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

fora tv' the world is thinking I would like to know more about the testicles and a few years ago that would have given me pause but nowadays I hear questions like that quite often this one actually came from Tim Ferriss who I listened to this morning turned around met Tim he said hi I said how are you we exchanged pleasantries and he in fact was serious he wanted to know about the castration process of lambs and it was an old dirty job we did that ran recently and I didn't have I didn't have a chance to give him the details with Tim then what with all the registering but I do now and so the Dirty Jobs crew and I were called to a little town in Colorado called Craig it's only a couple dozen square miles it's in the Rockies and the job in question was sheep rancher my role on the show for those of you who haven't seen it's pretty simple I'm an apprentice and I work with the people who actually do the jobs in question and my responsibilities are to simply try and keep up and give an honest account of what it's like to be these people for one day in their life job in question herding sheep great we go to Craig and we check into a hotel and I realized the next day that castration is going to be an absolute part of this work so normally I never do any research at all but this is a touchy subject and I work for the Discovery Channel and we want to portray accurately whatever it is we do and we certainly want to do it with a lot of respect for the animals so I call the Humane Society and I say look I'm gonna be castrating some lamps can you tell me the deal and they're like yeah it's pretty straightforward they use a band basically a rubber band like this a little smaller this one was actually around the playing cards I got yesterday but it had a certain familiarity to it and I said well what exactly is the process and they said the band is applied to the tail tightly and then another band is applied to the scrotum tightly blood flow is slowly a week later the parts in question fall off great got it okay I call the SPCA to confirm this they confirm it I also call PETA just for fun and they don't like it but they confirm it okay that's basically how you do it so the next day I go out and I'm given a horse and we go get the Lambs and we take them to a pen that we built and we go about the business of animal husbandry Melanie is the wife of Albert Albert's the shepherd in question Melanie picks up the lamb two hands one hand on both legs on the right likewise on the left lamb goes on the post she opens it up great Albert goes in I follow Albert the crews around I always watch the process done the first time before I try it being an apprentice you know you do that Albert reaches in his pocket to pull out you know this black rubber band but what comes out instead is a knife and I'm like that's not rubber at all you know and and he kind of flicked it open in a way that caught the Sun that was just coming over the Rockies it was very uh it was it was it was impressive in the space of about two seconds Albert had the knife between the cartilage of the tail right next to the butt of the lamb and very quickly the tail was gone and in the bucket that I was holding a second later with a big thumb and a well calloused forefinger he had the scrotum firmly in his grasp and he pulled it toward him like so and he took the knife and he put it on the tip now you think you know what's coming Michael you don't okay he snips it throws the tip over his shoulder and then grabs the scrotum and pushes it upward and then his head dips down obscuring my view but what I hear is a slurping sound and a noise that sounds like velcro being yanked off a sticky wall and I'm not even kidding can we roll the video no I'm kidding we don't I thought it best to talk in pictures so I do something now I have never ever done on a dirty job shoot ever I say timeout stop you guys know the show we use take one we don't do take two there is no writing there's no scripting there's no nonsense we don't fool around we don't rehearse we shoot what we get I said stop this is nuts I mean you know what I'm speaking this is crazy we can't do this you know and Albert's like what and I'm like I don't know what just happened but they're testicles in this bucket and and you know that's not how we do it he said well that's how we do it and I see why would you do it this way and before I even let him explain I said I want to do it the right way with the rubber bands and he says like the Humane Society and I said yes like the Humane Society let's do something that doesn't make the lamb squeal and bleed we're on in five continents dude we're on twice a day on the Discovery we can't do this this is okay he goes to his box and he pulls out a bag of these little rubber bands Melanie picks up another lamb puts it on the post band goes on the tail band goes on the scrotum lamb goes on the ground lamb takes two steps falls down it gets up shakes a little takes another couple steps falls down I'm like this is not a good sign for this land at all gets up walks to the corner it's quivering and it lies down and it's in abuse distress and I'm I'm looking at the lamb and I say Albert how long just you know when's he get up it's like a day day how long has it take him to fall off a week meanwhile the lamb that he had just did his little procedure on no he's just prancing around bleeding stopped he's you know nibbling on some grass frolicking and I was just so blown away at how completely wrong I was in that in that second and I was reminded how utterly wrong I am so much of the time and I was especially reminded of how would a ridiculously short straw I had that day because now I had to do what Albert had just done and they're like a hundred of these lambs in the pen and suddenly this whole thing's starting to feel like a German porno and I'm like Melanie picks up the lamp puts it on the post opens it up Albert hands me the knife I go in tale comes off I go in I grab the scrotum tip comes off Albert instructs push it way up there I do push it further I do the testicles emerge they look like thumbs coming right at you right and he says bite him just just bite him off