The Tim Ferriss Show - #157: The Importance of Being Dirty: Lessons from Mike Rowe

Episode Date: May 4, 2016

"Just because you love something doesn’t mean you can’t suck at it." - Mike Rowe Mike Rowe (@mikeroweworks) is perhaps the best storyteller and pitchman I've ever had on the show. You may know Mike Rowe as the host of Dirty Jobs. Mike Rowe is a TV host, writer, narrator, producer, actor and spokesman. His performing career began in 1984 when he faked his way into the Baltimore Opera to get his union card and meet girls, both of which he accomplished during a performance of Rigoletto. His transition to television occurred in 1990 when — to settle a bet — he auditioned for the QVC Shopping Channel and was promptly hired after talking about a pencil for nearly eight minutes. There, he worked the graveyard shift for three years, until he was ultimately fired for making fun of products and belittling viewers. Why listen to this episode? You will learn: Secrets of the perfect pitch How Mike flew around the world for free (until he got caught) Why to pursue opportunity instead of passion How being different can help you win in business and life The business of Mike Rowe Favorite books, voice-over artists, and much, much more... Enjoy! Show notes and links for this episode can be found at www.fourhourworkweek.com/podcast. This podcast is brought to you by Audible. I have used Audible for years and I love audio books. I have two to recommend: The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman Vagabonding by Rolf Potts All you need to do to get your free 30-day Audible trial is go to Audible.com/Tim. Choose one of the above books, or choose between more than 180,000 audio programs. That could be a book, a newspaper, a magazine, or even a class. It's that easy. Go to Audible.com/Tim and get started today. Enjoy! This podcast is also brought to you by MeUndies. Have you ever wanted to be as powerful as a mullet-wearing ninja from the 1980’s, or as sleek as a black panther in the Amazon? Of course you have, and that’s where MeUndies comes in. I’ve spent the last six months wearing underwear from these guys 24/7, and they are the most comfortable and colorful underwear I’ve ever owned. Their materials are 2x softer than cotton, as evaluated using the Kawabata method. Check out MeUndies.com/Tim to see my current faves (some are awesomely ridiculous, like the camo).***If you enjoy the podcast, would you please consider leaving a short review on Apple Podcasts/iTunes? It takes less than 60 seconds, and it really makes a difference in helping to convince hard-to-get guests. I also love reading the reviews!For show notes and past guests, please visit tim.blog/podcast.Sign up for Tim’s email newsletter (“5-Bullet Friday”) at tim.blog/friday.For transcripts of episodes, go to tim.blog/transcripts.Interested in sponsoring the podcast? Visit tim.blog/sponsor and fill out the form.Discover Tim’s books: tim.blog/books.Follow Tim:Twitter: twitter.com/tferriss Instagram: instagram.com/timferrissFacebook: facebook.com/timferriss YouTube: youtube.com/timferrissPast guests on The Tim Ferriss Show include Jerry Seinfeld, Hugh Jackman, Dr. Jane Goodall, LeBron James, Kevin Hart, Doris Kearns Goodwin, Jamie Foxx, Matthew McConaughey, Esther Perel, Elizabeth Gilbert, Terry Crews, Sia, Yuval Noah Harari, Malcolm Gladwell, Madeleine Albright, Cheryl Strayed, Jim Collins, Mary Karr, Maria Popova, Sam Harris, Michael Phelps, Bob Iger, Edward Norton, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Neil Strauss, Ken Burns, Maria Sharapova, Marc Andreessen, Neil Gaiman, Neil de Grasse Tyson, Jocko Willink, Daniel Ek, Kelly Slater, Dr. Peter Attia, Seth Godin, Howard Marks, Dr. Brené Brown, Eric Schmidt, Michael Lewis, Joe Gebbia, Michael Pollan, Dr. Jordan Peterson, Vince Vaughn, Brian Koppelman, Ramit Sethi, Dax Shepard, Tony Robbins, Jim Dethmer, Dan Harris, Ray Dalio, Naval Ravikant, Vitalik Buterin, Elizabeth Lesser, Amanda Palmer, Katie Haun, Sir Richard Branson, Chuck Palahniuk, Arianna Huffington, Reid Hoffman, Bill Burr, Whitney Cummings, Rick Rubin, Dr. Vivek Murthy, Darren Aronofsky, and many more.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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that you'd dig it a lot and you can, of course, easily subscribe any time. So easy peasy. Again, that's tim.blog forward slash Friday. And thanks for checking it out. If the spirit moves you. Hello, ladies and germs. This is Tim Ferriss, and welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferriss Show. I've had a bit of wine to drink, and by a bit, I mean two bottles, with a friend of Pleiades by Sean Thackeray, which I highly recommend. This show is usually about deconstructing world-class experts, and this episode is no exception. Although, instead of a chess prodigy or a military strategist or an entertainment icon, we have perhaps the best storyteller and pitchman I've ever had on this show. Certainly, he would give Cal Fussman a run for his money, and he is none other than Mike Rowe. Mike Rowe, you may know from Dirty Jobs,

but I'm going to read his bio because I've had enough to drink. And this is on MikeRowe.com. And having spent some time with Mike now, this is very fitting. Here we go. I'm going to read the entire paragraph, so bear with me. And this episode, I will say, is so worth listening to in its entirety because we cover how to sell a pencil, QVC, the meaning of freelance, the business of micro, his mentors. We talk about some of his favorite influences and mentors. We talk about favorite books. We talk about the art of voiceover. We talk about Bruno Mars and how he became Bruno Mars. We talk about Orson Wells. It goes on and on and on. I had a blast with this. I just got back from spending some time after the interview with Mike, and I hope we have a part two and a point three. Oh, Jesus.

I'm with somebody next to me, and they're admiring my state of inebriation. Here we go. Mike Rowe from the website is a TV host, writer, narrator, producer, actor, and spokesman. His performing career began in 1984 when he faked his way into the Baltimore opera to get his union card and meet girls. And that is true. Both of which he accomplished during a performance of Rigoletto. His transition to television occurred in 1990 when, to settle a bet, he auditioned for the QVC shopping channel and was promptly hired after talking about a pencil for nearly eight minutes. There, he worked the graveyard shift for three years until he was ultimately fired for making fun of products and belittling viewers. So all of that is true. And we dig into it. And you should say hi to Mike on either and or Twitter. And I'm flipping through pages because

I've had too much to drink. At Mike Rowe Works. That's Twitter. At Mike Rowe Works, or on Facebook, Facebook. Wow, it just gets better and better. The real Mike Rowe. This is a blast of a conversation that I've wanted to have for 15, 20 years, and I hope you enjoy it. So say hello to Mike. And without further ado, here is my conversation with the inimitable Mike Rowe. Mike, welcome to the show. I think you mean welcome to your living room. Welcome to the esteemed studio of Tim Ferriss Enterprises, i.e. my living room. Sophisticated, understated, with a certain insouciance and, dare I say, an Asian influence.

That's actually my Tinder description. Not bad. Is it working. It's converting pretty well. I have wanted to have the chance to sit down with you for many years, and I wanted to thank you right off the bat. I'm not sure if I mentioned this when we met, which we'll get to for the first time, but you helped keep me sane for a period of several years when I had an extremely punishing job from about 2000 to 2002. Specifically,

that was, that was when I was logging the most hours and I would come home and there were two shows, it was dirty jobs. So you, and then Jeff Corwin, who were like my, my like my teletherapists. Yeah.

And so I just want to thank you for putting out good work. 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. You know, reinforcement. I remember one episode in particular. I remember several episodes, of course, but one came to mind. I'd seen you do really, really dirty stuff. There was one where I think you were winterizing a boat and you just looked so bored out of your mind. And I just remember thinking exactly what

you said. I was like, you know, sitting in the fire exit, violating code at this startup, being unable to move, sleeping under my desk. Those are all hard things, but at least I'm not doing that. 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 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, 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 sound man is cursing 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 um and that was basically you know metaphorically anyway uh eight years of of my life it was groundhog day in a sewer in some way shape or form even if you're a boat it's another episode which sort of ties us back to our experience at TED slash the EG, which we're sort of part of the same parcel, is my opener. Because I was so curious to hear about it. And just remind me before I get into it, was it sheep?

