Big Technology Podcast - Is Social Media A Scapegoat For Bigger Problems? — With Charlie Warzel at Unfinished Live

Episode Date: October 13, 2021

Charlie Warzel writes the Galaxy Brain newsletter on Substack, a publication he started after a career at The New York Times and BuzzFeed. Warzel joins Big Technology Podcast in a live recording at Unfinished Live to discuss what a nuanced conversation about social media's harms should look like. Stay tuned for the second half where we discuss Warzel's views on post-Covid workplace culture, the subject Out of Office, a forthcoming book for which he is a co-author.

Hello and welcome to the big technology podcast, show for cool, had a nuanced conversation of the tech world and beyond. And this is about as special of an episode as we've had to date because we are recording live at Unfinished Live with our very special guest, a good friend of mine, a long time. colleague and now fellow media entrepreneur, Charlie Warzel. Welcome. Thank you. Thank you for having me. Thank you for being here. So you tweeted that showing up to a live event caused you to be like somewhat excited and also a little apprehensive. Talk about the emotions that are. Oh, so many emotions. I'm trying to figure out like my mask etiquette, right? Because I feel like there's, it's just this crazy kind of negotiation, right? No, I mean, this is, this is, it's, I feel like we're hitting a sweet spot right here where, you know, you had to sort of plan an event like this in, you know, times where, you know, pre-Delta, all that stuff and get people to, you know, want to come and be here.

And then we're, we have a book coming out in December and, you know, the plan is for that, me and my partner and Helen Peterson. And the book tour is, you know, slated to be virtual. So I think we're in this like kind of great little sweet. sweet spot where we can all see each other, feel good about it. And, you know, we might have to retreat to our corners for winter. So I want to get into so many things. But let's start a little bit with your biography because I'm kind of fascinated by your career trajectory. I don't know if everybody here, the masses that are on hand know about it. But it is worth going through again because, you know, we both started at the ad trades. You were at ad week. I was at ad age. Yep.

Then you went to BuzzFeed on the Tech Desk. Then I went to BuzzFeed on the tech desk. Then you got one of the most premier jobs in the media world, a job that a lot of people would be extremely jealous of and opinion writer at the New York Times, big audience, big platform. Yeah. And you left to go to Substack.

What happened, Charlie? It might have been what happened. It might have been a little like COVID madness. potentially. I left the Times in April to start a newsletter on Substack. And, you know, essentially what ended up happening for me personally was I love the times. I love the people there. I love the platform and the work. And it's, I mean, genuinely a privilege to be in an organization like that. And, you know, at the same time, working at a place like BuzzFeed really, kind of taught me how to be on or like how to want to be on the bleeding edge of like

you know the net the next thing you know like the the weird ways the internet is changing us warping evolving culture you know shaking the foundations of democracy whatever it is right and the times it I found myself in a moment sort of post-Trump you know a lot of like really interesting stuff happening in like the like the NFT craze was just kind of like you know in its media like bubble portion and it was I was I felt like there was a new like there was a next thing that was kind of happening and I felt that being in a place like the times it was really hard for me to do that work in the way that I wanted to do it the work that I was yeah yeah why don't go into that I mean it's been the whole day talking about the New York Times but yeah at least a few

minutes at the beginning makes a lot of sense. How did it limit you? And then I also am curious, did you have a moment where you had to balance the influence that you might have at a publication with that amount of reach versus just being a newsletter guy? So the way, the first part of the question, the way that it's limiting, again, like I had all this great freedom there, but you're always trying to do this thing where you're explaining to a really broad general audience.

