Offline with Jon Favreau - Is Remote Work Here to Stay? With Derek Thompson

Episode Date: October 9, 2022

For a closed-captioned version of this episode, click here. For a transcript of this episode, please email [e-mail] and include the name of the podcast.

On this season of The Wilderness, I'm finding out what voters who aren't hooked on Twitter or cable news think about politics. We've learned a lot so far, but there is still more to cover as we dive deeper into what it will take to actually reach these voters and help save democracy in 2022 and beyond. Make sure to catch up on the first four episodes of The Wilderness now and listen to new episodes every Monday, wherever you get your podcasts. You just wrote a piece about a related topic that's all over TikTok and Twitter, quiet quitting, which is supposed to be a pandemic related trend where employees are only doing the bare minimum at work. You think this is bullshit. Why? I think it's bullshit because quiet quitting is just a term to invent that which we've

historically called work. I mean, it's fun. It's is just a term to invent that which we've historically called work. I mean, it's it's fun. It's funny to invent new words like I'm not against the expansion of the American vocabulary. Like, cool, go for it. But like, let's just be realistic about like what is new and what is not new. There's this impression that quiet quitting describes the novel phenomenon of people only working to their wage or only doing that which is required of them. Well, that's just what we call a job. I'm Jon Favreau. Welcome to Offline. Hey, everyone. Welcome back. Offline is back online. I'm sorry. I hate myself. Anyway, we're back from a three-week break where I felt somewhat unplugged, at least for me. And by that, I mean I worked on the wilderness the entire time and checked Twitter for new midterm polls. Good stuff. But now I'm very excited to keep talking

to smart people who can help us make sense of our social media-addled, rage-tweet-filled existence. We got a lot of interesting conversations lined up for you. But today I wanted to start by talking about how the internet has changed the way we work, especially after a pandemic that kept millions of us out of the office. I have mixed feelings about remote work. Here at Crooked, we've been experimenting with a hybrid model, three days in the office, two days at home. We figured that gives people more flexibility while still bringing folks together for more creative work. But it's a tricky balance that a lot of companies and employees are still navigating. Partly because, as we've talked about on this series, there's a big difference between the kind of communication and interaction that takes place online and the kind that happens in person.

I wanted to talk about all this with Derek Thompson, who's something of an expert on this topic. He's talked about it on his phenomenal podcast, Plain English, and writes about it for The Atlantic, including his newsletter, which is called Work in Progress. Derek argues that there's not really a yes or no answer to the question, is remote work good? Instead, we should be thinking about how to make it a win for everyone. And he's got some great ideas about how to do that. Because this is offline, we also talked about everything from why he thinks quiet quitting is a bullshit internet thing, to why we're all living in a moment where the vibes just aren't good, and what that means for the economy, politics, and democracy. Fortunately, Derek is hopeful we're going to be able to figure this all out.

It was a perfect conversation for our first show back, and I think you'll really enjoy it. As always, if any of you have comments about the show, concerns, questions, and especially ideas for future episodes, please shoot us a note at offline at crooked.com. We would love to hear from you. Here's Derek Thompson. Derek Thompson, welcome to Offline. Hey, it's great to be here. Thanks, John. So we spend a lot of time on the show talking about how being very online during the pandemic has changed the way we live.

It has also, of course, changed the way we work. You've written a lot about this. You have a fantastic newsletter on the topic. I run a media company where we've been experimenting with a hybrid model of work. We do three days in the office, two days at home. I wonder, do you think some version of remote work is here to stay? There is no question that some version of remote work is here to stay. One way that I think about the obviousness of the answer to that question, because I think a lot of social phenomena are really complicated. And in most cases, I want to respond by saying, well, you know, we have to be very humble about predicting the future. The reason that I'm pretty confident that remote work is a thing that's going to stay is that you compare the comeback of various social

phenomena after the pandemic. Like let's say you compare going back to sports games and going to the movies with coming back to the office. Well, NBA attendance is back like 99%. Baseball attendance is back like 99%. Going back to the movies, especially when you look at blockbusters, is all the way back. Top Gun Maverick was a massive, massive hit. When there's a big movie, people go to the movie theaters. But if you look at Castle Systems, which is one of these companies that measures the number of people that fob into offices, I don't know if you guys use Castle Systems, I think we might at the Atlantic. When you look at that, the recovery of people fobbing back into offices in major American cities, talking Austin, Seattle, Washington, DC, New York, there's no city that's recovered more than 60%. And in San Francisco,