Yeah, we were. So sheep testicles. We were on an escalator, actually 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 uh is impossible to ignore uh and when you're in a crowd you know doubly so so i spun around and there you were tim ferris and yeah we we had a funny little exchange but it was um you know, doubly so. So I spun around and there you were, Tim Ferriss. And yeah, we had a funny little exchange. But it was, you know, apocryphal for me because on the way up 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? 2008, I think. 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 didn't know.

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, 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 except a lot of stories. And as I was going through them in my mind, I hear your disembodied voice. 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. Mike, I want to hear about the testicles. And 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 Craig, Colorado at 8,000 feet. Just for people who are missing the context, can you explain why you were biting the testicles off?

There's no context. It was just Thursday. Thursday after lunch, three martinis, and that's what you do. I need a little something to take the edge off. No, the business of animal husbandry was a very, very important component of Dirty Jobs. 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 insemination 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, intelligent, but at the same time satisfy the more puerile aspects of my viewers. God love them. And when I got the call to really explore, they called it sheep docking, 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 had 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 anagnoresis to parapetia to modern day agriculture to regret, and of course, the unforgettable taste of testicles.

So the visual I want to try to recreate, which is just indelibly imprinted on my mind, was you basically pick the sheep up, and please tell me if I'm getting this wrong, you kind of splay them as if they're in a gynecological chair on top of a fence post? Well, the fence 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. And this, of course, was the point of the talk. When I called the Humane Society and PETA, 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 scrotum 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 along the lines of doink, doink. And, you know, 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, you talking about? And I said, what the rubber bands. And so we use 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, at that same event, and I watched your talk. It was a very good talk, I thought. And the vast majority of other presenters probably spent weeks or months agonizing over what they were going to do. But you seem to have just an incredible innate, and I hate to use that word, but I'll throw it in there just for the fun of it, ability to improvise and perform. Where does that come from? 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 wasn't 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 2003. They still are today. It's really hard to do. 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. 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 warts and all. 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 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, I'm almost always better at take one because I do a lot of other things now that, you know, 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 15 years. And then with Dirty Jobs, had a chance to circle back and live it. And so 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 first pass. So I want to flashback to a part of your history that I actually have not heard much about. And that is QVC or was it home shopping? QVC,

but a distinction without a difference. Distinction without a difference. Just don't want to offend anyone at corporate if they might be listening. Susan, Susan, Suzanne, you know, you have to be sensitive about these things.

How did you end up working at QVC? 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 it was during a performance of Deringdis Nibelungen, I think, Wagner, interminable dirge, and I was during a performance of deringdus nibel lungen i think wagner

interminable dirge and i was dressed as a viking and um i didn't need to be on stage uh 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. The Ravens were not playing. He instead was watching a,

a fat guy in a shiny suit, sell pots and pans. And 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,

uh, 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 a 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 I felt-

It's a long podcast. Oh, good. 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. Okay. So what was the audition like? What was the audition process? 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 know, you can't, 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. Right. So, so it was a very weird set of muscles and the way they determine um potential candidates in my case uh was they they rolled a pencil across the desk while a camera was rolling 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 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 3 to 6 a.m. every morning on live television. So anyway, that's how it happened. I talked about a pencil for eight minutes. Do you remember any particular feature or benefit that you focused on? 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 the it's yellow now that's a feature and if you limit yourself to simply saying it's yellow then you're gonna be out of time but you know real fast why is 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, you can talk about the exact hue of yellow, and then you can

talk about 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 person 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. It's a New Yorker piece. It could be. It could be, sure. When you started then selling at QVC,

what distinguished the best performers from everybody else? Well, again, everybody was making it up as they went along. And in those days at QVC, it's not like Fortune 500 companies were lining up begging to be on as they are today. People would go out and do whatever they could to maintain a 3,000 or 4,000 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 tchotchkes. It was Capitamonte. It was porcelain. It was collectible dolls. It was the cheapest it was tchotchkes. It was Capitamonte. It was porcelain. It was collectible dolls. It was the cheapest kind of electronics. It was the health team infrared pain reliever. Did you guys have the knives and like oddly designed ninja swords and whatnot? Because that always has mesmerized me.

Were those part of the package at that point? We, 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 cookware coated with polytetrafluoroethylene, T-Fol, the slickest surface there is. I mean, all of this stuff, it was just an endless schmear of adverbs and unpronounceable things. 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.

So I have actually visited QVC headquarters once, and I don't actually, for whatever reason, recall the reason, but I left it the opportunity. Only you go to QVC for reasons unknown. I left it the opportunity. I think I might have been dating. Where is the headquarters? At the seventh level of hell, as I recall.

Is it which state, though? No, they're in Pennsylvania. Okay, I knew it. They're in Westchester. I think I was dating a girl around, what is it, King of Prussia? King of Prussia. There we go. And I think I was just in some way forsaken or left alone with nothing to do and decided

to go to QVC. That was it. And I took a tour and I remember being so impressed at the time. This was probably 99 with the control room and the sort of units and dollars per minute being moved by different presenters. Staggering. And at the time that you were there, did you have an earpiece where they fed you feedback?

I had two earpieces at the time that you were there, did you have an earpiece where they fed you feedback? 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 home shopping, I have great fun looking back and casting aspersions, but the truth is I learned more in my three years at QVC than I've ever learned anywhere about anything. And I probably even learned more about myself, which you'll do at 3 a.m. 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, you'll go places you didn't know you would go, but, 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. It's not native advertising. No. It is a clear and present proposition. It's transactional TV.

And I just think it's also a monument to to capitalism when did and we were we were sitting down chatting before we started recording when did american airlines fit into your chronology oh god well in 1993 i was fired for the third time from qvc so hold on i have to pause so part for the third time from QVC. Hold on. I have to pause. So fired for the third time. Does that mean they fired you and then begged for you to come back?

I wouldn't say they begged. Each situation was different. I spent – when I was fired the first time, I'd only been there about two months. And I stayed on a kind of – what they call it in Animal House, double secret probation for the next three years. Because remember, 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 is item, what was

it? Like E1410. Now at the time there were also items like E28,960. 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 3.30 in the morning. You, you know who you are. You're watching me sit here about to go up in 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 and it was um it was awesome yeah it was just sounds incredible it was great i mean it was it was i mean i would look out at the producer who was sound asleep right i mean i'm sound just a dead just silence in the earbud you're like trying to fit his name into your dialogue so he wakes up like meow with super troopers okay he didn't have his earbud in his feet are up he 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 and 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. That's what it was, three hours a night. So the viewers became my – they were never customers to me. They were this good-natured but slightly dangerous group of people, kind of like a Greek chorus, who would call in and instruct me. And I'd mess with them, and they'd mess with me. And occasionally, the calls would become utterly obscene, and then things would really go off the rails. 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. So with this sort of Petri dish of, of live broadcasting and all of your experimentation, you get fired for the third time and enter stage left American airlines, or how did,

how did you go from then? Well, for me, what happened was after three years, I, I, 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? I do not know the etymology of freelance. 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. You were a Ronin mercenary. 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 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 in 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 um and and got my share so 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 and many, many jobs. Eight months on, four months off, I patterned that part of my career after John D. McDonald's Travis McGee, in fact, 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.

And in what capacity were you working? Well, American in 95 realized how valuable the real estate was in their planes on a screen. You've got 300, 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 in 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, land in Sydney, Las Vegas, didn't 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 D3. And a D3 in airline parlance is called an MF or a must fly. If you walk up to the gate, this is pre 9-11 obviously, but if you walk right up to

the gate, show them the D3, 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. You fly 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 Tartikoff 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 d3 back it's like the key card that gets you back into the building they just it was willie wonka i was for a year maybe maybe 15 months without question and i say this with all due modesty but i think maybe the most interesting date because you know 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. And it's just ridiculous it's ridiculous i'm flying around the world with this magical thing wow and yeah it uh 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 on a random

little flight by myself down to san diego they called in the code and uh the woman's eyebrow went up a little bit and she held on to my d3 with both hands and and and walked back toward me obviously we're on other sides of the counter and she was she was so cool she said well mr rowe we had a good run, didn't we? It's like straight out of Catch Me If You Can. Except I wasn't flying the plane. I was just stowing away. When you were taking your four months off of these freelance gigs, how would you spend that time?

