute often. So this went on for about a year while we were in production for this show called On Air. And then a guy named Crandall came in. I think it was Crandall, American Airlines, and that space became even more valuable, and they decided to do a deal with Brandon Tartakov and NBC and brought in Seinfeld and some other legitimate shows to really justify the advertising, which meant I was out of a gig. Again. But they never took the D three back.”

   2016-05-04 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #157: The Importance of Being Dirty: Lessons from Mike Rowe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

3. “In Sydney, Las Vegas did matter, and I would do, I'd spend three days there and I would do a show about that town. So basically I'm a tourist doing all the fun things you would do in any of those places. Its purpose, like any content, really, is just to provide a landing place for the advertising. But for me as a 32-year-old kid out there in the world, it was maybe the best freelance gig I ever had because they issued a thing called a D three. And a D three in airline parlance is called an MF or a must fly. If you walk up to the gate, and this is pre-911 obviously, but if you walk right up to the gate, show them the D three. The agent takes it, looks at it, her eyebrows go up, because you don't see a lot of them. It's just for the board, basically. Picks up the phone, calls a number, hits in a code, and you get on the plane.”

   2016-05-04 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #157: The Importance of Being Dirty: Lessons from Mike Rowe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

4. “Well, American in 95 realized how valuable the real estate was in their planes on a screen. You've got 300,000, 400 truly captive business travelers, right? So they had been doing advertising, but they hadn't really been going after it. And so they made big deals with MCI and Xerox, and at the day, all of the usual suspects. All they needed was content. And so they hired this company who wound up hiring me to create a show called On Air TV. Nobody cared what the show really was as long as it was family friendly, as long as it unfolded in a destination served by any of Americans routes, so I would fly anywhere in the world, land in Copenhagen.”

   2016-05-04 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #157: The Importance of Being Dirty: Lessons from Mike Rowe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

5. “John D. MacDonald's Travis McGee, in fact, you know, a guy who took his retirement in early installments. And I just loved it. American Airlines was one of maybe 300 jobs that I Forrest Gumped my way into.”

   2016-05-04 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #157: The Importance of Being Dirty: Lessons from Mike Rowe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

6. “You were a mercenary. And I just love the idea of going to Hollywood without an agent, without a manager, without a publicist, without a lawyer, and booking as much work as I could. I didn't care about the work. I didn't care about the quality of the work. I didn't care if it was infomercials. I didn't care if it was books on tape. I didn't care if it was sitcoms or talk shows. Didn't matter. I did it all or tried it all and got my share. By 1995, I had had dozens and dozens of jobs in Hollywood and New York and feeling kind of arrogant, you know, the way you do when you think you've figured something out that most people haven't. And so I was freelancing. Many, many jobs. Eight months on, four months off. I pattered my whole, that part of my career after.”

   2016-05-04 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #157: The Importance of Being Dirty: Lessons from Mike Rowe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

7. “So the etymology of freelance is exactly as it sounds in the medieval days if you were a freelance, you were a knight without a lord.”

   2016-05-04 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #157: The Importance of Being Dirty: Lessons from Mike Rowe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

8. “Well, for me what happened was after three years I did develop a pretty good set of muscles and became a very good auditioner, and I had always wanted to be a tradesman, to tell you the truth. And I didn't get that gene. It's recessive. Everybody in my family did. I didn't. But I always looked at TV as a trade. And I finally felt like I had a toolbox that would allow me to approach it the way I always wanted to, which was as a mercenary. I mean, really, truly as a freelancer. You're familiar with the word freelance in its origin.”

   2016-05-04 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #157: The Importance of Being Dirty: Lessons from Mike Rowe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

9. “But I mean, honestly, Tim, we could talk about this for days. It was utterly transformational, and I'd never been on TV before, ever. I'd never had a job in broadcasting before. And suddenly it's three in the morning. I'm on live television. People I don't know are bringing me things I can't describe, and I'm completely reliant upon the viewer to get me through the shift.”

   2016-05-04 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #157: The Importance of Being Dirty: Lessons from Mike Rowe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

10. “You're like He didn't have his earbud in. His feet are up. He had fallen asleep doing a Sudoku like 20 minutes earlier, and he had the thick trails of saliva coming out of his mouth and going all the way down to his chest. I was utterly alone on stage save for these product coordinators who would bring me this never-ending chain of dreck that had failed to sell in prime time.”

