The Future of Work w/ Derek Thompson #818

Join us for a wide-ranging conversation with our guest today, Derek Thompson. We’re big fans of his work so it hardly seems necessary to introduce him, but he’s a senior editor over at The Atlantic where he’s been for 15 years and has since been recognized for his narratives on topics like the future of work and the science of popularity. The latter of which led to the book "Hit Makers," a best-seller that delves into the secret histories of pop culture hits and the dynamics of what makes something popular. Derek also hosts the podcast Plain English, offering weekly insights into the latest news, the things he’s most interested in, and important issues that our society faces today- like the changing views of what work should and shouldn’t be. We also discuss Derek’s craft beer equivalent, the intersection of the board game Ticket To Ride and higher ed, the vibecession, polarization in media, the decline of workism, the rise of AI in the workplace, and more!

 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to had to Money. I'm Joel and I am
Matt and today we're talking the future of work with
Derek Thompson.

Speaker 2 (00:25):
That's right, Yeah, So we are undoubtedly going to have
a wide ranging conversation with our guest today, Derek Thompson.
We are big fans of his work. It hardly seems
necessary to introduce him, but he is a senior editor
over at The Atlantic. I think he's been there for
around fifteen years now and has since been recognized for
his work his narratives on topic like the future of

(00:45):
work and the science of popularity. His notable book, Hit
Makers that was a bestseller that delves into the secret
histories of pop culture, hits and the dynamics of what
makes something popular. But Derek also hosts the podcast Plain English,
which I rarely missed an episode of personally, where he
offers weekly insights into the latest news things he's most

(01:05):
interested in, as well as important issues that our society
faces today, like the changing views of what work should
and shouldn't be. So that's what we'll be talking about today.
Maybe we'll touch on the Vibe session. Plenty more to
cover today with you, Derek. Thank you for joining us.

Speaker 3 (01:21):
Great to be here, Thank you guys.

Speaker 1 (01:22):
Of course. Yeah. Okay. First question we ask anybody who
comes on the show, Derek, is what do they like
to splurge on? Because Matt and I we drink craft beer.
Sometimes it's a little expensive and people might say, wait,
but you guys are supposed to be frugal. Why are
you spending so much on beer? And it's because that's
our craft beer equivalent. Everybody has one something they splourage
on while they're being smart, they're saving and investing for
the future. So what's yours?

Speaker 3 (01:42):
Mine is wine. There's absolu no question that mine. That
wine is my luxury item. When my wife or anybody
else asks me what do I want for my birthday?
I say, please, don't get me anything that I can't
finish in one night. Make it a bottle of wine,
or make it a bottle of ribon, which I tend
not to finish in one night because that would be
extremely dangerous. But I suppose if you invite enough people

(02:03):
over to your house to share in the bottle of
burb and it's possible. But seriously, the only thing I
spend money on our liquids, essentially alcoholic liquids. I love wine.
It's incredibly important to me. My dad, my late dad
had passed away a few years ago, was a wine
critic for the Washington Post. That was his side job
to being a lawyer in Washington, d C. Got introduced
to wine when I was a really young kid, and

(02:25):
I wish I could tell you that I liked all
different kinds of wine and you know, could totally drink
the cheap stuff and enjoy it. I have an incredibly
annoying palette, as they say, I think even describing saying
the word palce probably annoying itself. I really like fancy wine,
and I love spending money on it. And you know,
my wife and I this is maybe a longer ranch

(02:46):
than you were prepared for, because wine is such an
important indulgence.

Speaker 4 (02:49):
MA go them.

Speaker 1 (02:50):
I love it.

Speaker 3 (02:51):
My wife and I have a saying in our household
that you know, sometimes it'll be like a Tuesday or Wednesday,
nothing in particular will be important happening, there's no birthday,
no anniversary, but we'll just feel like really great it
will have had like maybe just like a great day,
or just be in a particularly good mood, and we'll
really want to open up a bottle of really nice wine.
And we used to sometimes think, oh, you know, like
opening up, like, you know, a fifty to sixty seventy

(03:12):
dollars bottle of wine on a Tuesday makes no sense
because they need to finish the whole thing. That's like
so much money to spend on, you know, for nothing.
But now we have a saying in our household, which is,
drink the wine. Whenever we feel excited and giddy about
the world, even if it's a Tuesday or Wednesday of
no import we say, what the heck, drink the wine.

(03:32):
And yeah, Wine's incredibly important to me, and I love
spending too much money on it.

Speaker 4 (03:37):
I love it?

Speaker 1 (03:37):
Okay. Two followup questions on that. If I came over
to your house and I brought over a bottle of
Kirkland's signature wine, Yeah, how would you feel about that?
Would you automatically turn me away? And two? Is it
possible to get good wine in the twenty dollars bottle range?

Speaker 3 (03:48):
Number two, I'll answer them in the opposite door of
the usk them. Absolutely as possible to get great bottles
of wine in the twenty dollar range. I think it's
easier for whites I think it's easier for you know,
whites like Shin and Blae that aren't like you know, Chardonnay,
things that go up to the moon in terms of
price because they tend to be grown really highly out
and app and Sonoma. But absolutely it's easy to get good,

(04:09):
often great twenty dollar bottles of wine. You just have
to work in varietals that aren't you know, the biggies.
You're probably not going to get a fantastic twenty dollars
cab from California. But if you're talking about something like granache,
or you're talking about maybe a Spanish wine, Italian wine,
absolutely you can get fantastic stuff from the twenty dollars range.
And then first, what would happen if you brought over

(04:31):
Kirkland Select or something. Well, look, I remember I once
with my grandmother. To give you a sense of how
much I drink and how much my family drinks, we
want sa a vodka test. My grandmother loves vodka. She's
ninety six years old, and we did a vodka test
with us. She had some Belvitere and some Gray Goose
and some Kirkland Select and some regular Kirkland and we
tried all the various vodkas and she, like Kirkland, select

(04:52):
the best that was for vodka. As for wine, I
think I would smile politely and say thank you if
I thought that maybe you didn't realize what you had bought.
But if I knew you better, I'd think you're probably
probably playing a prank on me, and I would laugh
and ask you to jrug the whole thing before you
stepped into my house.

Speaker 2 (05:13):
What's funny is like you mentioned the kirk Sig vodka
and the rumor is is that it's great. Curious is
the maker of the French vodka. So yeah, good to
know that Joel can't bring over a bottle of.

Speaker 1 (05:24):
Josh over to Derek's house.

Speaker 2 (05:27):
Derek, you're your writing it tends to operate in a
bunch of different topics, like across a broad spectrum, but
like it also kind of feels like there is a
common thread in all of your work. Like when I
think about your writing, it seems like like we live
in a disorderly kind of chaotic world, and I feel
like a lot of your writing it tries to bring
some sort of order to the world that we live in.
Like I guess what I'm asking is, do you have

(05:49):
like a mission statement behind your writing or are you
more or less just sort of following your curiosities.