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 30 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. So 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 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, to have a life. 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, it was built on, uh, a very specific kind of fallacy and a, and a, and a very specific kind of hubris. What type of hubris? 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.

And by industry, you mean television? Yeah. Yeah. TV, radio, writing. You know, they're all in the machine. Right. They've got their people. They've got their publicist. They the machine. Right. They've got their people. They've got their publicist.

They've got their agent. They've got their manager. Start adding up the percentage and then throw Uncle Sam on top of it. You know, you almost can't afford to work. You're treading water. Yeah, 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, 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 28 until 42, that's exactly where I was. The work didn't matter. What mattered was the quality of life, uh, in between the gigs. And of course, keep your tongue in your cheek and have as much fun as you can while you're, while you're doing all of the things you have to do and, uh, and you win.

That was my metric. So when did that hubris lead to a reckoning? When did Icarus get too close to the sun? When did that change? And why did it change? 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 2001, I was working here in San Francisco impersonating a host over at Evening Magazine, working really for CBS News in that capacity. And my mother called me to tell me my grandfather was fading. And I hung up thinking, you know, God damn 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 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. I thought before he goes, it would be nice to do something on TV that looked like work. That really started a conversation with my boss about a segment that was called Somebody's Got to Do It. That segment 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. He was early retirement anyway. But you know Evening Magazine, right? It's 7 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 of shit with a sewer inspector, covered in the worst excrement there is with rats and roaches. And it was great. And it was horrible. And half the people who called, called to congratulate me. And the other half called demanding 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. And if this is not something you can talk about or don't want to talk about, that's totally fine.

But I'm so curious. When you sold those shows to Discovery, were you able to negotiate back the rights? Or did you have them in the first place? Or how did that 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. It was too gross for CBS, not gross enough for Fox, too funny for PBS,

not funny enough for Comedy Central. I mean, round and round we went. And I eventually 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 of years earlier, I hosted a complete abortion called worst case scenario, which aired on a 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, it 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 10 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 creating the illusion of romance in five-star hotels.

From there, I worked my way up to the sewer and finally got a career start. So this gent that you mentioned, how did he then return the favor? 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 tentpole 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 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 Hawass to explore sarcophagi in the largest cemetery recently discovered in North Africa. And then, you know, 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 Rowe became this thing that ultimately launched 31 other shows. 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. No, no, no, I enjoy this.

I'm taking notes so I can reassociate. You're going to circle back. Yeah. The answer to your first question was, it happened through some weird mix of serendipity, me, Forrest, gumping my way once again into 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 are 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, we touched on something that was really real. And, you know, remember too, in 2003, there's no, uh, there's no deadliest catch ax men, ice road truckers. There's no gold rush. There's no, there's no work on television.

So it was, it was a very, very, I understand why Discovery was tiptoeing around this thing. This was the province of Cousteau and David Attenborough. And now a smart aleck covered with other people's crap is making dick jokes in a sewer. 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. So you are very good at crafting a compelling pitch. And I've witnessed this in many different capacities. But to go back to one of the stories you just told about pitching Discovery Channel,

you have this, you have this, you don't need more of this. This is what I'm proposing. And getting that deal done, how did you plan that meeting or did you walk in and free associate? A little of both. When I was, I think I was 1986, 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 Gio 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. That was the founder of Discovery Channel? Yeah.

Yeah, his story is amazing. You would love his book, A Curious Mind. Ooh, I'll look it up. 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, you, I think, get, get comfort and, um, and meaning from mastering a thing. I get anxious by the prospect of mastering a thing. And so as a viewer and as a host, I had always been a little fraudulent. I tried to be transparent about it, but I always felt a little icky

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 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, 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? And of course, the only way to do it is to be aggressively transparent.

So I just want just to pause for one second. I think that what you just said can be translated to so many people in so many worlds. I just think we're suffering from some type of existential malaise or career impasse. I don't know. It strikes me as well look very good advice i just don't think there's a i'm suspicious of playbooks yeah because once you write down the thing then it becomes uh dogma and pretty soon it's morals and dogma and pretty soon you're al 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'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. And so I just wore myself out being glib. And then it was suddenly time to be uh something else you know i'm i'm wary of earnestness in and of itself but but i wanted to be authentic and the only way i could do that on the discovery channel was as a fan with access we were talking before we started recording about creative process just a little bit and the trap and the temptation of the blank page and parameters, creative constraints. You mentioned maybe one example, correct me if I'm wrong, but that is focusing on the first take.

And what other constraints or parameters have you used for yourself in your various projects? That's a great question, man. I, because I, 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, 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 is a protagonist without an antagonist. What good is a story 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, they did me a huge solid. Because if you were a viewer in 1990, 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 really stand out. It made it so much easier. I didn't do anything 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. What would be, could you give an example of a good antagonist looking back? Well, aside from QVC, Discovery. Again, because they had so firmly entrenched in their viewers' mind a set of expectations. When I came along as the non-expert, just going around the country, looking under the rock,

it seemed so obvious now. And I'm not saying this 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. I got it. Not because I was good, because I was different. Because you were able to contrast against the expectations that had already been set. I'll tell you where it was even bigger than both those two combined. Ford. Ford hired me in, I don't know, whenever it was, 2006. 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 wore a shearling jacket and my hair had product in it and I had makeup on and I hit my mark and I said my line and I hated it. The commercial did fine, but I hated it. And that opened a dialogue 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, 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. Because I think you can take the same DNA from Dirty Jobs, and I think you can shoot it straight into an advertising campaign. And to the credit of the ad agency, we eventually got around to doing it. And a year and a half later, in the course of one day, we shot 22 commercials. Wow. 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. Um, go figure. You have, so I, we have a, a sort of a mutual acquaintance who I tried to mine for questions that he would like to hear you ask. And one was he, meaning Mike, talks about pursuing opportunity and not your passion, in parentheses, which I agree with, by the way. And then there's a follow-up to that. But if that is true, could you elaborate on that?

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 paneled conference rooms that have pictures of guys in like kayaks or, you know, rainbows. Or eagles. Eagles soaring. A lot of eagles. Yeah.

And, you know, teamwork and then some thing about teamwork or, you know, 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 choke on the sacronicity of it, if there is such a word. The thing that chapped my ass more than any of them was follow your passion.

I remember seeing one of these platitudes. What were they? Successories, they call them. 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. 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's septic tanks full time. He's in his 60s. 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. What 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. So always follow your passion for me became

never follow your passion, but always bring it with you. So that I remember I was told, so we live in an area, you know, Northern California, where you have a lot of very wealthy and simultaneously very miserable people. It is, and this is not unique to the Bay Area. And they're certainly happy, wealthy people. But the money, much like alcohol for some people, seems to exaggerate who they were already. Sure. If that makes sense.

Okay. Makes you more of who you are there you go and i remember being told at one point if you can't be happy with what you have nothing you ever get will make you happy and so that's that observation by less of bringing passion to what you do or learning to do that if you don't have it seems to be an extremely, extremely important lesson to put into practice with whether it's... I mean, I personally use journaling in the morning and trying to practice gratitude because historically I haven't been good at it, to be quite frank. No one's historically good at gratitude. We're not wired for that, man. Yeah. wired for that man yeah just uh how do you have any daily practices or morning rituals that you find help to keep you sane or saner look i i'm afraid the honest answer is i don't know but

i have patterns like anybody else except i'm i, I'm suspicious of my patterns. If that makes sense, this, this is my own psychosis, right? It's kind of what I meant before. I I'm, I'm, I'm wary of earnestness. I'm suspicious of protocol and I'm, I'm just, once I see the routine, it frightens me. And I don't know if it's a, if it's a sabotaging thing or, um, I don't know what it is, but you know, this morning I woke up and I had a lot of things that I wanted to do before I came over here to talk to you. Um, but I grabbed my laptop before I got out of bed, which is always a mistake. 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 it a little bit. And then it turned into like a 500-word thing. And then right before I came over here, I posted it

and now 5,000 people have shared it and a million people have read it. And 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 away from whatever plan I try and make. So sometimes I think it gums me up, slows me down and gets in the way. Other times I look back at it and feel terribly clever. So there are times, not infrequent in my case, particularly if I have a writing deadline, where I struggle between the desire to

kind of zig and zag with the wind and retain the ability to improvise in that way. And on the other hand, the desire to have the parameters and so on that we talked about earlier to force me not to like polish my tennis shoes when I should be actually sitting down and writing. Sure. How do you contend with those different impulses or forces? 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. So just stay in on your own joke. Don't start believing the press releases that your mind is sending you.

