Bullshit Jobs

Uh let's go in. Let's go in. Let's go in. And you have to cut all that because last time I told the same story twice. I didn't even think about it. I was just telling my stories to my friends. You know? Like It looks like someone only had one funny anecdote last week. Yeah, I saw that too.

Fucking kings of comedy over here. They're like, oh, you're reusing your bits? Everyone else just tells one story to one person and it's just done. Nobody ever repeats up anything that happened to them. You know how good my stories are by the third time I'm telling them? Uh okay. I actually this

This one has like a really obvious like little zinger to it. Yeah. But I don't know how to word it, but I don't know how to word it. Michael. Peter. What do you know about bullshit jobs? All I know is that I'm excited to talk about this book from the vantage point of my Bullshit Jobs, written by David Graber, came out in 2018. Graber is an anthropologist. and he is a hardcore lefty. He considers himself an anarchist. So

Finally, we're do we're doing a book by someone who's not a reactionary centrist. Also, my understanding is his work is like good. It's a pretty good book. It makes some important points, it prods at some good and correct ideas, I think. Like my big picture criticisms of it are one, it's like really meandering in the way that a lot of like lefty theory is. Yeah. It's hard for him to land at a point. He says a lot of things where you're like, okay, I like this.

And then he just sort of like meanders on until you're like, all right, I no longer get it. This is like meeting anyone in Seattle, Washington. And you're like at a cocktail party, you're like, I I think I agree. I don't know what you're saying though. My other big picture criticism is that the book really

screams for data but he doesn't give it. Oh really? That's surprising actually. Sometimes he's doing it very knowingly, being like, Look, I'm a I'm a theory guy, you know? So like if someone wants to look into this, they should. But there are other times where it's like, there is data here, and I feel like he could have looked for it. That is reactionary centrist coded. It is. I'm not gonna look up the premise of my book and whether it's true. Also, wait, wait, wait, wait.

Didn't he like die tragically? He passed away in twenty twenty, quite young. So yeah, he we will we will speak of him respectfully. Yeah, I mean he seems like a nice guy with good ideas. Like I feel like it's not I this is gonna be a much less dunky episode, it sounds like. Yeah, unfortunately there are no I'm just gonna send you various Excerpts and then we will

Think about them. Yeah. Rather than my usual MO of just finding the dumbest shit in every book and sending it to you. But this was like a heavily requested book. So it's like it was inevitable that we would do this. It just sounds like it has yielded a sort of like A portrait of like a book that is kind of interesting but falls apart in some places. Not yeah. Not like a fuck this book or fuck this guy kind of episode. I'm gonna give the definition of bullshit job Right off the bat.

unnecessary or pernicious that even the employee cannot justify its existence, even though as part of the conditions of employment, the employee feels obliged to pretend that this is not the case. That sounds quite extreme. That sounds like it would be very few jobs in America, actually. It is very extreme. And we'll get into like exactly what he means in more detail. But for color, because he's on the left.

This is mostly directed at like certain types of white collar work that he thinks add no real value to society. He distinguishes between bullshit jobs and what he calls shit jobs, which are just sort of like the traditional bad job, like low pay.

maybe degrading, right? You're treated poorly by society. Yeah, those are like very essential jobs. They just suck. Yeah. That's what he says, that those jobs are in fact Aaron Powell calling the kettle black or whatever, but like it is also funny to write a whole book about this while being like a Marxist. scholar at a liberal arts university. As we we speak into microphones from our uh from our own homes. If you ever try to describe what you do to someone who doesn't know about podcasts.

It's impossible to describe it in a non-humiliating way. It's so weird when you don't know someone because When they eventually ask enough questions to find the name of the podcast, it's like, yeah, here's here's a link to all of my opinions. I have kind of started dating somebody recently. And he didn't know about the show when he first met me. But like when you're in this stage of like you got on a couple dates, you like each other, you're flirting, texting, whatever.