Speaker 3 (05:54):
I'm absolutely glad about my curiosity, and if you can
see a thread that connects my work, that makes one
of us. I'm not entirely sure that I operate within
anything like the strictures of a beat. I'm very, very
very lucky in both my writing life at The Atlantic
and my podcasting life at The Ringer that I can

(06:15):
pretty much write whatever I want, and I do write
just about whatever I want. Working on an article right
now for The Atlantic about the history of work, working
on a podcast right now about NYU psychologists research into
how social media warps our brains and our sense of reality.
I'm interested in doing future podcasts right now on the
future of cancer research and health fads. I'm sort of

(06:40):
interested in the world, and I like the concept of
sense making, as you put it. I like the idea
that my job is to investigate mysteries in the world,
and that's pretty much what I see my job as
being to find important mysteries that affect a lot of
people in the world and to do my best to
make sense of them.

Speaker 1 (07:00):
I remember hearing you talk about getting the job offer
at the Atlantic and the kind of convoluted the way
that went down, and you ended up getting at least
to start out with. I know you've branched out since then,
but you ended up getting the economics speak and it
was like what you most didn't want to write about?
Why was that?

Speaker 4 (07:15):
Well?

Speaker 3 (07:15):
I was given right. So I'm twenty two years old
to twenty three years old at the Atlantic and I'm
basically an intern at the time, and they come up
to me in the eighth floor, which is where the
sort of communications interns sat, and they said, hey, do
you want to write for the Atlantic dot com for
the economics desk? And my first answer was absolutely not.
I don't know anything about economics. I grew up in

(07:37):
the Washington, DC area, and when we got the Washington
Post every single week, the only section of that newspaper
that I would throw in the trash was the business section.
I was interested in everything in the world except for
business and economics. And so I told them no, like,
please don't make me do this. I'll embarrass you and
I won't have a good time doing it. And they
were great about it. They said, look, we think you

(07:57):
can do it. And the truth is, if you're bad
at this will just fire you back to your old job.
So the opportunity cost of taking this position is absolutely zero.
So I gave it a shot and ended up realizing,
you know, to my own surprise, that economics was for
me a really useful lens through which to see the world.
I write about macroeconomics quite a bit, and podcasts about

(08:17):
macroeconomics quite a bit. I'd say that my interests are
more wide ranging than simply economic, But there's ways in
which economics. I think it's provided a useful lens because it,
at least in the way that I looked at it,
economics was the study of how people live and how
the incentives of their life influenced their life. And when

(08:40):
you think about economics from a really abstract level like that,
well it opens up a lot of fields of interests
that have nothing to do with specific businesses.

Speaker 1 (08:49):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (08:50):
I think I saw that you are like a triple
major in Northwestern and economics wasn't one of them.

Speaker 3 (08:54):
So I should say the triple major thing is a
little bit BS, so I would Yeah, I got it,
I got it. Yeah. First off, it was a Quinn
double major. How So I went to the journalism school,
the Middle School of Journalism, and they encourage everybody, just
for everybody, to get a double major. So I double
majored in political science. I should hasten to say, I

(09:17):
don't think political science it is a very useful major.
I've joked before that practically all the classes that I
took seemed to be about why World War One happened,
and the answer to all those classes is we don't know.
So I didn't get a whole lot out of my
political science major. And towards the end of my four
years at Northwestern, which I overall loved, I thought that
I might want to be a lawyer, and so I
picked up legal studies as a third major. And it

(09:39):
was one of these majors where you can take a
few seminars and write a thesis, then double count a
lot of other classes, then get credit for a third major.
This is probably not the you know, disquisition you wanted
on triple major. But basically I thought I wanted to
be a lawyer because I thought that being a lawyer
meant acting like Lieutenant Danny Caffey and a few good
men as played by Tom Cruise.

Speaker 1 (10:00):
That's exactly what it's like, right.

Speaker 3 (10:02):
A lawyer's job is just to scream at Jack Nicholson
and then get clapped at. And it turned out very
quickly that that was not what a lawyer's job was,
and so I decided to sort of abandon the lawyer
path and stuck with journalism.

Speaker 2 (10:13):
Well again, it makes sense you growing up there in DC.
But yeah, it sounds like, do you ever play man?
This is such a tangent, but do you ever play
a Ticket to Ride board game?

Speaker 3 (10:21):
Oh? Hell yeah, I love Ticket to Ride?

Speaker 2 (10:22):
Okay, So Derek, this is you getting that legal studies agree?
Was you drawing other routes and realizing that all you
had to do is build one more train segment and
all of a sudden you have like at coast kind
of yeah, I don't.

Speaker 3 (10:32):
Know if you guys have played Ticket to Ride the
European version, but all you really have to do is
just build through like sort of modern Siberia Poland, Like
you have to dominate in the northeast, right, The Northeast
essentially was my journal was was my journalism. I realized
that's where I really needed to extend my train line,
and all those tiny little rails in the center of
you know, Western Europe, where you know it's it's big cities,

(10:54):
it's attractive, but you realize you're not getting a lot
of points from them. That was legal studies, major.

Speaker 2 (10:57):
Just stay away from London, no matter better. Okay, let's
talk about money finally and not board games. But what
is your take on where the economy stands right now?
Because it seems like a lot might depend on your
stage of life, Because if you purchased a car, if
you purchased a home, say five years ago, you're thinking, oh,
the economies, it's great, everything's firing on all cylinder.

Speaker 1 (11:17):
Lot equity and low interest rate.

Speaker 2 (11:19):
But if you missed out, like that period of time
was such like a golden window for folks to enter
into adulthood. So I'm curious of your overall thoughts on
sort of I guess the vibe session and how folks
are feeling about the economy.

Speaker 3 (11:31):
Yeah, let me try to do a really quick summary
on how I see the economy right now. And we
can do bad news first and good news second. So
bad news inflation is coming down, but it's still positive.
And inflation describes the rate of change in prices. So
when the rate of changing prices goes from a really
high number to a less high number, that means that
prices are still getting higher, and prices still are really

(11:53):
very much above where they were four years ago. In
things like groceries. Also, interest rates are elevated, and so
if you are a addle class person buying a lot
of groceries, and especially if you are looking to buy
a new car, lease a new car, buy a new house, well,
then the economy is really tough for you right now.

Speaker 4 (12:09):
Because lots of prices in the.

