The Ricochet Podcast - Working Properly

Episode Date: February 9, 2024

We're reminded often to mind our "work-life balance", but perhaps that distinction is drawn too plainly. Today we hear from David Bahnsen, author of the just-published Full Time: Work and the Meaning of Life, who makes the case that what we do for a living means a great deal more than what today's wellness gurus would have us believe. They go over everything in between the midcentury trend toward retirement as the goal to the contemporary push to work in pajamas.On the flipside Peter, Rob and James discuss the latest reminder that Joe Biden is not up for the job he's got; and they dig into an unbelievable project to make ancient scrolls flash-fried by the Vesuvius eruption in the first century AD readable once again.- Audio this week: Biden defends his memory and then places Mexico outside of Gaza.

This country was built on a distinctly American work ethic. But today, work is in trouble. We've outsourced most of our manufacturing to other countries. And with that, we sent away good jobs and diminished our capability to make things. American Giant is a clothing company that's pushing back against this tide. They make a variety of high-quality clothing and activewear, like sweatshirts, jeans, dresses, jackets, and so much more. All made right here in the USA, from growing the cotton to adding the final touches.

So when you buy American Giant, you create jobs for seamsters, cutters, and factory workers in towns and cities across the United States. And it's about more than an income. Jobs bring pride, purpose. They stitch people together. If all that sounds good to you, visit American-Giant.com and get 20% off your first order when you use code STAPLE20 at checkout. That's 20% off your first order at American-Giant.com with promo code STAPLE20. I am going to whip somebody until they bleed. Three, two, one. Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country.

Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall. It's the Ricochet Podcast with Peter Robinson and Rob Long. I'm James Lallex, and today we talk to David Bonson about his new book, Full-Time Work and the Meaning of Life. So let's work ourselves a podcast. I'm well-meaning and I'm an elderly man and I know what the hell I'm doing. I've been president. I put this country back on its feet. I don't need his recommendation. How bad is your memory? My memory is fine. As you know, initially the president of Mexico, Cici, did not want to open up the gate to allow humanitarian material to get in. I talked to him. I convinced him to open the gate. Welcome, everybody. It's the Ricochet Podcast. I'm James Lask.

Oh, you're wondering what number it is. It's number 678. And we got that far. Holy moly. I know. Got that far thanks to listeners like you, as they say on National Public Radio, or members like you who have gone to Ricochet.com and discovered that, whoa. Please do. This is what I've been looking for all my life.

And here it is. And there it is. Go there. You'll love it. But in the meantime, I'm here with Rob Long. And hey, Rob. How's New York? Hey, James. Good.

How are you? Well, I'm I'm disconcerted because it's snowing and it's been 50 degrees here for a fortnight or so. It's been very warm, which, of course, people ascribe to the end of the world. And now it's snowing. And, you know, the old historical cultural or I mean, climate norms are reasserting themselves almost as though these things are cyclical and work themselves out yeah almost as if we have seasons yeah seasons that's a great idea well it is the season to complain about a lot of things and everybody's mad about the border dealer and the lack thereof and i mean having watched these things come and go over and over and over and over again i don't put any stock in anything that they pass whatsoever, because it seems to me that there's this weird feeling that unless we get a particularly tailored bill exactly to these minute specifications, we just got to let everybody in.

In the absence of a bill, we can't actually send anybody down there to say, no, you can't come in. We've got a lot of you guys now, and we're going to stop for a while, maybe a year. Sorry, but we are under no obligation whatsoever to let you in and then drive you to Montana and give you a phone and a gift card. We're just under no obligation to do that. Or are you of a different mind rob do you think that actually well i mean all this was very uh very important uh until about 7 p.m last night when it the entire political conversation became about something else which isn't whether the president is uh doing any uh the right thing on the border or the president is there inside the president.

I mean, I mean, just to finish the border thing, the argument for the border bill is that no, of course, the current president is going to do anything. And yes, of course, the number 5000 is very high, but it might help set up the next president or the future presidents who may be a little bit more inclined to protect the border to do so um yeah that's a pretty perfectly good argument it ended up being about presidential politics and then i i just don't think the presidential politics right now are going to be about the border they're going to be about um what we you know one candidate is border, has a borderline personality disorder. And the other candidate is Scott scrambled eggs up there, probably. So, you know, the best line I heard about last night was from Paul Begala or Begala or whatever on CNN.

He said he said, look, I'm a Biden supporter. And last night I slept like a baby. I woke up every two hours and wet the bed. He said, it is terrible. Anyone paying attention to politics knows this is a huge, huge disaster. I heard about it. I was out, and Twitter was going crazy. I got some texts from people saying, are you watching this? And then as I was going home, I was going to turn it on and watch it,

and all the tweets were saying, oh, man, it's so great. Watch people on CNN. They're falling apart. They're stunned. They don't know what to say. But by the time I got home and turned on the TV and was watching CNN, they had already collected themselves. I missed the part where they were stunned and didn't know what to say. They'd already gotten whatever the marching orders were they were saying no he looked fine he looked what are you talking about it was um i mean usually there's one president there's one candidate in every presidential election for for whom this is a high wire act right we're watching a guy and we're like i don't know this is gonna be i don't know let's hope um this just feels like elder abuse now we have these two guys running and and and i you know i i i just don't understand how anybody the democratic party could see what happened last night and say um we'll turn this around between now and labor day because it's going to get better i just

don't think yeah it doesn't get there only so many b12 shots to the shanks i heard a little throaty chuckle under there a little gentle throaty chuckle which means peter's with us peter robinson ah thank you gentlemen uh good to uh what what is this you're talking about politics what could this possibly be you know we have a we have we had a compare and contrast between putin and biden putin who is obviously all there the there happens to be on the throne of hell in a lake of fire but he's all there and then then you have biden who was ranting and shouting and saying things and stumbling and the rest of it last night which which some people are saying, and again, I don't subscribe to those conspiratorial models that have great Machiavellian machinations here, because I don't think they're that smart or that good.