He's like, it's weird to have like six hundred hours of your opinions on things that I can just like go listen to at any point. Yeah. Like, uh this guy I'm seeing, what what does he think about Princess Diana? I want one day for there to be someone who's like, Oh, you're the girl on if books could kill.

After meeting me on Grinder, yes. So in twenty thirteen, Graeber publishes a short essay in Strike Magazine, which is a radical lefty outfit, called On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs. A work rant. We've often had these situations where we're like

This should really just be an essay. Yeah, and sometimes it was. Yes. And sometimes it was. You do get the sense that someone was like, David, can you turn this into a book? And he was like, All right. Because honestly the at least what I understand to be the premise. Sounds like a fine essay. Like some percentage of the American economy is just like people kind of pretending to do stuff or like things that don't really need to exist.

But also if you extend that to three hundred pages, you then do need to provide some data. You need to provide examples. And then it also seems like it would kind of fall apart. The essay is super short. And so you actually end up with a weird situation where like the essay could be longer, but the book could be a lot shorter. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm gonna send you some of the essay and we can talk about it.

I think he hits on like this general idea that's very true. But then the more specific he tries to get, the more you're like, ah I don't know. Um all right, I am gonna send you some of the opening bits here. In the year nineteen thirty, John Maynard Keynes predicted that by centuries end technology would have advanced sufficiently that countries like Great Britain or the United States would have achieved a 15-hour work week.

There's every reason to believe he was right. In technological terms, we are quite capable of this, and yet it didn't happen. Instead, technology has been marshalled, if anything, to figure out ways to make us all work more. In order to achieve this, jobs have had to be created that are effectively pointless. Huge swathes of people in Europe and North America in particular spend their entire working lives performing tasks they secretly believe do not really need to be performed.

The moral and spiritual damage that comes from this situation is profound. It is a scar across our collective soul, yet virtually no one talks about it.

I already disagree with this. I I have had jobs that are sort of on the bullshit spectrum. I I mean this like when I used to work in NGOs, but I don't think it's that the job was bullshit. I think it just wasn't a 40 hour job. It was like 10 hours of kind of real stuff. And then 30 hours of bullshit. I know that you're gonna keep jumping the gun on me. Okay, okay, okay, okay. We're getting there. I kind of agree with you. I think that one of the problems

here is that he tries to drop jobs into a category. It's a bullshit job or not, but the reality is that a large part of almost any job has like a bullshit component. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. All right, I'm gonna send you more. He says

A recent report comparing employment in the US between nineteen ten and two thousand gives us a clear picture. Over the course of the last century, the number of workers employed as domestic servants in industry and in the farm sector has collapsed dramatically.

At the same time, professional, managerial, clerical, sales, and service workers tripled, growing from one quarter to three quarters of total employment. In other words, productive jobs have, just as predicted, been largely automated away. But rather than allowing a massive reduction of working hours to free the world's population to pursue their own projects, pleasures, visions, and ideas.

We have seen the ballooning of not even so much of the service sector as of the administrative sector, up to and including the creation of whole new industries like financial services or telemarketing. The unprecedented expansion of sectors like corporate law, academic, and health administration, human resources, and public relations. I'd like strongly disagree with this. Public relations is an important thing. Like I did public relations for NGOs. It's important to get the word out about like

Fucking conflict minerals. I don't know, like So I I mean I agree. There's a there's an imprecision in his terms a lot. There's another problem here, which I feel like is classic lefty stuff, which is like Sometimes you get the sense that he's never really worked for a company. Right, right. He's just sort of eyeballing it. He's also doing a weird thing kind of from the left that you see from the right a lot, where it's this idea that

Things like farming and manufacturing are like real jobs. Like, oh we used to make things in America. And then all these office jobs are like knowledge jobs. Are fake, but I also just don't agree with the premise. I think there's lots of jobs where you sit at a desk that are totally worthwhile. I wrote a note down in some sections uh where I

just said noble savage next to some of his discussion of like manufacturing work, for example. Right. Um, because even in my like limited exposure to blue collar jobs when I was young You see a lot of the same phenomenon that he's dis describing in white in white collar work, right? Where work is is redundant or whatever it might be and we'll get into it. Yeah. Now I'm gonna send you one last bit.