Speaker 3 (12:11):
Economy are high. Your wage might not have grown very much.
We'll talk a little bit more about the stratification of
wage growth by inflation in just a second. But if
you're trying to buy a house, you're trying to buy
a bit ticket item like a house or a car,
interest rates are high enough that that's a really really
expensive thing, and so you're going to kind of feel
locked out of that part of the economy because of
higher interest rates. Now, here's the good thing. Wages overall

(12:32):
are growing faster than inflation, and they have been for
just about a year. They're growing fastest at the bottom,
and they're growing slowest toward the top. So this is
a pretty good economy if you are a lower income
worker who does not necessarily need to find a new apartment,
find a new home. Your wages have been growing, you've
been able to trade up for a lot of you know,

(12:54):
trade out, maybe from a low paying service sector job
to a higher paying service sector job. And if you
don't have to find a new apartment, you can stay
and the department that you have, and you haven't had
to suffer the same kind of retinflation. We've seen wage
growth be positive compared to inflation. Unemployment is unbelievably low.
Inequality is falling because low wage workers are getting raises

(13:16):
faster than high wage workers, and productivity is growing. Plus
you have the strong equity growth over the last few
years if you do own, so you know, in a way,
it's kind of like there's you know, obviously, the economy
is not just one thing. It's three hundred and thirty
million people's experience of an environment and of different prices

(13:37):
in different states, in different places. If you own, if
you are a highest income worker, this is a pretty
good economy for you. But if you're trying to break
into the housing market and you're still relying and you know,
sort of not making as much money as you want to,
and you're suffering from grocery inflation. It's a much harder economy,

(14:00):
very good in some ways, not as good a oothers.

Speaker 1 (14:02):
You said we're gonna start with bad news, and then
pretty quickly we got into good news, and you had
a litany of good news. And it feels like the
difference between perception and reality, at least from where I'm sitting,
have never been farther apart. And the doumeristic tendencies right like,
they are just significant right now. There was some new
recent study in Nature magazine saying like that the most

(14:23):
dumeristic headlines with the pessimistic outlook got more clicks. There's
like this incentive too, I think, from the media to
talk about what's bad sometimes even when things are overwhelmingly good.
And I think maybe that colors how we perceive things
and maybe how we even think about our own lives.
So I don't know, do you think that's true? And

(14:44):
how do you square the actual reality on the ground,
the largely positive economic numbers, with how people are feeling
about things.

Speaker 3 (14:52):
It's a great question, and it's one that I've wrestled
with quite a bit. I don't think there's any value
to or, let me put a bit differently, I think
there is limited value to telling people who are having
a negative experience in the economy that they're wrong. People's
experience is their life, and if they're experiencing hardship, then

(15:14):
there's no point in saying, well, you're not actually experiencing
hardship because look at these productivity numbers. You're not actually
experiencing hardship, because look at this unemployment rate. Parts of
his hardship. That said, I do think that a lot
of the general pessimism of the economy is what my
friend kylela Scanlon calls a vibe session rather than something
that is like a recession. While Street Journal recently had

(15:36):
a study where they ask people in swing states to
estimate the or excuse me to express their sentiment of
the quality of the economy where they lived in their
state and the equality of the national economy. In every
single state, their assessment of the economy was positive, and
in every single state their assessment of the national economy
was negative. And this feeds into a phenomenon that I

(15:59):
have just described in a previous essay as everything's terrible,
but I'm fine. That is, there seems to be some
psychology at work whereby our attitude or sentiment gets more
negative the more national or universal we're asked to reflect

(16:20):
on the world.

Speaker 1 (16:21):
It's kind of like how we hate Congress but love
our own congress.

Speaker 3 (16:24):
Person absolutely, Or we think America's school system is going
to hell in a handbasket, but how's your own school? Oh,
we quite love it for young Tommy. I think there's
a lot of ways in which our assessment of our
own lives tends to be more positive because of resilience
and because of experience, and our assessment of the world

(16:45):
is mediated by the news media, and as you pointed out,
there's some NYU research that suggests that the news media
has a negativity bias in parts, by the way, because
news audiences have a negativity bias, and so as news
media is clamoring to get attention, they realize that the
cliche is true. If it bleeds, it leads, or more precisely,

(17:09):
I suppose I don't know how to make this rhyme,
but if it.

Speaker 4 (17:11):
Bleeds, she will clip.

Speaker 3 (17:13):
People tend to when they see a five alarm fire
feel their attention gravitate toward it, And in a way,
I don't want to sort of open up too many
tabs here, but in a way, I think that this
goes to the fact that I think we are, or
our attention is dis evolved for the world we live in.
I think that we're probably evolved to have our attention

(17:35):
gravitate to bad news. After all, if you're a hunter
gatherer on the savannah, and you see a bunch of
things that look fine, and then one thing that looks
like it's really not fine, right, like maybe the head
of a panther or tiger that's about to kill you, Okay,
we should clearly pay attention to the danger in your environment.

(17:55):
And I think in the same way, readers on the
internet are attuned to negativity for the same evolutionary impulse,
and news media have queued into this negative impulse and
just flooded the scene with negative news stories. And that's why,
to go to the first question that you asked, I

(18:17):
think our impression of our own lives, which is mediated
only by our own experience, has been more positive, while
our impression of the country, which is mediated by actual
news media can's been more negative.

Speaker 2 (18:28):
It's interesting how it's something that is programmed into our mind.
It's essentially being used against us in order to generate
clicks and to generate ad revenue. But you're saying that
it's being decided upon by media or legacy media. But
also not to go down another tangent here, but social
media and you kind of touched on this how it's
warping our view, but the actual algorithms and what it

(18:51):
is that we're being fed. It continues to polarize individuals,
whether I think it's negative, maybe sometimes in positive ways what.

Speaker 1 (18:59):
They choose to amplify as often the angriest was it's
the angriest, it's the most violent. It's the things.

Speaker 2 (19:04):
I mean, like I constantly I still get fed a
bunch of like car wreck videos, and I'm like, what
is it that the algorithm thinks about me?

Speaker 1 (19:11):
That I want to see this?

Speaker 2 (19:13):
But it's hard for me to look away because who
gets It's difficult.

Speaker 3 (19:15):
And it's also difficult, you know, not that everyone should
cry for news media editors, but it is difficult for
us to resist that impulse. Right, Like every day journalists
across the country, around the world obviously wake up and
think not only what stories will I pay attention to,
but also how will I present the truth or at

(19:37):
least my reporting of those stories. And if every single
day journalists operating in a scarce and declining industry are
fearful for their own jobs and their organization's ability to
eke out an existence an incredibly competitive ecosystem, if every

(19:59):
day they think, well, we're going to get more clicks
and more attention and more subscribers if we frame the
world negatively, what you're going to get is news media
that over time optimizes towards negativity. And I mean that
very literally optimizes towards negativity, because I think that sometimes

(20:20):
there's this mis understanding that negativity in news is a mistake.
Of course, in a way, I think that negativity bias
is bad for accurate representations of reality. But in many
ways it represents a kind of optimization of engagement. And
that's really that's the issue here. In a way, the

(20:43):
best way to represent the world clearly and honestly is
to resist that kind of optimization. It's to be suboptimal
in terms of getting people's attention. That's very, very difficult
to ask any one news organization to do. To essentially
embrace what they understand to be a suboptimal strategy.