    2016-05-04 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #157: The Importance of Being Dirty: Lessons from Mike Rowe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

11. “Sounds incredible. It was great. I mean, it was, I mean, I would look out at the producer who was sound asleep, right? I mean, I'm sound asleep.”

    2016-05-04 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #157: The Importance of Being Dirty: Lessons from Mike Rowe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

12. “Flames because I have no idea what the hell this thing is. Could you please call in so my producer can put you on the air so you can tell me how this works I swear to God, I did that. And I got overwhelmed with phone calls, hundreds of people, which at 3 30 in the morning is saying something. Hundreds of people called in to tell me how to do my job on live TV.”

    2016-05-04 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #157: The Importance of Being Dirty: Lessons from Mike Rowe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

13. “For the next three years. Because remember, you know, for me, the products were there to be made fun of. And the callers were there to help me. I didn't see them as customers. My first night on the air, I picked up the Amcor negative ion generator and I looked into the camera and I said, look, this item, what was it? like E1410. Now, at the time, there were also items like E twenty eight thousand nine hundred sixty. So like E1410 meant that thing had been there from day one. We'd been selling it for years. I'd never seen it before and I didn't know what it did. I looked into the camera and said, if one of you people at home, and I'm talking to you, you narcoleptic lonely heart right now, it's three thirty in the morning, you, you know who you are. You're watching me sit here about to go up.”

    2016-05-04 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #157: The Importance of Being Dirty: Lessons from Mike Rowe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

14. “I would negotiate begged each situation was different. I spent, when I was fired the first time, I was only been there about two months, and I stayed on a kind of, what do they call it, an animal house, double secret probation.”

    2016-05-04 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #157: The Importance of Being Dirty: Lessons from Mike Rowe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

15. “Then I've ever learned anywhere about anything, and I probably even learn more about myself, which you'll do at three AM when you're staring into the abyss and it's staring back and you're trying to make, you know, a precious moment figurine interesting. You'll go places you didn't know you would go. But kidding aside, you know, it's probably the most honest channel in the entire cable universe. It's utterly without pretense. It's a 24-hour commercial. There's no clever integration.”

    2016-05-04 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #157: The Importance of Being Dirty: Lessons from Mike Rowe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

16. “I had two earpieces at the time, one so the producer could tell me how I was doing or beg me to stop doing whatever it was I was doing. And then another one to handle the live phone calls, which were extraordinary. Now again, in 89 and 90, it was like radio days. It was like early television early radio. We didn't have a seven second delay. We're utterly live. So you're really out there without a net. The number of things that could go wrong and the degree to which they did are nothing short of spectacular. One day, if there's time, I'm going to write the book because it was just wild. But in defense of Homeshopping, I have great fun looking back and casting aspersions. But the truth is, I learned more in my three years at QVC.”

    2016-05-04 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #157: The Importance of Being Dirty: Lessons from Mike Rowe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

17. “I mean, to answer your questions, the people who were good at it took it seriously and they showed up three hours early and they studied the products and they committed things to memory and they did the best they could. And the people like me who never really got off the graveyard shift looked at all of that as a wonderful opportunity to impersonate David Letterman. Which really is all I did.”

    2016-05-04 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #157: The Importance of Being Dirty: Lessons from Mike Rowe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

18. “There must have been some corporate policy frowning on swords at QVC, but of course they got their own channel later on. But we had knives. We had in the kitchen with Mike, you know, and we had knives with full tang construction, I recall, you know, as the metal runs all the way down into the handle. We had, God, we had cookware coated with polytetrafluorethylene, teafall, the slickest surface there is. I mean, all of this stuff, it was just an endless smear of adverbs and unpronounceable things.”

    2016-05-04 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #157: The Importance of Being Dirty: Lessons from Mike Rowe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

19. “Well again we were People would go out and do whatever they could to maintain a three or four thousand skew inventory. And back then, that inventory, I think, would be best described as the interior of one of those machines on the carnival midway where the claw tries to grab the thing and then drop it for you. It was just Capitamonti. It was porcelain. It was collectible dolls. It was the cheapest kind of electronics. It was the health team infrared pain reliever.”