and Los Angeles, and Washington, DC, where I live, the recovery rate is closer to 35% to 40%. That means that office work is down two and a half years after the pandemic started more than 60%. That is massive. if you have a little bit more recovery, even if you eke out 50% office return recovery, 60%, you're still down 40%, which is a catastrophic for basically any other industry. Like if podcasting were down 40%, you'd notice if the movie theater industry was down 40%, studio producers and directors would be like, holy shit, this is terrible. Office attendance in major cities is not going to recover to anything close, I think, like it was in 2018, 2019. Remote work is clearly here to stay. I mean, the big difference between returning to the office and returning to

the movies and baseball games is that the latter is a category of things that people like to do. You know what I'm just i i part of me wonders whether like it's not totally surprising that employees who are sick of commuting to an office and being in office all the time a good number of them would not want to return i wonder if at some point like employers and employees too will together realize maybe it's not working for the company as a whole. And of course, this is like different by industry, it's different by type of worker, et cetera, et cetera. But like, why do you think it is that, I mean, we talked about why it's here to stay, but like, how do you think we got here to the point where it may never recover?

Let me answer that question in two parts. The first part is the caveat that all conversations about remote work have to have, which is that the majority of jobs in America cannot be done remotely. You cannot be a remote cashier. You cannot be a remote retail salesperson. You cannot be a remote brain surgeon. I definitely don't want my brain operated on by someone who is in his scrubs on his couch watching like Bridgerton while like, you know, fiddling around on his iPad inside of my cerebellum. Yeah. Until until we have like AI brain surgeons. I welcome the brain. I welcome the automation. I will not be I will not be getting surgery that way. But yeah, OK. I welcome the automation of the service. I just don't want it to be done fully remotely.

So we are talking about a large minority of the American workforce. So an important caveat that I think is always just important to put on the table. And now let's talk about this very important story of this large minority of the workforce. You said it right there. Offices aren't movie theaters because offices kind of suck. When people go to the movies, they generally have a lot more fun than they do at the office. So in a way, people voting with their feet, which is a phenomenon that you are intimately familiar with when you cover demographic patterns

and the migratory behavior of the American worker, people are voting with their feet and they are voting yes to Top Gun Maverick and they're voting no to offices on Mondays. Why is that the case? Well, one way you can tell that story is to say that the office is a technology that has existed for about 150 years in white collar work or knowledge work. And for 150 years, there was really no choice. If you were a podcasting company, if you were a sort of retail corporate office, if you were a media or marketing company, then you had no choice. You were going into the office five days a week. But because it was a default, we didn't have very sophisticated answers to an important question. What does the office do? If the office is a technology, what is its job? What does the office accomplish? And today, workers and companies

and bosses who have a choice have to actually answer this question. What is the job of an office? If we think our workers can be somewhat as productive at home, and there's evidence suggesting they can be, and we think our workers can be somewhat as happy staying at home, and there's research suggesting they can be, then what is the purpose of asking them to sacrifice 30, 60, 90 minutes of a commute time to come together in the office? I have some theories about that question, but that is the really big question that's being asked right now that we have to be purposeful about. What does the office do, and why must we subject people to offices in a world where we recognize they actually do have a choice?

Well, let's try to answer that question because you have written about how remote work does have some negative consequences. And specifically, you talk about how it has negative consequences for new workers, new teams, and new ideas. Can you sort of walk through each of those? Yeah, absolutely. So I've talked about remote work having a novelty problem because I think that one benefit of seeing people entirely, seeing their entire body when you talk to them, is that, and I know this is like a weird way to talk, but you get more data from them. So the story that I like to tell is imagine that you have a really, really interesting idea for a new direction for your company, and you send it over Slack to someone. You're the boss of your company, but you send it to the

co-boss. Would never do that. Would never do that's let's say you do, though. Let's say you do that because you don't know how the story ends. Maybe you're a young worker. You don't know how the story ends, right? You've seen the final chapter of it, but you have this big idea. You send it to a boss via Slack or to a colleague via Slack and they respond. OK, two letters. Okay. You are emotionally devastated. Like this person has just driven a fucking stake through your heart by just writing back. Okay. And not putting an exclamation point by it, a smiley face, a thumbs up, some kind of big plus sign in Slack. It's just two letters. But if you are in an office and the exact same behavior happens and someone gives you their new idea for a podcast with your network and you say to them, okay, and you're nodding and you're smiling and you're like

looking at this and you are communicating a lot of enthusiasm, not reading whatever this document is. Well, that's an entirely different thing. So I think a lot of emotional data is lost when we communicate over Slack. And it means that we have to sometimes over-communicate our emotions. We have to put exclamation points behind everything. We have to put all these emojis next to our communications because we're trying to make up for that which our bodies would communicate in an office setting. And I think it just means that this need to over-communicate via virtual communications is just really, really important. So how does that directly answer your question? Well, there's a novelty problem, I think, with remote work because new workers need to be, I think, a little bit enmeshed in a culture in order to understand