Speaker 1 (21:02):
How do you think the fracturing of the media space
is impacting how we encounter news and kind of the
world around us because the substatification of everything, the podcastification
of everything, is really changing where we go to get
access to the things that we then we need to know,

(21:23):
And in some ways maybe we're entering into more of
an echo chamber, but in other ways it's also I
think allowing for certain news organizations to flourish in a
way that they weren't able to before. Some of the
individuals or small organizations that create, you know, newsletters that
are reaching hundreds of thousands of people even at this
point and are kind of taking a different tact, Like

(21:44):
I'm just curious, what's your take on that.

Speaker 3 (21:45):
Abuttons of media is good in so many ways. I
think in the nineteen sixties, nineteen fifties, when news media
was much more scarce, when uncle when you know, Uncle
Walter Kronkite reached whatever it was, sixty seventy million Americans
a single night. We think that as the golden age
of media, but in many ways, it was a dark
age of media. It was an age where only a
handful of voices commanded our understanding of reality and truth.

(22:09):
I don't think that's optimal. I think as a news consumer,
I would much prefer a world that is like the
world that I live in, where I can listen to
a podcast the morning from some of the smartest, funniest
commentators on sports, and then read an article by a
brilliant foreign policy analyst. I mean, nothing like that riotous
abundance of expertise was available before the advent of the

(22:33):
Internet sort of created this Cambrian explosion of news outlets.
But that riotous abundance I think has costs, And one
of the costs is this that competition is antagonistic. And
by that I mean if you have a news environment

(22:54):
with ten thousand economic business and finance podcasts and you're
trying to break in to this field, the best way
to break in really is to be antagonistic. Is to say,
these big guys who've been in this business for a while,
they're wrong. You know, this person that you listen to
for finance, and this person you listen to for economic news,

(23:16):
they don't know what they're talking about. I'll tell you
the truth, right, that's the way to break in is
to be antagonistic. But if everyone does this, what it
does on net is create extraordinary everyone loves. It's a
little bit like everything's terrible, but I'm fine. Everyone loves
their own news source but believes that quote the media

(23:39):
capital T capital M is always lying to them. And
so I do think that there's a way in which
the abundance of media might lead somewhat linearly to an
increase in distrust and increase in conspiracy theorizing, and a
decrease in a shared sense of reality. And I'm not
entirely sure that that's good for us. And so this

(23:59):
is why I just sort of round out the answer.
I think that the evolution of news toward abundance has
been very complicated in terms of netting out whether it's
good or bad. On the one hand, we have more
direct access to expertise than we've ever had before, and
that's awesome for a diletan dish news consumer like me.
But at the same time, I think we have to

(24:21):
utterly give up on the idea that we're ever going
to have something like shared reality in America. It's just
not going to happen again.

Speaker 2 (24:28):
No more wanting for what used to exist, because yeah,
there's no going back, no putting the genie back in
that bottle. Derek, Okay, we're not only going to talk
about media. We are actually going to talk about the
future of work and talk about labor markets. We'll get
to that more right after the break.

Speaker 1 (24:49):
Our we're back to the break still talking with Derek Thompson.
We're talking about the future of work. Let's talk about
work now, because that is a topic, Derek, that you
focus on regularly. I'm curious, I want to kind of
start this off. Maybe can you talk about the uniqueness
of Americans and our country and how we view and
think about work. It seems like our approach to work
differs largely from so much of the rest of the world.

Speaker 3 (25:11):
There's absolute no question that Americans are the worker bees
of the Western world. There's really no other country in
the West that is as rich as the US that
works more than the US. It should be said that
over time, Americans have worked less and less. The typical
American worker in the late nineteenth century three thousand hours

(25:35):
a year. Today he or she works closer to seventeen
hundred eighteen hundred hours a year, and that difference, right,
working thirteen hundred hours less a year, that's the equivalent
of like one hundred and fifty vacation days the typical
nine to five worker. So we don't work like we
did during the Second Industrial Revolution, but nonetheless we do
work a lot more than other countries. And I think
you hear this experience sometimes when you talk to immigrants

(25:58):
when they come from Europe to the they say that
there really isn't the same cultural centering of work in
Europe that there is in America. And I think that
this is a complicated blessing. On the one hand, I
think that the centrality of work in America is one
reason why we tend to have so many of the
largest companies in the world. Like, if you look at

(26:18):
the biggest companies in the US, their average age is
like forty fifty years. It's a lot of companies that
were built in nineteen seventies, eighties, two thousands, you know,
Apple and Microsoft and Meta. If you look at the
biggest countries in Europe, a lot of them are from
like the early twentieth, late nineteenth century. They're really really old.
And so I think that this love of work feeds

(26:40):
into and maybe it's intertwined with its entrepreneurial spirit that
I think is quite lovely. But I also think that
over work, or what I sometimes call workism, which is
sort of the you know, centering of work in one's
life and treating one's career like it's a religion, also
has a lot of downsides. So, you know, I think
all the time about, like you know, is American's relationship
with work good or bad for us? And like so
many things that I report on, it is complicated and

(27:02):
there are a lot of goods with the bad.

Speaker 2 (27:04):
I mean, do you think that perception towards work is changing?
Like you mentioned workism, right, it makes me think of
younger generations view towards work. It makes me think of
the bill that Bertie Sanders proposed, the thirty two hour
work week, where that's going to be something that's mandated.
It seems like that there is this cultural shift that's
taking place. So like, yeah, it's a double edged sword.
It's being wielded as something that is good but also

(27:25):
something that's negative.

Speaker 3 (27:26):
I think that's good to it. I think that there's
negative to it, And I also think to the first
thing you said, it's true that it's possible that attitudes
toward work are changing across generations. Right when I wrote
my initial essay on the phenomenon that I called workism,
I was looking at a lot of data that centered
on workers between the nineteen eighties and the two thousands,

(27:50):
And essentially what the data I was looking at found
was that while you know throughout the world and throughout
history which people have tended to work less.

Speaker 4 (27:59):
Instead, in the late.

Speaker 3 (28:01):
Twentieth century in the US and early twenty first century
in the US it was only the rich who are
working more. And I asked it, why would rich people
who can do anything with their money choose to work more. Well,
maybe it's because work is what they wanted to do
with their free time, that work had become so central
to their life and to their identity that they were
choosing to work more and creating cultures where over work

(28:24):
was being valued. I think that may have been true
for older workers, but it might be changing among young
millennials and gen z. I do think that, you know,
fear of overwork movements like anti work and the anti
work subreddit. Not that that's like it's just a subreddit
on the one hand, but I think it reflects an

(28:47):
evolution and thought. And I also think that that gen
Z with the rise of hybrid work, also someone has
a different attitude toward work and they're centering new things
in their life. What exactly it is, I'm not sure what,
but I do think it's possible that workism is on
the decline. But again, this might just be a seesaw.
It might be that gen Z that you know that
the Boomers were work as gen Z is pulling back

(29:08):
from it a bit because they don't want to be
just like their parents. But maybe you know the next
generation is going to throw itself into work even more.

