If Books Could Kill - Bullshit Jobs

Episode Date: March 5, 2026

Peter and Michael discuss "Bullshit Jobs" by anarchist anthropologist David Graeber. The result: two professional podcasters debating which jobs are real and which jobs are fake.Where to find us: Our PatreonOur merch!Peter's newsletterPeter's other podcast, 5-4Mike's other podcast, Maintenance PhaseSources:On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs: A Work Rant37% of British workers think their jobs are meaninglessAverage Annual Hours Worked by Persons Engaged for United StatesThe times they are not changin’: Days and hours of work in Old and New Worlds, 1870–2000‘Bullshit’ After All? Why People Consider Their Jobs Socially UselessAlienation Is Not ‘Bullshit’: An Empirical Critique of Graeber’s Theory of BS JobsMany people feel they work in pointless ‘bullshit’ jobs, research confirmsThe Overworked American: The Unexpected Decline of Leisure Study: Leisure Time DeclinesUSA Consumption as percent of GDPThe Significance of Task Significance: Job Performance Effects, Relational Mechanisms, and Boundary ConditionsTask significance and meaningful work: A longitudinal studyAmericans’ job satisfaction in 2024Thanks to Mindseye for our theme song!

Uh, let's go in. Let's go in. Let's go in. And you have to cut all that because last time I told the same story twice. I noticed that. I didn't even think about it. I was just telling my stories to my friends. You know, like it looks like someone only had one funny anecdote last week. Yeah, I saw that. Yeah. How many do you fucking have every week, all right? Fucking Kings of Comedy over here. They're like, oh, you're reusing your bits. Everyone else just tells one story to one person and is just done. Nobody ever repeats anything that happened to them. You know how good my stories are by the third time I'm telling.

Exactly. You're like workshopping. Yes. dude. Okay, I actually, this one has like a really obvious, like, little zinger to it. Yeah. But I don't know how to word it, but I don't know how to word it. Michael. Peter.

What do you know about bullshit jobs? All I know is that I'm excited to talk about this book from the vantage point of my own. Bullshit jobs, written by David Graber, came out in 2018. Graber is an anthropologist, and he is a hardcore lefty. He considers himself an animal. anarchist. So finally, we're doing a book by someone who's not a reactionary centrist. Also, my understanding is his work is like good. It's a pretty good book. It makes some important points. It prods at some good and correct ideas. I think like my big picture criticisms of it are one,

it's like really meandering in the way that a lot of like lefty theory is. It's hard for him to land at a point. He says a lot of things where you're like, okay, I like this. And then he just sort of like meanders on until you're like, all right, I no longer get it. This is like meeting anyone in Seattle, Washington. And you're like at a cocktail party. You're like, I think I agree. I don't know what you're saying, though. My other big picture criticism is that the book really screams for data, but he doesn't

give it. Oh, really? That's surprising, actually. Sometimes he's doing it very knowingly being like, look, I'm a theory guy, you know? So like, if someone wants to look into this, they should. But there are other times where it's like, there is data here. And I feel like he could have looked for it. That is reactionary centrist coded.

It is. I'm not going to look up the premise of my book and whether it's true. Also, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, with meta comment. Didn't he, like, die tragically? He passed away in 2020, quite young. So, yeah, we will speak of him respectfully. Yeah, I mean, he seems like a nice guy with good ideas. Like, I feel like it's not, this is going to be a much less donkey episode, it sounds like.

Yeah, unfortunately, there are no, I'm just going to send you various excerpts, and then we will think about them. Yeah. rather than my usual M.O. Of just finding the dumbest shit in every book and sending it to you. But this was like a heavily requested book. So it's like it was inevitable that we would do this. It just sounds like it has yielded a sort of like a portrait of like a book that is kind of interesting but falls apart in some places. Not like a fuck this book or fuck this guy kind of episode.

I'm going to give the definition of bullshit job right off the bat. You talk into a microphone. You post it on Patreon. Yes, I know. A bullshit job is quote, a form of paid employment that is so completely point. Unnecessary or pernicious that even the employee cannot justify its existence even though as part of the Conditions of Employment the employee feels obliged to pretend that this is not the case. That sounds quite extreme.

That sounds like it would be very few jobs in America, actually. It is very extreme. We'll get into like exactly what he means in more detail. But for color, because he's on the left, this is mostly directed at like certain types of white collar work that he thinks add no real value to society. he distinguishes between bullshit jobs and what he calls shit jobs, which are just sort of like the traditional bad job, like low pay, maybe degrading, right? You're treated poorly by society.

Yeah, those are like very essential jobs. They just suck. Yeah. That's what he says. That those jobs are, in fact, often not bullshit at all. They're very important work. Not to do like pot calling the kettle black or whatever, but like it is also funny to write a whole book about this while being like a Marxist scholar at a liberal arts university.

Like, you could also argue. As we speak into microphones from our, from our own homes. If you ever try to describe what you do to someone who doesn't know about podcasts, it's impossible to describe it in a non-humiliating way. It's so weird when you don't know someone because when they eventually ask enough questions to find the name of the podcast, it's like, yeah, here's a link to all of my opinions. I have kind of started dating somebody recently, and he didn't know about the show when he first met me. But like, when you're in this stage, you're like, you've got on a couple dates, you like

each other, you're flirting, texting, whatever. He's like, it's weird to have like 600 hours of your opinions on things that I can just like go listen to at any point. Like, this guy I'm seeing, what does he think about Princess Diana? I want one day for there to be someone who's like, oh, you're the girl on if books could kill. After meeting me on Grindr, yes. So in 2013, Graber publishes a short essay in Strike, Magist. which is a radical lefty outfit called on the phenomenon of bullshit jobs a work rant We've often had these situations where we're like this should really just be an essay Yeah, and sometimes it was yes and sometimes it was you do get the sense that someone was like

David can you turn this into a book and he was like alright Because honestly at least what I understand to be the premise sounds like a fine essay like some percentage of the American economy is just like people kind of pretending to do stuff or like things that don't really need to exist. But also, if you extend that to 300 pages, you then do need to provide some data. You need to provide examples. And then it also seems like it would kind of fall apart. The essay is super short. And so you actually end up with a weird situation where like the essay could be longer, but the book could be a lot shorter. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm going to send you some of the essay and we can talk about it. I think he hits on like this general idea that's very true. But then the more specific he tries to get, the more you're like, ah, I don't know.

Yeah. All right. I'm going to send you some of the opening bits here. In the year 1930, John Maynard Keynes predicted that by centuries end, technology would have advanced sufficiently that countries like Great Britain or the United States would have achieved a 15-hour work week. There's every reason to believe he was right. In technological terms, we are quite capable of this, and yet it didn't happen. Instead, technology has been marshaled, if anything, to figure out ways to make us all work more.