and I was finding myself not really wanting or being that interested in those types of explanations right now. I was finding that a lot of the pieces that I was pitching were, like, didn't have, like, a thesis statement, you know? Like, there was no, like, I was trying to think out loud and, and, you know, develop my own opinions on things. I didn't have a lot of, you know, definitive, declarative ideas, you know. and and so and I was just like my work was getting longer and more sort of meandering and it was just something that really fit like the newsletter style perfect perfect yeah yeah and and I you know I what I find the work now that I'm doing is a lot more exploring these these curiosities at length with this community that I've built of people who are similarly curious who are constantly giving me feedback in this way and it's you know, I'm like reading more books and, you know, like reading like more papers and sort of, I sort of almost feel like I'm in school right now in a way. And I feel like I kind of had to go back to that in order to, you know, sort of get grounded in whatever is going on. There's like a lot of stuff. I think crypto is a really interesting example of that. Like I don't, I'm skeptical of a lot of it. I don't, you know, necessarily know that I trusted. But I also don't want to miss, you know, important smart things in that. space and I don't want to be left behind. The reading books more often definitely resonates. Because when I did the same thing as you did, I left BuzzFeed and I went to go

do newsletter life. And I definitely remember speaking to our former editor, John Petchkowski, and he's like, why do you want to do this? And I was like, well, I'd like to learn about monetary policy. What's wrong with you? But it does give you a little bit more of that freedom, which is nice. Yeah. I want to talk a little bit about your interests because I find it even more interesting your intellectual journey than your career path. You started out writing about the ad industry. Yeah. We were both writing about like the digital side of the 2012 election where it seemed like, you know, people campaigning on Twitter was novel and no waste of time. And people were live jiffing the Romney Obama debate on Tumblr. And then you moved to BuzzFeed

and we're writing pieces about the broader tech industry. But I think there was a moment maybe in 2015 or 2016, where you must have said to yourself, all this is bad, because your pieces got a lot darker. What happened there? Yeah. Well, it's a good question. I mean, I think that as I watched this, so the cool thing about the job at BuzzFeed was what they were trying to do there in the, you know, 2012, 2013, when I joined.

was trying to really, you know, get away from at that point, which had been, like, the main type of, you know, tech reporting, which had been, like, gadgets and stuff like that. And kind of a bit, like, you know, celebratory of the tech industry. And the way that John Herman, Matt Buchanan, and Ben Smith kind of, like, visualize this coverage. That was the original tech team. And Ben, as the editor was this idea of, like, you know,

technology is just culture, covered as culture, try to figure out what's going on. And I think, you know, looking at that lens, you know, at a time like 2013, 2014, it gave me this ability to sort of see some of these bigger platforms in a different way, right? Like, you know, the big one was the first piece that I remember writing about, like, Facebook that, like, stuck was trying to figure out why Facebook doesn't show you how many people saw your post. and that they do show on ad on advertising posts they show you the back end analytics and so I started like looking into it and it was really you know it was actually that sources and people it was like people actually aren't reading your Facebook posts like most of the time like most of the time you're kind of shouting into the into the ether and that was like yeah and that was at the time and and that actually pissed off a lot of people at Facebook because you know I don't I don't really know why if they got mad at that they had no idea there wasn't a lot of negative

coverage, but I was, but I was curious on that, like, that effect. Like, what is it, what, what will people think if they realize they're kind of screaming into the void? So, like, Facebook invited me out, and I started talking with, like, some of the engineers at, like, newsfeed and stuff at the time. Again, 2013, and just the way that they were, like, describing sort of, like, the power that they had, to turn a knob here to do this. And again, it didn't feel nefarious or anything, but I was like, this is such an effect on this. And so I started really interrogating that line. Like, what are these platforms doing to us?

How are they changing the way that we talk to each other? Is it shorter? Is it more terse? Is it smarter? Is it dumber? Is it, you know, angrier? Is it whatever? And then I think it was, it just started to become very clear.