    2016-05-04 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #157: The Importance of Being Dirty: Lessons from Mike Rowe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

20. “Where the paint came from or how the paint was mixed and where the paint was mixed. And you might even leave the viewer with an image of the pain mixing the paint to create the exact shade of canary yellow, and then of course you can touch on the application process. And before long, you've talked yourself into this endless tautology just about the color of the pencil.”

    2016-05-04 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #157: The Importance of Being Dirty: Lessons from Mike Rowe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

21. “Well, it's interesting you use those words because if you're really trying to sell in a classic sense or kill time in a practical sense, there is no better approach than the feature benefit. So all the obvious things, you know, it's yellow. Now that's a feature, and if you limit yourself to simply saying it's yellow, then you're going to be out of time, you know, real fast. Why is yellow important? Well, because you're a busy executive in the middle of a busy day, and when you need a pencil and open up that top drawer of your desk and gaze into it, you don't want to play some sort of game with your receptors. You want a color that pops out there. You want to know where that pencil is and what better way to do it by this bright canary shade of yellow. And then, of course, if you want to take a little detour, right, you can talk about the exact hue of yellow, and then you can talk about”

    2016-05-04 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #157: The Importance of Being Dirty: Lessons from Mike Rowe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

22. “And the man said When I ask you to, I want you to pick up the pencil, and I want you to talk about it, and I want you to make me want it. I don't care how you make me want it. I don't care what you tell me to make me want it, I don't care if it's true or not. But I want you to harness whatever enthusiasm and passion you can muster for this number two pencil, and do not stop talking until I tell you to. And I learned later that anybody who could do that for eight minutes was immediately hired and put on a three month probationary period where you were given enough rope to truly hang yourself from three to six AM every morning on live television. So anyway, that's how it happened. I talked about a pencil for eight minutes.”

    2016-05-04 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #157: The Importance of Being Dirty: Lessons from Mike Rowe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

23. “It was elegant in a way that I know you'll appreciate as a guy who values some measure of efficiency and effectiveness. And it was elegance personified by a company who had abjectly failed to create a workable audition process. So it's 1989. The home shopping industry is just the part of the map where it says here be dragons. You can't hire an actor and expect him or her to know how to sell. And you can't really hire a salesman and expect him or her not to shit the bed when somebody says action. So it's a very weird set of muscles. And the way they determine potential candidates, in my case, was they rolled a pencil across the desk while a camera was rolling.”

    2016-05-04 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #157: The Importance of Being Dirty: Lessons from Mike Rowe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

24. “Let me hit you with a little interpretive dance. So I wind up auditioning that next morning in a conference room at the Marriott Renaissance in Baltimore Inner Harbor, which is maybe the strangest audition of my life, but I didn't get a call back, but I got a job offer on the spot.”

    2016-05-04 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #157: The Importance of Being Dirty: Lessons from Mike Rowe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

25. “The ravens were not playing. He instead was watching a fat guy in a shiny suit sell pots and pans I said, Rick, what the hell are you doing? And he said, I'm auditioning for that guy's job tomorrow. QVC is in town, and they're having an open cattle call down at the Marriott, and I'm going to go see if I can get an actual job. So I sat there, dressed as a Viking, drinking National Bohemian beer, and arguing with Rick over the demise of Western civilization, and he bet me a hundred dollars I wouldn't get a call back if I accompanied him to the audition, which I did, and the next day, it's kind of a long answer to your question, but the next day.”

    2016-05-04 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #157: The Importance of Being Dirty: Lessons from Mike Rowe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

26. “Honestly, in the same way, I got most of my jobs back in the day. I lost a bet and I crashed an audition. I was singing. This was 1989, and I was in the Baltimore opera and was during a performance of During Disneylungeon, I think, Wagner, interminable durge, and I was dressed as a Viking. And I didn't need to be on stage for the intermission, obviously, but then for an hour after, which meant I could walk across the street and watch the football game, at the Mount Royal Tavern, dressed as a Viking, which of course I did. And look, if you haven't had a couple of beers and sung Wagner, I heartily recommend it, especially if you can put on the Viking helmet. Anyway, I walked into the bar and my buddy Rick was pouring the beer, but the game was not on.”

