The Future of Work w/ Derek Thompson #818

work and the science of popularity. His notable book, Hit Makers that was a bestseller that delves into the secret histories of pop culture, hits and the dynamics of what makes something popular. But Derek also hosts the podcast Plain English, which I rarely missed an episode of personally, where he offers weekly insights into the latest news things he's most interested in, as well as important issues that our society faces today, like the changing views of what work should

and shouldn't be. So that's what we'll be talking about today. Maybe we'll touch on the Vibe session. Plenty more to cover today with you, Derek. Thank you for joining us.

burb and it's possible. But seriously, the only thing I spend money on our liquids, essentially alcoholic liquids. I love wine. It's incredibly important to me. My dad, my late dad had passed away a few years ago, was a wine critic for the Washington Post. That was his side job to being a lawyer in Washington, d C. Got introduced to wine when I was a really young kid, and I wish I could tell you that I liked all different kinds of wine and you know, could totally drink

the cheap stuff and enjoy it. I have an incredibly annoying palette, as they say, I think even describing saying the word palce probably annoying itself. I really like fancy wine, and I love spending money on it. And you know, my wife and I this is maybe a longer ranch than you were prepared for, because wine is such an important indulgence.

And we used to sometimes think, oh, you know, like opening up, like, you know, a fifty to sixty seventy dollars bottle of wine on a Tuesday makes no sense because they need to finish the whole thing. That's like so much money to spend on, you know, for nothing. But now we have a saying in our household, which is, drink the wine. Whenever we feel excited and giddy about the world, even if it's a Tuesday or Wednesday of no import we say, what the heck, drink the wine.

And yeah, Wine's incredibly important to me, and I love spending too much money on it.

often great twenty dollar bottles of wine. You just have to work in varietals that aren't you know, the biggies. You're probably not going to get a fantastic twenty dollars cab from California. But if you're talking about something like granache, or you're talking about maybe a Spanish wine, Italian wine, absolutely you can get fantastic stuff from the twenty dollars range. And then first, what would happen if you brought over Kirkland Select or something. Well, look, I remember I once

with my grandmother. To give you a sense of how much I drink and how much my family drinks, we want sa a vodka test. My grandmother loves vodka. She's ninety six years old, and we did a vodka test with us. She had some Belvitere and some Gray Goose and some Kirkland Select and some regular Kirkland and we tried all the various vodkas and she, like Kirkland, select

the best that was for vodka. As for wine, I think I would smile politely and say thank you if I thought that maybe you didn't realize what you had bought. But if I knew you better, I'd think you're probably probably playing a prank on me, and I would laugh and ask you to jrug the whole thing before you stepped into my house.

Like I guess what I'm asking is, do you have like a mission statement behind your writing or are you more or less just sort of following your curiosities.

just about whatever I want. Working on an article right now for The Atlantic about the history of work, working on a podcast right now about NYU psychologists research into how social media warps our brains and our sense of reality. I'm interested in doing future podcasts right now on the future of cancer research and health fads. I'm sort of interested in the world, and I like the concept of

sense making, as you put it. I like the idea that my job is to investigate mysteries in the world, and that's pretty much what I see my job as being to find important mysteries that affect a lot of people in the world and to do my best to make sense of them.

I don't know anything about economics. I grew up in the Washington, DC area, and when we got the Washington Post every single week, the only section of that newspaper that I would throw in the trash was the business section. I was interested in everything in the world except for business and economics. And so I told them no, like, please don't make me do this. I'll embarrass you and I won't have a good time doing it. And they were great about it. They said, look, we think you

can do it. And the truth is, if you're bad at this will just fire you back to your old job. So the opportunity cost of taking this position is absolutely zero. So I gave it a shot and ended up realizing, you know, to my own surprise, that economics was for me a really useful lens through which to see the world. I write about macroeconomics quite a bit, and podcasts about macroeconomics quite a bit. I'd say that my interests are more wide ranging than simply economic, But there's ways in

which economics. I think it's provided a useful lens because it, at least in the way that I looked at it, economics was the study of how people live and how the incentives of their life influenced their life. And when you think about economics from a really abstract level like that, well it opens up a lot of fields of interests that have nothing to do with specific businesses.