But some people are saying, well, this is how they're clearing the deck for Newsom. They're just putting him out there and they're intentionally showing that their major character, their main character is not all there so that there will be setting the stage for getting him off the stage do you think that's true i have no idea what they're up to what's surprising to me is that anybody let's see how to put this i was surprised and i wasn't surprised here's what surprised me that after all that we've been through with the James Comey machinations during the election of, let's put it this way. really, really bad, may have elected Donald Trump and represented a grotesque violation of the ordinary prosecutorial standard, which is either you bring charges or you fall silent. And if I were the Biden campaign, I would be furious. Excuse me, I'm not the Biden campaign.

I'm whatever is the opposite of the Biden campaign. I'm still furious with her, H-U-R, I believe is the way the name is spelled, doing this. Either you bring charges or you shut up. You don't say, well, actually, we should bring charges. If you were younger and more vigorous, we'd bring charges. He willfully, but we're not going to bring charges, but we're going to drop a political bomb in the middle of the american system months before that is outrageous that shocked me what didn't shock me was a straightforward accounting of the president's state of mind so to speak which anyone any ordinary person looking at him on television in the last six months could see for himself.

What's amazing is that, as Rob said, there seems to have been a moment when MSNBC and CNN and a lot of professional Democrats actually were surprised. They seem to have talked themselves into supposing that the president of the United States is a well man. He's not. I just don't understand. I don't see. Honestly, I don't see how the Biden campaign recovers from this because we now have footage for Republican ads. Donald Trump, even his own DOJ says he's a doddering old fool. And furthermore, Bibi Netanyahu said yesterday or the day before, I've been traveling a little bit, so I've lost track of sequence this past week, that he expected the war in Gaza to last several more months. That means it's likely that the Democratic Party will be ripping itself apart, pro-Palestinian, pro-Israel. We already have a permanent encampment outside the Secretary of State's house in Northern Virginia, a protest encampment. We have hecklers shouting genocide, Joe. I just can't, we get this unwell old man at a convention in Chicago where the Democratic Party is likely to be ripping itself apart. None of this is an argument for Donald Trump. It's not even an argument that he would necessarily win. What am I saying? I am saying what Rob said with bells on. This is just,

it's a mess. It's a mess. And I don't see quite how we get out of it except to, so Gavin Newsom, excuse me, to answer your question, james after a long round about venting the question the president is unwell we know that he got angry during the this thing got released he called a press conference to prove that he's compass mentis and confused each i mean it was just a catastrophe he's not there who's making the decisions that's's the question. That's what everybody is. I don't know, and I also don't know how you get rid of him. I have assumed that it's Dr. Jill, that if they can persuade Dr. Jill that it's for his best that he step down, then it'll happen. But I just don't know. We're in this weird position where the most reported on man in the world, the President of the the united states actually isn't where the action is

no he's the country's being run by a seance that that channels the ghost of woodrow wilson's wife only james in fact i'm gonna just shut up and listen to james because your interstitial comments are the most powerful thing anybody said oh no you're right it's's just, it's absolutely, because somebody is running it. Somebody's running the show. And we really don't believe at the strategic level that it's going to be Joe's.

Now, on Twitter, Rob was right. By the time that they composed themselves, they were able to make a wide variety of arguments. And there was somebody on Twitter who was saying, oh, you know, a little bit shaky at the margins. Okay, do you know where your left ear pod is have you ever have you locked your car keys in the last week and everyone is you know there's like 400 responses good point yeah the left air pod is in the case it's in the case it's in the

case because everybody knew it's in the case we are not willing and then some people would point out that well actually not only do i know where my airpod is but i am not in charge of the nuclear control and the nuclear codes which which which makes you want to ask is job do they actually actually entrust him with anything of importance these days which seems to be like the worst thing you want to ask yourself about the country and its leadership. Who has the football? Well, the guy is. I mean, who has the authority?

We don't know. Who has the authority and why isn't the press asking? Where is, is he just too, maybe he's too old, but it's where three years, almost three years into this administration, so it's about time for the Bob Woodward inside the biden white house book right now explaining all this to us somebody should have been interviewing these people they should have been leaking to bob woodward or whoever bob would there's no curiosity on the part of the press about who's running the country especially a a a an administration that's been so so weirdly incompetent in so many ways.

It does seem like you're... I'd be interested to know. I was surprised at how... I've said this before in this podcast, just how keystone cops it is over there. These are people... You'd think it would just be... If anything, it'd be bland and boring and exactly what you expect, but it seems like it's a little bit...