He says the ruling class has figured out that a happy and productive population with free time on their hands is a mortal danger. And, on the other hand, the feeling that work is a moral value in itself and that anyone not willing to submit themselves to some kind of intense work discipline for most of their waking hours deserves nothing is extraordinarily convenient for them. So I think he's basically saying, Look, the ruling class has opposed policies that would create more free time

And fostered policies that incentivize work. That's true. That's just like straightforwardly true. Not hard to believe, right? But like, yeah, the the idea that like wealthy capitalists oppose things like working hours reductions or mandatory free time. Yeah. That's just obvious empirically true. But also that feels distinct from the phenomenon of bullshit jobs to me. Yeah, I I so I agree. So what he's what he's basically saying

Although he doesn't quite I'm not sure that he ever actually says this, but you can sort of piece it together. What he's basically saying is like we've had these big increases in productivity. Has it brought us no any more leisure time? No. And that's because there are these great institutional forces that oppose that and want to redirect our productivity elsewhere. That seems true. That seems fair. There's a big response to this essay.

A bunch of people write it up, bunch of Marxists start arguing about it and I won't I won't get into it. I won't it I will tell tell you, my first run at this episode, I was like, maybe I'll cover these intra Marxist debates and then like I read one S A and was like no, no.

Twenty fifteen, someone took evocative quotes out of the essay and plastered them all over the London Metro. The London Metro? The tube you mean? Sorry. Sorry to both sorry to our well traveled listeners. Uh people who know basic things. You can say the metro metro basic things. That's like the London have you ever heard anyone say the London Metro in your life? Also, it it might have also been buses.

That's also not the Metro. But it's not the tube either, so what is it? Oh whatever. Don't try to fucking Uno reverse. Just accept the L and move on. I don't think it's an L. I think I've introduced a nuance that you can't explain.

So yeah, so they put up these quotes. One of them says, Huge swathes of people spend their days performing tasks they secretly believe do not really need to be performed. One says, It's as if someone were out there making up pointless jobs for the sake of keeping us all working. These are quotes from the essay and they sort of cause a little bit of stir of a stir they get on the news.

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

Bullshit jobs to flesh the theory out, published in twenty eighteen, and a lot of his research for the book. Is essentially just compiling anecdotes from people who reach out to them about their bullshit jobs. Those actually sound fun, to be honest. I will say as a data set,

It's pretty obviously terrible. Yeah, yeah. You're people who reach out to a leftist academic to complain about their bullshit job. Probably not the you know, the best the representativest of samples. But he uses that to delineate what he believes are uh the five approximate categories of bullshit job. Okay. Flunkies? goons, duct tapers,

box tickers and taskmasters. Okay. Now this is not meant to be exact or exhaustive, I don't think. It's it's just useful groupings, right? So we'll start with flunkies.

Flunkies are people whose jobs exist entirely to make their bosses feel or seem important. Okay. I'm gonna send you a little bit here. He says another term for this category might be feudal retainer. Throughout recorded history, rich and powerful men and women have tended to surround themselves with servants, clients, sycophants, and minions of one sort or another.

Not all of these are actually employed in the grandee's household, and many of those who are are expected to at least do some actual work. But especially at the top of the pyramid, there is usually a certain portion whose job it is to basically just stand around and look impressive.

Some old fashioned feudal retainer style jobs still do exist. Dormen are the most obvious example. They perform the same function in the houses of the very rich that electronic intercoms have performed for everyone else since at least the nineteen fifties. Dormen often serve like a security function, don't they?

outdated examples that I think are a little more accurate. One is elevator operators, which I think might be like one of the better examples here. But also do those even still exist? I mean those not really. No. You used to need one. Certain receptionists

He you know, he believes are basically just there for aesthetics. Probably true. I guess but even a receptionist is like part of like marketing the company, right? You get to a place and like a person says, Hi there, welcome, what can I do for you?