I've joked before that practically all the classes that I took seemed to be about why World War One happened, and the answer to all those classes is we don't know. So I didn't get a whole lot out of my political science major. And towards the end of my four years at Northwestern, which I overall loved, I thought that I might want to be a lawyer, and so I

picked up legal studies as a third major. And it was one of these majors where you can take a few seminars and write a thesis, then double count a lot of other classes, then get credit for a third major. This is probably not the you know, disquisition you wanted on triple major. But basically I thought I wanted to be a lawyer because I thought that being a lawyer meant acting like Lieutenant Danny Caffey and a few good men as played by Tom Cruise.

essentially was my journal was was my journalism. I realized that's where I really needed to extend my train line, and all those tiny little rails in the center of you know, Western Europe, where you know it's it's big cities, it's attractive, but you realize you're not getting a lot of points from them. That was legal studies, major.

things like groceries. Also, interest rates are elevated, and so if you are a addle class person buying a lot of groceries, and especially if you are looking to buy a new car, lease a new car, buy a new house, well, then the economy is really tough for you right now.

higher interest rates. Now, here's the good thing. Wages overall are growing faster than inflation, and they have been for just about a year. They're growing fastest at the bottom, and they're growing slowest toward the top. So this is a pretty good economy if you are a lower income worker who does not necessarily need to find a new apartment, find a new home. Your wages have been growing, you've been able to trade up for a lot of you know, trade out, maybe from a low paying service sector job

to a higher paying service sector job. And if you don't have to find a new apartment, you can stay and the department that you have, and you haven't had to suffer the same kind of retinflation. We've seen wage growth be positive compared to inflation. Unemployment is unbelievably low. Inequality is falling because low wage workers are getting raises

faster than high wage workers, and productivity is growing. Plus you have the strong equity growth over the last few years if you do own, so you know, in a way, it's kind of like there's you know, obviously, the economy is not just one thing. It's three hundred and thirty million people's experience of an environment and of different prices in different states, in different places. If you own, if you are a highest income worker, this is a pretty

good economy for you. But if you're trying to break into the housing market and you're still relying and you know, sort of not making as much money as you want to, and you're suffering from grocery inflation. It's a much harder economy, very good in some ways, not as good a oothers.

dumeristic headlines with the pessimistic outlook got more clicks. There's like this incentive too, I think, from the media to talk about what's bad sometimes even when things are overwhelmingly good. And I think maybe that colors how we perceive things and maybe how we even think about our own lives. So I don't know, do you think that's true? And how do you square the actual reality on the ground, the largely positive economic numbers, with how people are feeling about things.

experiencing hardship, because look at this unemployment rate. Parts of his hardship. That said, I do think that a lot of the general pessimism of the economy is what my friend kylela Scanlon calls a vibe session rather than something that is like a recession. While Street Journal recently had a study where they ask people in swing states to estimate the or excuse me to express their sentiment of the quality of the economy where they lived in their

state and the equality of the national economy. In every single state, their assessment of the economy was positive, and in every single state their assessment of the national economy was negative. And this feeds into a phenomenon that I have just described in a previous essay as everything's terrible, but I'm fine. That is, there seems to be some psychology at work whereby our attitude or sentiment gets more negative the more national or universal we're asked to reflect on the world.

we quite love it for young Tommy. I think there's a lot of ways in which our assessment of our own lives tends to be more positive because of resilience and because of experience, and our assessment of the world is mediated by the news media, and as you pointed out, there's some NYU research that suggests that the news media has a negativity bias in parts, by the way, because news audiences have a negativity bias, and so as news media is clamoring to get attention, they realize that the

cliche is true. If it bleeds, it leads, or more precisely, I suppose I don't know how to make this rhyme, but if it.

gravitate to bad news. After all, if you're a hunter gatherer on the savannah, and you see a bunch of things that look fine, and then one thing that looks like it's really not fine, right, like maybe the head of a panther or tiger that's about to kill you, Okay, we should clearly pay attention to the danger in your environment.