In order to achieve this, jobs have had to be created that are effectively pointless. Huge swathes of people in Europe and North America in particular spend their entire working lives performing tasks they secretly believe do not really need to be performed. The moral and spiritual damage that comes from this situation is profound. It is a scar across our collective soul, yet virtually no one talks about it. I already disagree with this. I have had jobs that are sort of on the bullshit spectrum. I mean this like when I used to work in NGOs, but I don't think it's that the job was bullshit. I think it just wasn't a 40-hour job. It was like 10 hours of kind of real stuff and then 30 hours of bullshit. I know that you're going to keep jumping the gun on me.

Okay, okay, okay, okay, we're getting there. I kind of agree with you. I think that one of the problems here is that he tries to drop jobs into a category. It's a bullshit job or not. But the reality is that a large part of almost any job has like a bullshit component. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. All right, I'm going to send you more. He says, a recent report comparing employment in the U.S. between 1910 and 2000 gives us a clear picture.

Over the course of the last century, the number of workers employed as domestic servants in industry and in the farm sector has collapsed dramatically. At the same time, professional, managerial, clerical, sales, and service workers tripled, growing from one quarter to three quarters of total employment. In other words, productive jobs have, just as predicted, been largely automated away. But rather than allowing a massive reduction of working hours to free the world's population to pursue their own projects, pleasures, visions, and ideas, we have seen the ballooning of not even so much of the service sector as of the administrative sector, up to and including the creation of whole new industries like financial services or telemarketing, the unprecedented expansion of sectors like corporate law,

academic and health administration, human resources, and public relations. I'd like strongly disagree with this. Public relations is an important thing. Like I did public relations for NGOs. It's important to get the word out about like fucking conflict minerals. I don't know. So I mean, I agree. There's an imprecision in his terms a lot. There's another problem here, which I feel like is classic lefty stuff, which is like sometimes you get the sense that he's never really worked for company. Right, right. He's just sort of eyeballing it. He's also doing a weird thing kind of from the left that you see from the right a lot where it's this idea that things like farming and manufacturing are like real jobs. Like, oh, we used to make things in America. And then all these office jobs are like knowledge jobs are fake. But I also

just don't agree with the premise. I think there's lots of jobs where you sit at a desk that are totally worthwhile. I wrote a note down in some sections where I just said Noble Savage next to some of his discussion of like manufacturing work, for example. Right. Because even in my like limited exposure to blue collar jobs when I was young, you see a lot of the same phenomenon that he's describing in white collar work, right? Where work is is redundant or whatever it might be and we'll get into it. Yeah. Now I'm going to send you one last bit of the essay. He says, the ruling class has figured out that a happy and productive population with free time on their hands is a mortal danger. And on the other hand, the feeling that work is a moral

value in itself and that anyone not willing to submit themselves to some kind of intense work discipline for most of their waking hours deserves nothing is extraordinarily convenient for them. So I think he's basically saying, look, the ruling class has opposed policies that would create more free time and fostered policies that incentivize work. That's true. That's just like straightforwardly true. Right. I think if you're looking at it that simply, not hard to believe, right? But like, yeah, the idea that like wealthy capitalists oppose things like working hours reductions or mandatory free time.

Yeah. That's just obvious, empirically true. But also, that feels distinct from the phenomenon of bullshit jobs to me. Yeah, so I agree. So what he's basically saying, although he doesn't quite, I'm not sure that he ever actually says this,

but you can sort of piece it together. What he's basically saying is like, we've had these big increases in productivity. Has it brought us no any more leisure time? No. And that's because there are these great institutional forces that oppose that and want to redirect our productivity elsewhere. That seems true. That seems fair.

There's a big response to this essay. A bunch of people write it up. A bunch of Marxists start arguing about it, and I won't get into it. I will tell you, my first run at this episode, I was like, maybe I'll cover these intramarxist debates. And then, like, I read one essay and was like, no, no. In 2015, someone took evocative quotes out of the essay and plastered them all over the London Metro. The London Metro? The tube, you mean?

The tube. Sorry. Sorry, folks. London Metro. Sorry to our well-traveled listeners. We don't know basic things. You don't say the Metro. Basic things.

That's like the London. Have you ever heard anyone say the London Metro in your life? Also, it might have also been buses. That's also not the Metro. There's no... But it's not the tube either. So what is it? Whatever.

Don't try to fucking Uno reverse. Just accept the L and move on. I don't think it's an L. I think I introduce a nuance that you can't explain. So, yeah, so they put up these quotes. One of them says, huge swathes of people spend their days performing tasks they secretly believe do not really need to be performed. One says, it's as if someone were out there making up pointless jobs for the sake of keeping us all working. These are quotes from the essay, and they sort of cause a little bit of a stir of a stir they get on the news.

I'm trying to decide whether I think this sort of thing is cool or whether it would just piss me off if I'm like on my way to work. And it's like, great, some fucking communist is telling me my job's useless. Also, I don't believe, I don't agree with the second one. Why would somebody make up a job so they can pay you to do nothing? He does have a theory of this that we'll talk about. And it is a little bit abstract, and I don't quite buy it either. Okay. He writes this book, bullshit jobs, to flesh the theory out, published in 2018.

And a lot of his research for the book is essentially just compiling anecdotes from people who reach out to them about their bullshit jobs. Those actually sound fun, to be honest. I will say, as a dataset, it's pretty. pretty obviously terrible. People who reach out to a leftist academic to complain about their bullshit job, probably not the best. The representativist of samples.

But he uses that to delineate what he believes are the five approximate categories of bullshit job. Flunkies, goons, duct tapers, box tickers, and taskmasters. Now, this is not meant to be exact or exhaustive, I don't think. It's just useful groupings, right? So we'll start with flunkies. Flunkies are people whose jobs exist entirely to make their bosses feel or seem important. Okay. I'm going to send you a little bit here.

He says, another term for this category might be feudal retainers. Throughout recorded history, rich and powerful men and women have tended to surround themselves with servants, clients, sycophants, and minions of one sort or another. Not all of these are actually employed in the grandees household, and many of those who are, are expected to at least do some actual work. But especially at the top of the pyramid, there is usually a certain portion whose job it is to basically just stand around and look impressive.

Some old-fashioned feudal retainer style jobs still do exist. Dorman are the most obvious example. They perform the same function in the houses of the very rich that electronic intercoms have performed for everyone else since at least the 1950s. This also is like, I don't think that's... Dorman often serve like a security function, don't they? He gives some outdated examples that I think are a little more accurate.

it. One is elevator operators, which I think might be like one of the better examples here. But also, do those even still exist? I mean, those... Not really. No. You used to need one. Certain receptionists, you know, he believes are basically just there for aesthetics. Probably true. I guess, but even a receptionist is like part of like marketing the company, right? You get to a place and like a person says, hi there, welcome. What can I do for you? That's, there's some value in that. There are certain things like marketing and advertising that you get the sense that he just doesn't really like respect as an endeavor. Right. And you can also see here, he loves the idea. that corporations retain or like recreate certain like feudal dynamics.