There's some value in that. There are certain things like marketing and advertising that you get the sense that he just doesn't really like respect as an endeavor. Right. You can also see here, he loves the idea that corporations retain or like recreate certain like feudal dynamics. And like one of his overall theories here and we'll see.

Touch on this a bit later too, is that like corporations are not like hyper efficient like the libertarians would have you believe. That's true. Yeah. But are instead sort of like mechanisms for distributing wealth and power in a almost political sense. That feels like totally legitimate. Let's keep go let's keep going. Goons are people whose jobs have an aggressive element, but crucially

Who exist only because other people employ them. Okay. Here's what he means by that. The most obvious example of this are National Armed Forces. Countries need armies only because other countries have armies. If no one had an army, armies would not be needed. But the same can be said of most lobbyists, PR specialists, telemarketers, and corporate lawyers. Also, like literal goons, they have a largely negative impact on society.

I think almost anyone would concur that were all telemarketers to disappear, the world would be a better place. But I think most would also agree that if all corporate lawyers, bank lobbyists, or marketing gurus were to similarly vanish in a puff of smoke, the world would be at least a little more bearable.

This again is like a weird category error thing, because like telemarketing, like it's obviously a a bad job and I like I hate getting telemarketer calls, but I don't need I don't think it's bullshit in that way, because it does result in sales. Right? Well, I think when he said telemarketer, I it did kind of click in my brain because there were definitely Some jobs where the central purpose of

is essentially to trick or bully someone into buying a product or a service that they do not need. Completely. And I think that's what he's getting at. Dude, I sold frozen steaks over the phone for exactly one day when I was in college and I couldn't fucking handle it. That was a bullshit job. I'm not sure I think it's right that lobbyists and PR people and lawyers wouldn't exist if others didn't exist. Right? If you look at like some basic corporate lawyer bullshit, like they write contracts.

Yeah, yeah. Again, I just I'm not entirely sure that he understands these industries. And marketing gurus, I mean it kind of depends on what they're marketing. Like maybe they're marketing garbage, but they might be marketing like a a couch that you like. Like to sit on. I mean it's like people buy objects that they need in their lives as well. I don't know. All right, the next category duct tapers.

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

Making something work. I think I agree, but I think he's sort of saying like there's an ideal world where this doesn't this problem doesn't exist, right? I guess, but I think this is like the one that makes the least sense to me. Because like there's a problem and then someone gets hired to fix it and the problem is fixed. But then you're like, oh no, it's bullshit because the problem shouldn't have existed in the first place.

To draw a line between what he's saying and what we're and what we're saying. There will always be a certain gap between blueprints, schemes, and plans and their real world implementation. Therefore, there will always be people charged with making the necessary adjustments.

What makes such a role bullshit is when the plan obviously can't work and any competent architect should have known it. When the system is so stupidly designed that it will fail in completely predictable ways, but rather than fix the problem, the organization prefers to hire full-time employees

whose main or entire job is to deal with the damage. It's as if a homeowner, upon discovering a leak in the roof, decided it was too much bother to hire a roofer to reshingle it, and instead stuck a bracket underneath it, and hired someone whose full-time job was to periodically dump the water. I I guess, but then it's like this is a much smaller percentage of jobs then and is very much in the eye of the beholder. I do feel like it's telling that he had to make up

A fake thing. Yeah. Rather than just tell us about a job that he thinks fits this cleanly. Right. I but I think if you're trying to if you're trying to do a good faith thing here, he's saying there are people whose jobs are really the result of an inefficiency that could be addressed more directly. Feels like a different category than like telemarketers, but okay. I agree. I do I think he really kind of hits his stride when he's talking about industries or work that are like

scammy. Yeah. Yeah. That like really are like an obvious drain on society. Yeah, which feels like like the the amount of the American economy that is now dedicated to fucking scams is like absolutely should be and I'm sure is the subject of like many books. It's like an actual huge problem. But that feels like different than just like people who do PR are bullshit. I love I love watching you

have to go through the same process that I did. Yeah. Every s with every single one of these where you're like