And I think in the same way, readers on the internet are attuned to negativity for the same evolutionary impulse, and news media have queued into this negative impulse and just flooded the scene with negative news stories. And that's why, to go to the first question that you asked, I think our impression of our own lives, which is mediated only by our own experience, has been more positive, while our impression of the country, which is mediated by actual news media can's been more negative.

is that we're being fed. It continues to polarize individuals, whether I think it's negative, maybe sometimes in positive ways what.

least my reporting of those stories. And if every single day journalists operating in a scarce and declining industry are fearful for their own jobs and their organization's ability to eke out an existence an incredibly competitive ecosystem, if every day they think, well, we're going to get more clicks and more attention and more subscribers if we frame the world negatively, what you're going to get is news media

that over time optimizes towards negativity. And I mean that very literally optimizes towards negativity, because I think that sometimes there's this mis understanding that negativity in news is a mistake. Of course, in a way, I think that negativity bias is bad for accurate representations of reality. But in many ways it represents a kind of optimization of engagement. And that's really that's the issue here. In a way, the best way to represent the world clearly and honestly is

to resist that kind of optimization. It's to be suboptimal in terms of getting people's attention. That's very, very difficult to ask any one news organization to do. To essentially embrace what they understand to be a suboptimal strategy.

way that they weren't able to before. Some of the individuals or small organizations that create, you know, newsletters that are reaching hundreds of thousands of people even at this point and are kind of taking a different tact, Like I'm just curious, what's your take on that.

I don't think that's optimal. I think as a news consumer, I would much prefer a world that is like the world that I live in, where I can listen to a podcast the morning from some of the smartest, funniest commentators on sports, and then read an article by a brilliant foreign policy analyst. I mean, nothing like that riotous abundance of expertise was available before the advent of the Internet sort of created this Cambrian explosion of news outlets.

But that riotous abundance I think has costs, And one of the costs is this that competition is antagonistic. And by that I mean if you have a news environment with ten thousand economic business and finance podcasts and you're trying to break in to this field, the best way to break in really is to be antagonistic. Is to say, these big guys who've been in this business for a while,

they're wrong. You know, this person that you listen to for finance, and this person you listen to for economic news, they don't know what they're talking about. I'll tell you the truth, right, that's the way to break in is to be antagonistic. But if everyone does this, what it does on net is create extraordinary everyone loves. It's a little bit like everything's terrible, but I'm fine. Everyone loves their own news source but believes that quote the media

capital T capital M is always lying to them. And so I do think that there's a way in which the abundance of media might lead somewhat linearly to an increase in distrust and increase in conspiracy theorizing, and a decrease in a shared sense of reality. And I'm not entirely sure that that's good for us. And so this is why I just sort of round out the answer. I think that the evolution of news toward abundance has been very complicated in terms of netting out whether it's

good or bad. On the one hand, we have more direct access to expertise than we've ever had before, and that's awesome for a diletan dish news consumer like me. But at the same time, I think we have to utterly give up on the idea that we're ever going to have something like shared reality in America. It's just not going to happen again.

a year. Today he or she works closer to seventeen hundred eighteen hundred hours a year, and that difference, right, working thirteen hundred hours less a year, that's the equivalent of like one hundred and fifty vacation days the typical nine to five worker. So we don't work like we did during the Second Industrial Revolution, but nonetheless we do

work a lot more than other countries. And I think you hear this experience sometimes when you talk to immigrants when they come from Europe to the they say that there really isn't the same cultural centering of work in Europe that there is in America. And I think that this is a complicated blessing. On the one hand, I think that the centrality of work in America is one reason why we tend to have so many of the

largest companies in the world. Like, if you look at the biggest companies in the US, their average age is like forty fifty years. It's a lot of companies that were built in nineteen seventies, eighties, two thousands, you know, Apple and Microsoft and Meta. If you look at the biggest countries in Europe, a lot of them are from like the early twentieth, late nineteenth century. They're really really old.