And like one of his overall theories here, and we'll touch on this a bit later too, is that like corporations are not like hyper efficient like the libertarians would have you believe. Yeah, that's true. Yeah. But are instead sort of like mechanisms for distributing wealth and power in a almost political sense. That feels like totally legitimate.

Let's keep going. Goons are people whose jobs have an aggressive. element, but crucially, who exist only because other people employ them. Okay. Here's what he means by that. The most obvious example of this are national armed forces. Countries need armies only because other countries have armies. If no one had an army, armies would not be needed.

But the same can be said of most lobbyists, PR specialists, telemarketers, and corporate lawyers. Also, like literal goons, they have a largely negative impact on society. I think almost anyone would concur that, we're all telemarketers to disappear, the world would be a better place. But I think most would also agree that if all corporate lawyers, bank lobbyists, or marketing gurus were to similarly vanish in a puff of smoke, the world would be at least a little more bearable. This again is like a weird category error thing because like telemarketing, like it's obviously a bad job and I like I hate getting telemarketer calls, but I don't need, I don't think it's bullshit in that way because it does result in sales, right? Well, I think when he said

telemarketer, it did kind of click in my brain because there were definitely some jobs where the central purpose is essentially to trick or bully someone into buying a product or a service that they do not need. Completely. And I think that's what he's getting at. Dude, I sold frozen stakes over the phone for exactly one day when I was in college and I couldn't fucking handle it. That was a bullshit job.

I'm not sure I think it's right that lobbyists and PR people and lawyers wouldn't exist if others didn't exist, right? If you look at like some basic corporate lawyer bullshit, like they write contracts. Again, I just, I'm not entirely sure that he understands these industries. And marketing gurus, I mean, it kind of depends on what they're marketing. Like, maybe they're marketing garbage, but they might be marketing like a couch that you like to sit on. I mean, like people buy objects that they need in their lives as well. I don't know.

All right. The next category, duct tapers. Okay. Duck tapers are, quote, employees whose jobs exist only because of a glitch or fault in the organization who are there to solve a problem that ought not to exist. Okay. So, like, you know, there are a lot of people in software where it's like, yeah, there's like two pieces of software sort of budding together awkwardly. and then someone's job is to smooth over the resulting issues, right? But that, again, doesn't feel like bullshit because you're, like, making something work.

I think I agree. But I think he's sort of saying, like, there's an ideal world where this doesn't, this problem doesn't exist, right? I guess, but I don't know. I think this is, like, the one that makes the least sense to me. Because, like, there's a problem and then someone gets hired to fix it, and the problem is fixed. But then you're like, oh, no, it's bullshit because the problem shouldn't have existed in the first place. Here's his attempt to draw a line between what he's saying and what we're saying. There will always be a certain gap between blueprints, schemes, and, and,

plans and their real-world implementation. Therefore, there will always be people charged with making the necessary adjustments. What makes such a role bullshit is when the plan obviously can't work and any competent architect should have known it. When the system is so stupidly designed that it will fail in completely predictable ways, but rather than fix the problem, the organization prefers to hire full-time employees whose main or entire job is to deal with the damage. It's as if a homeowner, upon discovering a leak in the roof, decided it was too much bothered to hire a roofer to re-shingle it and instead stuck a bracket underneath it and hired someone who, and hired someone whose full-time job was to periodically dump the water.

I guess, but then it's like this is a much smaller percentage of jobs then, and it's very much in the eye of the beholder. I do feel like it's telling that he had to make up a fake thing rather than just tell us about a job that he thinks fits this cleanly, right? But I think if you're trying to, if you're trying to do a good faith thing here, he's saying there are people whose jobs are really the result of an inefficiency that could be addressed more directly. It feels like a different category than like telemarketers, but okay.

I agree. I do. I think he really kind of hits his. stride when he's talking about industries or work that are like scammy. Yeah, yeah. That like really are like an obvious drain on society. Yeah, which feels like like the the amount of the American economy that is now dedicated to fucking scams is like absolutely should be and I'm sure is the subject of like many

books. It's like an actual huge problem. But that feels like different than just like people who do PR are bullshit. I love watching you have to go through the same process that I did. Yeah. With every single one of these where you're like, yeah, kind of. of, but not really, right? Because this does feel like the phenomenon that we're talking about, where it's like,

you read the essay and you're like, yeah, man, some jobs are bullshit. Here's some fun examples. It's like you get in, you get out in a couple thousand words. Yeah, yeah. But it's like, as soon as now you're trying to specify, aha, there's actually different categories of bullshit jobs. It's like, are they, though? I think this should be familiar to anyone who does like work like hours or rights, right?

Where you're like, ooh, I have this idea and I'm going to flesh it out. And then you try to flesh it out and you're like, actually I'm stupid. This is a dumb idea. Yeah, totally. All right. Next, box tickers. box stickers are quote employees who exist only or primarily to allow an organization to be able to claim it is doing something that in fact it is not doing. Okay.

Send in you a bit. The following testimony is from a woman hired to coordinate leisure activities in a care home. Most of my job was to interview residents and fill out a recreation form that listed their preferences. That form was then logged on a computer and then promptly forgotten about forever. The paper form was also kept in a binder for some reason. Completion of the forms was by far the most important. part of my job in the eyes of my boss, and I would catch hell if I got behind on them. A lot of the time, I would complete a form for a short-term resident, and they would check out

the next day, I threw away mountains of paper. We found one. That's like a straightforwardly bullshit job. A friend of mine is applying for citizenship in Germany. Germany is like famously, like they still use like fax machines for shit in Germany. It's like super paper and pencil. There's an online form where you fill it out, you go to the office, a woman at the office, then prints it out and types it into the computer for you, like, while you stand there. Oh, my God. He's like standing there watching someone type into a computer, a thing that he already typed into a computer.

This is like the fact that you submit a PDF resume and then also have to type it all into a fucking form. Yeah. So here's a little more about box ticking. And I thought this is interesting. It's less obviously bullshit than the care home example, but I think he's getting at something here. He says, we're all familiar with box-ticking as a form of government.

If a government's employees are caught doing something very bad, taking bribes, for instance, or regularly shooting citizens at traffic stops, the first reaction is invariably to create a fact-finding commission to get to the bottom of things. This serves two functions. First of all, it's a way of insisting that, aside from a small group of miscreants, no one had any idea that any of this was happening. This is, of course, rarely true. Second of all, it's a way of implying that once all the facts are in, someone will

definitely do something about it. This is usually not true either. A fact-finding commission is a way of telling the public that the government is doing something it is not. But large corporations will behave in exactly the same way if, say, they are revealed to be employing slaves or child labors in their garment factories or dumping toxic waste. This is, again, really cynical. I think sometimes it is. Like Seattle's in the middle of this fucking cycle where we do like fact-finding on homelessness. And then all of the fact-finding commissions are like, we need to be spending like 10 times more on this.