It's just... It's kind of like like the the d team is in the strange thing for them is going to be i think to the example one is that they're going to try this i think they're going to try this business of oh well then you know it's going to it's going to go like in the kubler ross like first it's going to be like well so what trump thought that uh dickie haley was nancy pelosi this could be that for a while uh and then it's gonna be by the way there's a little something to that no there's definitely donald trump is 77 years old exactly and then it's gonna be uh well yeah are you you're so smart

and a bunch of people saying oh he's a whip smart the guy um um and then it's gonna be some silence and then they're gonna have to figure out they going to look at some numbers and they're going to say okay what do we do and it may be too late but it's also you're talking about a distributed party control system now for both parties so there's nobody nobody's going to make the call like there's nobody going to go sit in the office and say hey no one's going to do that in the office and say, hey, no one's going to do that. Unless it's Dr. Jill, maybe. I'll give you a contrast. In 1940, 1944, FDR is running for president again. He's been through, already he's been through, as I recall, two vice presidents. We now know that he wasn't well. Insiders knew that he wasn't well. He's waging the war. He's absorbed the details of the

war. And his view is that he should either run, that his vice president should remain Henry Wallace, who was very far to the left and a Soviet sympathizer and known as that at the time, or he would drop Wallace and take on William william o douglas who was another figure of the left four as i recall it was four it may have been five but as i recall it was four democratic party bosses guys who ran the party machine in four urban centers sent sent a delegation to fdr and said no this is just not going to flow. It's not going to work with our people. You need Harry Truman. And that is how Harry Truman was chosen as vice president. Now, am I defending party bosses? You know what? I sort of am. What I am defending is coherent

parties with decision-making capacity, with decision-makers who were in touch with ordinary Americans. In those days, it would have been largely union workers, labor, the guys who actually ran big Democratic cities. And that is gone. Harry Truman was a great president, and they were right about it. Henry Wallace would have been a catastrophe. William O. Douglas was a figure of the left until he died in the fdr put him on the supreme court uh they got it right there's no no decision making apparatus left well a lot of it has to do with this weird attitude people have towards the political leader of the moment which is sort of

a post i don't know maybe kind of a post jfk ish kind of thing maybe or maybe it's fdr the idea that this guy this chief executive of the administrative branch of government frankly is um you know the the father of the country you know he's the papa there and and we must love him and we must support him and you i used to think it was exclusively liberals right because that you know they had that horrible weird slavish attitude towards obama that you could never ever criticize the precious president and i the same thing now with the trump supporters which is like he's the jesus you know it's all kim jong-un stuff like uh 17 hole-in-ones for the great president um and it's just bizarre to me and i think that the there were people in the party systems back then who felt like no no i work for

a bigger organization than the president i work for the party the president's come and go um the party's got to last but you know every senator looks at every president thinks this guy give me a break he's going to be gone and i'm still going to be here um and i think we uh i think we missed that the senate was an alternative source of power in those days i mean you had what when lbj is majority leader he's in some ways as as powerful with regard to domestic politics of course not a president is also commander in chief. The idea that Chuck Schumer is in any way kind of offset to whatever is happening down at the White House is, as far as I can tell, it's just risible. Well, they'll be happy to get rid of Biden and swap in Newsom. I've been saying this forever because now it's apparent to them that

they're dealing with a guy who is going to get up and say, I just spoke the other day with Grover Coolidge, and he reminded me that the business of America is damaged or something like that. And everybody will have to go back and explain that. What your business is, I don't know, but here's the thing. Shopify is a commerce platform that revolutionizes business worldwide. Shopify, they've already taken the cash register online, helping millions sell billions around the world. But did you know that Shopify can do the same thing at your retail store? Give your point of sale, your POS system, a serious upgrade with Shopify. Shopify POS is your command center for your retail store.

From accepting payments to managing inventory, Shopify has everything you need to sell in person. You get a powerhouse selling partner too. They effortlessly unite your in-person and your online sales into one source of truth. Track every sale across your business in one place and know exactly what's in stock. That's handy. Connect with customers in line and online. Shopify helps you drive store traffic with plug and play tools built for marketing campaigns from TikTok to Instagram and beyond. And you'll get hardware that fits your business. Take payments by smartphone, transform your tablet into a point of sale system, or use Shopify's POS Go mobile device for a battle-tested solution. Plus, yes, there's more. Their award-winning 24-7 help is there to support your success every step of the way. So do retail right with Shopify. And you can sign up for a $1 per month trial period at shopify.com slash ricochet. Go to Shopify.com slash Ricochet to take your retail

business to the next level today. Shopify.com slash Ricochet. And we thank Shopify for sponsoring this Ricochet podcast. And now we welcome to the podcast, David Bonson, managing partner and chief investment officer of the Bonson Group and a contributor to Forbes and that national review that we all love so much. David, welcome. Well, wonderful to be with you. Thank you for having me. I'm at the office right now in Minneapolis, where not too many people are. And I'm here because I love my work. And sometimes people ask me if I'm ever going to retire, and I cannot possibly see why,

as long as I'm able to hold a pen or type at a keyboard, I can't imagine not working. My work, I dare say, defines me, and I would be bereft if I laid down my tools. You've written a book about the necessity of work, and we've been told over and over again that we work too much here in the West. We put too much stock in it. We identify with our jobs. We should have four-day work weeks. we should be like the French, we should be more spiritual, and the rest of it. You make a philosophical and spiritual argument for the necessity of work and lots of it. Tell us about your book. Yeah, it's interesting when people say we should be more spiritual and work less,