it. And if you just drop a 22-year-old into a fully remote company that doesn't have any way of bringing people together, they're not phenomenologically really joining a company. They're joining a group chat. They're joining a group chat that calls itself a company. And a group chat isn't very personal, and it's not very culturally deep. And so a lot of young workers, I think, feel very lost. And by the way, this isn't just me talking like out of my butt. Nick Bloom, who is a Stanford economist who does maybe more research in this area than almost anybody else, has polled thousands of Americans about their work from home preferences. And he's broken the responses down by age. And guess which age has the highest proclivity of wanting to spend more days in the office? It's not 50-somethings,

it's not 40-somethings, it's not 30-somethings, it's 20-somethings. Because they recognize that as they're trying to sort of graduate up this learning curve in a new organization, they need the data. They need to see people's faces and understand cultures. And that's why I think a lot of companies have had a lot of trouble onboarding young people in a world that is purely remote. In the middle of the pandemic, when we were fully remote, and I had the idea for offline for this podcast, I wrote up a proposal, a very long proposal with ideas for guests, topics, the pitch, everything else. I sent it to like 10 people in the company and I got nothing for a day. Not a response. And I was

like devastated. I'm like, how? No. Now, if I was in the office, I would have popped in and sure enough, everyone's like, oh yeah, I love it. It's great. Let's do whatever. But like you don't have, it is interesting that like, you know, we say this to all of our employees here too now, which is like, look, if you have work to do by yourself, just being in the office for FaceTime is ridiculous, right? Like who cares? Just go, go buy yourself. But I think collaboration and brainstorming and creativity, like that, first of all, that does happen much better in person than it does over Slack. I wonder what you think about the Zoom of it all, right?

Because I think at the beginning of the pandemic, people thought that Zoom would solve for the problem of digital communication, which can tend to be more impersonal and you can't read people's emotions, as you mentioned. I think we ought to be fair to Zoom. On the one hand, it's clear that I think we ought to be fair to Zoom. On the one hand, it's clear that you get less data from people on a Zoom. And it's clear that people seem to get burnout from Zooms in a way that I don't think they get similar burnout from getting coffees with people. There's something, I don't know what it is, emotionally, psychologically, cognitively exhausting about looking at people's tiny little faces inside of a screen rather than being with their full corporeal body while grabbing a latte.

It's just like it's just a different experience. I will say, though, that Zoom is great. You and I are talking over Zoom. I don't want to have to take like I wanted to do this podcast. I did not want to have to take 90 minutes out of my day to get into a car, drive to a podcast studio, be led in the podcast studio, be walked through instructions of how to do a podcast in a podcast studio, get my car, validate the parking, drive all the way back. Oh no, I can't find the parking. Drive around my block a few times. Commuting is freaking annoying. That sucks. And this makes our experience just from a time-based standpoint much better. I think that there's lots of ways that remote work creates opportunities for collaborations

that don't necessarily exist inside of an office. The same way that an office gives you lots of access to people in that office, it also arguably over biases you toward people around you in that office, it also arguably over biases you toward people around you in that office. Whereas if your job, and I certainly feel like my job, is to just come up with a bunch of interesting ideas about the world, well, Twitter and group chats and having conversations with people like you, all virtually, all through the screen of my MacBook Air, is actually a really beautiful way of funneling all sorts of opinions that I wouldn't necessarily have access to just by walking up and down a hallway in an office. So I don't think that the final calculation here of like, is remote work good or is remote work bad is as easy as yes or no. I think of these things that are kind of like food.

It would be crazy to answer the question, is food good or is it bad? Well, obviously some food is good for some people at some times, especially with the right kind of diet. And I think it's the exact same with remote work. Different organizations need to understand how to incorporate these tools and technologies in order to get the best out of them. One challenge I found is that it's hard to assign value to aspects of office culture like small talk or inside jokes, but you don't really get that kind of camaraderie when you're on Zoom or Slack all day long. How much of an issue do you think

that is and how do you solve for that? I think it's a big issue that can also be overrated. That's my cop-out answer to your question, right? It's important, but some people think it's more important than it actually is. So I'm actually the last part first. I think that there is a valuable skepticism of this idea of water cooler magic. That like, if you just put everyone in an office and you shut the doors, the molecules will bounce into each other and they'll create creativity. Like that's not how stuff works. I think you actually have to be

much more purposeful than just put smart people together and hope that sheer proximity produces genius. On the other hand, the first conversation that I ever had with any researcher about remote work in March of 2020, really in the depths of just all of our existential despair, he was a former researcher at Google, and he said, people spend a lot of time around the office bullshitting. They spend a lot of time doing something that isn't work, but it's also not work. I've come to call it soft work. And that soft work includes gossip. It includes making fun of people because their football team lost on Sunday and now it's Monday. It includes talking about Elon Musk or Kim Kardashian and whatever rumors are in the news.