Speaker 1 (29:15):
You you've mentioned that we're not as unhappy in our
work as a nation as some folks might lead us
to believe, and that because there's so many headlines I mean,
and especially in the COVID area of people like the
quiet quitting, people abandoning their jobs and saying screw this,
I hate work, I'm going to go hike for the
rest of my life or something like that, which I
and now we see more people re entering the workforce,

(29:36):
But like, why do you think we're not as unhappy
as some people might lead us to believe. I saw
the stat from Monster the other day, ninety five percent
of US workers are planning to apply or at least
look for a new job this year. So that's a
ton of people in one year who are playing That's
the vast majority of people.

Speaker 4 (29:52):
Where was that survey?

Speaker 1 (29:54):
Monster?

Speaker 3 (29:54):
Yeah, do you think they maybe have an ulterior motive
to make people think that people want to pick the job.

Speaker 1 (29:58):
That totally could be the case, right, for sure, But
it's just interesting that you might we would say people
are actually less unhappy that we might think in work.
But that also so many people, there's all these headlines
and the other stats that people are saying, I'm gonna
look for something else or I just want to work less.
All together, I.

Speaker 3 (30:15):
Think it's totally fine and predictable that most people would
be somewhat ambivalent about their job. Most people would say,
I like my job just fine, and I absolutely hope
that next year I have either a better job or
a similar job with more pey. I mean, that's just
human nature. What I find very interesting is that there
are a lot of mainstream media outlets in the general

(30:40):
business and economic space, your Wall Street journals and Fortunes
and Bloomberg's who run lots of stories every single year
pointing out how miserable they think or want us to
think the workforce is. Again, you have to go back
to the most fundamental bias of news media, which is

(31:00):
not a bias toward the left or the right. It's
a bias toward bad news. It's a bias toward negativity.
Americans are miserable at their jobs. Is a negative headline
that's going to cue the amigdala to look at it
and say, oh, that's a five alarm fire. People are
miserable somewhere in the world. I have to figure out
why and then click on it. A headline that says
most Americans are more or less fine in their jobs

(31:22):
offers no equivalent five alarm fire to the mind, and
therefore people aren't going to click on it. But if
you look at studies like Gallop or Pew or the
Conference Board, who ask Americans every single year, how do
you feel about your job? How do you feel about
your job? How do you feel about your job? Not
only are people steadily positive about their work, but at
least according to the Conference Board, I think every year
for the last decade more people have said if they're

(31:44):
happy at work. I think this is generally a good thing.
I think that it's a good thing that people are
generally happy at work, even though media headlines are consistently
trying to tell us that people are miserable. The last
thing I guess I would say about the phenomenon of
the media reporting on workplace misery is that it's just
way more fun to read about other people hating their

(32:07):
job than it is to read about other people liking
their job. I don't want to read about other people
liking their job. That's just gonna make me feel bad.
I want to read about how other people are miserable.
It works that I can feel the same way I
feel when I know that, Like you know, celebrities that
are incredibly beautiful hate each other and are breaking up
and are cheating on each other, Like I want to
feel like other people are miserable. That's a totally human instinct,

(32:27):
and I think that's also why you see news media
gravitating toward these negative headlines abou people's appreciation of their jobs.

Speaker 2 (32:33):
Okay, so what would you say then to folks? I
feel like there's been a swing from some folks saying
that like, and we've actually had Simon a on the
podcast talking about work and the role of work, stoles off.

Speaker 1 (32:48):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (32:48):
Right.

Speaker 2 (32:48):
On one hand, you've got somebody who sees their work
as something that Okay, I'm I'm ambivalent, I'm indifferent. It
allows me to pay the bills. On the other hand,
you've got the school of thought that says, oh no,
it needs to be the fulfilling thing where you find
meaning and satisfaction on multiple levels. It doesn't just provide
for you financially, but it checks all these other boxes
as well. Do you have an opinion on where an

(33:11):
individual should essentially find themselves on that spectrum.

Speaker 3 (33:14):
I think we live in an age of impossible expectations,
and that's true for so many things. You can start
with a category that has nothing to do with work.
In fact, in many ways, is the opposite, you know, marriage.
There's lots of really interesting research pointing out how our
expectations of our romantic partners are really unlike historical expectations

(33:36):
of a spouse. You know, today we expect our wife
or our husband, you know, maybe our partner, girlfriend, boyfriend,
to be sexy, to be our best friend, to be able,
to be our intellectual equal, to be stimulating, in conversation,
to be the perfect mother or father, to be the

(33:56):
perfect you know, person to clean up the house, the
person you want to follow a stately. We have all
of these expectations for a modern partner that I think
are somewhat disconnected from historical expectations of a partner. Right, So,
in romance, it is the age of impossible expectations. I
think it is also true in work that we expect

(34:18):
our jobs and our companies to be much more than
just a job or just a company. Not only do
we want our jobs more than just a job, the
whole concept of workism, which Simone picked up on in
this book is that a lot of people expect that
their jobs, through their careers, do the so called work
of religion. That it should provide meaning and a possibility

(34:40):
of transcendence, It should provide a community, It should provide
for self actualization. That you know, having a job. According
to Pew, having a job that you love is now
more important to Americans than religion or marriage is.

Speaker 4 (34:56):
So obviously, we.

Speaker 3 (34:57):
Have really high expectations of our jobs, and I would
add conclusion that we also have really high expectations of
our companies, the organizations that we work for. This is
not going to turn into any kind of political point,
but you see a lot more employees demanding that their
companies make political statements when the news cycle turns toward

(35:21):
that political topic. Whether it's the.

Speaker 4 (35:23):
War in Gaza or.

Speaker 3 (35:25):
That don't say gay law in Florida, or the bathroom
law in North Carolina, or some other political crisis of
the day, there's an expectation that certain companies and organizations
comment on that news in a way that I don't
think they were pressured on to comment on that news
twenty thirty years ago. Now what does this have to
do with wives and jobs? Well, I think we expect

(35:46):
that our companies, our in a way, do much more
than just be a company. We ask that our companies
reflect our values in the public square, so across the board.
I think in romance and in work and in politics,
I think we live in an age possible expectations, and
it just happens to also be true for our careers.

Speaker 1 (36:08):
Totally agree.

Speaker 2 (36:08):
Yeah, Like someone's probably thinking, I just we just want
to make tires, Like you don't necessarily need to make
a statement when it comes to.

Speaker 1 (36:14):
Israel and wa sir.

Speaker 2 (36:16):
Yeah, But to play Devil's advocate, though, I do think
because you recently, like I guess a couple of weeks
ago at this point, you wrote about just the decline
in religion and like, essentially it's an institution, and to
a certain extent, like I think our workplace can provide
a sense of community and the sense of belonging that

(36:38):
I think a lot of folks are missing out on,
especially like in earlier you mentioned hybrid work, and just
as more folks are shifting to working from home full time,
I do think that there is a sense of identity
that folks are missing out on that in the past,
they had some sort of shared reality that you talked about,
right how there's no longer going to be that sort
of shared reality. But I think it's because of this
atomization that's taking place of individuals as they stepped away

(37:00):
from different institutions.

