TED Radio Hour - Listen Again: Work, Play, Rest - Part 1

Episode Date: August 5, 2022

Original broadcast date: February 4, 2022. The past few years have shaken the fundamental ways we live. It's... disorienting. But it's also an opportunity to reexamine how we spend our time. Over the next three episodes, TED speakers will investigate evolving notions of what it means to pay our bills, feel joy in play, and rest our minds and bodies. This hour: Work. Guests include labor organizer Jess Kutch, social entrepreneur Irma Olguin, and tech reporter Kevin Roose. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy

This is the TED Radio Hour. Each week, groundbreaking TED Talks. Our job now is to dream big. Delivered at TED conferences. To bring about the future we want to see. Around the world. To understand who we are. From those talks, we bring you speakers and ideas that will surprise you.

You just don't know what you're going to find. Challenge you. We truly have to ask ourselves, like, why is it noteworthy? And even change you. I literally feel like I'm a different person. Yes. Do you feel that way? Ideas worth spreading.

From TED and NPR. I'm Manuch Zamoroti. And the past few years, I don't need to tell you, have shaken up the fundamental ways we live. It has been disorienting. But it's also an opportunity to examine how we spend our time. And so welcome to our special three-part series. We're calling it work, play, rest.

And over the next three weeks, we'll be investigating evolving notions of what it means to work hard, be productive, and pay the bills. There's been this idea in corporate America that you're part of a family. But that concept was really turned on its head during the pandemic. We'll explore what makes us happy and fulfilled, feel joyous, playful. Yeah, I describe it as there's no wrong way to play. It's like seeking the spark that starts the process going. And then we'll examine ideas about how we rest and spend our downtime. It's mindfulness, it's meditation that can help calm our brains down.

There's a lot to come. But for now, let's get started with part one. Work. My alarm goes off at 4 a.m. I get up, get myself together, get my dog out, get my cat's fed. and then I'm to my store to be ready to punch in by 5 a.m. This is Michelle Eisen. I'm a barista at the Elmwood Starbucks location in Buffalo, New York.

She's been working at Starbucks since 2010, and she's loved it. The customers are great. It's a lot of people who live around the corner. So you see these people every day. You know, I've seen their children grow up. But when the pandemic began, the job got more demanding. The company, they wanted increased productivity, the expectation that we were going to produce above and beyond pre-pandemic levels. And, you know, we're being told, well, you know, this store is underperforming.

You're not getting these drinks out fast enough. And that was hard. In August 2021, a coworker told Michelle that some of them wanted to form a union. And I thought I'd misheard her. And I said, what do I think about why? And she said, Starbucks unionizing. And I said, it never really crossed my mind because I just don't know if I ever thought that our industry could be unionized. But I went, you know what?

This might be the solution I'm looking for because my option was to leave a company that I devoted an excessive amount of time to. Or I could try to change that company for the better from the inside out. And that just seemed like the better option. Once the employees decided to move forward, they needed to let Starbucks executives know. And Michelle says their response felt pretty aggressive. They shipped in corporate members from all over the country. And they sent these people here essentially to be on the floor with us day in and day out,

kind of there to overhear our conversations and break up. any conversations that might be happening between a union supporter and someone who might still be on the fence. And it did scare a lot of my coworkers. People were calling off because the mental stress was too much to come in and work in our store every day. But I thought if we didn't win the union, it would probably get worse. In December 2021, the decision was put to a vote. And surprising almost everyone, it succeeded. History made in Buffalo, New York, Starbucks workers at the Elmwood Avenue location voted to unionize.

First unionized corporate Starbucks store in the country. Yeah, it was pretty powerful. And now to know that it has had an effect, additional stores across the country have filed petitions for unionization. I mean, if one store can get the response that it has gotten, I have to imagine that every time another store signs on, it's just going to get a bigger and bigger response, which is pretty amazing. Events like these come at a time when we're all rethinking how we work, where we work, and even why we work. Our work culture in many parts of the economy is simply inhumane. And I think there is zero tolerance for that now.