It involves making small talk and little jokes. What the small talk does over time, what that soft work does over time is it builds what he called psychological safety. Psychological safety is a buzzword that's sometimes used in sort of organizational psychology, but it basically means that, John, when you propose your crazy ideas for a podcast called Offline to a bunch of people around you, you have a good deal of certainty that they're not going to like make fun of you. They're not going to say something that's like too mean. They might actually, you know, poke fun at you, but it will be with like respect and love. And what you want, I think, in an office, especially in a creative industry, is for people to have the confidence that they can speak up and not be shut down, that the people around

them have respect. And that kind of psychological safety, I think, requires the weird week-to-week unproductive work of just getting to know people, just getting to know who they are as full people, and not just as people that every once in a while chime in on the group slack about something political and then put like a positive plus sign under someone else's political statement. That's a very shallow way to understand your colleagues. And so I do think that there are ways in which either purposeful, real- world hangouts, because there's lots of remote companies that have like, you know, summits and retreats, or more office time tends to be better at building psychological safety than a purely remote experience with no in-person interaction. I also feel like conflict resolution is easier to do in person than it is over the phone, over Zoom, over Slack. Like if there are problems, they are easier to solve in person. And they're also, I think, easier to solve. And there's maybe, I think there's an argument for

there's less conflict when you have relationships with your colleagues that are developed in person. So then when things go wrong, because they inevitably go wrong, you know the whole person, you have hung out with them, and you don't necessarily have as tough of a time dealing with conflict. I think a lot about, I love this aspect of psychology, the psychology of talking. And there's this aspect of psychology, the psychology of talking. And there's no more interesting question in the psychology of talking than how do you have a hard conversation with someone? Yeah.

And especially when two people disagree. I remember I used to act before I was a writer and the, when you're writing scenes or performing in scenes, what makes a good scene is that the two characters in the scene want different things. There's no interesting scene in a player movie where both characters want the exact same thing, right? Like, I don't know if you're watching like House of the Dragon or, you know, whatever other show you were watching recently. A good scene is two people that want two different things. It's very, you know, I mentioned in a sort of a wonky way that when you're in person with someone,

it's a very data-rich experience. You can see their facial gestures. You can see how their eyes move. You can see how their body moves, whether they're pointed toward you or away from you. I think conflict resolution is a very data-rich business. You really need to be with someone to see, when I'm telling you how I feel, and it's emotional, and I disagree with with you and I'm hurt, you can't do that via text. I mean, because into the vacuum of zero data, people tend to pour their anxieties. It's exactly like the okay business, right? If the person replies okay via Slack, when you propose something very complicated to them, into the vacuum of data, people pour their anxiety. Oh, they must hate me. They must think this idea is stupid. But when you see someone's entire body and all the data that's

giving off, all the information and the gestures that it's giving off, you think, oh, I'm dealing with a real human being who has the capacity to understand me and who has the capacity to understand my anxiety that they might not understand me. And that's just a rich, complicated freaking human experience. And I think you have to have it seeing the person's body and not through some virtual texting protocol. Isn't it funny? I feel like that's why I get pulled into too many exclamation points and emails and Slack, which when you see it, you're like, why am I writing so many fucking exclamation points? Or like, I never wanted to do emojis, but then now they have them on iMessage. And you're like, well, I need to show that I found that joke funny somehow.

And writing haha seems dumb, but like, I can't, you know, they don't know that I found it funny. It's a really weird, like, I do think there is limits to what digital communication can do for relationships. I mean, for sure. Can I take that one more level? So compare how you would respond to a mildly funny observation from someone who you don't know really well within your company and like a best friend, right? If it's someone you don't know really well, there's a huge need to over-communicate the fact that you found their observation humorous. So you might like put like an emoji or like a bunch of exclamation points or like make it very clear. Like I am enjoying your commentary. I don't know who I need to build some relationship with, but it was like a close friend.

It was someone that you text with like, you know, a dozen times a day and they tell like a funny joke or they sent you like a stupid little tweet. You can say, LOL, you can just say, LOL. And they'll get, oh, like he thinks that what I sent was funny enough. And I don't, I'm not going to feel catastrophic if he doesn't purely laugh at it. Like at this point, we're talking like purely about human psychology, but fundamentally this entire conversation just redounds to human psychology. Like companies are human work and really complex projects require that people feel a sort of trust, psychological safety and intimacy with each other. And I think fundamentally, this is my big I think the big problem for remote work to solve. It's very difficult to solve for those human problems if people only know each other as avatars in a group chat.

So you've written about some potential solutions to sort of the downsides of remote work as someone who believes that it's here to stay and that there are plenty of benefits. Like what are some potential solutions for some of the downsides? I wrote the story for The Atlantic that I go on this whole journey through the history of the middle manager.