because the fact of the matter is that the country used to be a lot more spiritual and it used to work a lot more. The spirituality of America was where the work ethic came from. It's also the work ethic that we're still living off of. We live from a DNA that our forefathers had that has created some of the greatest prosperity and quality of living the world's ever seen. I do agree with what you said, that living and working are one and the same, and the notion of retiring being defined as the removal of oneself from productive activity is a travesty, and it's doing great damage to a lot of elements of society. It's doing a lot of damage to retirees. Their lack of self-worth and engagement, I think, is a really tragic byproduct. But it's doing a lot of damage to the economy. It's doing a lot of damage to

businesses. Gen Xers like myself, I'll turn 50 this year. I love my 26-year-olds, but I don't really need them to give me a whole lot of advice and wisdom and experience. But they're going to do it anyway. You know, it's funny, actually, Rob, the 26-year-olds are a lot better than the 36-year-olds. The Gen Z's in a different place than the Gen Y. But I wish I had 66 year olds and 71 year olds to give me more counsel. They're not going to work the same hours. They're not going to have the same pressure. There's going to be different physical and mental and age and stage dimensions that change one's productive activity. But total removal from the marketplace to do nothing but golf and drink,

I find to be very depressing. So, yeah, I mean, I've heard the same thing. David, by the way, this is Rob in New York. Thank you for joining us. The book is called Full-Time Work and the Meaning of Life. And we'll have that in the show notes too, if you're listening and you just go to Ricochet. People I know who are approaching retirement or retired or thinking about it they almost always say the same thing which is like what happens then i gotta do something what am i gonna do um and i think people who are entering the workforce have been told something about how, you know, you have to find your passion and this and that,

and we have all these sort of ways to do it. We have all these quizzes and tests and stuff and counselors and HR. The HR business has become, I mean, you know, the human resources is now a department that 10, even 10 years ago, no corporate executive today would really recognize. It just was a different world. So how come there's this disconnect between people no corporate executive today would really recognize. It just was a different world.

So how come there's this disconnect between people enthusiastically finding their passion and going to work? We're spending a lot of time trying to fit people into the right pegs. Why and how are we failing? I think one of the problems has been a generation in the making, which is the notion that the boomers had, which was a very hardworking generation, a very productive and a very successful one. retirement. First of all, just because of mortality, post-World War II, mortality went up about 10 years. And then since then, it's gone up another 10. So people are living about 20 years longer than they were at the time the baby boomers were born. And that's coincident with the time period in which the material prosperity of the society exploded. Real GDP growth for 70 years was over 3% per year net

of inflation. So resulted in a tripling of the economy in that time period. So you had this potion available to boomers of living long enough to have a 20 or 25 year retirement and having enough money to do so. That's all well and good except for this. I think it messaged to the younger people you're asking about this notion that plenty of boomers were more than willing to communicate and almost explicitly state that the purpose of work was to not do it anymore. People were working for the purpose of exiting the workforce getting the rv getting the golf club getting the various essentially a sort of 25 year vacation i don't know why a 26 year old enters the workforce with the right passion and diligence if the message they've had is that the

only reason they're doing it is to not do it anymore i mean i went to a um i did this executive health thing years ago about you know i don't know five years ago um i was sony made me do it and i went and he spent a whole day and the first thing the doctor said to me after the whole day of tests and all this stuff to me he said look look um you're in pretty good health. Your real problem is going to be you're going to live a long time. You probably need more money. We're talking about every time people talk about raising the retirement age or any of those things, there's this giant reaction about how terrible that is. But you're arguing that work in general is something that is important, not for yourself, but also for your society and for your spiritual life,

for your soul, for your sense of purpose and belonging in the world. How do you convince people of that? You know, there's going to be some you don't convince. I think part of the issue with the book, Rob, is I'm trying to give a permission structure. There's a big target market for the book amongst people of faith, and I think that evangelicals, Catholics, and Jewish people are all going to have a certain common ground in one of the premises of the book, which is this sort of creational account of how God made us. He made us to work. He made us to be

productive. And he said so. And that it's modeled in sort of this creator creature design not not everyone's going to buy into that and there are people who may have different faith traditions but it doesn't change the fact uh whether people believe me about the reason or not that this is inerrant to human nature and so this view that has become really an economic problem that part of the society is meant to be productive and part is meant to be consumptive is creating the income inequality and wealth inequality that the left says they're very upset about. I no longer believe them that they're upset about it because the cultural prescriptions are the very things that are exacerbating it. The view we have at work right now, here's the thing I'll say about Gen Z, whatever's going to happen.

You can do whatever you want with a 32-hour work week, a four-day work week, 12 weeks of siesta or whatever the hell they call it. Quiet quitting. You can do all of it. The top 20%, the next Elon Musk, the next Mark Zuckerberg, the next junior level programmers in Silicon Valley, they're not going to cooperate. The next investment bankers down here, Park Avenue, private equity guys, they're not going to play along. They're going to be working 80 hours. So what are you going to do? You cannot hold back the engine of productivity that's embedded in the human spirit. What you can do is make it more contagious.