Don't read your own fan mail. At least not out loud. Don't do it. You have an incredibly... I don't know what that occur with the frog inflection was. It just came out. You know, it's very authentic, Tim. You have a very...

Don't you cut that out. No, it's going to stay stay in that's probably the highlight of the podcast for my my side of the performance uh a very impressive vocabulary uh where did that come from um although i don't read as much now as i used to i used to read a lot and And I think reading, but I also think weirdly 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 extraordinary. And sometimes, pass 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 uh you know slide the white crystals in your general direction with all due speed i feel like every third turn of phrase that you've had in this conversation could be either a great punk rock band, like Tails and Testicles, a restaurant in the Castro, or, and for those people who are going to get all social justice warrior with me, go to the Castro first.

There's the squat and gobble. There's Little Orphan Andes. There's a theme here with the naming uh the do you have any books that you've gifted to other people more than others oh god that's great too um i i tend to recommend uh 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. Curious Mind. No. 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 ones? 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. Yeah, that's Schwartz. We've got Dune. Oh, I have Dune. We have Zorba the Greek. I've got Zorba the Greek.

We have Musashi. Don't have Musashi. Which is, you would love that, I think. Walk in the Woods, Bill Bryson. So, Bill Bryson, right? There's a writer. That guy, I think, is so, the Sunburned Land. Have you read At Home?

I haven't read At Home. I've read, I think it was Mother Tongue, which he wrote about the evolution or, yeah, I suppose you call it the evolution of the English language. No, I haven't read At Home. 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. I'm going to plead ignorance. What is a vicarage? I feel an old church i'm going to plead ignorance what is a vicarage i feel like i've read it a thousand times and i don't know it's just a i think it's the you know like like

the vicar of such and such so like you're the vicar it's some sort of priest meets uh chaucer got it 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 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 the hell is going on? Not in real time, but he sees 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, no, the church 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? It was like about 700, 800 years. Yeah, it's more like 1,100. 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. 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 a cool premise. It's a great premise. And now that I hear myself talking about it, that's a book I would recommend. But not at the expense of John D. McDonald and the deep blue goodbye featuring Travis McGee.

The deep blue goodbye. Travis McGee is a boat bum created by John D. McDonald, 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. He's your last best hope. So the Travis McGee mysteries are really adventures that are told through the eyes of this quixotic character who's really a philosopher.

He's a knight-errant who, like I said, comes out of retirement to do these quasi-good works. He keeps 50% 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, bright orange for the shroud, a lonely silver rain, a tan and sandy silence, cinnamon skin, nightmare and crimson, all these great books. And,

uh, 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, they're offensive in the sense that they're politically incorrect and out of step, but they're good. So I want to, I feel compelled to try to trade or at least share. So a couple that I think based on that description you might like, have you ever heard of Motherless Brooklyn by Jonathan Lethem?

Have you recommended this before? I might have. Because I've heard of it, and I think it was on this podcast. Quite possibly. But it's emulating pulp detective fiction. The hero of the story, hero, I guess is the right word, ends up being a detective with Tourette's syndrome. Oh, I love it already.

It's fantastic. And the Bryson recommendation, I have not read at home, and I'm going to pick it up, made me think just the premise. It's such a fascinating way to structure a piece of writing reminded me of john mcphee who's one of my favorite writers and um there's a depending on sort of your subject matter but he's very similar to bryson in the sense that he can make almost anything interesting and the breadth of subject people read it because he wrote it not because of the subject matter. And so McPhee has, he's won at least one Pulitzer, maybe two. He's written an entire book on oranges, an entire book on hand-carved canoes. He's written Coming Into the Country, which is about the Alaskan wilderness.

But the one that I really enjoyed, two pieces. One is about a single tennis match involving Arthur Ashe called Levels of the Game, which is just spectacular and not that long. And then there's a shorter piece, which was serialized in The New Yorker called Brigade de Cuisine, about a tiny, tiny, tiny high-end restaurant before we had Celebrity Chefs. This is an older piece that just came to mind when you mentioned Bryson's piece. Well, jot them down because I'm looking for whatever's next. Motherless Brooklyn. Motherless Brooklyn. And you recommended another one and I haven't read it yet.

Something Graveyard. Oh, yes. The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman. Yeah. And so the Graveyard Book, people have asked me, and I'm just going to answer the question here. They've asked me, should I get, because I very specifically recommended the audiobook. I'm sure the text is fantastic, but Neil strikes me. So I will drill into this with you a little bit, because you have so much experience. Neil impresses me on many levels he's a spectacularly gifted polymath in the writing

sphere and his has not dabbled it doesn't do it justice he's not a professional dilettante like i am he actually does really good work in a lot of areas uh but he's he's a really compelling narrator as an audiobook uh narrator he's spectacularly good and so people have asked me should i get the full ensemble cast or should I get the Neil Gaiman? I've only listened to the Neil Gaiman version of the Graveyard Book, but it's really, really, really solid. And I believe that it is modeled after one of the Greek tragedies, I want to say, but I could be completely making that up to sound more cultured than I am.

You had me there for a minute. Yeah, I'll leave that out there. The other one that I'd actually like to give you as a gift, which you can see stacks of the same books over there. So I have stacks of two books. One is About Face, which was originally recommended to me by Jocko Willink, a Navy SEAL commander who was on this podcast. And the other was recommended to me by my mom and my brother, who are both very

particular about books. And once every four or five years, a book will be recommended, coincidentally, by both of them. Motherless Brooklyn was one. Stranger in a Strange Land by Heinlein was another. And for those people in say the tech world who, or in paleo CrossFit world to use the word grok, grok came from stranger in a strange land, meaning to understand the smaller one is the Baron in the trees by Italo Calvino about a small health, small young Baron who has a gigantic tiff

with his father over dinner one night, flees up into the trees never to come down again. Wow, that's a bad fight. Yeah. Was there at least a house up there?

Or did he just live in the trees? He built everything in the trees, had love affairs, was involved with wars, all from the treetops, never came down.

It's a really fun short read, about 170 pages. So I mentioned Neil Gaiman as a fantastic narrator. What speakers or narrators, voiceover folks, anything involving voice, really have blown you away, alive or dead? Just be like god how do they do that yeah i i'm 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 who really don't get in the way of the story itself, you know, 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, you know, 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.

Likewise, James Earl Jones? You got a guy though, like, um, Peter Coyote narrates as much or more than anyone. And he has a really interesting, uh, way of being flat and, uh, engaged at the same time. Uh, you watch,

uh, Donovan. Is it Ray, Ray Donovan? Ray Donovan. Showtime, I think. Yeah. What's his name?

I'm drawing a blank. Talking about the actor? Yeah, Liv Schreiber. I think that's the right pronunciation. It's him. It's him. He is a wonderful narrator. We were up for the same big project a couple years ago.

I had no idea. Yeah. Son of a bitch got it and I didn't. Heartbreaking. But, you know, honestly, the best ones, you don't know their names. Right. And that's part of the deal.

I'm very lucky because I've used what little notoriety I have to just relentlessly leverage my way into that space because I just love doing it so much. But, um, but the really great narrators are, are utterly anonymous and transparent. If you had to, uh, pick any particular female voice performer and I, and by voice performer, it could be a singer, could be, could be an actor or actress who uses their voice very effectively, voiceover, anything. Anyone come to mind?

Do you remember Hidden Valley Ranch? I do. The dressing. Yeah, I do. I'm telling you, if you Google some of those old commercials, you'll hear a woman narrating all of them. And there's a famous actress. I don't know if she's even around anymore but she was in mash the original mash her name is sally kellerman sally kellerman had a fantastic voice and it was so what made her voice so unusual is that it did it didn't strike me anyway when I was watching her act.

It was just part and parcel of her, but it was just one of those voices when it's disembodied and right there on the radio. Oh, my God, it was amazing. Orson Welles, same thing. I mean, just unbelievably impressive in every way, but all of a sudden to hear that guy just vocally, you really want to laugh. Listen to the old, there's some stuff on the YouTubes with him coming unhinged at being directed in these.