Speaker 1 (37:02):
Are you what are your thoughts there?

Speaker 3 (37:03):
You're talking about community and community is a hard thing
to define. But the best way it was ever defined
to me is that community is where you keep showing up.
And you think, where do Americans keep showing up these days?
Is it a church?

Speaker 4 (37:18):
Well?

Speaker 3 (37:18):
Last year, for the first time in American history, if
here than half the Americans said they go to a
house of worship regularly. Okay, so it's not church anymore.
Is it the bowlding leagues? Well, no, Robert Putnam talked
about the demise of bowling leagues and various organizations and
associations the nineteen nineties. Is it a school Well, Interestingly,

(37:39):
school absences have doubled since COVID. It seems like, you know,
a lot of both parents and students feel like school
isn't a place where kids necessarily need to show up
the same at the same rate that they previously showed up.
You know, what is the last community standing? Well, for
a lot of people, the last community standing is the office.
And by community again, I just mean where people keep

(38:00):
showing up. So in many ways, I think the office
was not necessarily built, or our work, our company is
not necessarily built to be the last community standing. They
just happen to become the last community standing because every
other community pretty much has wilted away in the last
thirty years. But that's not a defense of the workplace community.
That is an acknowledgment that work, for many people has

(38:23):
just become maybe the last community that exists for them,
and I see that maybe, as you know, for some people, wonderful,
I loved the people that I've worked with, and I've
definitely made a community, But for a lot of other people,
I think that that's sort of a sad thing to
fall into.

Speaker 1 (38:36):
Yeah, No, I think you're right. One of the things
you're pointing to as well is maybe, in some ways,
at least in the previous answer, we're talking about how
we're putting more of our eggs in the work basket.
We're like giving it more credence, more say over our
lives and how we feel, and that is maybe the
last baschon of the community that so many people have,
and they're losing that too as they're working from home more.
You've talked you've kind of like talked about that as

(38:57):
the worship of work, and you've talked to negatively about that,
but you've also admitted that you engage in it. So
I'm curious how you reconcile kind of that reality, that duality,
and if you've changed your approach to work after all
the thought you've given to this subject, plus the fact
that you're a dad now that changes everything, right, I mean,
I know I'm completely rethinking how much of my efforts,

(39:18):
my time, my mental faculties go to my work versus
to my family. What does that look like for you?

Speaker 3 (39:25):
So I wrote this essay on the religion of workism
several years ago, and I'm proud of it, but I
also think I mildly disagree with it for the following reason.
I think I came down very, very hard on the
idea that workism was mostly making people miserable, and now

(39:47):
I feel more ambivalent, ambivalently about the possibility that work
provides a really important ballast for lots of people, and
that in the absence of work, lots of people can
really struggle to find something else to fill their life. Now,
it doesn't mean that work is the best thing to

(40:09):
put at the center of your life. It's rather to
acknowledge that in a country where community is generally in
decline and association is generally in decline, we need something
to keep us together. We need some kind of organizing
principle to consistently connect us to people. And if we're

(40:30):
gonna have fewer book clubs, and we're gonna have fewer churches,
and we're gonna have fewer unions, and we're gonna have
fewer neighborhood associations, Well, then what's gonna be that binding principle?
And if for some people that thing turns out to
be work and they like their job, and I should
point out that, you know, jobs in general are a
lot more fun certainly than they were like one hundred

(40:51):
and fifty years ago, you know, when you know, common
jobs were like, you know, going out on the sea
to kill a sperm whale and then crack open its
skull and climb inside and get the pus you need
to you know, light lamps in the street.

Speaker 1 (41:03):
At least in theory, that sounds awesome, but I don't
want to really actually do.

Speaker 3 (41:06):
Yeah, right, and it does reading about it is awesome, right,
So yeah, we can have comfy jobs where we talk
on podcasts and then read Moby Dick in an air
condition room rather than actually have to go out and
get our boat.

Speaker 4 (41:16):
Crushed by a huge spirm whale.

Speaker 3 (41:18):
Yeah, And so I think I think that's there's lots
of ways in which I think the phenomenon of centering
work can for some people be really important. I'll say,
as a personal note, you know, I lost both my
parents to cancer in my twenties, and you know, one
of the difficult things about grief is that it so
utterly discombobulates your life. And one of the things that

(41:40):
I found most helpful. I think a lot of things
people find most helpful about getting over a major loss
in their life is returning to some kind of regular routine,
and having work be the anchor of that routine actually,
in many ways made me happier. I think it's pretty rare.
I think to hear that having a job helped you
get over but there's no question that having a routine

(42:02):
helps people get over grief, and work is an important
routine that helps to anchor people's lives. So that's a
long winded and somewhat personal way of saying that I
think I might have gotten aspect of the work is
a thesis a little bit too negative that I do
think that a religion that centers work is probably not
good for people's souls. But having work be a really
important core part of your life can absolutely be part

(42:24):
of a of a balanced and wonderful and rich life,
even when, as I do, even when you become a
father and just want to spend all your time, you know,
snuggling with your adorable, chubby eight.

Speaker 1 (42:34):
Month old and sometimes that's fun and then you want
to get back to work too, so you.

Speaker 3 (42:38):
Know what, yes, yeah, I mean right, like five hours
of snuggling an a month old who can't talk is like,
you know, thirty minutes is really fun, and it's twenty
five minutes. You know, you have three hours, three and
a half hours. Sometimes you're like, okay, I'd like to
sort of diversify my day a little bit, you know,
refresh the joy of you know, squeezing this little baby.
You go to work and then come.

Speaker 1 (42:56):
Ver I speak, you appreciate it all that much more.
Twenty four to seven cuddles sounds like over yes, yeah.

Speaker 2 (43:00):
Recently, Jill and now we're talking about let's too just rhythms,
like you're saying, and you're talking about with the rhythm
of work, but even just the rhythms of movement and
coming back from spring break. We were both sharing how
you know, it's good, but it's also really good to
be woken up by your alarm at five forty five, Yeah,
and to kind of get on with your day and
doing the things not only that you love, but the
things that also bring you health. But Derek We've got
just a couple more questions that we want to get to. Specifically,

(43:21):
we're gonna touch on AI. We'll get to that and more.
Right after this, we're back still talking with Derek Thompson.
We're talking about work and Derek, thanks, thank you for
just kind of getting personal with in that response to
that last question.