And then we just don't do anything because nobody wants to spend any fucking money. And then like five years later, they're like, oh, we got to get data. oh, let's do a fact-finding commission, and the fact-finding commission finds the same fucking thing. So, like, that partly rings true. But there's also fact-finding commissions that are, like, useful. And then you move forward with a policy and you do something about it. In my world, Joe Biden put together a commission on Supreme Court reform. Oh, right.

And, like, as soon as they announce the commission, you're sort of like, all right, well, it's so right. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, totally, no, totally. Yeah. So, I don't know, there's something here. And certainly, I believe that there are major corporations where there are major corporations where This exists entirely as like a PR exercise that everyone knows is fraudulent top to bottom. But also they're pretty good.

I mean, a lot of my work in human rights is about corporate human rights violations. And if you look at labor standards in apparel in like, you know, Indonesia and places that had these big scandals at like Nike in the early 90s, they actually have much better working conditions than they did back then. And some of the best working conditions in the developing world are in like brand name factories for like companies you've heard of because they've improved. So sometimes it's bullshit. It's very often bullshit.

But sometimes it's not. Obviously, you're more pro-corporation than I am. And, like, that's one of the big disagreements we have in this podcast. But, no, I tend to agree with you. The human rights space is not my space. But, like, if people ask me from, like, an employment law perspective, better to work for a big company or a small one, big one, almost every time. Yeah.

They're a little more on it. And I do believe that he has, like, a deep and partially justified, but not entirely skepticism or cynicism about big corporations. Yeah. that he should really direct more generally, right? Yeah, yeah. Well, he also says this. I want to know what you think about this.

Many large corporations maintain their own in-house magazines or even television channels. The ostensible purpose of which is to keep employees up to date on interesting news and developments, but which in fact exist for almost no reason other than to allow executives to experience that warm and pleasant feeling that comes when you see a favorable story about you in the media. Well, then it's got value, baby. Then it's not bullshit. This is one where, like, as so, like, when I was in employment. employment law, you're sort of adjacent to HR and you see a lot of the internal marketing

shit. Yeah. I do think internal marketing at large corporations. It's tough. I don't know that this is valueless. It's obviously designed for employee morale, but you'll literally be watching a video where they like hired actors to just play happy employees. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

That's something that exists. Yeah. If bullshit jobs exist, surely in-house magazines and in-house television channels fall into that category. Wait, do you want to hear my best example of this, Peter? You know, I just got back from L.A., and I heard from someone who's, like, sort of adjacent to Hollywood there, that, you know, those, like, for your consideration, it'll be like, Timothy Shalamey and Dune or whatever. Apparently, this is the conspiracy theory for which I have no evidence, but I like this story. Okay. Apparently, they put those billboards up near the actor's houses so that when, like, Timothy's,

Timothy Shalame is driving around. He sees the billboard saying, like, for your consideration, Timothy Shalame, so that he thinks, like, ooh, the studio is really supporting me in this. But it's not actually for the Oscar voters. It's just so that the actors think that the studio is behind them so they can, like, sign them for another role. Yeah. That's the kind of thing that I believe because it's the kind of thing that I would do.

I have what I think is a good example of box ticking. Okay. Sometimes if you work at a company, you will need to hire an outside law firm. And you will hire a very few. fancy law firm that costs more. Not because they're better, but because if something goes sideways and one of your higher-ups comes looking for you, you can say, look, I hired the fancy law firm, right? Okay. Now, does that mean that fancy law firms are bullshit jobs? No, not necessarily, but how many people's jobs within those firms rest on that principle? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. All right,

finally, the last category of bullshit job, taskmasters. Taskmasters are employees. quote, whose role consists entirely of assigning work to others or, quote, those who make up bullshit for others to do. I also think that every bad boss I've ever had is doing a bullshit job. Yeah. I mean, I think at a glance, I was really skeptical of this one because assigning work is sort of obviously not pointless. Yeah.

That's just called management. Yeah. But when he goes through examples, it's obvious he's talking about like middle managers who are supervising people who don't really need supervision. Oh, yeah. And I think that guy exists, right? Yeah, totally, yeah. I feel like I have two criticisms of, like, his whole category idea.

One is the one we've touched on, which is, like, not a lot of jobs fall into these categories, but, like, a little bit of a lot of jobs is bullshit by these definitions. But then also he's thinking in terms of, like, jobs within organizations. But it makes a little more sense to me to think about it in terms of, like, industries. Like, does the good or service you provide have any social value, right? Because you could have two guys that have the same job, but toward completely different ends. So, like, one guy builds apartment buildings and the other builds private prisons, right? Right.

But one of them is less socially valuable and perhaps pernicious. Dude, a couple years ago, I was dating a guy who was an event planner for, like, I don't know, Goldman Sachs or one of these, like, New York financial firms. And he was making, like, $400,000 a year. Yeah. And I also know people who are event planners for NGOs who make, like, 36,000. $6,000 a year. And it's like, it's the same job. No, no, it's not.

No, because a, uh, an event planner and an NGO is just, uh, putting together, uh, like a holiday party at Goldman Sachs, they need fucking fireworks. Yeah. They have like back playing or something. Yeah. Like, right. No, no joke though. That, that Goldman Sachs, I'm not, I, you're making, I understand your point.

I'm not trying to argue with it. But no joke, that Goldman Sachs job probably fucking sucks. Dude, no, yeah, yeah. The fucking CEO is up you up. Goldman Sachs is up your ass because fucking tie dollar sign is 20 minutes late for your corporate The way that he described it was not. It sounded very similar to the people that I know in NGOs. Fair enough.

Because NGOs also have like large events. You know, they have these like fundraising dinners and stuff, which are genuinely very difficult to plan. Yeah, yeah. Basically a bunch of rich people get together in a room and like you serve them dinner. That's like essentially what he was doing for like whatever city bank or whatever the fuck it was. And it's like it was remarkably similar.

I do think that like Graber. is not trying to talk about like who bill like who's doing good for society with with their career and shit like that he's really making this narrower point about how big corporations have become these like sprawling monstrosities that are no longer geared toward efficiency but have developed these like self-contained patronage operations I guess again it's like you need data on that it's got me so different industry to industry NGOs are not like that at all right let's let's talk data yeah this has all been very subjective so far which is why neither of us have any idea what the fuck is going on.

Yeah. When Graber wrote the original essay, he did not put data in it really. And that wasn't really the purpose of it. I guess, yeah. The subtitle of it was a work rant, right? Totally. Yeah, yeah, yeah. He's not trying to, like, put a coherent thesis out there.

This is a kind of thing that your friend would tell you at a bar. And you're like, fire. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. You're like, right, dude. You're so right. Yeah. You should write about that.

