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DC: Is that why people watch? To see you get dirty? To hear you sing?
MR: A woman stopped me in the airport the other day to say she liked the show because it teaches her kids to respect regular working people. Ten feet later, a guy stopped me to say he uses the show to warn his kids about the dangers of not going to college. I get the sense that people watch for very different reasons.
DC: So you have a show that's both inspirational and cautionary?
MR: Well, that's a little grand, but yeah. Underneath all the dirt and poo are some pretty big ideas. Sacrifice, delayed gratification, hard work — I don't want to overstate it, but the nobility of manual labor has definitely fallen out of favor. A relatively small number of people are doing the vast majority of dirty work. Those people are making our lives easy, and we've forgotten about them. Dirty Jobs is a reminder that most of us are getting off easy. It taps into a collective guilt.
DC: What ever happened to the Puritan work ethic?
MR: Technology murdered it, and forever changed our notion of labor. We've become soft and lazy. Most people today can earn a living without ever needing to pick up a sledgehammer or a shovel. And most of my friends have bought in to the notion that "smart work" is better than "hard work." That's dangerous. There are huge rewards to dirty work and manual labor that people have forgotten.
DC: Such as?
MR: Pride of ownership. Craftsmanship. Completion. Most people with Dirty Jobs can look back at their day and see a visible difference directly related to their efforts. They earn their blisters. Lumberjacks, fishermen, garbage men – when the dust settles, they can actually see the fruits of their labor. That's missing in a lot of white-collar jobs.
DC: What doesn't kill you makes you stronger?
MR: Something like that. Overcoming adversity, in any form, is satisfying. Convenience and technical advancement make us more efficient, but rob us of the satisfaction we used to get from accomplishing a physical feat. I just spent 12 hours with a well-driller in Tennessee. At the end of the day, I was tired, wet, bruised and incoherent. But there was a 250-foot hole where there had been nothing that morning. I was just a hole, but it was my hole. I felt like I did something.
DC: Everyone on your show, even you, appears to be having a fun, even when things look miserable.
MR: By and large, people with dirty jobs know how to enjoy themselves. They're more balanced than white-collar folk, and more fun to be around. No offense.
DC: None taken. I take "soft and lazy" as a compliment.
MR: Good. That's how I meant it.
DC: Do you see the people on your show as "heroes"?
MR: No. TV is good at transforming regular people into something artificial. Sometimes it's a hero. Other times, it's a "straight man." Both do a disservice to the subject, as well as the viewer, and I try not to let that happen on Dirty Jobs.