Yeah, kind of. But not really, right? Because this does feel like the phenomenon that we're talking about, where it's like you read the essay and you're like, Yeah man, some jobs are bullshit. Here's some fun examples. It's like you get in, you get out in a couple thousand words. Yeah, yeah. But it's like as soon as now you're trying to specify, aha, there's actually different categories of bullshit jobs, it's like

Are they though? I think this should be familiar to anyone who does like work like hours or rights, right? Where you're like, Ooh, I have this idea and I'm gonna flesh it out and then you try to flesh it out and you're like, actually I'm stupid. This is a dumb idea. Yeah, totally. All right, next, box tickers.

Box tickers are quote employees who exist only or primarily to allow an organization to be able to claim it is doing something that in fact it is not doing. Okay. Sending you a bit. The following testimony is from a woman hired to coordinate leisure activities in a care home. Most of my job was to interview residents and fill out a recreation form that listed their preferences.

That form was then logged on a computer and then promptly forgotten about forever. The paper form was also kept in a binder for some reason. Completion of the forms was by far the most important part of my job in the eyes of my boss, and I would catch hell if I got behind on that. A lot of the time, I would complete a form for a short-term resident and they would check out the next day, I threw away mountains of paper.

We found one. That's like a straightforwardly bullshit job. Yeah. A friend of mine is applying for uh citizenship in Germany. Uhhuh. Germany's like famously like they still use like fax machine machines for shit in Germany. It's like super paper and pencil. There's an online form. Where you fill it out, you go to the office and A woman at the office then prints it out and types it into the computer for you.

Like while you stand there. Oh my god. He's like standing there watching someone type into a computer a thing that he already typed into a computer. This is like the um the fact that you submit a PDF resume and then also have to type it all into a fucking form. Yeah. So here's uh a little more about box ticking. And I thought this is interesting. Uh i it's less obviously bullshit than the care home example, but I think he's getting at something here. He says

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

Second of all, it's a way of implying that once all the facts are in, someone will definitely do something about it. This is usually not true either. A fact-finding commission is a way of telling the public that the government is doing something it is not. But large corporations will behave in exactly the same way if, say, they are revealed to be employing slaves or child laborers in their garment factories or dumping toxic waste. This is again really cynical. I think sometimes it is.

Like Seattle Seattle's in the middle of this fucking cycle where we do like fact finding on homelessness. Yeah. And then all of the fact finding commissions are like, We need to be spending like ten times more on this and then we just don't do anything'cause nobody wants to spend any fucking money and then like five years later They're like, Oh we gotta get data, oh let's do a fact finding commission and the fact finding commission finds the same fucking thing. So like that Partly rings true.

But there's also fact finding commissions that are like useful. And then you move forward with a policy and you do something about it. In my world, Joe Biden put together a commission on Supreme Court reform. Oh right. Yeah. And like as soon as they announce the commission, you're sort of like, All right. Well, I I don't know, there's something here. And certainly I believe that there there are major corporations where this exists entirely as like

A PR exercise that everyone knows is fraudulent top to bottom. But also they're pretty good. I mean, a lot of my work in human rights is about corporate human rights violations. And if you look at labor standards in apparel in like, you know, Indonesia and places that had these big scandals at like Nike in the early nineties.

They actually have much better working conditions than they did back then. And some of the best working conditions in the developing world are in like brand name factories for like companies you've heard of because they've improved. So

Sometimes it's bullshit. It's very often bullshit, but sometimes it's not. Obviously you're more pro-corporation than I am, and like that's one that's one of the big disagreements we have on this podcast. But no, I I tend to agree with you. I the human rights space is not my space, but like if people ask me

from like an employment law perspective, better to work for a big company or a small one? Big one almost every time. Yeah. They're a little more on it. I and I do I do believe that he has like a deep and partially justified, but not entirely, skepticism or cynicism about big corporations that he should really direct. More generally, right? Yeah, yeah. Well he he also says this, I want to know what you think about this.