Speaker 1 (43:41):
That totally. I think there's a lot of truth that
people feel to that that sometimes even there's a maybe
a negative attachment to some parts of work, but there's
a positive attachment in other ways. And I think we
all feel that. But let's talk about the future of
work real quick. Like everyone is asking the question about AI.
How's AI going to change the way we work? This
is something that you have dedicated some of your thinking

(44:02):
and writing to as well. I guess I'm curious where
do you think things stand right now? It feels like
actually things have calmed down for a second, because maybe,
like a year and a half ago, a lot of
freak out about AI and how it's going to impact
all of us, Maybe people aren't as worried right now,
Like where do things stand on that front?

Speaker 3 (44:17):
Before I went on book leave, I wrote a piece
that at the time I thought might not hold up
very well, but in retrospect, I think has held up
pretty well. Which the headline of which was AI as
a waste of time, And what I meant was not
that AI is the genitive AI at Chatchabt and Claude
three from Anthropic, not that they are a waste of

(44:37):
time for everybody, but that one way to understand the
majority of use of these genitive AI tools for people
that maybe don't work in computer programming, where I think
it's just become a kind of permanent copilot. He said,
a lot of people are just sort of playing around
with this thing, and that's fine. You know, lots of
important products. The computer, for example, starts off as a
kind of toy and then evolves to become something that

(45:01):
is central to our working lives. But the truth is
that I don't think I think it is still too
early to say exactly how and where artificial intelligence is
going to change the world. Just two specific thoughts that
I have about that sort of that frontier, maybe like
the edge of the present. One is I am really

(45:22):
curious about AI and medicine. There are lots of scientists
that are using protein folding tools and large language model
tools to essentially speed run the search for molecules that
can bind with certain proteins do certain things in our
bodies that can make us healthier, or fight diseases or

(45:46):
cure cancer. And I'm really interested in at least trying
to stay at that frontier to understand how we're using
these tools to discover new medicines. The second thing that
I read recently, and this came from Ethan Mallick, who's
a really brilliant AI writer, has a substack I leave

(46:06):
called one Useful Thing, and just wrote a book called
co Intelligence, and he has a section in that book
about cointelligence where he talks about how AI might change
the career pathway. He says that, you know, a lot
of young people start off learning skills that are very
very basic, and they move from those basic skills sort

(46:27):
of the one oh one skills to the one O
two skills, to the two oh one skills, the three
on one skills. But one way to think about what
chat GPT is good at is that it's good at
being like one hundred entry level employees at once. Right.
It does the work essentially of like one hundred entry
level employees. It's not a great CEO, but it's a
really great research assistant. Well, what happens to the career

(46:51):
path as lots of the work previously assigned to twenty
two and twenty three year olds turns out to be
more efficiently done by having maybe just one twenty three
year old or maybe just one twenty five year old
working with CHATGBT, Right, maybe rather than hire ten twenty
two year olds, you hire one twenty four year old
and give them genitive AI and that's and that does

(47:14):
the same work. That really changes the entry level path
for a lot of different companies. And so I'm interested
both both sector by sector with the changes, but also
a cross sectors maybe how it changes career development.

Speaker 2 (47:26):
It's interesting that you kind of refer to it as
a tool. It makes me think of like when personal
computers first came out, and so it seems to reason
that a good takeaway would be to play with these
tools in a way that maybe you are intentionally wasting
time because you're playing with it's sort of like I
did with like an Apple two whatever back in the day,
like back in the eighties, where you're just playing these
alphabet games with a snake and you have to cob.

Speaker 1 (47:48):
The letters in order.

Speaker 2 (47:49):
But it seems like you said that that over time
it will have an impact on the career path of folks,
not just for individuals who are like medical researchers, but
the ability to slowly, over time adopt to whatever it
is that AI is is going to lead different industries towards.

Speaker 1 (48:05):
Is that what you're.

Speaker 4 (48:06):
Saying, Yeah, I think that.

Speaker 3 (48:07):
Well, I think about it for my own in my
own industry, right, I'm I'm I pretend to be an
expert about many things, but I'm only really an expert
in my own life. And you know, one of my
jobs is to explain new ideas to people in ways
that they can remember and understand and then communicate again
to other people, right to get mice the software of
my ideas running on as many pieces of hardware as possible.
And jenetai is really brilliant at doing a lot of

(48:30):
the work that I think of as quite essential to
my job. You know, I'm interested in a lot of
different things, work in macroeconomics and the frontier of you know,
cancer research, and these tools are really really good at
explaining novel concepts. So like, if I don't understand what,
like you know Carti Therapy does. I can just plug
that right in to chat GBT and it can explain

(48:51):
to me what this how to you know, engineer T
cells in order to fight cancers. I'm like, oh my god, wow,
Like that's that's what Carti's cell therapy is. That's really important.
Unders and I can do the same thing for you know,
economic concepts, and so I find it very useful to
allow me to surf the world as a dileton with
this little thing in my pocket that will explain certain

(49:13):
key concepts I don't understand. Right. It's a little bit like,
you know, how if you're traveling in a foreign country
and you don't understand the language and a certain sign,
you can, you know, hold out your phone and maybe
open up like the Google app and just point it
at the sign and then it translates the Danish word
for stop into the English word stop and you're like, oh, okay,
great stop.

Speaker 4 (49:32):
Imagine that.

Speaker 3 (49:33):
But for all linguistic mysteries, for all things that you
don't understand in the world, right, to have essentially a
travel assistant that can translate the world. That's sort of
how I use these tools right now. It's a kind
of universal translator of important ideas and concepts that I
don't understand.

Speaker 1 (49:54):
Well, okay, last question for you. So when we're talking
about something like the ATM, there were all these beliefs,
beliefs that it was just going to get rid of
the need for real humans at bank locations, or like
when you talk about kind of what like kiosks, or
are we actually going to need physical employees at fast
food restaurants anywhere now? And it seems like every time,

(50:15):
at every turn, there are all these new jobs that
open up. When when new forms of technology come into being,
do you think that's going to be the case with
AI or do you think it is going to kind
of eradicate eradicate a bunch of jobs that it won't
like that won't pop up in other places.

Speaker 3 (50:30):
One thing that humankind seems to be very good at
doing is thinking of new ways to spend money, which
means thinking of new ways to employ people. Yeah, because
in it was any category in which you spend money,
someone accepting that money has money to hire people to
go their business. So you know, in the late nineteenth century,
the economy was fifty sixty percent farm workers. In the

(50:54):
nineteen sixties, the economy was thirty forty percent many fashion workers. Today,
if you add all the many facts ushing workers with
to all the farmers in America, you get less than
ten percent of the labor force. So we found a
way to take that ninety percent and turn it into
ten percent, And now the other ninety percent of the
labor force is doing stuff that we couldn't have even
imagined in the nineteenth century. I mean, how do you

(51:14):
explain the concept of computer programming, which now is the
most popular major at most of America's elite universities. How
do you explain that to someone in like eighteen sixties,
You'd be like, okay, imagine a computer. Oh okay, well,
imagine like an abacus that can do a lot of
other stuff. It's like, very very hard to do. And
we were very very good to think of new ways
to spend money. We're pretty good at inventing stuff, although

(51:35):
I wish that we were better, And so I could
always choose to say history for the next one hundred
and forty years will be like history for the last
one hundred and forty years, and we'll just find new
ways to reemploy people. It's always possible, however, that AI
will do for humans what essentially the automobile did for horses.
You know, one way to tell the story of horses

(51:58):
in horse history is to say that for thousands of years,
we came up with new technology that made horses more
powerful with each you know, every millennium, right that we
invented stirrups, and we invented horseshoes, and we invented saddles,
and we invented armor in all these different ways and plows,
you know, to make horses more and more and more productive.