And so I think that this love of work feeds into and maybe it's intertwined with its entrepreneurial spirit that I think is quite lovely. But I also think that over work, or what I sometimes call workism, which is sort of the you know, centering of work in one's life and treating one's career like it's a religion, also has a lot of downsides. So, you know, I think all the time about, like you know, is American's relationship

with work good or bad for us? And like so many things that I report on, it is complicated and there are a lot of goods with the bad.

toward work are changing across generations. Right when I wrote my initial essay on the phenomenon that I called workism, I was looking at a lot of data that centered on workers between the nineteen eighties and the two thousands, And essentially what the data I was looking at found was that while you know throughout the world and throughout history which people have tended to work less.

was being valued. I think that may have been true for older workers, but it might be changing among young millennials and gen z. I do think that, you know, fear of overwork movements like anti work and the anti work subreddit. Not that that's like it's just a subreddit on the one hand, but I think it reflects an evolution and thought. And I also think that that gen Z with the rise of hybrid work, also someone has a different attitude toward work and they're centering new things

in their life. What exactly it is, I'm not sure what, but I do think it's possible that workism is on the decline. But again, this might just be a seesaw. It might be that gen Z that you know that the Boomers were work as gen Z is pulling back from it a bit because they don't want to be just like their parents. But maybe you know the next generation is going to throw itself into work even more.

as some people might lead us to believe. I saw the stat from Monster the other day, ninety five percent of US workers are planning to apply or at least look for a new job this year. So that's a ton of people in one year who are playing That's the vast majority of people.

human nature. What I find very interesting is that there are a lot of mainstream media outlets in the general business and economic space, your Wall Street journals and Fortunes and Bloomberg's who run lots of stories every single year pointing out how miserable they think or want us to think the workforce is. Again, you have to go back to the most fundamental bias of news media, which is not a bias toward the left or the right. It's a bias toward bad news. It's a bias toward negativity.

Americans are miserable at their jobs. Is a negative headline that's going to cue the amigdala to look at it and say, oh, that's a five alarm fire. People are miserable somewhere in the world. I have to figure out why and then click on it. A headline that says most Americans are more or less fine in their jobs offers no equivalent five alarm fire to the mind, and

therefore people aren't going to click on it. But if you look at studies like Gallop or Pew or the Conference Board, who ask Americans every single year, how do you feel about your job? How do you feel about your job? How do you feel about your job? Not only are people steadily positive about their work, but at least according to the Conference Board, I think every year for the last decade more people have said if they're happy at work. I think this is generally a good thing.

I think that it's a good thing that people are generally happy at work, even though media headlines are consistently trying to tell us that people are miserable. The last thing I guess I would say about the phenomenon of the media reporting on workplace misery is that it's just way more fun to read about other people hating their job than it is to read about other people liking their job. I don't want to read about other people liking their job. That's just gonna make me feel bad.

I want to read about how other people are miserable. It works that I can feel the same way I feel when I know that, Like you know, celebrities that are incredibly beautiful hate each other and are breaking up and are cheating on each other, Like I want to feel like other people are miserable. That's a totally human instinct, and I think that's also why you see news media gravitating toward these negative headlines abou people's appreciation of their jobs.

of a spouse. You know, today we expect our wife or our husband, you know, maybe our partner, girlfriend, boyfriend, to be sexy, to be our best friend, to be able, to be our intellectual equal, to be stimulating, in conversation, to be the perfect mother or father, to be the perfect you know, person to clean up the house, the person you want to follow a stately. We have all of these expectations for a modern partner that I think

are somewhat disconnected from historical expectations of a partner. Right, So, in romance, it is the age of impossible expectations. I think it is also true in work that we expect our jobs and our companies to be much more than just a job or just a company. Not only do we want our jobs more than just a job, the whole concept of workism, which Simone picked up on in this book is that a lot of people expect that their jobs, through their careers, do the so called work

of religion. That it should provide meaning and a possibility of transcendence, It should provide a community, It should provide for self actualization. That you know, having a job. According to Pew, having a job that you love is now more important to Americans than religion or marriage is.

than just be a company. We ask that our companies reflect our values in the public square, so across the board. I think in romance and in work and in politics, I think we live in an age possible expectations, and it just happens to also be true for our careers.