This is labor organizer Jess Cutch. We require employers to see our whole selves. We require employers to see that we are parents, that we have children, we have seniors and our family that need our support and care. And so I think that this idea that employers can ignore everything else that's going on in a worker's life, that's just no longer going to be the case. Right now, America is experiencing a big change in what it means to have a job, and especially what it means when your job treats you like crap. 2021 set records for the number of U.S. workers quitting their jobs. Many are calling it the Great Resignation. The Department says more than 4.4 million workers handed in their resignations in September.

We've seen employees going on strike. 10,000 Don Deere workers officially went on strike today. Workers at Kellogg are in their second week on the picket line. And workers forming unions in industries where we've never seen unions before. There's a job quality crisis in America. And workers are now having more of an upper hand and being able to decide which jobs are going to best fit their lives. The power dynamic between companies and workers has definitely shifted. But are we talking about a temporary change or something more permanent, like a real redefining of the employer-employee relationship?

Yeah, I think you're seeing it in all sectors of the economy. these emerging trends around companies like Unilever, experimenting with four-day work weeks. Some countries have passed laws banning employers from emailing workers after business hours. I think there's a recognition that work has its place in our lives, but it's not our whole reason for living. In some fields, working 60, 70 hours a week is the norm. And you're starting to see people, even in like the finance world, pushing back against that. But when it comes to pay, the lower end of the pay scale is where companies are really having to make changes, right?

Like, especially in the U.S. Well, there is just a sheer like numbers question. Every time people leave a job, that's a cost to the employer to recruit and train a replacement. I think what you're seeing is employer scrambling to improve job quality. I live in Asheville, North Carolina, and the crispy cream down the street from me, is advertising starting pay at $15 an hour. A couple years ago, that pay was half that rate. So you're seeing like wage increases, but I also think you're seeing like job quality improving as well.

What about in a place like the tech industry where you really haven't seen unions before? I guess I'm wondering when people organize, are they doing it for different reasons? Are the demands different now compared to, say, 50, 60, 60? years ago. No, so I think the reason people have always organized was to confront the power of capital and try to advocate for the needs of workers and the communities that workers come from. But seeing people kind of organize around ethical issues for the companies they work for, I think a reason we haven't heard about that is in part because labor law itself

doesn't recognize that issue as legitimate. Like workers have no business having a voice on how this organization conducts its business. And you're seeing this in the tech sector, just a refusal to accept that. Yeah. I mean, and we're seeing it in different ways. There was, of course, like the Google walkout before the pandemic. But then we saw people walk out at Netflix over comedian Dave Chappelle's content. But it's not that they're not getting paid enough.

It's about saying, like, do you understand the power that you have over society, dear company, right? Yeah, I mean, people want more of a say and how their businesses have an impact in the world, especially given the climate crisis. Like Amazon employees formed Amazonians for climate justice to pressure their company to really live up to its climate pledges that it's made. So you're going to have folks kind of deciding enough is enough and, you know, joining together with their peers to affect change. What do you say to employers, though, who are like, well, we can't afford to keep running our company by the standards that you're asking for because, you know, there are real concerns about companies that are just barely hanging on. And if their employees unionize, they may not be able to continue to exist. Yeah, I challenge that. I think that often when companies struggle, they look to cutting labor costs as the first place to reduce their costs.

But I think it's pretty short-sighted. And you're seeing that in the Great Resignation, which companies are doing well and which ones are struggling. Like, take, for example, UPS and FedEx. UPS is a unionized workforce. FedEx relies for its on-the-ground delivery, like a network of independent contractors with non-union drivers. FedEx has been dealing with a labor shortage since the pandemic began. UPS has not had that problem. So it's like that short-term thinking of, well, we need to reduce costs. We need to keep, you know, deliver shareholder value. So let's cut benefits. Let's cut wages. And it doesn't make good business sense.

You know, Jess, it feels like it comes down to a questioning of the entire system, a questioning of capitalism and maybe questioning whether shareholders should come first. Maybe the whole way we run society is hurting our workforce. Are you feeling that shift? Oh, yes. It feels very different. And this idea that capitalism will deliver sort of the greatest good for the greatest amount of people, I think is being questioned by everyone. And I think that like workplace organizing is sort of a social contagion. Like when people see other folks going out on strike or staging walkouts and being successful, they're more likely to try it themselves. So I think we're only at the beginning stages of what's going to be a prolonged period of labor act. activism in the United States and elsewhere.