(52:18):
And then finally we invented the machine that was just
better at horses, at everything, and we replaced them with
tractors and cars.

Speaker 4 (52:24):
It's conceivable that.

Speaker 3 (52:27):
Agi artificial general intelligence will do for the human mind
what the internal combustion engine did for the horse, but
that would truly be an unprecedented thing in human history,
and it's always very risky to make strong predictions about

(52:48):
utterly imprecedented things.

Speaker 2 (52:50):
Like Yeah, and what you're referring to as well, is
you're talking about like moving the goalposts, which we have
a love hate relationship with because on the personal level,
it's a terrible thing because it means we're never satisfied
but collectively, when you're talking about a general population, that
is what continues to that's progress, that's progress and innovation
and technology, and so.

Speaker 1 (53:07):
That's the part that I love. Derek.

Speaker 2 (53:10):
We really appreciate you taking the time to speak with
us today. Working folks. Find all of your different writings
of what you're up to these days.

Speaker 3 (53:16):
You can find my writing at The Atlantic. You can
listen to my podcast Plain English with Derek Thompson with
the Renuer podcast Network, and I guess you can follow
me on Twitter at dk thomp.

Speaker 1 (53:28):
There you go. All right, Derek, thanks again for joining us, man,
We really appreciate it that pleasure. Thanks us all right,
mat what a great conversation with somebody who just an
incredible thinker. And we've been reading this stuff for many,
many years. And I could have just honestly, I could
ask Derek a million questions, but if only he had
the time, right, It's true.

Speaker 2 (53:44):
Yeah, I feel like we talked a lot about media,
So hopefully folks stuck around.

Speaker 1 (53:48):
But what's your big takeaway? Is it more personal finance related?

Speaker 2 (53:51):
Is it going to be more media technology?

Speaker 4 (53:53):
AI?

Speaker 1 (53:53):
I think when he said we live in an age
of impossible expectations, I thought that was just to me
that like boom, that struck me like a ton of bricks,
And I think it's spot on. I think it really
goes to a million different things, the expectations we place
on what our job should be for us, how it
should make us feel, and the sort of way like
we expect it to place replace religion and marriage at

(54:14):
the same time, all of these things that have been
foundational to kind of how we go through life in
the past. Now work has become is taken top billing
in our lives and we expect a lot from it
and guess.

Speaker 2 (54:25):
What wasn't necessarily designed for that. It's shouldering a massive
load right now.

Speaker 1 (54:30):
Yeah, yeah, And it's not that work is bad, Like
I love how he touched on like some of those
great things that work can provide too. But that is
so true that we live in an age of impossible expectations,
and I think it's the same is true for us
on a consumption standpoint. We just think that we need
to keep moving up the ladder, and we're very rarely
content kind of with the way things currently stand. It's
always got to be the next thing, and we all Matt,

(54:50):
you and I included to find ourselves in that camp
at different points in time, like oh, you know what,
this house? Is it big enough? Like do I need
to move on up the property ladder? There's all of
these ways that we think about our lives content in
this is a hard thing for us to feel for
very long, I think as humans, and I think, yeah,
Derek eloquently discussed that when you mentioned that totally.

Speaker 2 (55:09):
Yeah, I think maybe related to that somewhat is my
big takeaway, which is going to be that he said
it's hard to be suboptimal. And this is back when
we're talking about media specifically, and how he said that
media companies or publishers or individuals have to choose to
not be the most antagonistic. And we have seen that,
Like let me just look at our political discourse over
the past four to eight years specifically, I think it

(55:31):
was mostly nice and friendly. I think the thing could
be true though, when it comes to what it is
that we are pursuing, because yes, to be more successful
quoe unquote successful in the eyes of the world is
going to lead you down a path that maybe you
don't necessarily want to go down, but to live a
life that you want to lead that that is more
important than being fully optimized essentially, and so you.

Speaker 1 (55:51):
Might have to give up to a certain degree some
of the ways you want others to perceive you. Yeah,
I totally agree.

Speaker 2 (55:56):
Yeah, I guess what we're pointing out here is the
fact that there's like a there's a conscious choice that
we have to make in order to live by the
ideals that we think are most important to us as individuals.

Speaker 1 (56:06):
Yeah, and they're not necessarily the ideals that our society
and our workism culture are proliferating, right, And so I
don't know, I'm thinking about that a lot right now,
just reading some books kind of on that very topic,
The Second Mountain by David Brooks, highly recommend it. But yeah,
if you want to live a life that is deep
with meaning, work is going to be a part of
that puzzle, I think. But you might want to find

(56:26):
community and meaning in other parts of your life too,
and in fact, yeah, you're going to need to if
you want to live that kind of life.

Speaker 2 (56:32):
Yeah, I mean, I was thinking about it somewhat through
the lens of work, but just all the other things
we do too. How it is that we consume, how
does we spend our money that we spend our time.
The things that we find interest in aren't only a
reflection of like our natural interests, but also the things
that we are intentionally placing value upon. But all right, man,
let's quickly cover the beer you and I enjoyed Long Haul.

(56:54):
This is a beer by creature comforts. This is a Doppelbock.

Speaker 1 (56:57):
Did you dig it? Yeah, found a lot of comfort
in this beer. In fact, it was delicious. I was
gonna say I had like brown bread vibes going on
for sure. Takes it like a fresh loaf coming out
of the oven. And it's also it's something I feel
like if I were to do this, which I would
go to an abbey and drink beer with monks, this
is the beer they would serve me.

Speaker 2 (57:13):
So on the label here it literally says something that
we have said before when drinking Brown Ales and Popple
Box in particular are daily bread in liquid form. And
I couldn't agree more. It's the kind of beer that
I would expect to drink fireside in an abbey because
you know, there's not there's not like central heat or
anything like that.

Speaker 1 (57:30):
Right, So you got it?

Speaker 2 (57:31):
You need to have a rage in fire going it's right,
but uh yeah, glad, you know. I got to enjoy
this one. Will make sure to link to some of
the different how about some of the different articles that
we referenced that we spoke about today with Derek and
we'll link to his profile over at The Atlantic as
well as his podcast as well, because it's fantastic. Yep,
but that's gonna be it for this episode until next time, Buddy,
best Friends Out and best Friends Out the fo