and I heard him I heard all the words well how did I get here how did I mean how did I get here it's just is this one of those moments where the brain goes you know off on its own and suddenly I'm standing there in the Rockies and all I can think of is the Aristotelian definition of a tragedy you know Aristotle says the tragedy is that is that moment when the hero comes face-to-face with his true identity and I'm like a jacked-up metaphor I don't like what I'm thinking right now and I don't know I can't get this thought out of my head and I can't get that vision out of my out of my sight so I did what you know I had to do I went in and I think something like this oh no yanked my head back and I'm standing there with two testicles on my chin and now I can't get I can't shake the metaphor okay I'm still in I'm still in poetics and Aristotle and I'm thinking out of nowhere two terms come crashing into my head that I hadn't heard since my classics professor in college drilled them there and they are anagnorisis in peripeteia and AG noir assistant peripeteia anagnorisis is the Greek word for discovery literally the translation to the transition from ignorance to knowledge is anagnorisis it's what our network does it's what dirty jobs is and I'm up to my neck in a nag Nora sees every single day great the other word peripeteia that's that that's the moment in the great tragedies you know Euripides and Sophocles that's the moment where Oedipus has his moment where he suddenly realizes that hot chick he's been sleeping with and having babies with is his mother okay that's pretty where peripeteia and this metaphor in my head I got an ignores and peripeteia on my chin I gotta tell you it's such a great device though when you start to look for a parapet eeeh you find it you find it everywhere you know fine mean Bruce Willis in the sixth sense right spends the whole movie trying to help the little kid who sees dead people and then BOOM oh I'm dead peripeteia you know it's it's it's it's crushing when the audience sees it the right way neo in the matrix you know oh I'm living in a computer program that's weird you know these discoveries that lead to sudden realizations you know and I've been having him over 200 dirty jobs I have him all the time but that one that one drilled something home in a way that I just wasn't prepared for and as I stood there looking at the happy lamb that you know I had just defiled but looked okay looking at that poor other little thing that I'd done it the right way on it and I just was struck by if I'm if I'm wrong about if I'm wrong about that and if I'm wrong so often in a literal way what other peripatetic misconceptions might I be able to comment upon because look I'm not a social anthropologist but I have a friend who is and I talked to him and he says hey Mike look I mean I don't know if your you know if your brain is interested in this sort of thing or not but do you realize you've shot in every state you've worked in mining you've worked in fishing you've worked in steel you've worked in every major industry you've you've had your back shoulder to shoulder with these guys that our politicians are desperate to relate to every four years right I can still see Hillary doing the shots a ride dribbling down her chin with the steelworkers I mean these are the people that I work with every single day and if you have something to say about their thoughts collectively it might be time to think about it because dude you know for years so that's in my head testicles are on my chin thoughts are bouncing around and after that shoot dirty jobs really didn't change in terms of what the show is but it changed for me personally and now when I talk about the show I no longer just tell the story you heard and 190 like it I do but I also start to talk about some of the other things I got wrong some of the other notions of work that I have just been assuming our sacrosanct and they're not people with dirty jobs are happier than you think as a group they're the happiest people I know and I don't want to start whistling look for the union label and all that happy worker crap I'm just telling you that these are balanced people who do unthinkable work roadkill picker-uppers whistle while they work I swear to God I did it with them they've got this amazing sort of symmetry to their life and I see it over and over and over again so I started to wonder what would happen if we challenged some of these sacred cows follow your passion we've been talking about it here you know for the last 36 hours follow your passion what could possibly be wrong with that it's probably the worst advice I ever got you know you know follow your dreams and go broke right I mean that's all I heard growing up I didn't know what to do with my life but I was told if you follow your passion it's gonna work out I can give you thirty examples right now Bob combs the pig farmer in Las Vegas who collects the uneaten scraps of food from the casinos and feeds them to his swine why because there's so much protein and the stuff we don't eat his pigs grow at twice the normal speed and he is one rich pig farmer and he is good for the environment and he spends his days doing this incredible service and he smells like hell but god bless him he's making a great living you ask him did you follow your passion here he he'd laugh at you you know the guy's worth he just got offered like 60 million dollars for his farm and turned it down outside of Vegas he didn't follow his passion he stepped back and he watched where everybody was going and he went the other way you know and I hear that story over and over Matt Freund a dairy farmer in New Canaan Connecticut who woke up one day and realized the crap from his cows was worth more than their milk if he could use it to make these biodegradable flowerpots now he's selling them to Walmart right he didn't follow his passion the guys come on you know so I started to look at passion I started to look at efficiency versus effectiveness as ten talked about earlier that's a huge distinction I started to look at teamwork and determination and basically all those platitudes they call successor E's that hang with that schmaltzy art in boardrooms around the world right now that stuff it's suddenly all been turned on its head safety safety first is me going back to you know OSHA and PETA and the Humane Society you know what what if OSHA got it wrong I mean I will this is heresy what I'm about to say but what if what if it's really safety third right now I mean I mean really what I mean to say is I value my safety on these crazy jobs as much as the people that I'm working with but the ones who really get it done that 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 and you know I'll never forget up in the Bering Sea I was on a crab boat with The Deadliest Catch guys which I which I also work on in the first season we're about a hundred miles off the coast of Russia 50 foot seas big waves green water coming over the wheelhouse right most hazardous environment I'd ever seen and I was back with a guy lashing the pots down so I'm 40 feet off the deck which is like looking down at the top of your shoe you know and it's doing this in the ocean unspeakably dangerous I scamper down I go into the wheelhouse and I say with some level of you know incredulity captain OSHA and he says OSHA ocean and he points out there and but in that moment that what he said next can't be repeated in the lower 48 it can't be repeated on a factory floor any construction site but he looked at me and he said son and he's my age by the way he calls me son I love that he says son I'm the captain of a crab boat my responsibility is not to get you home alive my responsibility is to get you home rich you want to get home alive that's on you and for the rest of that day safety first I mean I was like so you know the idea that we create this this false the sense of complacency when all we do is talk about somebody else's responsibility as though it's our own and vice versa anyhow a whole lot of things I could talk at length about the many little distinctions we made in the endless list of ways that I got it wrong but what it all comes down to is this I have formed a theory and I'm gonna share it now in my remaining two minutes and 30 seconds it goes like this we've declared war on work as a society all of us it's a civil war that's a cold war really we didn't we didn't set out to do it and we didn't twist our mustache in some Machiavellian way but we've done it and we have waged this war on at least four fronts certainly in Hollywood the way we portray working people on TV it's laughable if there's a plumber he's 300 pounds and he's got a giant butt crack admit it you've seen him all the time that's what plumbers look like right we turn them into heroes where we turn them into punchlines that's what TV does we try hard on dirty jobs not to do that which is why I do the work and I don't cheat but we've waged this war on Madison Avenue I mean so many of the commercials that come out there in the way of a message what's really being said your life would be better if you could work a little less if you didn't have to work so hard if you got home a little earlier if you could retire a little faster if you could punch out a little sooner it's all it's all in there over and over again and again Washington I can't even begin to talk about the deals and policies in place that affect the bottom line reality of the available jobs because I don't really know I just know that that's a font in this war and right here guys Silicon Valley I mean how many people have an iPhone on them right now how many people have their BlackBerry's on we're plugged in we're connected I would never suggest for a second that something bad has come out of the tech revolution good grief not to this crowd but I would suggest that innovation without imitation there's a complete waste of time and nobody celebrates imitation the way Dirty Jobs guys know it has to be done your iPhone without those people making the same interface the same circuitry the same board over and over all that you know that's what makes it equally as possible is the genius that goes inside of it so we've got this new toolbox you know our tools today don't look like shovels and picks they look like the stuff we walk around with and so the collective effect of all of that has been this marginalization of lots and lots of jobs and I realized you know probably too late in this game I hope not cuz I don't know if I can do 200 more of these things but we're gonna do as many as we can and to me the most important thing to know and to really come face to face with is the fact that I got it wrong about a lot of things not just the testicles on my chin I got it I got a lot wrong so we're thinking by we I mean me that that the thing to do is to talk about a PR campaign for work manual labor skilled labor somebody needs to be out there talking about the Forgotten benefits I'm talking about grandfather stuff the stuff a lot of us probably grew up with but we've kind of kind of you know kind of lost a little barack wants to create two and a half million jobs the infrastructure is a huge deal this war on work that I suppose exist has casualties like any other war the infrastructure is the first one declining trade school enrollments are the second one every single year fewer electricians fewer carpenters fewer plumbers fewer welders fewer pipe fitters fewer steamfitters the infrastructure jobs that everybody is talking about creating are those guys the ones that have been in decline over and over meanwhile we got two trillion dollars at a minimum according to the American Society of Civil Engineers that we need to expand to even make a dent in the structure which is currently rated at a d-minus so if I were running for anything and I'm not I would simply say that the jobs we hope to make and the jobs we hope to create aren't gonna stick unless they're jobs that people want and I know the point of this conference is to celebrate things that are near and dear to us but I also know that clean and dirty aren't opposites there are two sides of the same coin just like innovation and imitation like risk and responsibility like peripeteia and a diagnosis like that poor little lamb who I hope isn't quivering anymore and like my time that's gone it's been great talking to you and get back to work [Applause] you

Channel: FORA.tv

Views: 672,882

Rating: 4.9161906 out of 5

Keywords: mike, rowe, dirty, jobs, lambs, castrates, castrating, castration, testicles, bites, teeth, americans, united, states, labor, blue, collar, job, work, workers, working, career, success, value, society, discovery, channel, show, peta, fora.tv, foratv, fora, tv, fora tv, Mike Rowe (TV Producer), Dirty Jobs (TV Program)

Id: r-udsIV4Hmc

Length: 20min 34sec (1234 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 07 2009

Reddit Comments

[u/dmwit]

Wow. I can't upvote this hard enough. I don't even agree with all of the things Mike Rowe is saying, but the fact that he even started me thinking about these things enough to agree or disagree is a strong indication of the relevance and depth of his insight.

[u/MarkByers]

If he were a software developer he could call his company MikeRoweSoft, except I think someone else already had that name.

[u/mrbroom]

http://www.mikeroweworks.com

He's been talking about this same subject since at least Labor Day. Everyone should watch his little speeches. He makes important points that need attention.

[u/xelfer]

Fantastic speaker, I love Dirty Jobs. Also anyone who can admit they're wrong and learn from it is just awesome.

[u/relix]

His voice is amazing. It's fathery smoothing.

[u/[deleted]]

OSHA? --------------> Ocean

[u/tcpip4lyfe]

What a smart mother fucker.

[u/[deleted]]

I saw the length of the talk at 20 minutes and thought "I'll just listen to the first few minutes."

Next thing I know, he's walking off of the stage and I'm wishing his presentation were longer.

Good clip.

[u/Zentripetal]

Mike Rowe is my hero. You should check out his website, he's starting an initiative of some sort for bringing back the American work ethic. Good speech there too.

edit: http://www.mikeroweworks.com