That's Jess Kutch. She's the co-founder of co-worker.org. You can see her full talk at ted.com. And just a note on Michelle Eisen's story, we reached out to Starbucks for a comment, and Starbucks denies any claims of union busting and says the additional staff sent to Buffalo were there to support employees on the ground.

None of them came from their corporate offices. So far, over two, Two dozen other Starbucks locations across the country have filed petitions to unionize. On the show today, the first part of our series, work, play, rest. I'm Manus Zamoroti, and you're listening to the TED Radio Hour from NPR. It's the TED Radio Hour from NPR. I'm Manoosh Zamoroti. On the show today, part one of our series, work, play, rest.

So let's get back to work. Like so many booming industries, tech has completely changed some of our cities, creating hubs and uplifting certain places while leaving others behind. You know, you think about California, you think about palm trees and beaches and Hollywood and the Bay Bridge, and that's not where I grew up. That's not at all where I grew up. This is Irma Alguyen, and her hometown isn't exactly known for innovation. Yeah, Fresno is a place. place that you drive through to get to somewhere else. If you do drive through Fresno, you'll see a very different kind of industry.

You see miles and miles of ag land, which could look really different depending on the season. If something is in season, it's going to be green, and you might see the irrigation dripping. If it's not in season, you might see, you know, entire orchards being ripped out piles of trees and wood waiting to be burned. And if you are in Raisin Land, which is where my family spent its time, part of the process is that these giant sheets of paper are laid out in the dirt. You pick the grapes and they are left to bake in the sun. It's like this really thick, almost sweet, dusty smell that smells like home. It's really hard to put words to it. How long have you and your family lived in Fresno?

So my grandparents migrated from South Texas and from Mexico to California following the crops, following the work. And they became field labors right there in the Central Valley. My life is different from, say, my parents who all of their formative years were spent in the fields. And I did not realize necessarily that we were poor. Everybody that I knew at that time had a similar story to mine. immigrant parents or grandparents, farm labor being the story, never enough money, always trading, you know, rent for your electricity bill or your electricity bill for groceries or, you know, it's always that. And so you've got folks who have started with very little trying to

make their way, claw their way to something else. And the stress of that and the sort of community around never having enough didn't feel abnormal to me. That was the truth and reality. It wasn't until much later that I realized that not everybody struggled in that way. Yeah, and you actually got the opportunity to leave Fresno and go to college. I mean, that must have been quite a culture shock. Yeah, so ended up with a scholarship offer across the country in Ohio and arriving there. It was just like, I shouldn't be here. I don't know any of the things that you guys know. I'm so far behind. You know, when I got my email address for the college, it was my very first email address ever. And they had to show me what that

meant, like what email was. And so yeah, you just feel in so many ways like this is for other people. I mean, that's kind of crazy because you ended up getting a degree in computer science. That's right. I was very young in a place that I didn't know, understand, or recognize. and I really wanted to take classes in the most beautiful building on campus. And for me, that was a glass building. It turned out to be the College of Engineering. And somebody said that that's where computer science took place. And there were computers scattered all over that building.

So it was serendipitous that I ended up being able to choose a major that I would never have seen for myself. And how did it go? Well, getting a computer science degree was a slog. It was tough. No, not easy. I won't say that it came easily to me, but it did feel pretty obvious over time that a person could muscle their way through this industry. I think there's like this mystery that surrounds the technology industry, which makes people believe that it's super hard and super for other people. But spending time in it, I got to see kind of how the sausage was made.

And it was like, oh, there's a lot of different types of jobs inside. of this industry in a lot of different places for folks even like myself. When you say even like yourself, meaning that you didn't have a PhD or that you were a Latin X or how do you mean? So there were a number of things where it felt like that phrase even for me comes in. First of all, I'm a woman. I am Latina. I was a queer young person in a time when being a queer young person was still really, really loud.

and in many rooms unwelcome. And so, yeah, there was a lot of even for me feeling, but more importantly, I felt like I didn't have to be a genius to be in the industry. I could be just me. I could put my shoulder into it and be tenacious and do the same thing I'd done all of my life, which was, you know, fight to survive, and I could find my place in this industry.