Many large corporations maintain their own in-house magazines or even television channels, the ostensible purpose of which is to keep employees up to date on interesting news and developments. but which in fact exist for almost no reason other than to allow executives to experience that warm and pleasant feeling that comes

when you see a favorable story about you in the media. Well then it's got value, baby. Then it's not bullshit. This is one where like as so like when I was in employment law, you're sort of adjacent to HR and you and you see a lot of the internal marketing

Shit. Yeah, yeah. But I do think internal marketing at large corporations It's tough. I don't know that this is valueless. It's it's obviously Designed for employee morale, but you'll literally be watching a video where they they like hired actors to just play happy employees. Like that's that's something that exists. Yeah. Like if bullshit jobs exist.

Yeah. Surely in house magazines and and and in house television channels fall into that category. Wait, do you want to hear my best example of this, Peter? You know I just got back from LA. And I heard from someone who's like sort of adjacent to Hollywood there that you know, there's like for your consideration. Yeah. It'll be like Timothy Chalamet in Dune or whatever.

Apparently, the this is the conspiracy theory for which I have no evidence, but I like this story. Okay. Apparently, they put those billboards up near the actors' houses. So that when like Timothy Chalamet is driving around, he sees the billboard saying, like, for your consideration, Timothy Chalamet. So that he thinks like, ooh, the studio is really supporting me in this. But it's not actually for the Oscar voters.

It's just so that the actors think that the studio is behind them so they can like sign them for another role. Yeah, that's the kind of thing that I believe because it's the kind of thing that I would do. I have what I think is a good example of box ticking. Okay. Sometimes If you work at a company, you will need to hire an outside law firm. And you will hire a very fancy law firm that costs more.

Not because they're better, but because if something goes sideways and one of your higher ups comes looking for you, you can say, look. I hired the fancy law firm. Right. Okay. Now, does that mean that fancy law firms are bullshit jobs? No, not necessarily, but How many people's jobs within those firms rest on that principle? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. All right, finally, the last category of bullshit job, taskmasters.

Taskmasters are employees who quote whose role consists entirely of assigning work to others Or quote those who make up the Bullshit for others to do. I also think that every bad boss I've ever had is doing a bullshit job. Yes. I mean, I I think at a glance I was really skeptical of this one because assigning work is sort of obviously not pointless. That's just called management. Yeah. But When he goes through examples of

It's obvious he's talking about like middle managers who are supervising people who don't really need supervision. Oh yeah. And I think that guy exists, right? Yeah, totally. Yeah. I feel like I have two criticisms of like his whole category idea. One is the one we've touched on, which is like Not a lot of jobs fall into these categories, but like a little bit of a lot of jobs is bullshit by these definitions. But then also he's thinking in terms of like

jobs within organizations. But it makes a little more sense to me to think about it in terms of like industries. Like does the good or service you provide have any social value? Right. Because you could have two guys that have the same job, but toward completely different ends. So like one guy builds apartment buildings and the other builds private prisons. Right.

Pernacious. Dude, a couple of years ago I was dating a guy who was an event planner for like, I don't know, Goldman Sachs or one of these like New York financial firms. And he was making like four hundred thousand dollars a year. Yeah. And I also know people who are event planners for NGOs who make like thirty six thousand dollars a year.

And it's like it's the same job. No just no different ladders. No, because a uh a an event planner and an NGO is just uh putting together uh like a holiday party at Goldman Sachs they need fucking fireworks too. Does that have like back playing or something? No joke though. That that Goldman Sachs I'm not I you're making I understand your point. I'm not trying to argue with it. But no joke, that Goldman Sachs job probably fucking sucks.

Dude, no, yeah, yeah, yeah. The fucking CEO is up of Goldman Sachs. is up your ass because fucking uh Ty Dala sign is twenty minutes late for Area Corporate.