And if you're on the left, your friend does have a magazine that no one reads. Yeah, exactly. And he's like, you should write for my magazine. When the essay gains traction, UGov runs a poll in the UK, and Graber puts the results in his book as sort of like a proof of concept. The UGov headline reads, 37% of British workers think their jobs are meaningless, which is pretty dramatic. Yeah, that's really high, actually. Graber cites the poll in his opening chapter, basically being like, look, I was right. But it's also totally subjective, yeah.

But here's what the poll asks, okay? the poll asks, is your job making a meaningful contribution to the world? Oh, well, that's a completely different, yeah. It really is, right? So 50% said yes, 37% said no and 13% said they didn't know. If you look back to his definition of a bullshit job, it's like a job that is entirely pointless. If someone says, are you making a meaningful contribution to the world? That reads to me like a significant contribution to the world, right?

morally valenced in some way. Right. Right. Like there's all like either it's a large contribution or you has has a sort of moral quality to it. Yeah. And so yeah, I think a lot of people are just sort of like, oh, I don't know. Yeah.

Because like as a teenager, I worked for years in video stores and like that was not a bullshit job, but that was not meaningfully contributing to the world either. Right. It wasn't like a charity or something. It's like I sat at the counter and people rented videos, whatever. Right. But yeah, I would have answered no to that question. But I don't think that was a bullshit job.

He also cites a poll of Dutch workers from 26. 16, where according to him, 40% of respondents said that their jobs had no reason to exist. But very similarly, if you look at the poll, the actual question was about, like, whether they experienced their job as meaningful. So, like, it's very similar, right? Yeah. He does make a big case for self-reporting about this. He basically says, like, look, there's no way to, like, come up with an objective metric for what a

bullshit job is. And, like, the best we have is self-reporting because people have a decent sense of this stuff. And like they might not always be correct in our opinion, but this is basically this is the best way to go. And I kind of, I agree there is no way to do an objective determination of whether a job is bullshit. And maybe self-reporting is best. But the other side of that is self-reporting is still very bad. Yeah, exactly. And also it's like the reason why the only thing that works is self-reporting is partly because of the muddiness of the concept.

Yeah. Because you're asking, like, is your job bullshit? But like the term job kind of implies something you don't want. to be doing. You're doing it because you get paid. So most people are going to say, like, yeah, my job's bullshit. There were a couple years ago some researchers at Cambridge wanted to see whether there was empirical support for this. And they pulled together a bunch of data and they tried to compare it to his affirmative hypotheses throughout the book. How many people are gooning? How many people are duct taping? Yes. They looked at the European Working Condition Survey that filed data from

2005 to 2015. So the survey asks workers to rank whether they, quote, have the feeling of doing useful work on a five-point scale. Okay. I think that that much more closely tracks the bullshit jobs definition, right? And when you phrase it that way, only 4.8% of respondents said that they did not feel like they were doing useful work at all. That's actually lower than I thought it would be. That climbs to 5.6 in the UK, but like nowhere near. Oh, I know, Peter.

You look at the UK, like, not a lot of people are doing youthful work here. Just professional transphobes. Yeah, I know. So if you say, do you think that your job makes a meaningful contribution to the world? 40% of people say no. But if you're just like, well, is it useful at all? Then only 5%. Right.

I will note there is some data that shows that in the United States this number goes up pretty dramatically. One piece of research said it's at 19% in the United States. Whoa. Okay. There's another part of Graber's thesis that he lays out in the book that is a little bit testable, which is that this problem is worsening. There is every reason to believe that the overall number of bullshit jobs and even more, the overall percentage of jobs considered bullshit by those who hold them have been increasing rapidly in recent years alongside the ever-increasing bullshittization of useful forms of employment. So he says like there's every reason to believe that the number of bullshit jobs is going up.

But then the only actual evidence he provides is that the service sector is replacing agriculture and industry as like a percentage of the economy. That's just like a completely different thing. That's the thing is like if the claim of the book is like the service sector is a larger part of the economy than it used to be, then like you wouldn't have a book. Right. Like that's that's not interesting. It's not really debatable. He's doing the thing that you find a lot in the ultra processed foods discourse where when people describe it in the abstract, they'll say like, oh, they're addictive, food like substances, like the super artificial junk, right? And then you get into the actual categories and it's like all tortillas and like all bread. Because he's basically saying he's he's identified this thing of like everyone's doing bullshit. jobs. Then he just says, like, the service sector is increasing, like, knowledge jobs are increasing, which is the, yeah. But that's not the same thing. He's, so he's basically arguing that service jobs are frequently bullshit, whereas, like, agriculture and industry are generally not. And so the rise of the service sector indicates a rise in bullshit jobs. A lot of these kinds of manufacturing jobs are also bullshit, too. You're doing something super redundant.

That's the thing is there's, there's tons of redundancy in, like, manufacturing. Yeah. But his point broadly is that, like, technology and automation has taken all of these jobs. jobs and that it's sort of like left a void that we've filled with this bullshit, right? That like because we all feel the need to work and corporations want people employed because they're like little feudal societies in his mind that we sort of filled the void created by technology with bullshit jobs. I don't know that I agree with this because again, companies wouldn't be spending money on work just for like ideological reasons.

He thinks that you're a capitalist sucker. that that argument is sort of like, oh, you think markets are efficient, dip shit. Well, I don't think markets are efficient, but I also think these are like profit-oriented industries. The whole problem with the way that we've structured capitalism is that they put profit above everything else. I don't think companies are like, ha, ha, ha, we must keep employing people to do nothing. But yeah, like, why do in-house television channels exist at corporations? Because someone's stupid. Yeah, exactly, completely. Because a bunch of dumb people thought it was a good idea. Or there may actually be, this again,

you need to look at the data, there may be indicators that this does affect retention. We probably are being unfair to in-house, in-house television channels or whatever the fuck. Because if that shit's working to boost morale for like 15% of people, it's probably worth the investment. Yeah. The fact that it makes us want to kill ourselves, it might be irrelevant here, right? Yeah.

Let's dig into this a bit because I think there is this question of like, what industries house the bullshit jobs that Graber is constantly sort of touching on. I'll send you this. He says, say what you like about nurses, garbage collectors, or mechanics. It's obvious that were they to vanish in a puff of smoke, the results would be immediate and catastrophic. A world without teachers or dock workers would soon be in trouble. And even one without science fiction writers or ska musicians would clearly be a lesser place. It's not entirely clear how humanity would suffer if all private equity CEOs, lobbyists, PR researchers, actuaries, telemarketers, bailiffs, or legal consultants were to similarly vanish.

I mean, there's lobbyists for like animal rights and stuff. Right, right, right. The entire category of lobbyists is just weird to do this. Private equity CEOs, he's fucking correct about. But that's also, that's not because the job is bullshit. It's because the sector is harmful. That's just like a different concept. And that's what I think he misses with like where he has this like perspective on certain industries.