It was like Mrs. Paul's fish sticks or something like that right and no he's you hear him in the booth you know and the and the pages are rustling and he's getting his copy together and he and he starts with i know a man in the fjords of norway a man and he's reading the copy and it's like there's some split of split infinitive or maybe a dangling participle and he's just pissed off and he just I can't read this shit and back and forth he goes with the producer and it is I mean the greatest living director and actor

is at that point in his career where he's doing you know gallo and all these things and you know he's just you know consumed with loathing because of it and he's taking all of that angst out on some poor lime producer. Trying to produce it.

It's just awesome. Bill Shatner actually has done some remarkable voice work, in my opinion. Now, is this Priceline Star Trek William Shatner yeah okay cool I've just never heard him called Bill Shatner okay well you know I don't know if he would remember it but we were actually uh in business together for a brief time back in New York he was he's always ahead of his time Shatner is and I think I think one day years from now when people who write books about this stuff look back at celebrity and the cults of personality and just the arc of a career, I suspect his will be unexampled. And we were in business.

I had a friend who got the license to do phone cards, which at the time, in the early early nineties were very, very big in Europe and never caught on here to the degree everybody thought they were. But, you know, you'd, you'd buy your long distance time in advance. And he had the idea of saying, well, what if, you know, you buy a hundred dollars a long distance and you put it on a calling card, but what if the calling card had a picture of the enterprise on it or the X-Files or the Simpsons or your favorite show. And what if when you call that 800 number to access the long distance platform, what if you were confronted by a voice, say mine, that said, welcome to the Star Trek information platform to place a long distance call, hit one to listen to original content from your favorite Star Trek characters, press two.

So you press two and you open this world of old time radio where you can take a Klingon language lesson or listen to, you know, you send a wake up call from Bart Simpson, all this crazy stuff. So Bill Shatner loved that idea and invested in that company. I was the voice of the company. He was the investor. He was a couple years too early. Didn't really work. But the fact that he was there and the fact that Priceline came along right on its heels, I'll never forget watching him make that deal with Priceline and thinking,

hmm, this will never work. But if it does, lucky him. And as it turned out, it worked okay. Lucky, lucky, what is it they say? Not Sly the Fox.

I'm trying to come up with a proverb that I can't remember properly. Sly the Fox is good. But it's not the right, it's not what I'm going for. The important thing with metaphors, Tim, is you should try.

I know, I'm just not trying hard enough. I'm not trying hard enough, Mike. And, you know, I think that people might think we're further apart than we are on the trying hard part, which is – and I read an interview with you recently about sort of working smart, working hard, and the false dichotomy between the two where people choose one or the other. And the blessing and the curse of having a book with a title like The 4-Hour Workweek is that people never seem to forget it

and that people never seem to forget it. But the fact of the matter is I have absolutely no problem with hard work as long as it's applied to the right things. And the operative portion of that being focusing it in the right place. And another thing that you mentioned earlier when we were talking about passion versus opportunity that at least I've observed a few times in friends who've made this decision and then ended up having to reverse it in some way later is when you follow just your passion and not the opportunity it's also a great way to corrupt something that gives you a great degree of personal pleasure and decompression oh turning your uh avocation into your vocation

exactly so friend i've had friends for instance who've decided they love surfing on sunday mornings so much that they want to do it full time. And then they end up teaching, you know, finance wonks how to surf at seven, six in the morning, Monday to Friday. And before you know it, two months later, they want to never surf again.

You bitched up your hobby. Exactly. So, so here is a question we're going to, we're going to back into some, some of your current projects here. If you were doing a fiveminute podcast story and the secret reveal were micro how would that podcast how would that episode begin and where would the story take its

major turn or turns wow well i mean the key to what paul harvey did uh was find an obscure moment in the life of a famous person and then try and make that moment relevant. And it almost always is. Sometimes it's a bigger stretch than others, but if it were... I mean, given all that we've just talked about, you know, I would probably circle back to, you know, the home shopping salesman who somehow or other became closely associated with, well, a blue-collar apologist, you know, or an opera singer who took a very, very crooked path and, you know, wound up becoming a purveyor of podcasts. I mean, who knows? I guess I don't know how to tell my story. Do you think that is common among people who are exceptionally good at telling other people's stories? Because I listened to, for instance, an episode of Here's the Thing with

Alec Baldwin, and he was interviewing Ira Glass. And it was a really difficult interview for Alec. And at one point he said, you know, it's amazing how you can tell anyone's story except for your own. Now you are good at telling your story, but, uh, do you find those tend to be somewhat exclusive or what makes it hard for, for you to, uh, to think of how that might be formulated? I don't know. I mean, look, there, there, there, there's something sociopathic about being great at telling your own story. It's easy to forget living in Silicon Valley. That's like, that's the new norm.

Yeah. I, I, I just, I'm, uh, I just think that if you're good, if you're too good at it,

it either means, well, it probably just means you've been practicing it, you know? And, um, you know, it's something I think everybody ought to do later in their life when they become interesting enough to do it. Um, everybody is always more interesting from the, you know, from the outside. Uh, we know our own secrets too well. And so we probably feel a bit fraudulent if we try and stack the deck. Um, but look, the, what you're really talking about is, is, um, is parapetia, you know, the, the peripety that's the, the part of the narrative where the protagonist realizes everything he thought he knew about himself was wrong. You know,

where, where Oedipus realizes, Oh, this beautiful woman who I love, who I'm married to, who I have children with, you know, she's my mother.

Ah, crap. You know, that's the kind of realization that changes the direction of the narrative. And that's the Aristotelian definition of a tragedy, right? It's those moments in our life when we realize our identity or our version of ourself is either at odds with something we just learned or more often than not, at odds with the way the rest of the world sees us. And so, look, for me today, the biggest jolt of cognitive dissonance that I deal with on a daily basis is from fans of

Dirty Jobs who believe that I can fix their toilet, who believe that I can pour a foundation and hang drywall and take care of all that stuff because I was just around people who do that for so long. And they assume it also because I run a foundation that focuses on work ethic scholarships and trains people to do those very things. But the truth is it all goes back to the recessive gene that I confessed about an hour ago. I didn't get it from my granddad. What I got was an appreciation for it. But it's remarkable, Tim, how separate those things are in people's minds and how difficult it is for people to reconcile this idea that, yeah, that's Mike. He narrates Deadliest Catch.

Surely he knows how to fish for crab. He hosts Dirty Jobs. Surely, surely he can overhaul the engine in a garbage truck. I can't, you know. And it's been fun working hard to set the record straight, but it's also been futile, which is another great lesson. Just because it's futile doesn't mean it can't be fun. And just because you love something doesn't mean you can't suck at it.

Yeah, absolutely. American Idol, episode one of any season. We see this great collision of reality and dreams. It's not the fact that these 20-year-old kids can't sing that's so fascinating. It's the fact that they're realizing it for the first time in their life, that they always thought that their dream and their passion and their love of music would be enough to push them into the top 40. And then to suddenly have it all come crashing down, it's more than schadenfreude as a viewer. It's very personal because you can't watch that if you're not a sociopath and not look at your own giant soft spots. We're covered with them.

We're all just rotten fruit. Rotten fruit. I sometimes use Swiss cheese, but I like rotten fruit too. Of all of the creative outlets and opportunities that you have, why did you choose podcasting? Maybe you could just give people an overview of what you're currently doing, but I'd love to know why. Well, look, I'm always late to the party, social media or otherwise. And I don't think what I'm doing right now, maybe I just don't know what podcast means, but what we're doing right now, I think is, is about as honest an example of two people having an unscripted conversation. That's

touching on a lot of interesting things. I love that, but I don't, and I would love to, I would love to do what you're doing. You know, I'd love to have people over to my home and have these conversations and have a glass of wine. I mean, my God, if you're actually making money and prospering from this, Tim, you win. At the moment, I can't do it, but I'm still scratching this. I'm watching your adorable dog, Molly, having a dream and slapping her tail into your hardwood floor. You should actually get some clean audio on that because that's just remarkable. That's when he was knocking on the door. I did too, man. What do you think she's dreaming about?