I can't catch the bug of laziness, but other people can catch the bug of hard work and productivity and success, what Arthur Brooks refers to as earned success. The greatest feeling in the world of knowing that you did something and you now get to enjoy the rewards and you earned it. It's, it's really, I think about reframing the conversation ontologically, that this is the very being of humanity to be productive and capable and

self-sufficient. Is it hard to catch the bug though? I mean, I'm talking about Gen Z when you're working from home and talking to a zoom. I mean, let's just, you gotta got to tell you you have to understand Rob has never really worked hard yeah this is like he's sort of dancing around a good job of it though right here I'm saying what you know what should I do at this stage in my life and all those of us who have known him at other stages in his life

what what what you're going to start working now well no obviously not i'm really more of a thinker as you know peter i uh i get spit out an idea every day that's what i do but okay i my my young cousin what your second cousin i guess she is my cousin's daughter she gets a good job she's working here in new york she gets a great great job new job at a big you know new cool finance company and they tell her uh you come in you know you got to come in the office just to you know two days a week she's like okay great yep and we well i have dinner i'm talking to her she's shut her job because and the good thing is i only have to come in two days a week and i said well what do you mean right well that's what they you know my my boss wants me in two days a week and i said why don't you go in five days a week?

She said, why? She's young enough. This is all new to her. Why? They want me two days a week. I said, well, my guess is that your boss is there three days a week or something. And what she doesn't want is you there five days a week when she's not there. No boss wants the bright underling to be walking around the office solving problems and doing stuff.

But how do you catch that virus of exciting, competitive employee if you're at home? And how do you put the... If I may... Rob's question. what I've observed with my own kids who are the age of the young woman Rob is describing. How do you put the pieces of the working world back together for kids who just went through COVID where working at home was enforced? Well, the entire appendix of this book is my critique of the work-from-home movement as itself an anti-work movement. And having been here in the city the entire time, five days a week, required,

we have seven offices around the country, 63 employees. There was that brief period in spring of 2020 where you couldn't go into the offices. But at the point starting around May of 2020, when we could get stuff reopened, everybody had to go back, did go back. I've never had a single complaint. And i think rob's right that there are some of the companies it's less so in finance than some of the the tech cool type companies but almost every one of them is throwing in the towel um your netflix facebook google amazon throwing in the at home towel yeah they've all said okay this whole thing we're gonna let you work in your pajamas forever well now we need you in three now Now we need you in four. Now a lot have gone to, oh, we realized by saying

three days a week that we just created a four-day weekend. Every single person is taking Monday and Friday off. So we're going to now require you to be in the office three days a week, but Monday is going to be one of the required ones. I'm sitting here looking outside Park Avenue. Jamie Dimon, JP Morgan, you know, he's an old school boomer. David Solomon, who runs Goldman Sachs downtown. They got everybody back. I didn't understand some of the companies. Google and Facebook, Facebook over by Penn Station, Google down, I think it's near Chelsea, signed the biggest leases in the history of New York City for office in the middle of COVID. And then they're telling people, oh yeah, we're going to do work from home forever. And then they're signing billion dollar leases. Salesforce built

a billion dollar tower in downtown Chicago in the middle of COVID. All of these people were full of it. And they know human nature, you're not going to get maximum productivity but what they did is create the perfectly self-centered trap where as much as they want to not go to work they can have a permission structure and flexibility for their younger people to not come but to rob's point which i agree 100 the answer unfortunately even if he meant the question rhetorically is you're not going to get people to embrace the full orb of work of office work in particular. What we're talking about here, if you're not in the office, the culture, the brand, the collaboration, the real time interaction that can only take place at the water cooler in the kitchen, walking down the hallway, popping your head in someone's door. Our ability to manage money, do research, have traders, talking to advisors, talking to investors, clients.

You have to be in office. And I'm a conservative largely because I believe in conserving norms and traditions. I'm biased towards that. We act as if this office thing came out of nowhere, like someone just made it up. And then 2020 virus told us, well, the office thing sure was a bad idea. It came about for a reason. And unfortunately, we went on a two or three year temper tantrum and it was childish and it needs to stop. You mentioned JP Morgan. I don't know if you can see it from there, but they're building that gargantuan and, to my eyes, ugly structure on Park Avenue. There's no way they're spending that much money and building that much space without requiring everybody to come in. I'm looking right now across at a building here, which was largely empty after

COVID until the major tenant said to all of his employees, all right, here's the thing. Your presence is necessary for your continued employment by this firm. I'm going to pay for your parking. I'm going to give you a $10 lunch voucher every day, but you've got to be here. And you know what? They all came. In our building, which is a newsroom, it's largely empty every day, except for Tuesday when everybody shows up and pretends.

There's a picture on the wall of the staff of the newspaper outside our old building before it was demolished. Big group of people, big, wonderful group of people who all work together knew each other had that sort of kinetic little synthesis that you get of ideas and the rest of it it's a wonderful image of the community that you can build when you are all together in the same place um i'm not there because i was working from home at that day, as it turned out. I've been hybrid all my life, and I see the advantages of both. But that said, when you talk to kids today, and you tell them this, and I see this over, I was just reading this on the subreddit

for Minneapolis, because once again, one of the major employers has said, we want you back. And everybody riles up, why should I have to drive? Why should I have to sit in traffic or on a bus? Why should I have to do anything connected physically in meat space with other people?

And these are the people who were born and raised on glass screens, on glowing glass screens, that they've been looking down their entire life at this narcissistic pool in their hand. And I don't know if they're temperamentally or intellectually capable of catching that virus. They may just have so many antibodies that they're never going

to understand the virtue of shared physicality in a basic location, unless they're forced to. So what do you do? I mean, is it going to get to the point where the economy contracts so much that people will actually take a job that requires them to be in for five days a week, he said, ending his long speech with what sounds like a question but probably isn't. But see, it doesn't have to be the macro economy shrinking that much. It has to be the micro economy. IBM announcing last week people need to move closer to work. They didn't say you got to come to work.