The way I got into all of it was really harassment. You know, I was for a time editing at BuzzFeed, the tech section, for about a year. And one of my direct reports was Joe Bernstein. And Joe was covering the video. game industry, sort of in that same cultural lens. And then GamerGate happened. And I didn't know anything about a lot of these worlds. And he kind of dove into it to do the coverage. And, you know, I got really interested in, like, you know, places like 4chan and what, you know, sort of these like fever swamp areas, some of these, you know, really awful Reddit communities dedicated towards,

you know, essentially misogynist harassment. And it's just sort of like opened a door of the, you know, the underside of these platforms. So I started investigating that, and then it just kind of, it went from there. It was like a very, interestingly enough, straight line from Gamergate to, you know, these toxic message word communities, to the rise of the pro-Trump, like, media apparatus and Trump trolling and stuff to, you know, to QAnon, to just sort of like, you know, stop the steal to all this stuff that's happening and this, you know, this real focus that people have now on the platforms

and the way that they're destabilizing, you know, democracy potentially. And yeah, so it got darker, but I think it grew out of actually the exact work that I was trying to do, which is like, how do these platforms, you know, shape us in any way?

Did you feel like you were yelling out into the void for a while and then eventually people started paying attention or I think there's always... Was it, yeah, sorry, well, answer that one. I think there's always been people who are really interested in this. And there's obviously like, you know, I actually feel like there's, you know, a lot of scholars out there who just don't get their due, who've been interested in this for

so long and been doing sort of the front lines work, especially on her, you know, like the field of writing about online harassment. Like there's, you know, so many black female scholars out there who have pioneered a lot of that work, you know, monitoring their own communities. And, you know, kind of gets steamrolled by, you know, journalists jumping in and taking that over. But, I mean, you definitely can tell that there's post-2016, it was, like, there was kind of a rush, right, to, like, explain how all this stuff happened. And I think, I think some of that is great. You know, some of that is, like, it's put a lot of pressure on a lot of these companies, you know, holding their feet to the fire. And I think that that's helpful. That's, you know,

what the industry is supposed to do, the journalism industry? We've heard a lot of chattering. Speaking of this, we've heard a lot of chattering inside these companies. I'm sure when you speak, you know, on background of some of these folks where they say, you know, everyone is holding us responsible for all the ills of the world. We're not the boogeyman. In fact, the Wall Street Journal, when they ran their set of stories a couple weeks ago, there was a statement from Facebook that said people were divisive before Facebook

and they will be after or something like that. I guess I didn't acknowledge there will be an after, but there will be an after. What do you think about that argument? It does seem like it is people, we're a story-based species. It seems like a very convenient story to say everything wrong with us is the platforms. We very rarely talk about the underlying conditions in society that make us the way we are. Yeah. So you must be thinking about this.

What's your thought? Yeah. I wrote about this recently, and I think that kind of statement from Facebook, book, you know, people were divisive before that is both true and, like, just a huge dodge at the same time. You know, I think it's disingenuous in the way that it is, that it is, you know, they try, they're trying to slip out of responsibility in some sense. Like, I think it's true that there needs to be sort of proportional criticisms, right, of these types of things. And, you know, I think, like, I think the Cambridge Analytica story was actually a really

interesting example of this. So like Cambridge Analytica, when it, when that story broke, you know, all the reporting was factual. But there was this sort of feeling that came out of it and a little bit of like sensationalizing in the way that it got aggregated, et cetera, of, you know, scary Russian data science disinvolvement, you know, sort of like hinting at like the Kremlin, you know, peeking over the edge or like this idea. It was interesting. All the aggregations seem to get it more and more wrong. Yeah. And there's this, yeah, it's like a game. a telephone. And then there's this idea of, you know, that the psychographic profiling is mind control, right? Like that it just like, that Steve Bannon and this, you know, shady, you know,