I talk about the rise of the middle manager since the 19th century. I don't know that I need to go through the entire history of the rise of the middle manager, but it is an interesting story. And you can check out the piece. It's related to all sorts of technology that came about in the 19th century, like telegraphs and railroads, which totally changed the nature of corporations 150 years ago. But fundamentally, I think that companies need to be unbelievably purposeful about who is in the office together at what times. Because there is an enormous distinction between these two categories of work that comprise most white-collar labor, most knowledge work, like marketing or media. There's hard work and there's soft work.

So hard work is the work that can be done asynchronously and anywhere at any time. So for me, writing an article for The Atlantic, I can do that in an office. I can do it right here at home. I can do it at a coffee shop. I can do it at midnight. I can do it at 2 p.m. I can do it at 4 a.m. It doesn't actually matter where I am and when I am when I'm writing this article. It can be done asynchronously. It can be anywhere. That's the sort of hard work that is often necessary in a lot of jobs like ours. But there's also soft work. The work of being with people and telling jokes and brainstorming together and getting to know each other and building psychological safety, that work can't be done anywhere at any time. It has to be done with people together in an office. And so I talk about the idea that offices and large companies

need to have someone who does the role of what I call a synchronizer. And a synchronizer is someone who makes the very deliberate decision to say, what is the necessary work in our business that can be done at any time, anywhere? And let's allow people to do that work at any time, anywhere. Let's not force them to commute to an office in Los Angeles or Washington, DC, in order to just sit on Zooms and type into Word documents and Excel sheets. Instead, let's be really purposeful about, okay, there's a production team meeting about this huge upcoming news story, like, say, an enormously important midterm election. And we want to be really creative about the way that we cover it.

The way to do that, I think, is to have people together bouncing ideas off of each other and feeling everyone's body language about what ideas are exciting and what ideas are merely like borderline threshold acceptable. Let's call them all into the office and make sure that we're like present together. And I think that that job of a synchronizer needs to be much, much more deliberate because the way we work really has fundamentally changed and it's not going back to 2018, 2019. Yeah. And one other challenge is structuring that time is difficult because I think some of the most fruitful conversations I've had that are brainstorming sessions are like spontaneous conversations that happen when someone roams into your office, sits down and you start talking about politics or whatever else, you know? So, and then, you know, I think we tried during the pandemic to have like Zoom hangouts within

the office where you like have a random group of three or four people every week and you're all on Zoom together. And, you know, at first it works and everyone catches up on this is what i've been doing of course it was the pandemic so like no one was doing much um but then after a while you're just like all right i have 30 minutes to have a spontaneous conversation online here let's let's see how that goes so that is a challenge it's interesting i had the exact same experience the first time i did a zoom hangout the novelty of it was fresh enough that i kind of enjoyed it like i kind of enjoyed my first few like sort of zoom cocktails where i was like can you see this is a mezcal negroni what what do you what do you have and eventually uh we

did two or three of those and i was like well i still have a mezcal negroni um and also haven't left my house in three weeks like you. So what's new? Well, and then we just commiserated about the lack of new things. And by the fourth, it was like we are clearly so unbelievably out of gas. So I agree. I think that the novelty of the Zoom hangouts worked for a little bit, but it's just so blatantly obvious to me that, my God, I would much rather have cocktails with someone than to drink at home alone in front of a screen that they are virtually appearing on. Yeah, no, it wasn't fun. It wasn't fun. You just wrote a piece about a related topic that's all over TikTok and Twitter, quiet quitting, which is supposed to be a pandemic related trend where employees are only doing the bare minimum at work.

You think this is bullshit. Why? I think it's bullshit because quiet quitting is just a term to invent that which we've historically called work. I mean, it's it's fun. It's funny to invent new words. Like, I'm not against the expansion of the American vocabulary. Like, cool, go for it. But like, let's just be realistic about about what is new and what is not new. There's this impression that quiet quitting describes the novel phenomenon of people only working to their wage or only doing that which is required of them. Well, that's just what we call a job. I mean, most people just treat their job as a job and they do the tasks required of that job.

There's a second implication of quiet quitting that's actually been sort of weaponized by some managers and executives in places like Bloomberg and the Wall Street Journal. It seems to indicate that Americans are less engaged in their work than they used to be, that there's this epidemic of Americans quiet quitting. And if you're a manager or boss out there who's frustrated that people aren't working very hard, well, now you have your answer. It turns out that half the workforce just quiet quit in the last six weeks or something. But if you look at the best polling data we have, and it turns out we have great polling data because Gallup has been asking thousands of Americans about their engagement at work for the last 22

years. And the rate of engagement today is at the exact same level that it was in 2015, and is higher than every year between 2000 and 2014. Does that sound like an epidemic of quitting? Like, oh, no, we've catastrophically declined to mid-2014 levels of employee engagement. Like, give me a break. This is not new. You invented a new, fun, alliterative term that means having a job. I commend you on your capacity to make such a banal idea go viral. But this is not new.