They said you got to move closer to work. UPS said we're laying off 10,000 people and we're starting with the folks that haven't been coming to the office. These weren't drivers, obviously, about corporate jobs. And they're just announcing that we're going down the list and we're looking at key cards of who's coming and who's not. Well, what is the answers to how you get people to come back to the office? What is the reason that most people who have worked in the office their whole career used to go? Because it was table stakes for the paycheck. I'm not a real big fan

of the deal of people even saying, we're going to give you a lunch voucher. We're going to put an arcade in the break room. We're going to put an arcade in the break room. We're going to have a yoga class two days a week. I don't think you have to bribe people to come to work, but maybe some do. I don't like treating adults like children, but I do know this. It's not the kids' fault that when COVID happened, their bosses quit going to work. I mean, the portion where my office is moving to in the 50s on 6th Avenue, all of those skyscrapers, they're mostly filled with law firms. And the reason why they

weren't open is because the senior partners were not there. And now they've gone back. And look, I think that there is a certain kind of organic solution to this over time. Personally, Rob's niece, you're in your 20s you're talented you're working hard if no one's there to see it it doesn't matter you have to be seen and and so i believe a lot of this will correct itself but you you made a comment about for years you'd already been doing a kind of hybrid deal see that, that's not what we're talking about. I'm referring to jobs that were forever time eternal, places that people went and worked together and that allegedly something changed at the point of the pandemic. There was always a certain work from

home component. There were always people that would grab a laptop and go into Starbucks and that kind of stuff. Well, I'm not talking about everybody needs to go for the sake of it into some beer crack environment, but there are companies that we know operate more efficiently and you know the thing that has never come up in this conversation is when the young people say what's best for me when the bosses say what's best for me does anybody care anymore what's best for the customer of the business it's just surreal to me how self-centered it is well i got a question so the strangest thing is that for i mean just before we'll say march 2020 right the high watermark of covid where everybody went home and never came back the workplace had gotten

really nice i mean there were these famous stories about the silicon valley you're gonna go like i'll give you a pizza and i'll do your dry cleaning for you to drive you around and even like down here with like these sort of hard nose spots uh that are traditional seem kind of nice you know if you walk downtown on broadway and we're great by um zuccotti park you look up at the brown brothers harriman building just gotta be like that what could be more austere than that and like you can look in the window there and it's kind of nice and it's like easy chairs people sitting around it's kind of like a really high-end starbucks right so and at the same time the sort of hr machine and hr uh philosophy took over everything

so that you could uh you knew you're going to have certain kinds of understandings your your main uh your main um relationship in the company was your hr person who would be the the the interloper between you and your supervisor would guide all the um the the um reviews that you had to have right so it seemed like we were in a in a direction of making uh work more fun and more human and more all sorts of more good stuff um but did we end up doing the opposite was that a mistake yeah that's a good question i mean obviously it was a mistake economically for the good people at we work you know they added the kegs and the and the lobbies and the lounges and then they i was at a we work once for like for a

month and let me tell you there was a lot of jewelry making and beer tasting and there was nobody was working at the we work it's very ironic and i i do think and i you know what i know i sound so old saying all this. I just don't care. Because there was a big Silicon Valley thing. Google would brag about how you could skateboard around the office and there's no dress code and they had the full cafeteria. Musk went into Twitter and just said to hell with all this stuff. He fired 70% of the people. They were doing breakfast, lunch, and dinner.

I mean, a $10 voucher. These guys were probably getting $100 of food a day. You know? I mean, it's just... I think it's infantilizing. And it's not because I want everyone walking in the snow

two miles back and forth. It's not that kind of thing. It's that work is supposed to be something in which you go with a collective purpose to produce goods and services profitably that meet the needs of humanity. And the idea that we have to pamper everyone with these things, and apparently in pampering them, we don't even get a payoff. We don't even get a built loyalty. So I think societally that this will adjust because it was a failed experiment.

You just mentioned no dress code out here in Silicon Valley. And that is true, of course, in California, nobody ever dresses. What our viewers can't see, we're looking at you on Zoom, and you are dressed in a suit and tie. There you sit in the middle of Manhattan Island. I am told that even at Goldman these days, Rob and I, I disclose a little more about Rob and me than anybody cares to hear. Rob and I both had the same dream as juveniles coming out of our college that we too wanted to go work on Wall Street. Of course, we had no idea what they really did on Wall Street. Thank God for the American economy, we didn't. But they ate at nice restaurants, and they dressed well, and that appealed to both of us.

I'm told that even at Goldman, nobody wears a tie anymore. What's going on here? I think it is the end of the world, although it isn't true of all of Wall Street. Goldman is struggling with this complex of being so austere and so traditional that now they feel like, oh, we can be the cool kids by saying you don't have to wear a tie. So they do a Friday business casual, which most of Wall Street does. But then they do a Monday through Thursday where you're not even wearing a tie, but it's still a suit with just open collar. But JP Morgan doesn't do that. Morgan Stanley doesn't do that. And then a lot of private equity doesn't. When you are on Manhattan, California, you're right, Silicon Valley. So it's different everywhere. Most of the law firms aren't requiring it. So someday... Wait a minute. You mean you can go to Sullivan Cromwell as a junior associate without a tie? I would imagine it would be a very bad idea for a junior associate to do it. And I would imagine

anyone in the legal world is going to court or deposition. It would be a very bad idea. You still wear a tie in front of a judge. Okay. Yeah, because you're a grown-up and you're in front of a grown-up and you have to act like it. But then I think in the offices, it's a much more casual culture. So, yeah. How am I doing at not sounding old?