The way that he described it was not it sounded very similar to the people that I know in NGOs. Because NGOs also have like large events. You know, they have like these like fundraising dinners and stuff, which are genuinely very difficult to plan. Yeah, yeah. Basically a bunch of rich people get together in a room and like you serve them dinner.

That's like essentially what he was doing for like whatever Citibank or whatever the fuck it was. And it's like it was remarkably similar. I do think that like Graeber is not try trying to talk about like Who build like who's doing good for society with with their career and shit like that? he's really making this narrower point about how big corporations have become these like sprawling monstrosities that are no longer geared toward efficiency, but have developed these like

self contained patronage operations. I guess. But again, it's like you need data on that. It's gonna be so different industry to industry. NGOs are not like that at all. All right, let's let's talk data. This has all been very subjective so far, which is why neither of us

have any idea what the fuck is going on. When Graeber wrote the original essay, he did not Put data in it really. And that wasn't really the purpose of it. I guess, yeah. The subtitle of it was a work rant, right? So he's not he's not trying to like put a

coherent thesis. This is the kind of thing that your friend would tell you at a bar and you're like, fire Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. You're like, right, dude. Dude, you're so right. You should write about that. And if you're on the left, your friend does have A magazine that no one reads. Yeah, exactly. He's like, you should write for my magazine. When the essay gains traction, UGov runs a poll in the UK, and Graber puts the results in his book as sort of like a proof of concept.

The Ugov headline reads thirty seven percent of British workers think their jobs are meaningless. Which is pretty dramatic. Yeah, that's really high actually. Graver cites the poll in his opening chapter, basically being like, Look, I was right. But it's also totally subjective. Yeah. But here's but here's what the poll asks, okay? The poll asks

Is your job making a meaningful contribution to the world? Oh, well that's like completely different, yeah. It really it really is, right? So fifty percent said yes, thirty seven percent said no, and thirteen percent said they didn't know. If you look back to his definition of a bullshit job, it's like a job that is entirely pointless. Right. If someone says, Are you making a meaningful contribution to the world?

That reads to me like a significant contribution to the world. Right. Like morally valenced in some way. Right. Yeah. Right. Like this all like either it's a large contribution or yeah, has has a sort of moral quality to it. Yeah. And so yeah, I think a lot of people are just sort of like, oh I don't know. Because like as a teenager I worked for years in video stores and like that was not a bullshit job, but that was not

meaningfully contributing to the world either. It wasn't like a charity or something. It's like I sat at the counter and Bill rented videos, whatever. Right. Yeah, I would have answered no to that question, but I I don't think that was a bullshit job. He also cites a poll of Dutch workers from twenty sixteen.

where according to him, uh forty percent of respondents said that their jobs had no reason to exist But very similarly, if you look at the poll, the actual question was about like whether they experienced their job as meaningful. So like it's very similar, right? Yeah. He does make a big case for self-reporting about this. He basically says like, look, there's no way to like come up with an objective metric. And like the best we have is self reporting because

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

The the reason why the only thing that works is self-reporting is partly because of the muddiness of the concept. Yeah. Because you're asking, like, is your job bullshit? But like the term job kind of implies something you don't want to be doing. You're doing it because you get paid.

So most people are gonna say, like, yeah, my job's bullshit. There a couple of years ago some researchers at Cambridge wanted to see whether there was empirical support for this. And they pulled together a bunch of data and they tried to compare it. to his affirmative hypotheses throughout the book. How many people are gooning? How many people are duct taping? Yes. They looked at the European Working Conditions Survey that filed data from two thousand five to twenty fifteen.

So the survey asks workers to rank whether they quote have the feeling of doing useful work on a five point scale. I think that that much more closely tracks the bullshit jobs definition, right? And when you phrase it that way, only four point eight percent of respondents said that they did not feel like they were doing useful work at all. That's actually lower than I thought it would be. That climbs to five point six.

Six in the UK, but like nowhere near Oh, I know Peter. You look at the UK like not a lot of people are doing youthful work here. Just professional transphobes. So if you say, Do you think that your job makes a meaningful contribution to the world? Forty percent of people say no, but if you're just like, Well is it useful at all?