    2016-05-04 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #157: The Importance of Being Dirty: Lessons from Mike Rowe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

27. “we have to, and we never go back to quote unquote, pick it up. So I don't know that I'm necessarily good at improvising, but I'm almost always better at take one because I do a lot of other things now that I like to get along with people. And so they want to do it again. And so I'll do it again. But it doesn't matter how facile you are the second time. The second time is always going to be a performance. And I learned that lesson early on and forgot it for about fifteen years and then with dirty jobs had a chance to circle back and live it. And so, you know, whether it's a speech or a show or a commercial or a podcast or a Facebook post, whatever it is, you know, I want to get it right, but not to the point where I'll completely forsake the...”

    2016-05-04 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #157: The Importance of Being Dirty: Lessons from Mike Rowe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

28. “Thanks. I don't know, is the honest answer, but if I had to guess, I would say one of the things that was important on dirty jobs and one of the few things I really insisted upon was no second takes. And the reason I did that was because I thought it would make the show better. I did it because I thought it would make the show more authentic. And everybody was talking about the importance of authenticity back in two thousand three. They still are today. It's really hard to do, you know. And when you consider how many people say it's critically important and then look at the things people do to put barriers between themselves and the authentic experience they actually want to impart, it'll break your heart, you know, and turn on news, listen to FM radio. The reason it all sounds the same, the reason most TV, I think, looks the same is because we're all doing it the same basic way. So my hope with Dirty Jobs was to say, listen, this is going to be a hot mess. I mean, this is Wartzenhol. We're going to go into the field with a good natured crew. Everybody has a camera. We never stop rolling until or unless we.”

    2016-05-04 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #157: The Importance of Being Dirty: Lessons from Mike Rowe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

29. “along the lines of so stunning television obviously unusable so I yelled cut which I never do on dirty jobs and explained to Albert look we got to do it the right way and he said what are you talking about and I said what the rubber bands and so we used the rubber bands but quickly determined that the sheep with rubber bands around their scrotums were stumbling around in abject misery, while the ones he had just orally addressed were prancing around without a care in the world. So the point of that talk really was to challenge the primacy of experts and at the same time say it's possible to do honest television that's both disgusting and intelligent in a tertiary way.”

    2016-05-04 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #157: The Importance of Being Dirty: Lessons from Mike Rowe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

30. “And this, of course, was the point of the talk when I called the humane society, and Peter they were very specific in telling me the proper method which involved a rubber band that would go over the scrotum, thereby retarding the flow of blood to the testicles and ultimately resulting in their detachment in about three days. That's the quote-unquote right way to do it. Albert and Melody, the people who ran the ranch, did it the old-fashioned way. And when you do it the old-fashioned way, you only need two people. The way I just described requires three, somebody to handle the scrotum, somebody to handle the rubber band, and somebody to control the creature. But in this case, Melanie just put the lamb right up on the fence post, and Albert reached in, pulled the scrootum out, cut the tip off, exposed the testicles, leaned down, bit them off, and spit them in a bucket that I was holding, making a sound.”

    2016-05-04 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #157: The Importance of Being Dirty: Lessons from Mike Rowe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

31. “Well, the Prince Post is what was handy. And look, we should be very, very clear. The reason ranchers for centuries have been biting the balls off of sheep is because it's not only more efficient, it's actually kinder.”

    2016-05-04 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #157: The Importance of Being Dirty: Lessons from Mike Rowe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

32. “Which means with the spring lambs you have to take their tails and their testicles. So I thought, well, this is visually both alarming and potentially stunning. But I had problems. You know, dirty jobs was constantly under attack by an army of angry acronyms. And I'd long since fallen off the Christmas card list of OSHA and PETA and the Humane Society. So I called Peta and I said, listen, we're going to be castrating sheep. I just want to make sure we do it right. And what followed was a completely bizarre conversation that ultimately led to the TED talk that I gave. And yeah, we touched on everything from Aunt Agnoresis to peripate to modern-day agriculture to regret and of course the unforgettable taste of testical.”