I would say chasing birds is her ultimate, most just savored, enjoyed experience in life, I think. So probably chasing birds. Did she ever catch them? She is not. I haven't seen a successful kill yet but she's getting more and more athletic as she grows so i think if it were maybe uh one of these sort of hard-hitting urban pigeons with like a club foot she might get it she she might and tourette's. And Tourette's.

Yeah, and Tourette's. But it would have to be like a planet Earth moment where they're like, you know, the wolves have isolated a calf. You know what? If that happens, call me.

We'll come over and we'll recreate the old Mutual of Omaha while Tim and I watch from the brush. Molly will attempt to approach the elusive sparrow.

That's great. But I apologize on behalf of Molly. She knows not what she does. Where were we? The way I heard it is my attempt to pay an homage to Paul Harvey, get into the podcast space without sucking up too much bandwidth, and at the same time uh scratching what for me is a really indulgent itch and that's writing i i i don't have time to write i'm going

to make time because i love it but but i just right now i'm having a ball identifying um people who are well known doing a little bit of, which is so much easier today than it was when Paul Harvey was around. Good grief. You pick up your handheld device, tap into the large compendium of shared knowledge, and everything is at your disposal. So it really is just an exercise in writing and then recording and then see if people like it. And if you could give an example of, uh, could you tell us about one episode that you particularly enjoyed and the process of creating it, how you chose the person, how you chose the storyline, et cetera. Um, well, the one I just did, I haven't recorded yet, so I hate to give it away.

But like the, okay, so Bruno Mars. And I'll just tell you how it ends, right? So everybody knows who, but I was watching the Super Bowl a couple years ago. And watching this kid on the biggest stage there is, absolutely killing it. This unbelievable crossroads of pop and rock and funk and just, wow, what's his deal? And I read a lot of stuff that anybody can find really, really simply by doing a simple Google search, but went a little deeper and found what I thought was an interesting hook. His dad in the delivery room was playing oldies and his mother was a Filipino hula dancer. And the guy was surrounded by music his whole life. And his parents were basically

in a traveling variety show. And he was imitating Elvis Presley at three years old. And I looked at some old footage of it, and it was amazing. And he was imitating Michael Jackson. And it was incredible. And he was imitating Little Richard. And it's breathtaking. And this guy was a genius mimic.

And so I started thinking, well, how does this genius mimic wind up becoming somebody so completely original? And so that was my sort of like, okay, I'm going to tell a very, very simple story and I'm going to unwind it. But that's the theme that I want to kind of find. And usually with these things, you start writing them, not quite knowing how they're going to end, and it takes care of itself. And so in this case, it was interesting because his name was Peter Hernandez in real life. So this is really a story of Peter Hernandez, a guy who is impersonating Elvis Little Richard and Michael

Jackson, who at 17 years of age decides to go for it. He moves to Hollywood, spends his last dime, gets immediately signed by Motown, and gets immediately put in the Latino heartthrob box. And everybody wants the next Enrique Iglesias. But Peter, he doesn't want to be that. You know, Peter wants to be the next Peter Hernandez. He wants to be a little Michael Jackson, a little James Brown, a little Elvis Presley. And he goes broke and he loses everything. And he refuses to sing in Spanish. So it's really a story about how Peter Hernandez gets down to his last nickel and decides something's got to give. And he walks outside and he looks up into the heavens and he laughs because he finally sees his name in lights. He's looking at the stars, and he chooses for his last name a planet that's truly out of this world.

And for his first name, he remembers his father's favorite wrestler, Bruno San Martino. And so we learn that what Peter Hernandez does is simply change his name, not as the first thing that most people do who come to town, but as the last thing. The last thing he wanted to give up was his heritage, but he had to because everybody looked at him as this very, very narrow performer, this Latino heartthrob. So when Peter Hernandez became Bruno Mars, he was immediately re-signed by Atlantic Records. And within a year, his first album was Gone Bananas. And within a year and a half, he had sold over 130 million singles. And a couple of years after that, there he is on my screen during Super Bowl XLVIII. That's how that happened.

So look, it can be as simple as a Wikipedia entry. I could tell you the story a dozen different ways, but what I'm trying to do with these little stories on the podcast is find the big transformational moment, the parapetia in everybody's life and find a way to unwind it in five minutes or so. Well, it strikes me also that you're asking in everybody's life and find a way to unwind it in five minutes or so.

Well, it strikes me also that you're asking a non-obvious question about an obvious person, right? You're taking well-known people and unwinding it by asking a question that few people have probably asked before. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, Harvey, Paul Harvey was all about, I mean, he really distilled it to the whodunit. It was a mystery. And so the whole, his whole thing was just clue after clue. The clues became a little more obvious as you got to the end. So everybody had a chance to kind of figure it out along the way at their own speed. Um, I'm finding it to be a little more interesting to, and maybe a little more indulgent to spend more time in, in that peripatetic moment, you know,

and really try and paint the scene as richly as I can. And sometimes that means I wind up overwriting it, but it's easy enough to correct it. But I just think it's a, I just think it's a fun way. I mean, look, you're a fan of Dan Carlin. Definitely. Huge fan.

I love Carlin. Yeah. Hardcore history. If for people listening, everybody should check out. Wrath of the Khans would be my recommendation as a starting point. I'd go with Blueprint for Armageddon. But you can't go wrong with it. You can't go wrong. But what Dan does is he makes history accessible to people who otherwise wouldn't give a shit. If you can do that with fitness, that's what you did with your books. You find a way to take a thing that most people are either blasé or disinterested about and make them care.

And so if you can do that with history, if you can do it with biography, the writer you mentioned before, if you can make oranges interesting you win yeah that's the challenge in all things it's not a anybody can point a camera at um at at vesuvius erupting right that's great footage but you know it's harder thousands of years later to write a retrospective on herculaneum before the eruption. Do that. Make that interesting, if you think about how to differentiate yourself, uh, I'd love to ask. And, uh, and then we're going to come back to, I want to ask some additional questions about, um, the podcast and a few other things, but

just a couple of rapid-fire questions for you. The first is, and the answers don't need to be rapid, the questions to sort of neuter my tendency to ask long-winded questions are pretty short. When you think of the word success or successful, who's the first person who comes to mind and why? Carl Noble, my granddad, for reasons we touched on before, but a seventh grade education, drops out of school to work, becomes a master craftsman and a tradesman four times over,

five times over, and lives to build houses and churches without blueprints that are still standing. He was the guy who said to me when I flunked out of all my shop classes in high school, he said, you can be a tradesman. Just get yourself a different toolbox. Oh, I like that. That's a good one. That is a really good one. Yeah.

So this is out of my usual order but since since we had a little chat about it earlier and i and i i don't know the story but i i wanted to bring it up if you could have a billboard anywhere with anything on it what would it say and the reason that question is so crazy in my world right now is i got a call about four months ago from a guy who said, Mike, you don't know me, but if you could have a billboard anywhere you want, what would it say? And I said, what am I, like inside the actor's studio? Well, he was a big shot over at – How did you get this number, sir? Honestly, that's exactly what I said.

He says, well, your people passed it on because they thought, you know, you would want to answer the question. He was a guy who worked for Lamar. Lamar Outdoor Advertising. Huge. This guy owns billboards. I mean, tens of thousands of them. And he said, listen, I'm a big fan of your foundation.

And at any given time, I got 20%, 30% billboards that are empty. Advertisers do their thing. We pull them down. Every single person listening to this podcast right now has driven down the highway and looked up and seen a blank billboard. Well, he was just calling to say, what would you like to put on them? And I said, Jesus, seriously? He said, yeah, anything you want. And I said, well, we're currently in the midst of a work ethic scholarship program. We've raised about $4 million selling crap out of my garage and various other places. And we have this program, right?

And I said, if I send you a picture of me holding a sign that says help wanted and in big letters, microworks.org, work ethic scholarships, would you put that up there? And he said in a heartbeat. So all over the country now, that's on a billboard. Wow, that's a hell of a call.