No, you're not doing great. Okay. Now I'm going to sound really young. The past week, two weeks, two viral videos I saw as I'm a dedicated, devoted TikTok consumer. One was a woman. It was on Twitter. She recorded, she videotaped, or videoed, or whatever we say now, her firing. She knew she was getting called on to a Zoom call with somebody.

It was the last, you know, it was like, please be on the Zoom call at 12.07 p.m. That was three weeks ago. Your virality is really like. So she did it. She recorded the whole thing. And she keeps saying, hey, listen, this is unfair. I did my, I just, I did, I met all my requirements, my KPIs, right? I met them.

I just started in August. She had all these, and it's a very awkward, weird call. The HR people with their weasel word, HR weasel word. And the response was really interesting from some people. It was, half the people said, you know, I will never hire this woman for like recording this interview. And the other half said, you go,

you fight. Um, and then the second viral video, somebody, I don't know whether it's mom or what it was, some young kid, uh, young,

I mean, maybe early teens, maybe right. maybe right early teens uh at a fast food restaurant i couldn't tell which one it was smiling happily going through with the customer all the different choices and then kind of robotically staying what he's supposed to say and recalling it back and asking for it and um the comment was how depressing more mcjobs and half of the people on twitter i mean you may have seen it who saw that uh proudly talked about their first job and how much they admire this kid. So I guess my question is, how do we keep that kid from turning into that woman? And how do we do it and still be America

where we reward risk-taking and swashbuckling pirate capitalists doing crazy stuff with their money that's going to either work or like, how do we get more Elon Musks? A great way to start is the 16, 17, 18, 19-year-old at the fast food restaurant, that first job. There's a war in our country on teenage employment. A lot of parents don't like it anymore's a lot of parents don't like it anymore a lot of schools don't like it and then most of the laws don't like it regulatory minimum wage um you know i did a panel the other day at my book release with a national review

event at union league club and andy puzder was the ceo of car's Jr. and Hardee's was on the panel. And Bradley's a Ph.D. economist at George Mason. And there was another gal who was a Treasury Department economist in two different presidential administrations. All three of them, their first job in high school was an hourly wage job at Baskin Robbins. It's just a coincidence. All three actually started not only in an ice cream, fast food kind of environment, but the same one. Andy became the CEO of one of the largest fast food companies in the world. One of the reasons in my book that we were talking about earlier, full time, that just came out, every chapter I started with a little cute thing at the beginning

of my first jobs in order. And so there's, you know, 12 chapters and I go through the various jobs I had in those teenage years. That kid you're talking about has the ability to serve a customer and they think it's a job. They think it's demeaning. No, it is the ability to interact with human beings, to meet a need, to formulate adult conversation skills, to have a boss you don't like and you have to get along with them, to navigate being on a team. These are life skills that will parlay into all sorts of other creative and productive endeavors. Taking away the minor league system, if careers and vocations

are major leagues, taking away teenage employment is like taking away AAA minor league baseball. It's an absolute disaster culturally. I think we have to facilitate more teenage employment. I think we have to get rid of the entitlement that says a call why did college people stop working when they're in school or why has it gone down so much the student loans were never meant to pay for your room board tuition and your beer money you were supposed to have have to go work for that stuff right now they've supplemented in the student loans people are living off of it and i think a part-time job for college work students is is a very good thing as well some scenarios and situations are going to be a bit different but i'm more speaking macro and culture so i know we got we gotta let you go but so you're not just talking about work being a good, a foundational piece of a working, flourishing capitalist economy. You're talking about it merely be passive and recipients of other people's work.

That what we are made to do involves proactivity. It involves agency. And I think the words, and again, I share this as a result of my own Christian faith, but there are different analogies people can find. I think we share with our creator his attributes of being productive, creative, and innovative. Work provides the avenue for production, innovation, and creation. You take away those things, you end up getting people that it becomes dehumanizing, it becomes alienating, and it leads to this crisis of despair, oftentimes drug and alcohol abuse, depression, mental health. But let's say some of those more severe things are not there. Take

opioids out, suicide, all of this unimaginably depressing stuff. And you just have someone who's not hyper depressed, but they sleep into 11, they get up, play video games, smoke pot, and rinse and repeat every day. Peter Robinson, in other words. Exactly. You know what the tragedy there is? A wasted life. Yes. And all I'm trying to do is get people to not waste their lives.

Yes, David. My father went into the office every day of the business that he started and founded until he was 93 and died. And it was only later we found that he was taking money out of the till. But still, it kept him going every day to have a reason to go. Thank you for joining us. The book, the book that you've got to go to Amazon and get is Full Time Work and the Meaning of Life because they're connected. David Monson, thank you for joining us in the podcast today. And, uh, you know, if you ever change your mind and write a book about the necessity of part time or something like that, come by and we'll talk about that. And the interview will be half

as short though. There we go. Thanks for David. Thank you. The, uh, thing you might want to do those, you know, you don't want to do the Japanese salaryman thing though, where you just work and grind and die. And the only and the only possible joy you have in life is going out somewhere and getting absolutely hammered? No. Especially if you're older. I mean, oh man, after a night with friends and imbibing, you know, you don't bounce back the next day like you used to, right? Because you age. So you have to make a choice. You can either have a great night or a great next day. That is, until we all discovered Z-Biotics. Z-Biotics pre-alcohol probiotic.