Right. And he's constantly bouncing back and forth between like, between being like, this role is bullshit, which can. be defensible in certain respects. The lady with the fake paperwork. Bullshit job. Yeah. And then being like, yeah, and like lobbying is also bullshit. And it's sort of like, no, like I have a ton of objections with how this industry operates, but it doesn't feel like it's the same thing where it's just completely pointless.

Yeah. The fact that he says private equity CEO is really weird. Right. Because in most of his categories, what makes a bullshit job a bullshit job is like you're doing stuff your boss wants you to do that makes no sense. but if you're the CEO of a company, you're the one making people do stuff. It's also hilarious to include ska musicians in this. This is such a fucking leftist academic thing to do. He's writing this in 2018.

Yeah, he's like squirrel nut zippers are the real essential workers. Let's talk about the people that we all know are essential, less than Jake. But I think he's getting at something here. If you just try to imagine a good faith version of this, there are some jobs where the utility of that job is just readily apparent. If you are sweeping the floor, the benefit that you provide is a lot more immediate and clear than someone who is putting together decks on a marketing team somewhere. Totally. When I was a teenager, like I said, I swept floors.

And if I slacked off for a day, someone would notice. You had this very clear and discreet objective. Right. This would never happen. But if we were to not release an episode every single week, nothing would happen. The fans would get angrier. Have you started getting, I'm starting to get the mentions when I tweet something like, oh, so you have time to post, but you don't have time to make an episode? Well, when it comes to the amount that you post, they have a point.

They have a point, Michael. He says, one must assume that the percentage of nurses, bus drivers, dentists, street cleaners, farmers, music teachers, repairmen, gardeners, firefighters, set designers, plumbers, journalists, safety inspectors, musicians, tailors, and school crossing guards who checked no to the question, does your job make any meaningful difference in the world, was approximately zero. But also, dude, don't get me starting a fucking school crossing guard. That's totally a bullshit job. The only reason they existed because the streets in America are so unsafe.

That's like one of those cludge jobs that he was talking about, like a duct tape job. I thought you were going to be like, survival of the fittest kids. Who gives a shit? So there's also data in those European worker surveys on how people in those different industries view the usefulness of their jobs. Some of it aligns with what he's saying here. Like the percentage of teachers and nurses who think their jobs are useless is very low in these surveys. low 2%, but some of the jobs that Graber categorizes as clearly useful have higher rates of workers who say it's useless. 9.7% of garbage collectors said they don't feel the job is

useful. Really? Okay. And on the other hand, the percentage of people in like financial services who said their job is useless is about average. It's not below average like you think he'd predict. It does feel like maybe he's wishcasting a little bit here. Like he thinks that certain jobs are letcherous and useless and don't add value. Right. So he thinks, well, people will agree with me. Yeah. I think that you probably have a lot of people who have tedious jobs.

If you're a garbage collector and you go from house to house grabbing trash and then dumping it into the truck and then a couple days later you come back. There's more trash. Yeah. I can see some part of your brain, even if it's irrational. Yeah. Yeah. And like, what the fuck is this?

And I, you know, I swept floors and there is like, there is a part of your brain that loses it a little bit, right? Where you're just like, God damn. It's dirty again. But it's also funny because he's kind of locked himself into this self-report thing because a lot of people in the financial sector think that they're doing useful stuff and they fucking aren't. Right. If you're like chopping up mortgages and reselling them back to me, you might think that's useful, but it's fucking not. I think you're right. The self-reporting here, the self-reporting thing has blind spots because, yeah, garbage men are obviously doing useful work. Those things do not make people feel useful, right? Right. And then, yeah, there are people who are like just rent-seeked.

who contribute nothing, but make a fortune and couldn't possibly be convinced that their jobs are useless because their entire sense of themselves relies on the belief that they are valuable. Yeah, I'm drop shipping vitamin supplements, but I have to believe it's essential because I paid $300 for the seminar. There is research showing that the more attenuated the impact of your job is, the lower your job satisfaction is likely to be. So, like, if you're not seeing the positive impact that you cause, even if you cause it, that might make you think that your job is useless.

which sort of makes sense. It might make you think that your job sucks. Yeah, this was my human rights career in a nutshell. We're like going to fucking UN conferences and giving speeches and stuff and like no tangible impact. And like everybody would sit around at night just being like, what are we doing here? It's cool that you were like, this is useless work. I'm going to go become a podcaster. It's time to really reach people. Every extra hour of the Olivia Nutsi episode makes the world such a better place. I want to draw a distinction because this came into my head a couple of times when he was talking about like the internal marketing stuff. like, you know, the fucking in-house television channels and all that, that grinds at you when you, if you're, if you're, I think, like us, right? Like when I worked at a large corporation or two, and I saw shit like that, I'd be like, ugh.

But the other end of that is the way that Elon Musk runs companies. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Where everything is stripped down to the bone and there's none of that. Yeah. And that does, I have to say, feel worse. So much worse. Yeah.

It's like the, you know, the old saying is that half of. of all advertising spending is wasted. It's just hard to identify which half. I feel like a lot of this cultural stuff within corporations, a lot of it is bullshit, but it's difficult to find exactly where the bullshit is and where the non-bullshit is. Yeah, it's a balancing act and on either side is an abyss. Yeah, I feel like both of us are just not joiners in that way. Like, I've never gotten invested in like the corporation I work for or the school I go to. I mean, I do participate in sports fandom, so I do understand this. Would you have an emotional response of Kansas City won the Super Bowl, because I had no response whatsoever to Seattle winning.

Not only that. When I watch a team I like in a high stakes game and like the playoffs or whatever, my anxiety levels are through the fucking roof. Oh, you're like clenched. Yeah, yeah. Like real physical anxiety that would be almost impossible for me to replicate outside of like super high stakes work situations and stuff. This does make no sense to me, but also I watch Eldon Ring no hit randomizer runs and I'm like clenched the entire time. So like I do get it on some level. Yeah, I mean, that's so much worse. No, it's all fake. No.

I love it when sports people are like, oh, this is fake. Like, oh, yeah, like putting a ball in the hoop isn't fucking fake. I know, I know that you think that it's all fake, but I do feel like there's a spectrum where like a... No. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

No. Sports is dumb. Makeup tutorials are dumb. Twitch streamers are dumb. No, no. It's all dumb. It's all bullshit jobs. No, we made it.

It's a spectrum. And sports are just a little bit farther along than no hit Eldon Ring speed runs. False. You're watching a 13-year-old who's like sitting on a gamer chair slash toilet play and you're like, this is like sports. Whatever. Both of us are watching someone else do something that we are incapable of doing and getting invested in it. It's precisely the same thing. That's not the definition of sports. The quarterback fucking like Dan Marino or whatever is the same level of bullshit as like the 19-year-old Twitch stream that I'm watching. Brett Farr? Who's a fucking who's a quarterback? Dude, these are... Who's a quarterback?

These are all athletes from the 80s and 90s. At least they're football, though. I know some football people. They are quarterback, so you're right. You know what? Credit where it's due. No, thank you. Now, what's the name of a no-hit Eldon run?