Irma Alguyen picks up her story from the TED stage. something miraculous happened. I got a job in tech. And I remember the first time I didn't have to count the change when trying to figure out how much to tip for pizza delivery when I realized that this industry,

the technology industry, was going to change my life forever. And I remember thinking to myself, if it can happen to me, a poor, queer, brown woman from nowhere. Why can't it happen to entire cities of people like me? So to find out the answer to your question, instead of going to Silicon Valley or New York, you decided to go back to Fresno. I did. It seemed like the only thing where I would sort of be able to live up to what the world gave me.

So yeah, it was a pretty simple decision. Go home and figure out how to bring this back. All of these lessons. How do you give them away? And so for the last eight years, that's what I've been working on in Fresno. building a business that could expose what it takes to cause an entire city and not just to select few people in it to thrive. Fast forward a bit. You founded a company called Bitwise Industries. Can you just describe in a nutshell what you do? Yeah, certainly. So Bitwise, we build tech economies and underestimated cities, which is sort of fancy for we ignite the technology industry in places where you don't expect to find. and invite people to that new economy that don't expect to be there. So the cornerstone of everything that we do is job training. The communities that we work with are often from very poor populations,

maybe folks who are learning English as a second language, maybe they were unhoused, the formerly incarcerated veterans, folks who are very often from retail or factory work. These folks, their issue is not their ability to learn technical things. their problems center on things that are a lot less obvious. Things like child care, transportation, hunger, money. So those are the things that we focus on. A person's ability to break into the technology industry has nothing to do with their ability to learn JavaScript

or whether they were good at math in the fifth grade. What is a factor is creating room in that person's life to see if they're good at JavaScript or if they can be good at math. and to create room in a person's life, you really have to attack the things that stand in the way of that time. How do you justify learning to do something like write code when there are bills to pay? Wouldn't it be better for the family if you just got a job at McDonald's

and put in as many hours as you can? Because that's a check. And who's going to watch your little brother? That's what we do as a family. We pitch in. But how do you justify to the people around you when it looks to them like you're just playing around on the computer. We didn't invent a new way to teach JavaScript.

We just focus a lot more on the things that actually prevent people from learning it. In addition to connecting our students to things like bus tokens and free regional transit options, we also just deploy a fleet of vehicles whose only job is to pick these folks up before their study groups and drop them back off after class. If they need food, we get them food. We work with food cupboards and pantries and making sure that boxes of food are delivered to these students' homes

with enough for a family of three to five people. We connect them to child care options that make sense for their schedules and their budgets. But most importantly, because cash is such a center of energy and decision-making for these families, through our apprenticeship program, we literally pay them to learn. So not only do they get to earn a wage and are exposed to real world work, but now they also have that first line on the resume,

the one that's so hard to get and the one that builds confidence in the rest of the world that you might know what you're talking about. You know, it's interesting. You describe bitwise as providing a technology education, but what you're really kind of doing is igniting in industry, a tech economy from the bottom up? Yeah. Once you remove those as the problems, now you've got access to a wide population of

folks who have never been invited to this segment of the economy who could take advantage of the jobs that exist in that economy and change the reality for the generations that come after them. And so you might be thinking to yourself, okay, Irma, this sounds great, but it sounds really expensive. So how do you pay for you? for it. We've turned a long-held idea on its head. We have to stop putting the burden, the financial burden, on the student and the families who are already struggling and start putting it on the people and the entities that benefit most from their untapped potential. Entities like government, corporations, philanthropy. These are the entities that benefit from the development of that talent, and so that's who we get to pay for it.

The U.S. spends a trillion dollars scaling up a workforce for this country. We apply for allocations of that same kind of money and use it to pay people to learn. We also work with corporations. We can train up entire cohorts or a generation of junior level and apprentice level technologists trained directly to their systems ready to be hired on day one. We've worked with all kinds of companies getting them to pay for things like tuition and money for students to accomplish exactly this goal. We've worked with over 5,000 students,

and of those entering our career programs, over 80% earned technical employment. And in Fresno, this means that that new technology workforce is greater than 50% female or gender non-conforming, greater than 50% minority or Latinx, and 20% first generation. And those demographics mirror the demographics of our county. These are folks leaving restaurant, retail, factory, and field labor earning on average less than $20,000 a year, exiting the programs earning $60,000 to $80,000 a year.

