November 29, 2024
"I talked about a pencil for 8 minutes" — at the QVC audition — "I was on the air 48 hours later at 3 in the morning trying to make sense of the... infrared pain reliever and the Amcor negative ion generator."
"Like what the hell?... You can talk about anything for as long as you need to. You know, you never talk about a feature without talking about its benefit. And so that's kind of how that world worked. So you don't say it's a pencil for 99 cents. You say it's a yellow #2 pencil with an eraser that is of the exact proportion necessary to last for the life of the pencil. So when this thing is down to a nub, you'll still have enough eraser left. It's really a monument to efficiency and ingenuity. And it's not just yellow. It's yellow because you're a busy professional. And when you need a pencil, Joe, and you open up your drawer, you don't have time to root around for some vaguely beige-colored writing implement. You want that canary yellow to pop and you can pick it up. And... it's a #2 pencil. It's not #3 with that thin wispy line that you can't read or, or that thick disappointing skid mark of a #1. So you just train yourself to fill dead air with nonsense...."
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26 comments:
He’s told the story many times. I used a pencil to describe the concept of maintenance and reliability on the Space Station. Pencil, it can do so many things, and filling dead air pays good money.
Rowe’s podcasts usually last 90 minutes. So I suspect it was an easy interview for both.
I have this queued up for the weekend. I enjoy listening to both of these guy. I am listening to " Protect Our Parks 13" right now.
That is a firm rule for marketing communications, whether the intended audience is internal or external, that you always include the benefit when talking about features. It follows the design logic that a feature only exists because it provides a benefit to the user. (Many people hear “advertising” when the marketing is mentioned but one four important roles of a marketing department is product development.)
That Rowe could extemporaneously think up benefits for the features in a common object like a #2 pencil and speak eloquently about it on-air is the sign of a very quick mind. Or he read the classic essay on division and specialization of labor, I, Pencil. And he has exceptional recall.
Please ignore my grammatical clumsiness. Early, iPhone, etc.
The idea that the eraser is perfectly proportioned, time-wise, to the graphite was delightful. It's intuitively right, but also can't be true, since individual writers use the eraser in different proportions, but it was such a satisfying thing to believe, kind of like the idea that everything happens for a reason.
I was fascinated to hear of his career in opera, and would be curious to hear him sing.
A favorite, Milton Friedman on the number 2:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=67tHtpac5ws
Classic B school marketing stuff. Very nice…
It was a great interview. Listen to the whole thing while you're doing something else. He got into Opera just so he could get his sag card and get on a sitcom. I was amazed at all the narration he did.
That's pretty brilliant. It's all true and on some level, we all understand it, but it's still fascinating to hear it spelled out in plain English and reflect a moment over how every detail is purposeful and functional.
The #2 pencil is one of the genuinely brilliant inventions of mankind. Simple, effective, long-lasting, capable of correcting its work, and inexpensive. Humble little workhorse of writers and engineers for centuries.
Classic essay on the simple pencil, "I, Pencil" by Leonard read
https://mises.org/mises-daily/i-pencil
John Henry
A clever person could talk for hours about a pencil and the listener might even learn things he had never given a moment’s thought to.
Thanks for the link. Every time I hear Friedman speak, I think I need to read his books.
I am a sucker for pretty much anything Mike Rowe. He has his oft repeated shtick about his involvement in opera and QVS. There's something about his delivery and that great voice that always makes it interesting and listenable. His own podcast The Way I heard It pretty much never disappoints. I listened to one recently with Rob Lowe and I couldn't believe how much I smiled and laughed throughout it.
Odd. Not as odd as a human foot in my toaster oven but still...
Episode 2234 with Marc Andreeson and episode 2236 with Shane Gillis show up in my podcast addict list of episodes. But not this one 2235.
I have no desire or time to watch a podcast. I just want to listen. I can extract the audio using tubemate then play it on my music player but that's a lot of work. The music player isn't great for podcasts, either.
I highly recommend the a drees on episode.
John Henry
I never even noticed Mike Rowe until this Joe Rogan podcast. It's just by chance that I listened. But he was great. What a voice and what a flow to his speech.
My wife often has QVC on in background which means I hear it a lot. Their selling model is amazing.
She buys a lot from them too. She has always been well satisfied with quality and that it is what she expected.
John Henry
I recall a video of him singing The Star Spangled Banner at a minor league baseball game. I was impressed.
His Dirty Jobs show is wonderful. He's brilliant interacting with regular people doing regular jobs and making them (and us) feel like they're some of the most important people in the world.
"such a satisfying thing to believe"
Rowe rifts often on the concept of how he, as a professional voice-over performer, can say things in a voice that rings of certainty and truth, even when he has no certainty and it isn't true. His favorite example is a voice-over for "How the Universe Works", when he was discussing the number of galaxies, when his first narration had about 100 billion galaxies. He was called back in to re-record that session and bring the number to 2000 billion galaxies. Off by nearly 2 trillion, but delivered in the same voice of authenticity and certainty it was just a couple of weeks earlier.
I quit using wood pencils decades ago and have been a mechanical user ever since. Never dull, no waste, no need to sharpen. And I use a slightly softer 'lead' for darker lines.
Reminds me of when the English teacher told us to describe our pencil(s) in writing and then told us when she passed the assignment back to us that there was a lot of 'overwriting' in what we wrote. Lady, how much is there to really say about a pencil?
I see Mike Rowe interviewed Pete Hegseth back in July. I'm sure I listened to it, but I don't recall it. The next episode was with Kris Engelstad, which was one of my favorite listens.
There is a spectacular and essentially wild barrier island off the Georgia coast, Little St. Simons Island, which according to the story owes it's preserved state to the #2 pencil.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_St._Simons_Island
The story that we were told is that the industrial magnate who purchased the island in the early 20th century had assigned a minion (or perhaps an emissary) to find a source for cedar trees to make pencils. He found the undeveloped island with lots of cedar trees, and bought it.
They subsequently discovered that the windy conditions which prevailed on the island (and keep the mosquitos somewhat at bay) cause the cedar wood to develop with twisty grain, which was unsuitable for pencils.
The magnate decided to keep the island as a hunting and fishing preserve. It stayed in the family long enough that it never got developed. Hank Paulson and his wife have bought it and put it into some sort of trust which keeps it as preserved land.
The former lodge and a few cabins are run as a resort-sort of like summer camp for grownups. I highly recommend it.
Mike Rowe is a national treasure. He's encouraged millions of people to ignore the calls of higher ed, arguing it’s not necessary to achieve a decent livelihood.
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