Somebody asked that question. That's a hell of a call. It's a good call. I'm glad I took it. Now, could you just elaborate for a second on the work ethic scholarships? What does that mean? So in 2008, when the economy went sideways,

Dirty Jobs was in 212 countries and the number one show on the network. And I was doing well. And everybody I talked to on the show that owned a business was telling me an extraordinary thing. And that was the biggest challenge that they were facing was technical recruiting, really any kind of recruiting. Help wanted signs everywhere I went on dirty jobs while the headlines were screaming about

10% and 11% unemployment. So I realized there was a huge parallel but conflicting narrative going on in the country with respect to work. And the skills gap as it existed in 2008 included maybe 2.1, 2.2 million jobs that existed that people either weren't trained for or just simply didn't want. Today, the number is more like 5.8 million. I decided that it would be good for the show and good for me and hopefully good for the businesses that allowed us to thrive to set up a foundation that functioned as a PR campaign for jobs that actually existed. These are not the glamorous jobs, but these are jobs that make civilized life possible. And that PR campaign morphed into a bunch of trips to Congress and a bunch of partnerships with the Fortune 200, and then ultimately into

an attempt to reward the kind of behavior that we actually wanted to encourage, which was work ethic. Most scholarship programs, as I'm sure you know, reward the usual stuff, academic achievement, athleticism, talent, and of course, basic need. I didn't think anybody was making an affirmative case for work ethic. So we look for kids, I'm less interested in your GPA, I'm more interested in your attendance record. I'm more interested in people who will make a case for themselves with respect to the reasons why I should pay for them to become a plumber or a welder or a steam fitter or a pipe fitter or any of the jobs my granddad did intuitively. That's what the foundation is. And it's been around since Labor Day of 2008.

And every six months, we release another tranche of money raised mostly from our chronic low-rent telethon that really never seems to end. It involves me hawking the crap out of my garage, mementos from dirty jobs and a style not unlike the old qvc days where i'm now using my my powers for good your toolkit my toolkit right uh if if you could have every let's just say high school graduate in the u.s uh read watch consume two or three things you can sort of prescribe it and every single kid coming out of high school would get these things what would you what would you prescribe well the first thing i mean and there is no bromide for all these kids, but in general, I think we make a horrible mistake matriculating right out of high school, right into college.

I think it's a hell of a thing to ask a 17-year-old kid to declare a major, borrow money. I mean, the pressure to borrow is mind-numbing. $1.3 trillion in student loans today, 5.8 million jobs nobody's trained for, a widening skills gap, and this increasing belief that somebody's moved our cheese. 25% of millennials are living back home. We're just doing it wrong. So I think the general answer to your question is, I don't know about books or movies and things. Those impact everybody differently. I would take a year and I would say, look, you got to get a job. You have to do something. Call it an apprenticeship. Call it an internship. Call don't know, but we have to back away from the pressure that's conspired to drive so many kids so far into debt and start to go down a road so soon. Because really, look, I always think there's time to change the road you're on. Robert Plant, last stanza, stairway to heaven. But it's hard. And I was very lucky. I did it at 42.

Meaning you took a, what did you do at 42? I apologize. Well, I hit the reset button. I decided this career that's been based on not caring about the work I do is going to be based on caring very much about it. And it just required a complete brain dump and reset button. It's hard to do that at 42, but it's even harder now, I think, at 26, because now you've got your paper, right? You've graduated. You've done well. You've done everything everybody told you to do, but you've just realized the opportunity in the field you've studied is not what you thought it was. The $90,000 in student loans is. That's not going away. And so it's just a terrible thing to have your coffee served to you by a double major in poli sci

and medieval French. It's kind of tragic. Whatever we do, it has to happen between high school and this period of declaration and this horrible assumption of mindless debt. Look, when I say things like this, I always get criticism because people say,

he's anti-college, he's anti-education. I'm not. I wouldn't trade my education for anything. And I challenge anybody who says there's any hope of success without it. But when people say, how the hell can college get so expensive? Man, the answer is right in front of us. We've been telling kids for 50 years, the best path for the most people is in this direction. And here's an unlimited pile of money. Borrow as much as you need, is it any wonder tuition has gone up faster than the cost of

real estate, food, energy, healthcare, and 500% of inflation over the last 40 years? It's unprecedented, but we're still doing it, Tim. We are lending money we don't have to kids who will never be able to pay it back to train them for jobs that don't exist anymore. When I think about this, and I get asked quite a bit about college because I went to college, but I have friends who very vociferously disagree with that being the right path for everyone, which I would agree with. So I get asked about it a lot. And I think what you suggest in terms of, you know, in the UK, they would call it a gap year, right? But not necessarily as a vacation. It's a year where

you explore and try and do something. Getting a job would certainly be, or jobs would be a very good example of that. I took a year away from college a year before I graduated because I was having effectively a nervous meltdown because I felt like I was being funneled towards, say, management consulting or investment banking. And I knew both would make me miserable. And so I panicked, took a year off, and I just worked. I tried a bunch of different jobs. And it was extremely instructive, not because it gave me the answer, i.e. the singular passion that I should have been seeking or anything like that. It didn't do that. But it helped me to question the assumptions that up to that point, I'd just been riding on top of. And so I completely agree. I think a gap year or a year sabbatical internship whatever

it might be uh would be a wonderful thing for people to somehow uh integrate into the education which does not take place simply within the the walls of a educational institution unless i mean look I only say that because I don't know how we're going to get the cost down. But if we do, then never mind. Then jump. Look, I went to a community college for two years right out of high school.

I had no idea what I wanted to do. I had just assembled my new toolbox. I didn't have anything in it yet. So I studied everything at a community college. And I was amazed in hindsight at how good the philosophy professors were and how smart the English teachers were and music and drama. And I mean, at 26 bucks a credit, I could afford to be wrong. And I was. I stayed there three years and I took every class I could. Then I took six months off. Then I went back to a university and finished up. I got a degree from Towson in communications,

philosophy, and speech. But by then I knew what I was paying for. And again, I could afford it. I finished in late in 1984. There's just no way that happens today. A kid in my exact same circumstance, the math isn't there. He cannot afford to do it. And if he does, he's going to finish up about 45 grand in the hole. And that is a millstone around your neck. And there's no reason for it. Look, each of us in our pockets right now have a device that proves the ultimate democratization of information. Never before has knowledge been so egalitarian. Once upon a time, I get it. You know, and you can't, it's not fair to compare a Harvard lecture to, you know, a deep dive down the YouTube rabbit hole. But it's not completely unfair either because we have access now like we never had. It's not unfair. I think that one of the primary reasons in 2007 or 2008 that I leveraged the exposure of the four-hour workweek to get involved with tech was to try to develop or at least enable teams to develop tools that would level the playing field a bit. not only with, in this case, this would be a nonprofit example, but say the Harvard's or MIT's, et cetera, Stanford, another good example, opening up a lot of their lectures and coursework for

people to take for free, which my brother has done, for instance. But also you have companies like Duolingo, one I've been involved with for a very long time. They now are the widest used language learning tool on the planet and it's all, it's free. And they've demonstrated in a number of instances how it can be more effective than the typical coursework assigned in a semester of college, say Spanish instruction. And so I'm optimistic about the tools. I'm very curious to see if one, when people, if when people have what they say they want, which is this equal access to education, if they will be able to choose that instead of the entertainment and porn and everything else on the internet. Do you really think they will? That they will choose education over that? Yeah. I think that it will be a natural selection process.

And I've seen this, for instance, in areas I've been involved with a number of organizations that build effectively computer centers overseas to help with job creation. So you have, and so the good example would be something like SamaSource, which I've been involved with here. It's a non-profit startup. They do some very interesting work where they will take, say, repetitive small tasks at a place like YouTube or eBay, and they might build a computer center at a refugee camp or in Nairobi, train people, and then have that work sent to those people. And they're also doing things domestically.

But in examples that are not well implemented, they make these resources available without the training, without instilling the sort of philosophies and work ethic that we've been discussing. And people end up watching your cat videos in porn. So I think it'll be a natural selection process, much like we currently see in every aspect of life. But the outcome is not life or death, at least not necessarily in the literal sense. It's more of a financial prosperity or lack thereof. I think it'll be case by case because- Look, you're either, I don't know, when I try and really think in terms of what are the real fundamentals that drive education and ultimately prosperity, however we choose to define it, it's hard to get more granular than curiosity.