I do think that there is a sense of identity that folks are missing out on that in the past, they had some sort of shared reality that you talked about, right how there's no longer going to be that sort of shared reality. But I think it's because of this atomization that's taking place of individuals as they stepped away from different institutions.

school absences have doubled since COVID. It seems like, you know, a lot of both parents and students feel like school isn't a place where kids necessarily need to show up the same at the same rate that they previously showed up. You know, what is the last community standing? Well, for a lot of people, the last community standing is the office. And by community again, I just mean where people keep

showing up. So in many ways, I think the office was not necessarily built, or our work, our company is not necessarily built to be the last community standing. They just happen to become the last community standing because every other community pretty much has wilted away in the last thirty years. But that's not a defense of the workplace community.

That is an acknowledgment that work, for many people has just become maybe the last community that exists for them, and I see that maybe, as you know, for some people, wonderful, I loved the people that I've worked with, and I've definitely made a community, But for a lot of other people, I think that that's sort of a sad thing to fall into.

You've talked you've kind of like talked about that as the worship of work, and you've talked to negatively about that,

but you've also admitted that you engage in it. So I'm curious how you reconcile kind of that reality, that duality, and if you've changed your approach to work after all the thought you've given to this subject, plus the fact that you're a dad now that changes everything, right, I mean, I know I'm completely rethinking how much of my efforts, my time, my mental faculties go to my work versus to my family. What does that look like for you?

really struggle to find something else to fill their life. Now, it doesn't mean that work is the best thing to put at the center of your life. It's rather to acknowledge that in a country where community is generally in decline and association is generally in decline, we need something to keep us together. We need some kind of organizing

principle to consistently connect us to people. And if we're gonna have fewer book clubs, and we're gonna have fewer churches, and we're gonna have fewer unions, and we're gonna have fewer neighborhood associations, Well, then what's gonna be that binding principle?

And if for some people that thing turns out to be work and they like their job, and I should point out that, you know, jobs in general are a lot more fun certainly than they were like one hundred and fifty years ago, you know, when you know, common jobs were like, you know, going out on the sea to kill a sperm whale and then crack open its skull and climb inside and get the pus you need to you know, light lamps in the street.

I found most helpful. I think a lot of things people find most helpful about getting over a major loss in their life is returning to some kind of regular routine, and having work be the anchor of that routine actually, in many ways made me happier. I think it's pretty rare. I think to hear that having a job helped you get over but there's no question that having a routine helps people get over grief, and work is an important

routine that helps to anchor people's lives. So that's a long winded and somewhat personal way of saying that I think I might have gotten aspect of the work is a thesis a little bit too negative that I do think that a religion that centers work is probably not

good for people's souls. But having work be a really important core part of your life can absolutely be part of a of a balanced and wonderful and rich life, even when, as I do, even when you become a father and just want to spend all your time, you know, snuggling with your adorable, chubby eight.

just a couple more questions that we want to get to. Specifically, we're gonna touch on AI. We'll get to that and more. Right after this, we're back still talking with Derek Thompson. We're talking about work and Derek, thanks, thank you for just kind of getting personal with in that response to that last question.

do you think things stand right now? It feels like actually things have calmed down for a second, because maybe, like a year and a half ago, a lot of freak out about AI and how it's going to impact all of us, Maybe people aren't as worried right now, Like where do things stand on that front?

pretty well. Which the headline of which was AI as a waste of time, And what I meant was not that AI is the genitive AI at Chatchabt and Claude three from Anthropic, not that they are a waste of time for everybody, but that one way to understand the majority of use of these genitive AI tools for people that maybe don't work in computer programming, where I think it's just become a kind of permanent copilot. He said, a lot of people are just sort of playing around

with this thing, and that's fine. You know, lots of important products. The computer, for example, starts off as a kind of toy and then evolves to become something that is central to our working lives. But the truth is that I don't think I think it is still too early to say exactly how and where artificial intelligence is going to change the world. Just two specific thoughts that I have about that sort of that frontier, maybe like the edge of the present. One is I am really

curious about AI and medicine. There are lots of scientists that are using protein folding tools and large language model tools to essentially speed run the search for molecules that can bind with certain proteins do certain things in our bodies that can make us healthier, or fight diseases or cure cancer. And I'm really interested in at least trying to stay at that frontier to understand how we're using

these tools to discover new medicines. The second thing that I read recently, and this came from Ethan Mallick, who's a really brilliant AI writer, has a substack I leave called one Useful Thing, and just wrote a book called co Intelligence, and he has a section in that book about cointelligence where he talks about how AI might change