Ever heard of that? Yeah, yeah, I've been listening to this podcast. We've told you about it, but I'm going to tell you about it again because it is the world's first genetically engineered probiotic. It was invented by Ph.D. scientists to tackle rough mornings after imbibing. Here's how it goes. When you drink, alcohol gets converted into a toxic byproduct in the gut, and it's this byproduct, not dehydration,

that's to blame for your rough next day. Z-Biotics produces an enzyme to break this byproduct down, and it's designed to work like your liver, but in your gut, where you need it the most. Just remember, drink Z-Biotics before drinking alcohol, drink responsibly, and get a good night's sleep to feel your best tomorrow. So go to zbiotics.com slash ricochet to get your 15% off your first order when you use ricochet at the checkout. You can also sign up for a subscription using our code so you can stay prepared no matter the time or the occasion. ZBiotics is backed with, get this, a 100% money back guarantee. So if you're unsatisfied for any reason, they'll refund your money. No questions asked.

You can't lose. Remember to head to zbiotics.com slash ricochet and use the code ricochet at your checkout for 15% off. Thank you, ZBiotics, for sponsoring this, the Ricochet Podcast. Well, gentlemen, before we go, you know, I was informed of this on the rundown that's passed along to us, things we might want to discuss. It is the most exciting news of the year, period. And that is the Vesuvius

Challenge. Have you guys been following this? No. Well, what it is, is they got these carbonized scrolls from the Vesuvian explosion. Oh, yes, yes. Go ahead.

Explain that. That's fascinating. Yes. Right. So they found this vast library. And I don't know if it's, whose it was. I mean, who did it belong to? Did we find out?

Was it Pliny? It was actually Pliny's library or something? Anyway, it's a huge collection of scrolls, and they were just turned into carbon by the pyroclastic flow or whatever it was that buried Pompeii and Herculaneum. But they're able now to read them with this new technology, the MRI, somehow there's laser imaging, whatever. They're able to figure out what each individual letter is on this packed rod know rod of coal practically and they're finding

primary sources they're going to find histories they're going to find novels they're able to bring back this library from 2 000 years ago and it's i i mean it's the greatest it is so what do you think what else is there to say exactly but i I mean, what are you hoping theyides? We know that two-thirds of that work has been lost. We know that much of Plato has been lost. There are references in Plato to conversations to where there's a lot that we have references to that have been lost. I was listening to BBC In Our Time podcast the other day on Tiberius and the sources that we have on the reign of Tiberius, there are only four or five sources on a reign that lasted four decades, and those sources refer to bits of writing that have been lost. Some of this has to exist in this

vast library of charcoal scrolls in Pompeii. It has to. Absolutely so. If so much of the stuff that we know about the emperors is secondhand coming from people, I mean, they weren't there at the time. They're writing about what people supposedly wrote at the time. If we find other primary sources about these things, we may have our expectations, our knowledge upended. And that's fantastic.

That's great. I also want to see, I also want popular literature. I also want to see what the, you know, what the romance novels were like, what the, what the, I mean, because guys are kind of sort of writing science fiction in their own way I also want to see what the romance novels were like. I mean, because guys were kind of sort of writing science fiction in their own way in those times from some of the stuff that we've been able to catch. They were speculating on civilizations and the moon and the sun and the rest of it and having conversations about that. There was a thriving book industry in Rome. Just because it was scrolls doesn't mean it was books.

So, yes, this is very exciting. Rob is looking, of course, for some sitcoms he he wants more he wants more of the comedies right um well who knows what is uh what is latin for set up joke set up joke well there was a menander wasn't he was it menander i don't know one of those but very bad they're the roman comedies are pretty, the ones we have. Hey, boys, listen, I just have to ask you, because it totally eludes me. We have the Super Bowl coming up. I'm a 49ers fan. I have to root for the 49ers, although I'm extremely worried. Our quarterback has turned in a couple of shaky performances in the last couple of games, and Mahomes is one of the greatest quarterbacks, as far as I can tell, who's ever lived.

Set that aside. Taylor Swift. Oh, what? What? Just explain in brief. Explain to me, A, why she's a national phenomenon, and B, how she's gotten mixed up in the Super Bowl, presidential. I don't understand.

Rob, which part do you want to take? Do you want to take the appeal of Taylor Swift or the science? I feel like it's time to wrap. There's no finish. There's no way to make me understand. All right, we'll take this off, Mike, then. Basically, she's a 32-year-old woman who acts like a 16-year-old and appeals to all the other unmarried 32-year-old women who like to believe they're 16.

And the whole thing about this being a psy-op to elect Joe Biden is absolute, complete, stonking nonsense. And you can read about that and why it's nonsense at Ricochet.com, which one of our members did a very nice job of filleting the other day. So that's that. Go to Ricochet.com and, of course, patronize our sponsors, which would be ZBiotics and Shopify. Give us that five-star review at Apple Podcasts

just to make everybody happy. And stay tuned. Ricochet 5.0 is coming, but for the meantime, we'll see you all in the comments at Ricochet 4.0. Go Niners. Next week, boys. Kansas City. Ricochet.

Join the conversation.