English defense contractor guy got a bunch of Facebook data and like brainwashed some people in Wisconsin to, you know, to vote for Trump and ergo, there you go. And it's like, you know, that's, I think it gave a lot of people this idea, you know, around like what we can do with data and, you know, how manipulative it can be. That was, you know, that was. a little bit false. But directionally, the story's correct, right? Directionally, like, there's a huge breach of privacy that this company, you know, has this unchecked influence and a lot of power and the way that it's mingling with politics is concerning. So I think, like, that's a great example of, you know, we have to be, you know, very careful with the, you know, the blows that we choose

to strike on these companies and not, you know, over-assigned, lest we are, you know, the journalists who cried wolf. But, but, you know, I think what I wrote in this piece about all those Wall Street Journal revelations, et cetera, from last week is what I thought was really interesting is they showed that like, you know, when people were doing too much, you know, passive consumption of video content, Facebook researchers were saying, well, this actually makes people feel really miserable. Yeah, I read. And they're like, okay, so now we got to tweak the knobs, right? Yeah. And then it's like, we tweak the knobs and now you're, with, friends and family now you're arguing and it's getting into this like harassment territory and

all this you know misinformation manipulation and a personal level is making people feel bad and so my feeling is like the problem with Facebook is Facebook right to some extent like we got to figure out yeah like they got to figure that part out of it um and so that anyway it's a very long way of me saying i think it was a dodge okay it was definitely a dodge but go to the core of the question though Sure. Which is, in these discussions, we'd already talked about how much of the nuance gets lost. So do you think there needs to be a little bit more nuance in terms of, you know, these companies being one part of the problem in our society versus they're often portrayed as whole. Like you might have read, and I think the Wall Street General did a pretty good job framing its stories, but you might have read that story about Instagram and teen girls and said the only reason why teen girls are depressed or killing themselves is Instagram.

Instagram. Sure. And I mean, there's also, you know, you got to, I think what those stories showed on one end, which kind of did get lost a little bit, is the fact that Facebook has teams of people inside it who are working really hard, who are good people who care about making these platforms better. And they're trying to understand it. Like, they know there's problems. In fact, that's where the leaks came from. Yeah. And the bottlenecks happened to be, you know, at the top with a bunch of people who don't want to change or, you know, yeah. And the product organization, I would say. Yeah. Yeah. And

so where was I going with this? I totally lost my training. The question was, do we need to be a little bit more nuanced? We talk about the ills of the world and where Facebook, in particular, maybe Twitter 2, fits in that picture. And YouTube. Yeah. So yeah, I actually think about it and I'm trying to develop like a mental model around this to some degree to write better about it.

But I think that like looking at, you know, information crisis, let's call it, our information problem, platform problem, from a like a supply and demand perspective is actually pretty useful, right? And the platforms are the distributors, the amplifiers, there's a lot of supply. What is the demand side of that, right? Like, their, you know, awful content gets created for people because oftentimes there is some sort of demand. And I'm not saying that, like, you know, people necessarily want all these things that they're not being manipulated a little bit. But, you know, a thing that I've been thinking a lot about is that the Internet is reflecting,

the Internet feels miserable in a lot of places, right? And if you go to the heart of a lot of these conversations that are happening in, you know, these really divisive Facebook groups or whatever, or the, you know, all the kinds of harassment and bullying on Twitter and things like that, the, you know, the sort of toxic neo-Nazi adjacent debates happening on YouTube, things like that, like, there's a lot. lot of, you get a sense of a lot of misery, right? And a lot of misery finding company. And so something I've been thinking a lot about is like, I think there's real reasons. Life expectancy has declined, you know, for numerous years in America. There's a lot of, I mean, just ramp

and inequality. And I think, I think we're seeing some of that misery manifested, right, in the way that we're talking to each other. And I think these platforms amplify it, et cetera. But I think there's also, to some degree, you know, maybe a demand for that. And I think that some of these fixes have to go well beyond, you know, like, I don't think winding Instagram out of Facebook and, you know, taking WhatsApp and making it its own company is going to change any of that. And so it's like when we think about this, and I also don't know that we can, like, content moderate our way out of this problem.