You're either curious or you're not. And the real geniuses that I've stumbled across are people who can inspire curiosity. It's not about imparting knowledge. It's about flicking the switch. You've got great books here on your shelf. Everybody has access to these books. Not yours specifically, but you get to choose whatever books you want to have in your house or your apartment. You get to choose all these things.

Everybody has those same choices. I personally don't think that the democratization of innovation will make more people innovative. I think it will make the people who are predisposed to be curious and inventive more so. Likewise, education. I think it's a trap to suggest that if we build it, they'll come. It just has never happened before. There's always going to be a weeding out process. But I think what you do on this podcast is really valuable in a way that goes beyond whatever its financial model might be.

You're talking specifically to people who give a crap in a specific way. And that's always been the struggle from a connectivity standpoint. Yeah, no, it, it absolutely has. And part of the reason I make these, these podcasts so ear bleedingly long is that it is, it is for me a weeding and filtering process and uh i enjoy interacting with fans who are willing to commit to engaging and digesting these conversations because my realization aside from this podcast serving as a creative outlet and reclaiming of freedom in a way for me after we talked about this number of large projects with large companies. I was very often asked by my book fans on social media or elsewhere, you know, what should I do if I'm in Nebraska? What should I do if I'm in fill in the blank location where I don't have the peer group that you have in San Francisco or New York City or fill in the blank? And I would have these conversations with friends, much like the conversation we're having right now, although not as 20 questions,

of course, over a glass or two of wine. And I'd say, fuck, you know, it is such a shame that this conversation, nothing really sensitive was discussed, was not recorded. So I could just share the damn thing. Oh my God. Okay. I just have to tell you that that is the story of my life. That's actually why I'm here today, and it's why I'm still in television. I'm working on a project now called Drinking with Geniuses. It's just a title in my head, and I went ahead and locked it up because it sounds like a show or something. And it happened because do you remember a couple years ago when that meteorite

came burning through the atmosphere in russia yeah right so i don't know about you but i'm watching this on tv and the only question tearing through my mind is what the fuck was that how the hell is this possible so i called an astrophysicist i knew over at berkeley and i said hey meet me over at grumpy's there's a little bar down in the financial district here in San Francisco. We sit down, get a couple of beers, and I look at him just like I'm looking at you right now. And I say, what the hell just happened? And he said, I know, right? You have lots of questions. I said, I have so many questions. I mean, I get that meteorites are out there. I get that sooner or later, one of them is going to flip

our switch. But how did we not see it coming? How did it get past the satellite net? And for the next 20 minutes, he explained everything I needed to know about meteorites and satellites, right? Interestingly, that same day, I had narrated most of episode four of How the Universe Works. So it's on my mind. The beer is cold. The brain across the table is enormous.

And I suddenly look around and say, why, why aren't we recording this? You know, that's a show, but so is this, you know, alternate title,

cold beers, enormous brands. Also not bad, not bad, not bad at all. Well, I will be, I will be one of the first to listen.

I love it. I love this idea. You just wanted two more questions. What advice would you give your 30-year-old self? And if you could place where you were at the time, what you were doing. Okay. what you were doing um okay not to be glib but i i i don't i don't believe i would advise myself in hindsight only because you know you hate to tear a hole in the time-space continuum you know you step on the butterfly the next thing you know know, right? The Mastodons are singing show tunes when you come back or something crazy stuff. But I would pull myself aside in the very, very early days of...

Actually, I was hired in QVC at the... I was 28. And when I was 30, I was on the verge of my own, I won't quite say a mental collapse, but I knew I couldn't do that anymore. And I was trying to figure out if I could go into the whole entertainment business and freelance in an effective way. And I, it gave me hives. I mean, I was really, I was scared, you know, if I could go back, I would have probably just pulled myself aside and said, it's going to be fine. It's going to be fine. And then as sort of a side note, I would have said, stop wearing makeup on camera.

It just makes you look weird. Uh, for those people who would like to sample your podcast, and I encourage everyone to sample it because let's face it, you don't always want to listen to three hour podcasts. Uh, and you might want some professional narration and storytelling. Uh, which two episodes would you suggest they start with that are already out there? You know, they're so short that you'll, you'll know if you like them, even if the subject matter isn't your favorite right out of the gate. I mean, they're literally five minutes long. So I'd actually start at the beginning.

I'd listen to the first one. And then I would listen to the most recent one. And then you'll hear a bit of a shift between the two, but not seismic. You'll just get a better sense of where I'm headed and not a big change at all. And then if you like them, just cherry pick one in the middle.

And then who are we kidding? You can listen to them right now. By the time this thing gets posted, there'll probably only be 20 of them out there. 20 times five. What is that? That's 100 minutes. And that's it. Listen to all of them out there. 20 times five, what is that? It's a hundred minutes. Listen, all of them. Hour and 40. Uh, where can people learn more about you? See what you're up to, hear your rants on Facebook, et cetera. You know, I, I really hate to say it.

And I will put all this in the show notes. If, uh, we don't need to record, uh, record, we do need to record. We do need to record. We don't need to rely on. Oh, shit. I'm supposed to hit record. We don't need to rely on your very impressive memory, which is a whole separate podcast. But are there any particular places you'd like people to pay attention to? And we'll put the whole list in the show notes as well.

Micro.com is sort of the, you know. The mothers sun and the solar system you can get anywhere from there um but um in the name of the podcast one more time the way i heard it the way i heard it the way i heard it it's i'm managing expectations a little bit right uh because people get so pedantic now with with facts i mean how much how much grief do you get if you get a stat wrong or a date wrong oh it's like i it's like i you know skin skinned a child in public tied to you know a telephone pole in union Right. So the way I heard it is really me in advance. When somebody says, hey, that story about Bruno Mars, you said it was Peter Hernandez. He went by Pete, not Peter.

And I can say, hey, look, man, this is just the way I heard it. What do you want from me? It's a big, sloppy, googly world out there. You don't like it? I tell you what, you don't like it? why don't you get a podcast and do your version uh this is this is great fun is there any anything any last words things you'd like my audience to think on uh do consider before we sign off wow no that that i'm afraid is a bit beyond my pay grade, but I,

I'd like to thank him for listening to us free associate for three hours. That was very decent of them. And I would, uh, look, advice is that thing you, um, you ask for when you secretly know the answer and wish you didn't.

So I'm, I'm stingy with giving it, but, um, but Robert plant really had it right, man. There is time to change the road. You're on whatever the road is.

And I've just had a ball, uh, blowing things up in my own fake little career. And I, I'd encourage more people to as well. I can't think of a better way to, to wrap this up. Mike,

so much fun to hang. I really appreciate you making the time and to everybody listening, we will put all sorts of resources and links in the show notes at for our workweek.com forward slash podcast. Misspell it any way you like, preferably the correct spelling just because I don't know what I've rerouted. So four hour workweek.com. Is it number four? It's all spelled out. Is there a hyphen between four and hour? There's no hyphen. This is one of those things I thought would be really easy

on the internet. And people are like, oh, you mean four hour? Like F-O-R-O-U-R. Yeah. Work week. I'm like, no, no, no. It is F-O-R. So fourhourworkweek.com. I'll spell that forward slash podcast.

Is it week W-E-E-K? Like the time or am I just- Work week W-E-A-K. Yes, I'm just so exhausted. I'm just so weak. I know. I know. Work week.

Yeah, you know. You could spell the title of this thing wrong really in every single word possible ways maybe that'll be my revised and updated edition that i'll try to get a nice little royalty for just change the spelling everybody i appreciate you listening as always and until next time this is Tim Ferriss signing off. Hey guys, this is Tim again. Just a few more things before you take off. Number one, this is Five Bullet Friday.

Do you want to get a short email from me? Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little morsel of fun before the weekend? And Five Bullet Friday is a very short email of fun before the weekend. And five bullet Friday is a very short email where I share the coolest things I've found or that I've been pondering over the week. That could include favorite new albums that I've discovered. It could include gizmos and gadgets and all sorts of weird shit that I've somehow dug up in the, uh, the world of the esoteric as I do. It could include favorite articles that I've read and that I've shared with my close friends, for instance. And it's very short. It's just a little

tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend. So if you want to receive that, check it out. Just go to fourhourworkweek.com. That's fourhourworkweek.com all spelled out and just drop in your email and you will get the very next one. And if you sign up, I hope you enjoy it.