And we can do this. You know, it's not at all a mystery. It's worked in Fresno. It's working in Bakersfield and Toledo, Ohio, and it can work in underestimated cities all over the world. So you've been doing this for eight, nine years now. And have you started to see the city change as a result? And you mentioned other cities. What is happening in terms of not just the people in the program, but the places where they live?

They're not leaving, I guess. No, no. It's one of the best parts of what we do by doing this specific work in underestimated cities, 90% of the folks that we train stay at home. That's where they want to be. They're not looking to leave. We talk about the lift from, you know, earning $21,000 a year to in three years. in three years, $80-plus,000 a year. But that is really just one ingredient in a person being able to participate in their community.

And when people participate in their community, you see homeownership changing, you see reliable cars being driven, you see new businesses springing up, you see better support of local businesses that already exist, and you see people voting differently and leadership changing over time in that place. But we know what happens, Irma, when tech comes into a city and makes the cost of living that much higher, it keeps out the people from whom you came, the families, are you worried that other families won't be able to afford to stay if you are, could you be a victim of your own success? I think if we forget who we are, we absolutely could be. But what we definitely

don't want to do is create an unworkable situation for the next generation. I think the topic itself is, of course, complicated. There's a housing shortage across the next. nation. There's a lot more units that need to get built. And so, yeah, of course, we're asking ourselves that question is, you know, can or should bitwise participate in that? Or is there another way to attack the problem so that we're not perpetuating the issue of sort of gentrification? It's the last thing we want to do. But we're built for and by the community of a place. And we deeply, deeply believe that people who know and understand real problems can solve real problems. It's all awesome, Irma. But I mean, I have to ask, a lot of these jobs are entry level. And it makes me worried,

because when you look at job trends, you know, the next 10, 15, 20 years, these are the jobs that will likely get automated. Is it just a continual process that these people will need to be reskilled over and over again? Or, you know, I guess what is the potential for some of these jobs? Well, the potential is pretty extraordinary. So I think that with the technology industry, we think about it. And I think a lot of times you think about, oh, it's Google and Facebook and it's big tech. But the truth is that just about all companies are becoming technology companies or technology-enabled companies. And that includes the school district.

That includes the local hospital. That includes the county office of education and the nonprofit down the street and Joe's logistics on the corner. And all of those being powered by technology, there's an incredible sort of gap in the industry right now where we actually need way more entry-level folks into the industry than ever before. And I think importantly, that entry-level job is still transformative income. This is life-changing money and by extension community changing money. It sounds like your life is just completely different. more than you ever could have imagined as a child. And now, like, in some ways, you want to help people realize that, you know, they can do this too. And maybe they don't need to be so surprised

or shocked at what they're capable of or what they can achieve. Like, everyone should have that opportunity. They shouldn't doubt it. And maybe they should even expect it. Yeah. You know, there were these moments in that experience where during that very first job, pulling down a check I'd never seen four digits on before. And you realize that even without a whole lot of skill, you're going to out-earn anything you could have ever done in a different industry or an agriculture. It was a really big deal for me. But then you have to ask yourself what kind of person you're going to be when you are not

constantly in survival mode. That is awesome. and there's a lot of agency there, there's a lot of accomplishment, but it's so dark. Your entire existence, you understood the world to be one thing, which was a fight,

and you put on your armor every single day, and you go get it. And now you realize that there's a different way to exist, and you have to ask yourself, well, what am I going to do with my armor? Is that still mine? Do I carry that around? So, yeah, there is a lot of questioning yourself.

I'm talking to you today from a pretty nice hotel room in a pretty nice city. And I got here on a plane that I never would have dreamed of 15 years ago, taking this trip to think about the expansion of our company. But it's not comfortable. I don't know if I'm ever going to feel comfortable taking advantage of all of the privileges that are afforded to me by this work. And so what do you do with that angst? The only thing I know how to do is to put that energy back into the work and make sure that you're not the only one who gets to experience these moments.