I think we definitely can. Yeah. And it's lost in the conversation about content moderation. It's like, this is only solving the manifestation of the problem, doesn't address the core problem itself. Yeah. And so, and I don't think we know. exactly what the core problem is, but I know, I, I really feel this deep in my bones that there

is just, there's a lot of this misery and inequality. And, and I think that, I think that, you know, people want to share that. These platforms allow that to be inflicted on others. And, you know, there's, there's some, there's some bigger societal issues there. And I'm not trying to absolve, I think we get, you know, if you talk about this, like, on Twitter, like, you know, people can't tweet about this. People will try to say, you know, like, oh, you're, You know, you're trying to, I'm not trying to, I'm not trying to, you know, excuse, like, the horrible things that go on or anything. But I do think, like, we have these deeper root societal problems, and the platforms are making them worse. But we also have to figure out what those are and the ways to potentially address them.

And that's where I get kind of really depressed. Yeah, yeah. I feel like that's how I usually end a lot of the stuff that you write. There you go. No, it's spot on, and stuff in the newsletter is great. All right, why don't we take a quick break and return to talk about what happened after this, you know, long run that you had writing about the social media platforms, which is that you wanted to write about the workplace or what it used to be. Yeah. So, which is a totally normal stray line between the two of them.

Let's take a quick break and we're back right after this on the Big Technology podcast with Charlie Warzel. Hey, everyone. Let me tell you about the Hustle Daily Show, a podcast filled with business, tech news, and original stories to keep. you in the loop on what's trending. More than 2 million professionals read the hustle's daily email for its irreverent and informative takes on business and tech news. Now, they have a daily podcast called The Hustle Daily Show, where their team of writers break down the biggest business headlines in 15 minutes or less and explain why you should care about them. So, search for the Hustle Daily Show and your favorite podcast app, like the one you're using right now.

And we're back on the big technology podcast with Charlie Razzell. Second half of our show, We're live at Unfinished Live. Great conference here in the heart of New York City. Charlie, you're in from Montana. You bet. How's life in Montana? Can you tell everybody the story about the bears and the trees that I feel like this is the best way to start off the second half? Sure.

The Montana in the fall, where I live, I live in sort of an area on the edge of Missoula that is nice and wooded. It's also the like black bear migratory path. to, you know, go and hibernate in the woods. So every fall, there are lots of bears. We have an apple tree in our backyard. And one morning I woke up and I went outside. Or actually, no, I just looked out the windows. I was like making coffee.

And there were two black bears just in a tree like 10 feet from my house. And this is the first year that I moved there. I moved there in 2017. And I was like, ah, so that's a welcome to the neighborhood. your neighbor was like oh you'll see them just look up and then you looked up and there they were there they were so you in some ways or actually not in some ways in all the ways got a really early start in the work from home yeah lifestyle uh is that why you wanted so you and your partner have this book coming out about it shortly is that why you wanted to write about it because you had this head starter yeah what makes someone so passionate about the way that social media ecosystems work decide they want to write I like a workplace book. Yeah. Like, honestly, is opportunity and the moment.

I mean, so, yeah, we moved in 2017 and started working from home. And, you know, the sort of the short story is for the first eight months of it, and my life was just terrible. Like, I was so worried about working remotely and not blowing this opportunity that I collapsed my entire life into just working. You know, it was at the point where I was on the couch. couch all day, doing emails, writing stories, whatever, talking to sources, that at night I'd be on that same couch watching Netflix, and I'd be, I'd have a cold sweat going.

Truly, because I felt like, I was like, I was laboring, or I was, like, watching TV in my office, you know, it was like, it was this real collapse, and that's when I sort of realized something was wrong. Annie, my partner, was struggling a little less, but also, you know, we were working way too much. It was difficult. She's from that area, and we were looking kind of for an adventure. She was doing a lot of reporting out there, and we thought, like, there's no way BuzzFeed

a lot of smooth. We were working both at BuzzFeed at the time. And they did, to our surprise. And, yeah, and so, you know, we had this period where it was essentially what we were doing was like our own kind of like COVID lockdown remote, you know, work situation. Like we were just stuck in the house. We don't have kids. But, and then we realized that we weren't actually working from home.