Why do you think it went viral? Because there's something behind this, right? And you sort of alluded to that and i know you've talked about sort of the great resignation also and the great resignation is really sort of um people with lower wage jobs trying to get higher wage jobs and not just a bunch of people quitting the workforce but so like why do you think we get quiet quitting we get the great resignation we get this sort of general feeling that the pandemic has made everyone decide they don't want to work anymore? I think it's a couple things. I think that, first off, the vibes have been really bad in America the last few years. I don't need

to tell you what the source of those bad vibes are. They involve a particular ex-president, they involve the phenomenon of political polarization. They involve a pandemic. They involve inflation. Sorry, I guess I did just tell you what they were. No, that's good. I want to talk about that. It includes those and others. And I think that there's just, on top of that, a very complicated relationship that a lot

of millennials and Gen Z workers, but also Gen X boomers, I think it's a very complicated relationship that a lot of these people have with work. In the article that I wrote for The Atlantic, and I've talked about this phenomenon as well in my podcast, Plain English, I said, you know, a lot of workers want an efficient way of describing these sort of colliding pressures of wanting to be financially secure, but not wanting work to take over their life, but also having major status anxiety, but also experiencing guilt about that status anxiety, and sometimes feeling like gunning for that promotion, and sometimes feeling like quitting, and sometimes feeling like

crawling into a sensory deprivation tank to make all this anxiety shut up for a moment. And they're desperate for a new vocabulary to explain this tortured relationship that they have with career and work and careerism. And so they're inventing a bunch of words and terms to describe this incredibly complex relationship that they have because it's a very rich experience. They want to talk about it. It turns out that when you have a volume of experience about something, you want to have a lot of words for it. I also wonder if they want to talk about it, like you said, and for the last couple of, they haven't really been able to talk about it with other human beings, because we've all been isolated. And the way that we talk about these things now is all together online, where you sort of need new vocabulary words and new phrases and new, you know, viral moments to kind of take off. Such a good point. That's such a good point that we're not, you're right, these terms are not emerging from conversations in bars and restaurants and living rooms.

They're emerging from viral TikToks and newspaper headlines. And the kind of news that tends to go viral is very different than the sort of thing that people talk about quietly outside of the dynamics of social media. What tends to go viral are high arousal, negative emotions, anger, outrage. So maybe it's no mystery that the terminology that's become most popular is not about the positive aspects of work. There's not a lot of like, you know, novel terms for

the ways in which remote work is making our lives slightly more convenient. No, Zoom fatigue, languishing, quiet quitting, great resignation, what goes viral are these negative representations of work. And that to me expresses both sides of the coin. First, that people are looking for new ways of talking about these negative emotions, but also they're talking about them in social media environments where negativity tends to go viral. It sort of reminded me of the piece you wrote back in June, Everything is Terrible, But I'm Fine, where you argue about how there's a growing gap between how people say they're doing financially individually, which is mostly good, and how they view the economy nationally or even locally, which is mostly bad. What evidence did you find to support that argument?

Can you talk about that a little bit? Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, I just pulled that piece up. I mean, basically, I pivoted off this finding that from the Federal Reserve, the Federal Reserve asks a bunch of Americans every year, a ton of questions about the state of their finances. And among the questions that the Federal Reserve asks Americans is, give me your assessment of your own personal financial well-being, and then give me your assessment of the national economy. And in 2021, 78% of Americans, the highest in the history of the survey, said that their personal financial well-being was doing at least okay. That's a

direct quote, doing at least okay. And the same year, an all-time low share of Americans, just 24%, said that the national economy was good or excellent. So this is a 54-point gap, a record high gap, between Americans' self-report of their own financial see in the political space. It's another way of thinking about this classic phenomenon of hate Congress, but love your congressman. This private assessment of your life that is optimistic and resilient and focused on the ways things might be getting a little bit better, juxtaposed with this national assessment of the country or the world that says everything is getting worse. Darkness is ahead. The world's about to implode. Apocalypse now. And that gap between personal or private optimism and distributed national pessimism, I just think is like so fascinating. And so like when you think about it, like obviously true. Like how many people do you know who if you ask them like, how are you doing, maybe at least to be like a little bit polite, they might sort of focus on like the things that are going a little bit okay in their lives. And sure, there are downsides, but they're, they're trying to look up. And if you're like, what do you think about the state of America? It's just doom. And so I just think it's a fascinating phenomenon for people to grapple with. I mean, even just one implication before I throw it back to you is a lot of times I think there are politicians who read certain surveys about people's gloom and doom about the state of the national economy, the state of the way things are going. They need radical change. We need to tear down