I'm not going to say because it's too embarrassing. Yeah, exactly. There's a kernel of truth there. There's a kernel of truth. I'm not giving it to you. What makes sports a little more real is that I am in gay, because it is popular. Whatever.

What's the fucking different? Then it's just like a question of scale. Well, I do think there's a slight difference in that I feel like any 13-year-old who tried really hard could do what the Ilden Ring streamers are doing. That's not true because they can't do it. There's only like only a few people have done it. I'm not going to name names, but I know the names. There's only a few people who have tried, Michael.

Because other people are out there getting their dick sucks out. It's crazy how far off topic we are right now. We're like. You're just trying to say the word bullshit sometimes so we can tie this back in. Exactly. That's exactly what I'm doing. There is another, if you sort of take a step back and look at his big picture thesis, there's testable claim that he makes, which is that technology has resulted in us working more, not less, right?

Remember he said that Keynes predicted that technology would lead us to, wait, Keynes? Fuck. What is it? Yeah, whatever. Okay. Well, don't say whatever because I'm going to get strung up for this. I'm going to keep the one where you're wrong. I'm going to look it up and then keep the take where you're incorrect.

So don't worry about it. That's why I'm saying this. But he basically, you know, he basically says, look, technology has gotten to a point where it could lead us to lives of leisure, but instead, quote, it has been marshaled, if anything, to figure out ways to make us all work more. This gets at something that feels instinctively kind of true, which is that technological advances results in more productivity, but not a lighter workload, right? Although it does seem like bullshit jobs is the wrong way to look at that. There's like sort of specific political science reasons for that. This is the heart of the episode because we've been going back and forth with like, well, he's kind of on to something, but not really. But there are actually coherent theories of this.

It's tough to measure this in a big picture way. But you can just look at average work hours over time. Over a long enough time frame, you do see that. In 1870, the average American worker worked over 3,000 hours a year. Now that's down to about 1,800. And obviously that's not just the result of technological advances. There are a ton of variables. You have workers' rights movements, legislation, cultural changes.

But you see very, very similar trends across the Western world. So I think this is the best argument that generally speaking, better technology has, in fact, reduced overall working hours. So you might look at that at a glance and just think, well, Grieber is wrong, right? He's a communist dumbass, and he does not understand the glory of capitalism. That's what I'm thinking. That's what I'm sitting here thinking. But if you zoom in, the story does get a little bit more complicated.

I'm going to share a chart with you. This chart is annual working hours per worker across various countries. Yeah, yeah. So basically, since, what is it, roughly 1980, almost every other country has seen reductions in working hours, especially in Western Europe, and we've stagnated. So we're basically working the same number of hours that we were in 1980. That's right.

So there are massive decreases in working hours from 1870 to about 1970. After that, it's been largely flat, slight declines, but really hovering at about 1,800 hours worked per year in the United States. Whereas Germany is below 1,500. So now it seems like maybe Graber is getting at something, right? There have been a ton of technological advances since the 70s, but this has not reduced American working hours. So he may be wrong that bullshit jobs are proliferating, but he's right that better technology and more productivity has not led to more leisure time for Americans, at least in the last

several decades. Which is a big deal. Braber has a ton of frankly rambling explanations of why it occurs at like the micro level within organizations. A lot of it revolves around his idea of managerial feudalism, you know, where he argues that corporations have grown to resemble feudal relationships where wealth and power is distributed for political reasons rather than economic reasons. We've sort of talked about how this doesn't quite click. It's an interesting angle, but I do not believe that corporations have just created 20 to 30% fake jobs. Right. Yeah.

Out of like a feudal spirit. It feels more like they've just lobbied against things like more vacation time, you know, maternity leave. Like this is why hours are so much reduced in Western Europe. Let's not get ahead of ourselves and start talking about Western Europe, all right? Okay. So his macro explanation is a little more coherent and it's cultural. It's basically like Protestant work ethic stuff.

So I'll send that. He says, the captains of industry, first in America, then increasingly every, have been able to convince the public that they, and not those they employ, are the real creators of prosperity. One could call it a revival of Puritanism. But as we've seen, this idea goes much further back. To a fusion of the Christian doctrine of the curse of Adam, with the northern European notion, the paid labor under master's discipline, is the only way to become a genuine adult. This history made it very easy to encourage workers to see their work, not so much as wealth creation, or helping others, or at least not primarily so, but as self-abnegation,

A kind of secular hair shirt, a sacrifice of joy and pleasure that allows us to become an adult worthy of our consumer toys. This argument is basically that we're a society where people get their dignity from work, and that has created incentives to pursue work, even if it is pointless. I don't actually, after living in Western Europe for 12 years, I don't actually think that's the case. They have the same thing there, but they have fewer working hours than we do, and they have, like, paid vacation. Like, I just don't think this works for, like, we work 15% more hours than other capitalist countries. Like, they also get a sense of self-worth in fucking Denmark, but they just work less than we do. So here is my attempt to synthesize bullshit jobs with the best research I could find. Okay.

There's this economist Juliette Shore who studies this and wrote a very influential book in 1992 called The Overworked American. And she was also trying to understand this very basic phenomenon. Why did productivity stop reducing hours in the 1970s or so? and where did that extra productivity go? Her main explanation is that in the United States around this time, the extra productivity stopped turning into more leisure time and started turning into consumption. In 1970, household consumption was under 60% of GDP.

By 1990, it's in the mid-60s. And for the last couple of decades after the publication of her book, it's been about 70%, just south of 70%. She points out that if you survey people, they are not materialist. They actually value free time. She conducted a survey of people making around $30,000 a year, which is about $70,000 in today's money, and asked if they would trade a day of work each week for an equivalent reduction in pay. 70% said yes.

Okay. She also points out that polls asking people to rank their priorities between things like health, family life, etc. Always result in material things ranking very low. One obvious explanation for this is that people are lying, either to themselves or to the pollsters. they think they want more leisure time, but when presented with the choice, they'll choose more money. But Shore's broad argument is that these choices are shaped by institutions and norms. So not only are there social and cultural pressures to work, but even if you wanted to reduce your working hours, it's not always easy, right? Most people cannot trade their job for a part-time version

of their job. Right. Right. There's also a finite amount of well-paying part-time work in general. The job market is built around full-time work, right? I also, I do this for everything, but I also think the decline of unions, people don't want to get fired in America. So you do what your boss tells you. I mean, this, this kind of feels obvious. And like, this is like, it's where it's sort of obviously going, right? But like, in Germany, they're now under 1,400 hours per year on average, right? France hovers around 1,500.

And you look at like, what would account for this gap? And she says, stronger unions, labor law protections, mandatory vacation. Right. Why are they working less? Well, they all take like a month or two off. every single year. I will say like culturally, when I worked in Denmark, I was part of a unionized NGO. We would have meetings where my boss would be like, oh, I need you to get me that by Monday.