You know, we were just like laboring in confinement, essentially. And so we actually started trying to figure out, like, what does it look like if we try to, you know, get the perks of this? If we try to actually make our work flexible and, you know, fit it around our lives instead of our lives around work. And we developed a system that really, really worked for us that really allowed us to, you know, like be more. active participants in the community and, you know, volunteering and stuff like that, developing a lot more hobbies, friendships outside of, you know, the realm of, like, media and tech and all that stuff that, and it was just this three, more three-dimensional life. Anyway, cut to the pandemic. I noticed, I mean, everyone obviously is working from home,

but also everyone was doing what we were doing, which is this kind of, you know, like collapse. Yeah, and it's like this, you know, this collapse. And there were sort of two things that happen. One, we are like, well, you know, we have this experience. I think we have something to say that might help other people feel seen or what have you. But the other was like, it just felt like there was, you know, I just like new interesting ideas, right? Whether it's the tech stuff, whether it's whatever. I'm interested in the way that different forces shape our lives. And I felt like the most interesting idea at the time really was that there's this moment of promise, right? Where, I mean, what a crazy control experiment it is to have, you know,

everyone in the knowledge workspace pretty much, like stop working in offices at the same time. Like, it's just a wild thing. And there's so much data we can, you know, gather from that and we can see, you know, we've been told for so long that, you know, that without offices, without decentralized spaces, that, you know, work is going to, like our ability to work, our productivity, it's all going to collapse, you know, we're not going to be able to do that. And it proved this wrong, but it's like, so what do we do with that information, right? Do we snap back or do we see there is some promise here? There's, you know, there's maybe another way forward, especially with this idea that we're all very burned out, you know, like our jobs are incredibly stressful.

It feels, if you talk to a lot of knowledge workers, and obviously people, essential workers and in the service economy, have this, you mean, order of magnitude, you know, harder. but there's this there's this notion of like a lot of modern work doesn't really seem tenable right now you know you have to subsume your life for it and we we really wanted to you know pick around that that idea and see if we could kind of you know

not develop a how to book or anything but like I think we you know the term we use like it's like a it's like a map right you get to choose your direction but like we're going to try to lay out everything and so that's why we did it So it's interesting that you decided to write a work from home book because it was sort of predicted that we'd all be back to the office now. Yeah.

So how did you think about the longevity of your book? Do you anticipate there would be another pandemic or were you rooting for a variant or something? Like how did you end up predicting? Definitely not rooting for a variant. You know, as someone who publishes pretty frequently and rapidly, and rapidly, you know, who writes for the internet, like, book, this worried me a little. I was really worried when, you know, we turned it around as quick as we possibly could. We wrote it, pitched it, everything in about three and a half months, four months, maybe.

And then that was, we basically turned it in March 1st of this year, the first draft. And they were like, okay, it's going to come out in December. And I was like, oh, everyone's going to be so tired of this conversation. and, like, maybe back in their jobs or, you know, have figured out some of these things, and this is going to seem, like, you know, stale. And then life has, you know, has sort of, you know, made the book a little more relevant in a way that's, you know, obviously unfortunate. But the thing is, I don't worry about it with longevity because the book at the end

of the day isn't really just about, I know this sounds kind of like corny, but it's not really just about, you know, where, we work. It's about how we do it and what the expectations need to be. And it's basically, I mean, I don't think work, whether or not we, more people are in hybrid or whatever, or going back to the office or all at home, I think it's going to continue to be broken because of a lot of, you know, a lot of our cultural attitudes towards it. A lot of the way that we, you know, like a lot of the ways that managers, especially older managers and executives are set in their way. and want people to reproduce the sort of coming up through the ranks.