That's Irma Alguyen, the co-founder and CEO of Bitwise Industries. You can see her full talk at TED.com. On the show today, work. The first part in our series, Work, Play, Rest. I'm Anush Zamoroti, and you're listening to the TED Radio Hour from NPR. with us. It's the TED Radio Hour from NPR. I'm Anoush Zamorodi. Today on the show, the first part of our series, work, play, rest. And so far, we've been hearing about ways to make work better for workers, for cities, for entrepreneurs. But right now, with millions of people having given up their jobs in

the past year, some companies are struggling to fill their ranks. And so they're turning to machines. companies have been investing in automation to fill the gap in their labor force, saying, instead of paying people $15 or $20 an hour for entry-level work, what if we spent $100,000 and built a machine that could do this job forever? This is Kevin Ruse. He's a tech reporter for the New York Times. And he says the pandemic is only speeding up the inevitable automation of many jobs. Right.

I saw that Domino's Pizza is putting in place. equipment to produce their dough. And people are just saying, well, we were going to make the transition. Let's do it now because we actually don't have enough humans to do the jobs. Is that a strange knock-on effect of this employment crisis? Yeah, there are a lot of economists who think that this sort of acceleration that we've seen during the pandemic could really pull forward by a number of years this looming automation crisis. Let's be clear.

Robots taking over jobs. it's not really a new problem. In the first sort of wave of automation during the 20th century and early in this century, automation and machines were mostly doing manual labor. They were doing repetitive tasks in factories. They were, you know, sorting packages and warehouses, things like that. And now, you know, there are still people who are performing jobs

that are essentially endpoints. You know, they're taking instructions from a machine and they're plugging them into another machine. Basically, the goal is to automate these tasks entirely. Those jobs are the first that are going to be automated. We've known about that kind of automation for a while. But machines are also coming for other sectors, even professional higher paid jobs.

Now with AI and machine learning, machines can do what we would think of as cognitive work, even complex cognitive work. There was a study a few years ago, And they found that actually the jobs that were most at risk of being automated were white-collar jobs, jobs that require college education. Some of them require graduate degrees, managers, supervisors, things like market research analyst or sales manager, personal financial advisor. Those were the jobs that actually AI is now doing quite well. Nearly a decade ago, automation even came for Kevin's job.

And it kind of freaked him out. One of my first jobs in journalism involved doing a lot of corporate earnings reports, the kind of basic, you know, Toyota made this much money this quarter with strong sales in their North American division or something like that. And now that job has been almost completely automated. Most publications and like the AP and Reuters now use automated software to write corporate earnings reports. And so that was my first hint that something was happening in this industry in journalism. and then I needed to start paying attention to it because the last thing I wanted to do is to wake up one day and find that I had been replaced by a robot. I remember the first time that we heard about these automated journalism and reports going on. And I read one and I was like, oh, it's pretty good, actually. I mean, you know, you start to think, well, what am I adding to this work, right?

It starts to beg a very fundamental existential question when you see that AI or whatever you want to call. call it can automate your job pretty well. It starts to make you think, well, why am I needed? Absolutely. I mean, this is happening not just in journalism, but in every industry, in medicine, in law, in finance. And so now the question for us is what can we do that machines can't? Where is our distinct human advantage? And so that's what I set out to learn. I started off by going to every expert I could find. And I basically asked them, like, what can we do to avoid being replaced by robot. And what they told me was basically no, there is no job that is completely protected from robot replacement, from automation, from AI. But any job can be made more

resistant to automation by essentially making it more human. Kevin Ruse picks up the idea in his TED talk. Rather than trying to compete with machines, we should be trying to improve our human skills, the kinds of things that only people can do, things involving compassion, critical thinking, and moral courage. And when we do our jobs, we should be trying to do them as humanely as possible. For me, that meant putting more of myself in my work. I stopped writing formulaic corporate earning stories, and I started writing things that revealed more of my personality. I started a financial poetry series. I wrote profiles of quirky and interesting people on Wall Street, like the barber who cuts people's hair at Goldman Sachs. I even convinced my editor to let me live like a billionaire for a day,

wearing a $30,000 watch and driving around in a Rolls Royce. Tough job, but someone's got to do it. And I found this new human approach to my job made me feel much more optimistic about my own future. because you can teach a robot to summarize the news or to write a headline that's going to get a lot of clicks, but you can't automate making someone laugh with a dumb limerick about the bond market or explaining what a collateralized debt obligation is to them without making them fall asleep. Okay, so for journalism, I mean, it makes sense, right? We live now in a world where journalists have brand names. Their byline is sometimes more important than the name of the publication.