the career pathway. He says that, you know, a lot of young people start off learning skills that are very very basic, and they move from those basic skills sort of the one oh one skills to the one O two skills, to the two oh one skills, the three on one skills. But one way to think about what chat GPT is good at is that it's good at being like one hundred entry level employees at once. Right. It does the work essentially of like one hundred entry level employees. It's not a great CEO, but it's a

really great research assistant. Well, what happens to the career path as lots of the work previously assigned to twenty two and twenty three year olds turns out to be more efficiently done by having maybe just one twenty three year old or maybe just one twenty five year old working with CHATGBT, Right, maybe rather than hire ten twenty two year olds, you hire one twenty four year old and give them genitive AI and that's and that does the same work. That really changes the entry level path

for a lot of different companies. And so I'm interested both both sector by sector with the changes, but also a cross sectors maybe how it changes career development.

And jenetai is really brilliant at doing a lot of the work that I think of as quite essential to my job. You know, I'm interested in a lot of different things, work in macroeconomics and the frontier of you know, cancer research, and these tools are really really good at explaining novel concepts. So like, if I don't understand what, like you know Carti Therapy does. I can just plug that right in to chat GBT and it can explain to me what this how to you know, engineer T

cells in order to fight cancers. I'm like, oh my god, wow, Like that's that's what Carti's cell therapy is. That's really important. Unders and I can do the same thing for you know, economic concepts, and so I find it very useful to allow me to surf the world as a dileton with this little thing in my pocket that will explain certain

key concepts I don't understand. Right. It's a little bit like, you know, how if you're traveling in a foreign country and you don't understand the language and a certain sign, you can, you know, hold out your phone and maybe open up like the Google app and just point it at the sign and then it translates the Danish word for stop into the English word stop and you're like, oh, okay, great stop.

open up. When when new forms of technology come into being, do you think that's going to be the case with AI or do you think it is going to kind of eradicate eradicate a bunch of jobs that it won't like that won't pop up in other places.

nineteen sixties, the economy was thirty forty percent many fashion workers. Today, if you add all the many facts ushing workers with to all the farmers in America, you get less than ten percent of the labor force. So we found a way to take that ninety percent and turn it into ten percent, And now the other ninety percent of the labor force is doing stuff that we couldn't have even

imagined in the nineteenth century. I mean, how do you explain the concept of computer programming, which now is the most popular major at most of America's elite universities. How do you explain that to someone in like eighteen sixties, You'd be like, okay, imagine a computer. Oh okay, well, imagine like an abacus that can do a lot of other stuff. It's like, very very hard to do. And we were very very good to think of new ways

to spend money. We're pretty good at inventing stuff, although I wish that we were better, And so I could always choose to say history for the next one hundred and forty years will be like history for the last one hundred and forty years, and we'll just find new ways to reemploy people. It's always possible, however, that AI will do for humans what essentially the automobile did for horses.

You know, one way to tell the story of horses in horse history is to say that for thousands of years, we came up with new technology that made horses more powerful with each you know, every millennium, right that we invented stirrups, and we invented horseshoes, and we invented saddles, and we invented armor in all these different ways and plows, you know, to make horses more and more and more productive.

And then finally we invented the machine that was just better at horses, at everything, and we replaced them with tractors and cars.

the past. Now work has become is taken top billing in our lives and we expect a lot from it and guess.

content kind of with the way things currently stand. It's always got to be the next thing, and we all Matt, you and I included to find ourselves in that camp at different points in time, like oh, you know what, this house? Is it big enough? Like do I need

to move on up the property ladder? There's all of these ways that we think about our lives content in this is a hard thing for us to feel for very long, I think as humans, and I think, yeah, Derek eloquently discussed that when you mentioned that totally.

was mostly nice and friendly. I think the thing could be true though, when it comes to what it is that we are pursuing, because yes, to be more successful quoe unquote successful in the eyes of the world is going to lead you down a path that maybe you don't necessarily want to go down, but to live a life that you want to lead that that is more important than being fully optimized essentially, and so you.

that puzzle, I think. But you might want to find community and meaning in other parts of your life too, and in fact, yeah, you're going to need to if you want to live that kind of life.