every single institution and every single system. But what happens when they try to pass policies that tear down their healthcare, that tear down local zoning laws? It turns out people are paradoxical. They have both status quo bias about their own lives and this representative interest in changing everything in the world. And understanding that paradox, I think, is so important just for politicians, because sometimes it means that in order to sell your most radical programs, you have to sell them with sort of traditional status quo language. So I think about this all the time. This is now the subject matter of this podcast and The Wilderness, the other podcasts I do where I talk

to like focus groups full of voters. And I think about this especially because, you know, we're in this moment of inflation and have been for some time. And I think when there were first a lot of stories about inflation and high gas prices, there was a lot of online churn about how this is just the media covering inflation and gas prices. And because the media is covering this, they're making people think that their lives are bad and their lives really aren't bad, you know? And so then I go out and do all these focus groups with voters for the wilderness over the last year. And I sit down and say, you know, what issues are important to you? What issues matter to you? And like every single person in every focus group in every demographic

was like, things are too expensive. Things are too expensive. And now it wasn't necessarily gas, gas, gas. Though I heard that a couple of times. It was like, I can't afford my rent. I'm never going to buy a home. Like it was more about housing than anything else, which lives or that the bad vibes environment from the media and social media and just the general online environment that we all live in now has made people sort of more willing to just be pessimistic when they talk about even their own lives? I think it's such a good question. And I love the fact that it slightly pushes back against the thesis that I wrote last year, which is, you know, everything is terrible, but I'm fine. When it comes specifically to the issue of inflation, I think that a lot of liberals

got over their skis in over-interpreting my thesis, arguably, now that they were just working off of my thesis. But there were a lot of people on the left who were saying, Americans are only kind of pretending or only think that inflation is a problem because they saw a headline on CNN. And I thought that that's just not the case. Inflation is very clearly a phenomenon that touches everybody. It's one of the rare economic phenomena that touches everybody because it is a global phenomenon across prices. Food prices are going up and energy prices are going up. And now we see shelter and rent prices are going up. So that's an area that I kind of want to carve out of my thesis. I think that people really, really are suffering when it comes to inflation. And I'm supportive

of policies that try very purposely to bring inflation down because it does seem to be one of those rare political issues that there's nowhere to hide from it. If inflation, particularly gas and inflation, is going up, the party in power just gets punished every single time. That said, there's something else happening with people's opinion about the economy that is distinct. And that's that around 10 to 15 years ago, if you asked Democrats and Republicans, how's the economy? They tended to Michigan's Consumer Confidence Survey, asking Americans, do you think the economy is good? When there's a Republican in office, all the Republicans are like, economy's great. I'm having a great time. And a lot of Democrats say the economy is absolutely terrible. And you can see in the data, November, December 2020, it completely flips.

Suddenly, like 70% of Republicans decide the economy suddenly fell off a cliff because the guy left the White House, even though it had no effect on the economy. And a very similar thing happens with Democrats. And so now a lot of representations of how is the economy doing are basically just different ways of people saying, Do I like the person in the White House? And I'm just trying to get people to understand that, understand that a lot of people's opinions about the state of the country is more of a, and I typically hate using this word, but I have to use it. It's more of a vibe. It's more of a vibe than an evaluation. It's not them saying, I like the direction of unemployment. I like the direction of GDP. It's they're saying, I have a thumbs up or a thumbs down to the guy in

the White House. And that's going to determine how I see the direction of the country. Well, I mean, and to that point about vibes, the one question that has been fairly consistent in the results now over several administrations is the right track, wrong track number. When you ask people, is the country on the right track or the wrong track and you know we've been up 60 70 80 percent wrong track now for when trump was president biden was president the end of the obama i mean it's and i and i wonder i wonder what the implications for politics and democracy of this sort of bad vibes news environment that we're stuck in that I think the internet has certainly accelerated. Because it feels like even if you're in an administration that's presiding over relative peace and prosperity, your hopeful message is likely to get drowned out by all the

negativity. What do you think about that? I have a very specific thought about this that I actually just talked about in my podcast, Plain English with Scott Galloway. We had a conversation about the nature of punditry. And my direct answer to your question starts with a bit of media theory. In an environment where there's only say three media channels that most people are watching, say like the 1950s, you can get a huge audience by playing things down the middle because there's not a whole lot of competition. But as the number of media channels grows from three to 10 to 10 million, suddenly, whenever you're making something new, whenever you're trying to create an audience, you're creating an audience in an environment that's extremely competitive and therefore antagonistic, right? In order to get people