And so I'm not too worried about it being out of date or obsolete anytime soon because the real idea is like what does your life look like if it doesn't revolve around work, if it's not the primary axis of your life, and it is a meaningful part of it. Yeah. So do you have like, well, first of all, can the stuff that you write in your book, can someone who's down the line like someone who's being overmanaged take advantage of it and learn to do anything

different? And is it, yeah, I guess like, is the problem I think you sort of hinted at this in your answer, but is the problem that we need to learn to work from home or is the problem that we need to just learn to work healthier? Yeah, I think it's the second. I mean, and I think that that is

it's really hard work. Like, a lot of people think that we've, that Annie and I, because we wrote this book, have like figured that kind of thing out. And the way that I like in, you know, our attitudes towards work and productivity and all that,

to me, it's similar to, you know, the process of like, I go to therapy and I work out. And those things feel very, very similar to this in the sense that there are days when it's an extreme struggle. There are days when there's not a lot of progress when you feel like you've

gone, you know, you've backslid or something. And the only thing that really helps is continued dedication to it and trying to figure it out. And then I think that that's part of like the, that routine, that pattern is what, you know, creates healthy habits. And I think applying that to our jobs. But, I mean, there's so much that I feel, you know, has been kind of drilled into us,

especially like modern American workers, you know, the idea that more work is always better, More time spent is always better. I mean, it's been extremely hard for me to, like, unwind that from my life. I mean, I've tried experiments, right? I've been trying to work four days a week. I've been trying to, you know, take time in my day to just, like, stop, like, for two hours and just do something else, anything else that's not work-related. And you start to learn these lessons that are like, oh, wow, when my mind isn't totally shot

and fried from banging my head against the wall on this thing, you know, I actually feel like I have a little more space. You know, I think, like, the mind is, you know, there's this, this writer, Jenny O'Dell, who wrote this book, How to Do Nothing. And she had a line during a podcast that I listened to where she was talking about this, you know, during the pandemic, she's not really been doing a lot of work. Like, she's, you know, she's not, like, she's also an artist. She hasn't, she hasn't been very inspired to do anything. It's this like fallow period, right? And, you know, society and everything is telling us, this is bad. Like this, you know, you're not being productive. You're wasting time. You're doing whatever. And she said that basically at the end of every one of those periods, she goes into, you know, like a peak of just like productivity, inspiration, creativity, and the whole time it's been working. You know, your brain doesn't really know it. And I think that that happens on a sort of a mic. level with us. You know, there's a lot of times that especially in knowledge work, interesting ideas click because we've given ourselves the space to let them sort of marinate

when we're not constantly putting that pressure on ourselves. And I think it's like that with the work week, right? Like, you know, this idea of working 90-hour weeks. Like, it's the classic way to burn out. It's a short-term solution. And the long-term solution is actually, you know, like, how do we, how do we air it out a little bit and, you know, treat ourselves you know, with a little more respect. Yeah. Do you think that's feasible in the American workplace? I mean, it is interesting because we do find ourselves in between two different types of workplaces, right? There's China with 8.86, 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. 6 days a week.

And then there's Europe, which takes a month off in the summer or longer. So America does seem like it might be a nice compromise in between the two. but obviously our workplace is still extremely unhealthy yeah so it's also interesting because we are now in like more direct competition with china so where do you think we net out and how can we do it and stay competitive i don't think that it has anything to do or like will have any massive you know impact again some of these things are there are equity issues right with like you know supply chains are made of humans right and a lot of those humans have you know like hourly labor jobs with not that great protection.

