Dirty Jobs’ Mike Rowe on Lamb Castration, PETA and American Labor

Link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r-udsIV4Hmc
Who is he? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mike_Rowe
In his words: “Follow your passion. What could be wrong with that? Probably the worst advice I’ve ever got.”

In my words:
Mike Rowe’s show, Dirty Jobs, exists between two often irreconcilable worlds: Rowe calls them Clean and Dirty. Believe it or not, this division has defined our politics since Richard Nixon. Eastern media elite, Rednecks, radical liberals, southerners: it’s all code for Clean and Dirty. Clean’s knowledge of Dirty (or vice versa) is little more than what he or she sees in media, which usually distorts the truth beyond recognition.

That’s the line Dirty Jobs toes in each episode. Rowe’s appearance is that of a classic Clean. He holds a college degree, is a former opera singer and uses words like anagnorisis. He is Clean America’s tour guide into Dirty.

Rowe fails to really focus on this conflict until the final minutes of his talk. He spends the bulk of his time telling fabulously engaging stories about his time in Dirty, but the real take-home messages are muddy. His explanation of anagnorisis and parapatea only confuses the relatively simple moral of the lamb castration story (“Hey, maybe established ideas are wrong!”). He stumbles again in the crab boat story, which he uses to prop up the idea: “what if it’s really safety third?” At the end of the story, he decides for himself that it’s “safety first.” There’s certainly room to debate the meaning of this story, but in short talks like these, it’s “clarity first.”

A lot of this talk’s muddier moments may be attributed to the complexity of the issue. Perhaps simply raising an issue like this is all a speaker can really hope to do in 20 minutes.

But it’s not all bad. The lamb castration story is attention grabbing, and the kind of story you can’t un-hear. During it, Rowe showcases masterful use of repetition, and hand gestures. His description of the PETA castration method (“The band is applied to the tail *snap* tightly. And then another band is applied to the scrotum *snap* tightly”) demonstrates both of those qualities in spades.

His talk is also populated with several great one-liners, which are detailed in the quotes section. These kinds of lines are great to keep your audience from feeling like they’re being lectured.


Key Quotes:
“Hmm, that’s not rubber at all.”
“What I hear is a Slurping sound, and a noise that sounds like Velcro being ripped off a sticky wall.”
“My responsibility is not to get home alive. My responsibility is to get you home rich. You want to get home alive? That’s on you.”
“The ones who really get it done, they’re not out there talking about safety first. They know that other things come first. The business of doing the work comes first, the business of getting it done.”

Noodle scratcher:
Do you agree that there is a war on work? Is it a weakness for Rowe to only raise these issues without suggesting some kind of solution?