And people would just be like, oh, no. People come into my boss's office and be like, oh, it's sunny out. I'm going to leave it like 3.30 today. That rocks. People are not afraid of getting fired. People are so afraid of getting fired to America's use health care. Oftentimes you're not like, you can get evicted much more easily. Like losing your job is just objectively much more devastating here.

And so you have to do whatever you can to keep your job. And like, you just don't have that in Western Europe in the same way. Right. And a lot of that as unions. I mean, it's also like labor protections. It's other things too. I mean, they go hand in hand. Yeah.

So I think she's making an argument that like half supports Graber and half doesn't, right? He's basically saying our capitalist overlords want us to work for this like sort of like abstract reason, right? Where they maintain this like feudal control over people and it benefits. benefits them. She's basically saying, no, what's happened is the money goes to consumption. So it's not that bullshit jobs are being sort of like created out of the ether by corporations to keep us working or something along those lines. It's that we now consume more, which creates demand, right? So we got richer, but instead of saying, oh, hey, I'll trade that for free time. We traded for consumer goods, which creates demand, which creates more jobs, right?

So you could sort of view those as the bullshit jobs, right? The excess consumption that goes beyond what we actually need. And that's sort of vague in and of itself. The repairman on the Laboubu vending machine. Yeah, right. Yes. The Labibu is perhaps a great example, right? Like demand has been created out of thin air for a thing that literally no one needs, right?

I think that is sort of a category of bullshit. It's just like needless consumption. Watches, for example. People are buying watches. That we do not need. That we do not. I was just watching a TikTok by like a watch TikToker. Dude, I think we've reached the ultimate bullshit job.

A watch TikToker. I can't think of anything more bullshit than that. How else would I learn about watch? The funniest type of guy is the guy who's like, I like a Rolex because that will get you into the room where you can do more business. Oh, it's like an investment in like my, it's like a LinkedIn post. Yeah, I'm spending 12 grand on a watch because it opens doors for me and God knows how much that's worth. And it's just like, I can't imagine how much of a fucking pervert someone would have to be to be like, yo, that guy's got a Rolex.

Yeah, I'm definitely going to that guy's seminar now. So there is one sort of final thought section he has. Okay. The final chapter sort of touches on policy. He says, I don't usually like putting public policy recommendations in my book. One reason for this is that it has been my experience that if an author is critical of existing social arrangements, reviewers will often respond by effectively asking, so what are you proposing to do about it then?

Search the text until they find something that looks like a policy suggestion, and then act as if that is what the book is basically about. So if I were to suggest that a mass reduction of working hours or a policy of universal basic income might go far in solving the problems described here, the likely response will be to see this as a book about reducing working hours or about universal basic income, and to treat it as if it stands and falls on the workability of that policy, or even the ease by which it could be implemented.

I mean, that's fair, although that's what we're about to do. Yeah, it's sort of like, what I'm the fucking smartest guy on earth? I don't know. I'm just pointing out a problem, right? I do respect somebody that has a book that's just like, hey, this sucks. Yeah, like, you're all a bunch of flunkies and goons, and I don't know how to fix it, but I'll see you guys later. I complain about, like, Hollywood making, like, sequels and remakes all the time. I don't have, like, a public policy solution to that.

It just sucks. Why don't you make a gay little indie film? Why don't you make a gay little indie film? Why would it be a gay little indie film, Peter? I love a gay little indie film. I'm on your side, Michael, and I will fund you if they don't get too angry. But so does he just end by saying I don't have any public policy recommendations and here's my reason? Yeah, the final chapter has a bunch about like the sort of impact that he believes that this has on society,

that it creates these like resentments up and down the latter. And that, you know, I think this is sort of like a very basic lefty idea that elites take advantage of resentments between non-elites. Right. So, yeah, I think he sort of has this belief that these jobs drag on society. I don't think he has identified like a discreet and identifiable thing. Right. I do think it feels hard to argue with the idea that the reason productivity started going to consumption rather than leisure in the United States is that we lack what they have in Europe, right?

Yeah. We don't have the unions, the labor law protections. That is the big difference here. And I think in my mind that that's sort of like obvious leftist shit 101. Yeah. But that's kind of what I like about it, right? I kind of feel like Braver did this whole thought experiment that ended up just landing me at like, yeah, we need labor laws. Yeah, like this is why I'm on the left and not on the right is because like these obvious things.

Also, doesn't his thesis depend on Western Europe having fewer bullshit jobs than we do? Yeah. Brother. Which he doesn't, he doesn't explore. Brother. As someone who live there, they do not have fewer bullshit jobs than we do, man. Have you met a French person? Have you asked them what they do?

He sort of navigated his way towards some truths here, right, in different parts of the book. I do think that there are elements of our jobs that are bullshit. It seems to be objectively true that we are not pursuing leisure as a society in America, right, that we have not converted our productivity into leisure. These are like real things. And I think, like, in the micro, he'll say these little things where you're like, that's true. Is the sort of the broad macro phenomenon of the bullshit job as he describes it, I don't really think so.

I will say I'm much more negative on this book than it seems like you are. You said this is like an okay book. This thing's bad to me. I will say that the experience of reading it is probably a lot better than the experience of hearing about it. Every few pages, you're like, that's an interesting way to frame that. Even if it's not quite right. I do think it's like managerial feudal idea of corporations, even though it's not an accurate

way to explain what's happening with bullshit jobs is an interesting way to explain certain corporate dynamics. Maybe it's the opposite of Robert Kiyosaki where, like, he was just an execrable person to spend time with. And David Graber seems like an okay guy to spend time with. Even if you're like, eh, I don't really agree with that. There's also another, a lot of the book is anecdotes that people send in about their bullshit jobs. And it's extremely boring to read because every single one, you're like, yeah, that does sound like bullshit. Yeah, yeah. For the podcast, it wouldn't be able to be like, and here's another person who said that they did useless paperwork. But that's a large chunk of the book. And I will say it's kind of fun to read.

Like, it's sort of, yeah. There's something about it that's a little bit entertaining. It's like cathartic, yeah. Yeah, there's something like a, there's some like shared human experience in like, this fucking shit we have to do sometimes because our boss thinks it's important and it's obviously not. And that's also so relatable to the idea that some part of your job, I think this is like universal, some part of your job is complete bullshit. Right, right.

I was able, and I still am sort of on this train, to convince myself that he's sort of pointed out this social phenomenon. And he's inaccurately diagnosing it, but it's a really interesting phenomenon. the idea that we as a society have had the option to turn our increased productivity into leisure and haven't done it. Yeah, I think that's true. I think it's true that we shouldn't get rid of the SCA musicians. And it's especially true that we shouldn't get rid of the no-hit randomizer Eldon Ring Streamer.

I think that's not it's not bullshit, Peter. I want you to say what everyone listening wants you to say, which is that it's cool to throw a ball far.