but how can that human-centered approach be applied to other jobs? Yeah, I think that a lot of these more resilient jobs will be the ones that involve providing emotional support for people, you know, home health care workers, occupational therapists, nurses, teachers, career coaches, these kinds of jobs that, you know, even if a robot could technically give you advice on, you know, how to talk to your boss about a raise, you're going to want a human with experience and some real, you know, bedside manner to walk you through that. You're not going to accept a robot substitute. To me, that was proven so much through the pandemic with my kids' education, how much they needed the support of a teacher who

saw the look in their eyes when they didn't understand something, you know, as much as there is available online with Khan Academy and other ways that you can learn remotely. that relationship in and of itself is an education. And I feel like my kids really missed it. Absolutely. I think one of the lessons that we learned during the pandemic is that there are limits to the amount of automation and technology that we will accept into our lives.

There are certain things that humans are just better at. So those jobs, they're not totally immune. No job is immune. But those jobs are much, much safer than jobs that don't involve meeting people's emotional needs. As I researched more, I found so many more examples of people who had succeeded this way

by refusing to compete with machines and instead making themselves more human. Take Marcus Books. Marcus Books is a small, independent, Black-owned bookstore in my hometown of Oakland, California. It's a pretty amazing place. It's the oldest Black-owned bookstore in America,

and for 60 years, it's been introducing Oaklanders to the work of people like Tony Morrison and Maya Angelou. But the most amazing thing about Marcus Books is that it's still here. So many independent bookstores have gone out of business

in the last few decades because of Amazon or the internet. So how did Marcus Books do it? Well, it's not because they have the lowest prices or the slickest e-commerce setup or the most optimized supply chain. It's because Marcus Books is so much more than a bookstore.

It's a community gastrook. gathering place where generations of Oaklanders have gone to learn and grow. It's a safe place where black customers know that they're not going to be followed around or patted down by a security guard. As Blanche Richardson, one of the owners of Marcus Books told me, it just has good vibes. Marcus Books temporarily closed. And like a lot of businesses, its future was uncertain. It was raising money through a GoFundMe page. And if you look at the comments on its GoFundMe page, you can see why Marcus Books has survived all these years.

One person wrote that we have a duty to preserve gems like this in our community. Someone else said, I've been going to Marcus Books since I was a child, and Blanche Richardson showed me many kindnesses. Those aren't words about technology. They're not even words about books. the words about people. The thing that saved Marcus Books was how they made their customers feel

and experience out of transaction. I wonder if somebody listening is like, well, Marcus Books clearly isn't scalable. But I guess what you're saying is like that's the point. Right. And a lot of the sort of businesses that we're seeing today are successful because they're not scalable. And that's a signal because what people

are paying a premium for in those businesses is the handmade quality of these goods, the fact that they're not being churned out in a warehouse in China somewhere. So I think that the economy that we're seeing is sort of fracturing into two. There are the things that are done by machines. They're the things that are done by humans. And I think both of those are worthy of exploration. Okay. So let's talk about how we actually build this sort of next era of the workforce. Because what you're talking about is a different kind of training. I think it's about emphasizing emotional intelligence. How do you even teach that? Because what worries me is that some people who maybe are introverted or shy or, you know, a good journalist, but maybe not quite as

charming as you, Kevin, that they somehow get left behind in this emotionally centric workforce. Yeah. I mean, it's going to take some work for some people. The way that during the Industrial Revolution, people had to retrain themselves to work in. factories rather than on farms. For this new AI era, we're going to need to learn these more fundamental human skills. There are social and emotional learning programs. There are, you know, courses you can take to improve your empathy. In medical schools now, there are classes that are purely about how to talk to patients. They're not about, you know, how to diagnose them. It's about how do you break bad news to people? How do you empathize with someone who's going through