Like, you know, like look at Amazon, right? It's like, you know, when you look at the, you know, the workers' rights and all the issues that have gone there with, like, you know, Alabama and the labor strike and all that stuff, like, those issues are probably when you're talking about competition more pertinent, right? Like, how do we treat people sort of lower on that supply chain line, who are sort of more on the front line of it. But in terms of, like, the knowledge work side of that, like, I don't think, I don't think

it's even, it's really a question. The way we frame it again in the book is this, like, long versus short term, I mean, to bring Amazon up again, like, listen to Jeff Bezos talk about the arc of his career and building Amazon, and it's like, it's obviously there's this whole relentlessness to it. But there's also this long-term view of what the company's supposed to be and not to conform it into these, like, these short-term, you know, quarterly market gains or whatever, and, like, build, you know, build out that base. And I think you can sort of flip that and refers it to the way that we work. We are burning ourselves out. People are miserable.

There's so much turnover in the workforce. There is a great resignation thing going on, you know, quote-unquote. That's real. And unemployment benefits are going away, and people are still saying, no, it's like, screw it. I'm not going to work. Like, that is a signal that something is up. And I think that, like, I think that companies and individuals who understand that, like, we're not, you know, automaton's, or not robots who exist to work, that is, that's going to be, that is a long-term solution. We end the book with a letter to employees or workers and a letter to executives.

And both of, you know, what we try to do in both of those is show, and again, this is sound super, super corny, but like show that there's, you know, like, do you borrow the business term, like synergies between those things? What is good for employees ends up being good for employers if you look at the long run. If you look at the short run, no, you want to burn people out into the ground, you know, get what you need from them, scale fast and, you know, get your VC money and get out. And, you know, I don't know how long that works for. Yeah. And it is interesting that Bezos does have that long-term view, but he burns everybody out in the fulfillment centers. Yeah, but his business is structured in that way that like, you know, like Amazon, the company

is living, had a lot of, you know, a lot of runway, and the workers obviously didn't. Yeah. I want to end with this. We've talked about it throughout this whole conversation, but you cover a lot of different stuff. You made a lot of different stops. You've done it in a lot of different venues. What's the goal of your work, Charlie? Like, what are you trying to accomplish? Oh, wow. Yikes. Just interesting shit. I mean, seriously. Like, that's, it's such a, it's such a privilege, like, to be able to do this kind of stuff. I mean, I really, I'm, I'm, I have an obsessive personality, but one that's like, uh, hinges on like, you know, I guess short term obsessions, right? And then I want to bring people in on it.

I want to meet those people who are involved in that obsession. You know, right now it's kind of around work. I worry a little that it's like that I'm a little too much of a generalist sometimes. It's not, you know. I don't know, Charlie, I think it's working. It's, I don't know. But, but the, but it's just like, honestly, like we were just talking about, like, about, you know, the idea of like reading and stuff. Like, it is so cool to be able to learn for a living or to be able to dial up the, you know, the people.

We're involved in whatever it is and have them teach you. And then it's such a privilege to be able to, like, you know, disseminate that and try to, you know, bring people along on your journey. So that's really, like, I don't think about it in the long-term scale of that. It's like as long as I can keep doing interesting stuff. And hopefully, like, hopefully there's an element of it that helps people understand, you know, our world a little better. I don't know. It's, again, sounds corny, but it's just actually how I feel. Yeah. Well, I'm a very religious reader of the newsletter. I look forward to devouring the book. Everybody out there, you can get the newsletter, Galaxy Brain on Substack.

Yep. And tell everyone where to get the book. The book, I mean, shop at your local independent bookstore is what we'd like since we were just talking about the Amazon supply chain. And the title? It's called Out of Office, the big problem and bigger promise of working. from home. It is out December 7th, but you know, those pre-orders, get those pre-orders in

they help. They help a lot. Yeah, definitely. Okay, well, thanks everybody for stick around. Thank you guys so much. Appreciate it. I want to say a quick thank you to my editor, Nate Gowatney, Red Circle for hosting and telling the ads. Thank you to Charlie for spending this time with me and most importantly to everybody

who's listened. Thank you very much. And we'll see you next week on the big technology podcast. Thank you.