to pay attention to you, you have to point out why they shouldn't pay attention to everybody else, which means fundamentally you have to say, the news sucks, but I'm right. And right now you have this sort of interesting paradox where lots of people have very little faith in the media, capital T, capital M, but they like their own media because their own media is constantly pointing out how bad the rest of media is. So everyone is like consuming a lot of media that says the media is bad. In that environment, in order to win audience, you have to be a talented catastrophist. You have to get people to pay attention to you because every time you have a

new headline or a new A-block on your cable news show or a new podcast or new newsletter, you have to say, there's a fucking five alarm fire out there. Pay attention to me, pay attention to my observation about this catastrophe, and I will guide you through the inferno that is the state of America today. And if you have a lot of people who are making that message, then you have structurally created a situation where the electorate is going to be consistently pessimistic about the state of the economy because they've been trained to see everything through this negative lens. And I think that politicians just have to acknowledge that this is the playground in which they play now.

This is the sandbox. This sort of negativity about the future seems to me to be a relatively fixed part of the American system for now. And I think talented politicians, like I think Obama had a very interesting response to this, find a way to braid the acknowledgement that people are negative with a call to positivity. So one thing that I think Obama was always very clever at doing, and maybe you would obviously have maybe more insight than I do into how we did this. I have a theory that all politicians need to be somewhat antagonistic. They all have to point to an enemy in order to define their side. Sometimes you point to capitalists, right? Corporate fat cats. Sometimes you point to an enemy in order to define their side. Sometimes you point to capitalists, right? Corporate fat cats. Sometimes you point to the woke left. Sometimes you point to whatever.

Obama was interesting because his message was unity. Like, how do you find an enemy to unity? Well, he kept saying, now there are cynics out there. There are doubters out there. I was going to say, yeah. There are the cynics and the doubters. Who are the cynics and the doubters? He didn't say, but they're out there. And those are the antagonists. And what's, I think it's very clever. It's there's, there's a, there's a certain genius in building a kind of phantom cynicism that you can be antagonistic against in order to call people to your side. And that's, I think a very, I think it's a very brilliant thing to do.

And I will say is like, look, the first time he did like a DNC winter meeting as a senator, and he was thinking about running for president, we wrote the line that like our biggest enemy right now is not the other party, but it's it's cynicism. And there was some mockery of that from the Washington press corps, as you can imagine, that of course became his message. I mean, it's strategic. It's also I think think he believes it, as do I, which is at a time where there's such eroding trusts in institution that the danger with politics is that not that people are skeptical, but that people are like, oh, it's all rigged and I might as well just stay home, right?

And that is sort of like what we're fighting against here. But like, look, you have landed on sort of my existential challenge, both personally and professionally, because I do not want to be a catastrophist as I talk about politics twice a week on Pod Save America. At the same time, I'm like, well, the world seems pretty fucked. I'm always trying to figure out how to balance that. And to go back to Obama, like when he gave that speech at the 2020 convention about democracy the reaction to that speech was like oh my god obama's gone so dark like what's happened and

it's like no no i think he's genuinely worried about the state of the country and so i'm always trying to balance is this vibes right like are we sort of over twerking this are we like worrying too much are we worrying each other too much because we're all online? We're all freaking out all the time about everything. Everything's up to an 11. Or are we like not worrying enough about threats that are out there right now, like the threat to democracy? Yeah, I have an answer to this question. I see catastrophe as the Trojan horse. I like giving people a sense of what could go wrong to finish the metaphor of cockney Troy. But the point is, it's your appetizer. It's your delivery mechanism. You get people in the door through understanding the power of negativity biases. But once you're in the door, once people are reading the article, listening to the podcast, engaging with material, I don't want to tell them that the catastrophe is the point.

I'm not saying doom and gloom is the conclusion. We are fucked, period. Have a nice Friday. No. We face serious challenges. That's the prelude. The meat is what do we do now? These problems can be fixed. I am a dispositional optimist, maybe a pathological optimist, honestly. I really do think that most problems can be solved. And historically through the history, certainly of technology and science, things do typically get better decade over decade. And there are all sorts of ways in which I think we underrate the progress

that we've made in America and around the world. I won't get into that whole spiel. But I think that historically speaking, you're a fantasist if you're a pessimist. You are disengaged with the truth of history and reality if you're a pessimist and a catastrophist. So be realistic. Be realistic both about the fact that catastrophe is often necessary to build an audience and be realistic about the fact that people are pretty good decade over decade at solving the world's most important problems. So why can't we? Because I am also a pathological optimist. I will leave it there on that high note. That's great. I love that. I love that nominee for a, uh, for you for an answer to the, to the, to the question I posed. Derek Thompson, thank you so much for joining Offline.

Everyone, go listen to Plain English. It's a fantastic podcast. Thank you, man. Appreciate it. Offline is a Crooked Media production. It's written and hosted by me, John Favreau. It's produced by Austin Fisher. Andrew Chadwick is our audio editor.

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