one of the hardest times of their lives. And that's the kind of education and skills that we're going to need across lots of disciplines. One of the fastest growing jobs in the tech industry right now is basically trust in safety. It's people who can manage the health of these enormous platforms to prevent people from misusing them. And that's something that requires a lot of complex understanding

of human dynamics and human nature and understanding threat models. and that's the skill that they're not teaching in a lot of college computer science classes, but that has turned out to be hugely important. I mean, no matter how much we need humans to do certain work, it sounds like in the future, there will simply be fewer jobs, period. Is that something we need to hear governments address more? Because right now, politicians still seem to run on a platform of, you know,

bringing work back to a region, saying, we will train for new jobs. But perhaps what we really need is more of a paradigm shift. I think we do. I mean, I think we should take a lesson from some of the other countries that have implemented structures and systems to help people through times of technological change. In Japan, for example,

there's a long-standing practice among factories where if your job is automated, they can basically loan you out to another company. needs your skill set, until they find something else for you to do. It's a practice called Shuko, and it's been going on for decades. In Sweden, there are these job councils that basically catch people who are laid off because of automation, and they pay for these sort of public-private partnerships, and they pay to retrain people, to teach them interview skills, to get them out onto the job market again, to basically serve as a kind of safety net for people

when their jobs are displaced by automation. And then, of course, the most basic thing we could do to help people through this time of transition is to provide things like universal health care, which, you know, would prevent a lot of people from feeling like if they lose their job, they also lose their access to health care and would kind of decouple these things that we need to survive with the jobs that make us money. But, Kevin, maybe we even need to pay people if they don't work, right? Some people have been talking much more seriously, and it's actually being tested in certain places, this idea of a universal basic income. Is that what the future holds?

Yeah, I think that, you know, I support universal basic income, but I do think we will need a broader safety net, not only because there will be fewer jobs, but because it's going to take some time for people to make the transition from one set of jobs to another. I think that this often gets lost when you hear people at big fancy conferences saying, oh, there will be new jobs created to replace the old ones that disappear to AI. And it's like, well, yeah, but that's not going to be a seamless process. It never has been during the Industrial Revolution. There was lots of dislocation. There were labor riots and horrible working conditions and many years where wages were not catching up to corporate profits. and it took a lot of real effort and activism to make that work for workers.

And so I think that we need to be conscious of the fact that some people are not just going to seamlessly leave their, you know, automated job and go become, you know, metaverse therapist or whatever the new jobs will be. They will need skills. They will need to be taught. So we actually want to differentiate ourselves to leave our own distinct mark on the things that we create so that people on the other end, people who are, you know, listening to podcasts know that we are humans doing this conversation and not robots,

you know, feeding each other laugh lines. That's Kevin Ruse. He's a technology columnist for the New York Times and the author of Futureproof, nine rules for humans in the age of automation. You can see his full talk at ted.com. Thank you so much for listening to our episode about work today. We couldn't, of course, get into all the ways the people are rethinking their jobs and how they make a living. But I hope the broader themes of this show brought you some context. Maybe it even gave you a different perspective on any dissatisfaction with work that you're seeing or experiencing yourself.

Some old ideas like collective bargaining, they are coming back. Other old ideas like who gets to access high-paying jobs are being toppled. But perhaps most reassuringly, to me at least, there are. are signs that in the future will put a higher value on humanity, the work that only humans can do, even in an economy increasingly run by algorithms and machines. A quick reminder, this was the first show in Work, Play, Rest, our series about how the fundamental ways we spend our time are changing,

which means that next week we explore play with musician Jacob Collier and many others. Subscribe to the podcast so you don't miss it. And as always, to see hundreds more TED Talks. Check out TED.com or the TED app. This episode was produced by Katie Montalione, Matthew Cloutier, and Diba Motisham. It was edited by Sanaz Meshkampur and Rachel Faulkner. Our TED Radio production staff also includes Jeff Rogers, James Delahousie, Fiona Guren, and Harrison V.J. Choi. Our audio engineer is Brian Jarbo, and our intern is Mark. Our theme music was written by Romteen Arablewee. Our partners at TED are Chris Anderson, Colin Helms, Anna Feelein, Michelle Quint, Sammy Case, and Danielle Bala Rzez. I'm Minnuch Zomerode, and you've been listening to The TED Radio Hour from NPR.