    2016-05-04 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #157: The Importance of Being Dirty: Lessons from Mike Rowe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

33. “A little something to take the edge off. No, the business of animal husbandry was a very, very important component of dirty jobs. You know, when we worked our way through feces from every species, we suddenly realized collecting semen from various barnyard animals was great television. And beyond the spectacle of it, just a great way to connect people to their food, you know, because artificial intelligence is, in fact, I mean, we're just not feeding 300 million people three times a day if we don't do that. So I was always on the lookout for interesting agricultural misadventures and ways that we could be intelligent, but at the same time satisfy the more purile aspects of my viewers, God love them. And when I got the call to really explore, they called it sheep.”

    2016-05-04 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #157: The Importance of Being Dirty: Lessons from Mike Rowe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

34. “Just like that, I'm back in Monterey. So I turn around and I say, ah, you're talking about the sheep. And you said yes. And we had a few laughs regarding the time I bit the balls off lambs in Grey, Colorado at eight thousand feet”

    2016-05-04 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #157: The Importance of Being Dirty: Lessons from Mike Rowe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

35. “Except a lot of stories. And as I was going through them in my mind, I hear your disembodied voice. You know, it's not a high voice. It's not a low voice. You're familiar with your voice. In fact, let's relive it right now. Say to me, Mike, I want to hear about the testicles.”

    2016-05-04 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #157: The Importance of Being Dirty: Lessons from Mike Rowe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

36. “So Discovery is one of the sponsors of this thing, and they send me down there. I was the discovery guy in those days, basically. And they said, yeah, it's this thing. It's like Ted. And I'd never heard of Ted. I'm like, okay, so there's some guy named Ted who I should know, but I don't. So I'm just going to pretend like I do. Okay. So there's a guy named Ted and he's down in Monterey and we need you to go because we're sponsoring his thing and introduce some people and say something smart on behalf of the network. That's why I was there when I walked in. I saw the giant banner hanging from the ceiling. I saw my face on it. And I realized very quickly that I was there in fact to say something, not only memorable but recordable for posterity in like three hours. And yeah, I didn't have any visual aids. I didn't have any real, I had nothing.”

    2016-05-04 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #157: The Importance of Being Dirty: Lessons from Mike Rowe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

37. “We were on an escalator actually headed up to the main auditorium, and I heard a voice behind me say I want to hear about the testicles which, you know, as a rule, is impossible to ignore. And when you're in a crowd, you know, doubly so. So I spun around and there you go. The escalator, what was really going through my mind was what in the hell am I going to talk about here? Because the Discovery Channel had sent me down there. This was, what, 2008 maybe?”

    2016-05-04 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #157: The Importance of Being Dirty: Lessons from Mike Rowe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

38. “Metaphorically anyway, eight years of my life. It was Groundhog Day in a sewer in some way, shape or form, even if you're wrapping a boat.”

    2016-05-04 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #157: The Importance of Being Dirty: Lessons from Mike Rowe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

39. “I'm not wrapping a boat. Yeah, that was Manhattan Beach, oddly named since we were in Cincinnati on the river, and it was, I think, late November, and all of the pleasure crafts down there, you know, are obviously vulnerable and susceptible to the climate in a huge way. I mean, they'll just crack. It just gets so cold. And a team of guys wrap them in the same way you might wrap your sandwich in saran wrap, except it's industrial strength saran wrap, and it goes all the way around the boat. And of course, you know, it's freezing rain. You're on a boat. It's slickered and snot. You're flying around, your cameraman's flying around, cameras are flying through the air, the soundman is cursing you. Everybody's just, it's, you know, it's just so humiliating to, like, if you can't skate, to find yourself on the ice. It's no fun. And that was basically metaphor.”

    2016-05-04 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #157: The Importance of Being Dirty: Lessons from Mike Rowe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

40. “Well, you're welcome. I mean, look, when people say things could always be worse, it means whatever you decide it means. But then when you can actually turn on the TV and see some sort of optical manifestation of what worse is, well, there you go. Reinforcement.”

    2016-05-04 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #157: The Importance of Being Dirty: Lessons from Mike Rowe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT