News Conference with Mike Rowe

Thanks hello how's it going so many cameras so many people how do these things work my supposed to say something pithy right off the top and just start answering questions yeah pithy or answer questions well I tell you what let lets go with the questions and I'll insert Pythias into the answers and through the magic of editing you all will make me look smarter than I am I have the fact that's a promise right that's good thank you yes sir with a Cromwell I Gretel network in Illinois and Kentucky heard you mention before the relationship and the need that we have for the soil either for what comes from under it or for what we raise on top of it how the dirty jobs in your relationship with with the rural communities how have that helped to expand that story that you've you've told before well it actually wasn't in that order dirty jobs and I'll talk about this today in front of a few thousand people I guess but it really did evolve very much on its own I didn't pitch the show that's on the air today with the intention or the knowledge the expectation that it would be on the air today this was a tribute to my granddad there were three one-hour specials and I just wanted to highlight people who weren't afraid to get dirty and weren't afraid to do this that or the other or really whatever it took to pay the bills along the way you know I discovered a lot of things some more obviously than others but one was that every industry that we have that I can think of it depends on agriculture or mining every single thing we need we either grow out of the dirt or we mine out of the out of the earth and what we do with that raw material after the fact of course you know that's the business of farming that's the business of craftsmanship and that's really the one of the big underlying themes of dirty jobs so your question was connecting with the dirt I think and that's really become one of the slogans of the show dirt is not the enemy you know work is certainly not the enemy but the idea of getting dirty 40 50 60 years ago everybody understood it you know farmers were the essence of our gross domestic product 100 years ago so we loved our dirty farmers and then tradesmen were the embodiment of our of our workforce you know 60 50 years ago as the infrastructure was being built you know and so we love their dirty tradesmen today you know our GDP is defined by something else altogether we don't have a relationship with dirt if there were such a thing as a dirt index it'd be it'd be all wrong today because we're not connected to the people who are willing to get dirty and that's really what the show aims to be I mean aside from a light-hearted look at work that's what the theme is to reconnect people and a lot of different ways with fundamental notions of work to learn a few things along the way and to maybe have a few laughs as we do it as a longer answer that I meant to give you but you but you got it and I can't take it back what is the dirtiest farm job you've ever done well I mean you might as well just ask what the dirtiest job is because there you know I mean some farming such a huge part of this show but I guess I mean anytime let's see there's a guy named Matt find matt has a dairy farm and I want to say New Canaan Connecticut this is maybe four years ago but Matt like maybe a lot of people who read and listen to what you guys do was a farmer who realized that his intended purpose really wasn't allowing him to make ends meet as well as he would have liked he was he was on the ropes and he needed to supplement the milk that he was selling and he figured out that if he took the manure from his cows he could make them into these flower pots this seemed crazy to me but when I read about it I thought I got to meet Matt Floyd he's he's making poo pots you know and what he's doing is he's he's selling them so people can put their tulips through their geraniums in them and they just bury the whole pot and as the poop biodegrades it's a natural fertilizer of course anyhow he's a crazy inventor this guy Matt and when I met him he had just patented the machine that allowed him to make these poo pots and so we spent today there going through the whole process and out in the back of course he's got one of those ponds that I'm sure you guys have seen a thousand times but this really was poo Creek for real I mean it was a whole giant pond of just raw sewage and of course I had to go out and paddle through there to get some stuff that was stuck in a drain or something and I might have fallen in and and it was any day you swim through a lake of you know poop even from your own species you know it's a journal entry so I could give you 50 answers but that's what I'm going with Matt Floyd's poo pond behind his poo pot making dairy farm pretty good one yes sir Thank You April Davidson with the Louisiana this week in Louisiana agriculture by my count I think Louisiana is the state you visited most with the most dirty jobs is that correct top three okay top three what is it that makes Louisiana so darn dirty well I mean it's it's desirably located for one thing it's a it's a fun place for us to go but we made we didn't really I think California is probably where we've done more dirty jobs but not because it's the dirtiest place just because I live there Michigan's up there but Louisiana became a good one for us because I think the first time we went down there was to do a it was an exterminator guy named Bill bretherton owned a company called vex con and aside for being an unorthodox exterminator and showing us the sites he knew everybody and he gave us the way the show works is we don't really produce it in a classical sense we we try and figure out one place to go and then we go and we do that and then we all impersonate reporters and try and figure out who's doing the dirty wherever and Bill hooked us up and those people the thing that's different about Louisiana isn't the fact that there's so much dirt there it's the fact that the people who have dirty jobs all seem to have some quiet little Brotherhood some club they go to because they all know each other and so we just got we just got hooked up you know next thing I knew I was in cutoff with the alligators Jerry salvos farm and then I was back up in Shreveport and then I was down in Lafayette to do something and then there was an oil thing right there on the border of Louisiana and wherever we were Oklahoma's Oklahoma border Dewey's yeah yeah somewhere over there point is people in Louisiana like to talk and they they gave us good leads and that's why we keep going back Dirty Jobs is programmed by the viewers I should be clear I haven't had an original idea since season one so I go where the ideas are yes sir Roger Ward from w old yes and Jacksonville Illinois on a different more seriously one of our main farm broadcasters isn't here I don't think that suggested he would like to see you as a spokesperson for American agriculture would you like to do that and would you be interested well it's tricky word you know on the one hand I don't think American agriculture needs a spokesman I think they need an advocate and the advocates that I believe they need are people like me who have shown a long-term addiction to chewing and swallowing I think the trick if there is one today is just to hit the reset button and remind people in a thousand different ways of the amazingly gobsmacked task that you guys do day in and day out which is feed 300 million people three times it is so easy to become distracted by a lot of other agendas and a lot of other voices and a lot of angry acronyms that are out there but all those conversations are fine I to me personally I think it's a free country and people ought to be able to talk about whatever they want to talk about but I do believe what what AG needs is is unity I think that there are a couple of basic messages that the industry can get behind in a way that I haven't seen them get behind but I can tell you after doing the show for seven years and working shoulder-to-shoulder with a lot of farmers I hear the same thing everywhere I go I've shot in every state and I've worked on most types of farms with most farmers and what I most hear is a sense that the rest of the country is just disconnected fundamentally from what it is farmers do today we've just taken it for granted and this is if there's a message that needs to come back to over and over and over again it's just reminding the 300 million people who rely on what farmers do that it's not happening by by magic there's not a steak tree in the backyard there's nothing you know it is extraordinary the extent to which we're disconnected from our energy from our basic manufacturing base and of course from our food and from the people who provide it so on a personal level I'm a huge fan of all of that on a professional level I'm skeptical of the spokesperson relationship because I just see it over and over and over again and I'm I'm not shy about speaking I represent some of the I think the best brands in the world but your bias winds up showing when you go out there and start lecturing and preaching to people and I don't want dirty jobs to ever be that I want the I want the show to be a series of examples that show farmers as they are that show workers as they are and that just quietly celebrates the business of getting the job done there are lot of ways to speak for big AG but dirty jobs in 180 countries it aired 700 times last year and the more opportunities I have just to show farmers being farmers to me that's the best way I can think of to move the needle there are other ways and I'm open to doing whatever I can for the industry on the whole what I don't want to do though is be a predictable voice and I don't want to create traditional materials because in my opinion the 300 million or so people that that need to be persuaded aren't going to be by listening to the traditional sorts of messages it's just white noise so I do things like castrate lambs with my teeth because that's how they do it in Colorado and that stimulates a huge conversation and it gets a little controversial but in the end we get to examine really what happened and why in fact that was a really good thing to do and we dispel some myths and we give the farmer a chance to show us what he does day in and day out rather than me the chance to tell you about it like I'm a guy behind a podium you know proselytizing it's not as persuasive as I wish it was and again that's a very long way of saying I'd be honored to help in any way I can as long as I don't look like a traditional spokesman yes sir rekt Raptor with Georgia Farm Bureau you were down at a barbecue place fresh air barbecue and you learned how to dump the old oil pit the old grease pit what you think it sounds familiar where where was I get I was in Georgia well what was fresh air part that I crawl inside the thing yeah and that was a terrible day to be honest with you I mean it was we were on our way to the airport it was one of those classic those classic dirty jobs where we thought we were done and there was a sign out that said something about best barbecue whatever and I thought well I can't be true is it really and we went in and had a sandwich it was good and then of course you know you talked to the owner and he's got the barbecue and it's a mess and can I clean it for you and well that's weird yeah I got a film crew and we all went in and there's just a very random day but we learned everything about making barbecue and how how the process works and we had a few laughs it's actually a great example of why the show works when it works because there's no way you could have produced or no TV crew in the world is gonna go to Georgia to do a retrospective on a barbecue but we wound up spending 20 minutes and TV time shooting that thing in the better part of the day to answer your question yeah it was miserable I smelled like a chicken for about three days after that I believe but that's all right I've smelled worse you're also involved of Deadliest Catch are there similarities between the crab fishermen and American farmer sure sure farmers and fishermen miners they're all basically the same people sit down and talk with him long enough you know the The Deadliest Catch connection for me is a really important one because while I it took me a long time to sell Dirty Jobs very very difficult pitch and I got three hours of the show on the air and while the network was trying to figure out if we would do more they asked me if I would like to go to Alaska and work on a crab boat and I said yeah that sounds that sounds interesting to me we didn't know what the show was called we didn't we don't the show was but I went up there and spent six weeks crabbing on the Bering Sea I worked on a couple of different boats worked a little bit as a greenhorn but mostly as hosts you know got to know the captains went to six funerals in six weeks and got a front row look at really one of the most demanding jobs in the world and the last day I was up there actually on on the northwestern I was on a satellite phone and wound up making the deal for dirty jobs so when I came back it was very excited because I pretty sure I'm gonna be in two shows and I think both these shows are gonna be good they're both gonna be on Discovery Channel and the president of the network said yeah here's the thing you can't be in two shows at the same time and I said oh that's a bummer you got to pick one when in doubt pick the one with your name in the title but by that point I had become very attached to Deadliest Catch and when that show got ordered as well I stayed on to narrate it so I'm friends with the captains I try and get up there once a year and work a little bit on the boats but but the show's themselves yeah they're very similar you know it's the same DNA it's about regular people who wake up clean and come home dirty and have their own attitude about about risk their own notion about how the world ought to work and a lot of that rubs off on you I I hope I'm better for it but yeah good guys a good show yeah Mitch leaves with the Capitol press and Salem Oregon doesn't want to find out about your some of your interesting Oregon experiences on Oregon farms my organs Oregon so I don't want to know about your organic speery insist okay the Oregon farms you have any interesting stories about Oregon farm oh the state of work in Oregon yes I thought we were taking a really real International Championship tonight I got you I got you what did I do in Oregon what did I do I what's that was on a cranberry farm that's right that was oh man I was that was two years ago that was a great when I've been like Port Orford maybe something something like that yeah we're again coasts great people also did a honeybee show in the first season of do you call them honeybee farmers did you farm honey I'd be farmers yeah beekeepers got stung 14 times and that was annoying but good fun but yeah you know the the cranberry episode was another really good show for us because 99.9% of the people just their entire experience with cranberries as those Ocean Spray commercials you know with the guys standing there just reading lines but the business of getting cranberries harvested you know like any other crop it's a son of a gun you know and it's it's it's time intensive and process heavy it's cold and it's it's just it's weirdly good TV to see all that red stuff flying through the air and turn it into jelly later on I love that's much of an answer but cranberries in Oregon you know I I didn't think we'd wind up doing that show in that state because I guess cranberries are better known and you know different places wherever we'll go pretty much anywhere yeah that was a good I forgot all about organ yeah I disconnect with our energy as well as our food and I wanted to get your thoughts on ethanol and biodiesel well speaking is I mean again it's really really important to never confuse me with an expert I'm not one and the minute I try to become one I lose what little credibility I have you know the point of Dirty Jobs is to allow me to function as a as a fish out of water more viewer than your typical discovery voice of authority and so you know my opinions on those things are what they are however my my larger view is that most people have no idea what they are and they want very much to feel good about the things they're told to feel good about if it sounds like I'm talking in a circle I guess maybe it's because I am let me tell you what I'm really impressed with and in the same way we've we've lost sight of what you guys do day in and day out I think the energy industry is kind of miraculous and you know when I think about a gallon of crude that somehow becomes a gallon of high-test combustible fuel or diesel I'm just amazed at at first of all how it happens but doubly so by the fact that I talk to people every day who don't seem to care less about it I mean for a little bit more than a gallon of milk you you've got this gallon of fuel and somehow or other people are pulling it up from the earth oftentimes you know in a mile deep of ocean water and then they're then they're doing things to it that allow it to explode and burn in our engines which in turn allow us to fly to Atlanta in a snowstorm word or drive home or bring the crop in or we're just not sufficiently impressed by a fundamental business of making energy and we're not sufficiently impressed by the fundamental business of getting food on the table or manufacturing widgets we just aren't so I know it's not a specific answer because I don't want to be confused with a specific guy but my thoughts on things like that are great great let's let's learn more about them let's let's see them let's let's innovate but let's never do that outside of the context of being duly impressed by the underlying business of making energy because it's awesome yeah in Louisiana agriculture my producer Avery Davidson asked a question earlier there's an old saying in television that the cheapest thing in television is the talent because the equipment is so expensive it was in Louisiana you lost a hundred grand worth of cameras on that airboat turned over how much equipment do you guys go through in a season how much does that cost you all of it yeah we uh we we go through a lot of equipment you know you mentioned Deadliest Catch it's the same thing up there for the first couple of seasons at the end of every episode we just threw the cameras overboard you know because the salt gets in there once salt gets and forget about it but the good news is I mean 100 grand is a lot of money but UTV is a very lucrative business and and and hit shows generate lots and lots of money so if the cost of getting a show on the air we just made it a line item to be honest with you we just said look this is there gonna be costs some are gonna be fixed some are gonna be random some are gonna be embarrassing and random and when you're in the Atchafalaya swamp taking a turn a little faster than you should and your producer steps over the line just a little bit and disturbs the axis on the boat and the front lip catches the water the whole thing will flip over and everything on the boat will go into the water and the only reason you saw that show was because I happen to be on the boat in front of it and I happen to have a camera and one of the things on Dirty Jobs is you know if you work on the crew you need to be able to shoot everybody needs to be able to do everything so I wound up shooting the end of that show from my boat and I'm holding the counter like this talking to me and and of course you know you take that footage back and at first people are just appalled by it but because our show doesn't have a script and because we don't do second takes and because we don't rehearse or Scout or really have storyboards or any of the kind of traditional things you do when you do a show I'm able to say to the network well you know that was kind of supposed to happen and it looks exactly like it's supposed to look and they go oh okay well that's great and then we put it on the and everybody's happy so the bad news is yeah you hate to lose equipment you know it's a capital expense and anybody that runs a farm knows that's a nightmare not much different in TV difference is we can put it on the air and people laugh when our stuff breaks so yeah I see your I'll bite on the safety third shirt and then also I'm thinking about probably your injury in terms of working on dirty jobs I mean farming is a dangerous occupation to be honest and I'm surprised that you haven't been injured more I remember one that wasn't related to agriculture where you were reaching down on Lake Erie or somebody grabbing snakes that were biting young oh yeah that was a great I'm glad you enjoyed that that's good yeah my my dad calls it a revolving door of Perpetual infirmary no serious injuries but you know lots of stitches couple of breaks you know the normal stuff that happens in the course of working those those kinds of jobs safety third is you know is one of those turns of phrase that evolved from the show and I use it partly because it stimulates conversation but mostly because I I'm a huge fan of coming home in one piece at the end of the day and you know risk and farming and risk and any kind of work you know back to Deadliest Catch it's a it's a huge conversation and what my crew and I found was after about 200 or so dirty jobs everywhere we went factory floors construction sites farms barns wherever all we saw the same thing big banner that said safety first and I sat through all of these compliance meetings hundreds of them mandatory meetings from everybody from NASA to wherever and a funny thing happens when when you hear safety first over and over and over and over again you stop hearing it you become complacent it doesn't mean anything it's just like the teacher in Charlie Brown Miss South might want long okay and I started thinking Oh every time my crew or I wound up getting hurt it was it was just because we were in that complacent place and I thought it's weird safety first isn't isn't working as a slogan for us because we had heard it so much and then I thought about it a little more and I thought well is safety really first I mean what's really happening when we're telling people safety first safety first safety first word in my opinion creating this idea that somebody out there in the world cares more about my own well-being than I do and once you buy into that basic premise however well intended you mortgage your own personal responsibility your own accountability so to us safety third means look if you want to come home in one piece it's on you and that real lesson again it happened on the Bering Sea it happened with a with a crab boat captain my first day up there I was on a stack of crab pots maybe 40 feet high it was blowing 50 I don't even know I'd say 30-foot seas easily I was petrified and I crawled down from this stack of pots you know the gist I mean if you're on a stack of crab pots looking down at the deck in seas like that it's like you're standing up looking at the top of your shoe only it's doing this it's hazardous beyond sense and I crawled down and I and I went into the into the cab in the in the wheelhouse and I said captain II gotta be kidding me and he's looking over his his his wheel and green water's coming over the the window he says not now and I said not now that's my point you know I'm like OSHA he says OSHA ocean I'm like no I get it it's dangerous but it at what point do we stop you know I mean it's it's it's dangerous out there you know and he says son he's my age he calls me son which I love his son on the captain of a crab boat my job is not to get you home alive my job is to get you home rich you want to get home alive that's on you and I thought man first of all that's crazy you're never gonna hear that in the lower 48 but a funny thing happened for the rest of the day on that boat I walked around like this you know I made sure I everything was dressed the life-preserver everything I'd never felt more present or accountable or aware of the hazards around me and so after kicking around with my crew we just said you know what when I say safety third to you it means be careful for real cuz it's on you so that's that's why that expression came about and lots of other expressions like it have come from the show I'll talk about a few today actually I'm glad you asked because I don't know what I'm going to talk about when I'm out there today but safe there it's a good one so is Brown before green yes sir throughout all your experiences in American agriculture what have you learned most about yourself throw all your experiences that's a that's a 400 page book that I'm I can't get around to writing but but mostly I've learned that I've learned that most of what what I thought I knew was simply incorrect to varying degrees you know the Greeks call it peripeteia in a moment in a in a Greek tragedy where the hero realizes that everything he thought he knew was wrong and that discovery changes not only the the narrative but the direction of the story itself peripeteia right so I've had lots of those and I'll talk about those today but I've learned I guess maybe the best example and the first platitude that I wanted to sort of debunk that was related to work happened when I was invited to speak at something called a an efficiency symposium sponsored by some big company somewhere and I was walking to the to the stage and on the wall were these successor E's you've seen him right teamwork guys rowing boats go for it rainbows butterflies bunch of bullcrap I hate him and I'm just like whatever I just can't believe people take these seriously but but the one I saw that incensed me was a picture of a construction site guys working and it was from the point of view of an executive in a corner office in a building that was already done and he's in his suit and he got his arms crossed and he's looking out the window at the work going on beneath him and you can see at a glance what's happening the here's a prosperous guy seemingly smug and here a bunch of guys working in the drizzle looking miserable building a thing and the caption says work smart not hard and it was essentially some screwed-up PR message to go to college and and it really hit me in that moment it's we're sending such a bad bad message because I I hear work smart not hard all the time and that's bullcrap it should say work smart and hard and so that was the moment where I started looking at dirty jobs as an opportunity not just to work on a show that people liked and have a few laughs and make my living but to find people who work smart and hard and and use them as examples to to push this notion forward and we've tried to in our own style debunk a great many of those successor E's over the years but that was the first one and today probably still the most important one so again on a personal level I come from farmers and fishermen I've learned these lessons as a kid I forgot them you know my business I wound up singing in the Opera I wound up performing in all sorts of different places I found out ah I went in a completely different way and ultimately it wasn't until I was 42 or 43 and the show started to work where I thought you know something it's the biggest lessons are the most fundamental ones so let's do a show where we can champion hard work being performed by smart people because I had forgotten that along with I think of a lot of other people that's funny I mean on the one hand I'm tempted to say I'm never not working but on the other hand to be honest I'm really never working I I got what I got what I wished for where I got what I thought I wanted it wasn't but as it turned out it was it was kind of better and so working on a show that allows me to come to places like this and answer questions like these is gratifying in a way that I can't really expect you to understand unless you've worked in Hollywood on a great many projects that you're deeply embarrassed of which which I've done over the years so you know to have an opportunity to do a show that the that you produce I'd say right except there is no writing in it but you know this was this this was as close to an original idea as I've ever been able to implement truth is I stole her from George Plimpton but he was dead and I didn't think anybody would mind and you know there are no new ideas but but this was an idea that nobody else was doing eight years ago and to get it on the air and a truly unscripted way and then to watch other shows come after it I mean and you've seen them they're drilling for oil down here they're fishing for crab over there and they're I mean it's to usher in to help usher in a whole genre of programs that celebrate work you know that's not work and that's why I'll fly through the rain to come and talk to a bunch of farmers that's not really work either it's a it's something I tell myself I wish I'd had done 20 years ago when I was a little younger and stronger and in better shape but I probably would have blown it because I was an idiot back then not that I'm not an idiot now but I'm a different sort of idiot and I and I and I just feel very very grateful for the chance to work on something that I'm that I'm sort of proud of so know I'm always working and I never am thanks guys

Channel: AFBF Archive

Views: 36,474

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Id: pWGuvRj9-KQ

Length: 32min 32sec (1952 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 03 2017