Then only five percent. So I will note there is some data that shows that in the United States this number goes up pretty dramatically. One piece of research said it's at nineteen percent in the United States. Whoa, okay. There's another part of Graber's thesis that he lays out in the book that is t a little bit testable, which is that this problem is worsening.

There is every reason to believe that the overall number of bullshit jobs, and even more the overall percentage of jobs considered bullshit by those who hold them, have been increasing rapidly in recent years, alongside the ever increasing bullshitization of useful forms of employment. So he says like there's every reason to believe that the number of bullshit jobs is going up, but then the only actual evidence he provides is that the service sector is replacing agriculture and industry.

As like a percentage of the economy? That's just like a completely different thing. That's the thing, is like if the claim of the book was like the service sector is a larger part of the economy than it used to be, then like you wouldn't have a book.

Right. Like that's that's not interesting. It's not really debatable. He's doing the thing that you find a lot in the ultra processed foods discourse where when people describe it in the abstract, they'll say like, oh, they're addictive food like substances, like the super artificial junk, right? And then you get into the actual categories and it's like all tortillas. It's like all Because he's basically saying he's he's he's

Identified this thing of like everyone's doing bullshit jobs, then he just says like the service sector is increasing, like knowledge jobs are increasing, which so yeah. Right. But that's not the same thing. He's so he's basically arguing that service jobs are frequently bullshit, whereas like

Like agriculture and industry are generally not. And so the rise of the service sector indicates a rise in bullshit jobs. A lot of these kinds of manufacturing jobs are also bullshit too. You're doing something super redundant. That's the thing, is there's there's tons of redundancy in like manufacturing. Yeah. But his his point broadly is that like technology and automation has

taken all of these jobs, and that it's sort of like left a void that we've filled with this bullshit. Right? That like because we all feel the need to work. And corporations want people employed because they're they're like little feudal societies in his mind. That we sort of filled the void created by technology with bullshit jobs. I don't know that I agree with this. Because again, companies wouldn't be spending money on work just

For like ideological reasons. He thinks that you're a a capitalist sucker. Oh, you think markets are efficient, dipshit. Well I don't think markets are efficient, but I also think these are like profit-oriented industries. The whole problem

with the way that we've structured capitalism is that they put profit above everything else. Right. I don't think companies are like, ha ha ha, we must keep employing people to do nothing. But yeah, like why do in-house television channels exist at corporations

Because someone's stupid. Yeah, exactly. Because like a bunch of dumb people thought it was a good idea. Or they or there may actually be this again, you need to look at the data. There may be indicators that this does affect retention. We probably are being unfair to in house Uh in house television channels or whatever the fuck because If that shit's working to boost morale for like fifteen percent of people probably it's

probably worth the investment. Yeah. The fact that it makes us want to kill ourselves. Might be irrelevant here. Right. Yeah. Let's dig into this a bit'cause I think there is this question of like what industries house the bullshit jobs that Graeber is is constantly sort of touching on. I'll send you this. He says, Say what you like about nurses, garbage collectors, or mechanics. It's obvious that were they to vanish in a puff of smoke, the results would be immediate and catastrophic.

A world without teachers or dock workers would soon be in trouble, and even one without science fiction writers or ska musicians would clearly be a lesser place. It's not entirely clear how humanity would suffer if all private equity CEOs, lobbyists, PR researchers, actuaries, telemarketers, bailiffs, or legal consultants were to similarly vanish. Uh I mean there's lobbyists for like animal rights and stuff. The entire category of lobbyists is it's just weird to do this.

Private equity CEOs he's fucking correct about. But that's also that's not because the job is bullshit, it's because the sector is harmful. That's just like a different concept. I I and that's what I I think he misses with like where he has this like perspective on certain industries. Right. And he's constantly bouncing back and forth between like between being like this role is

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

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

This is he's writing this in twenty eighteen and like Yeah, he's like squirrel nut zippers are the real essential workers. Let's talk about the people that we all know are essential, less than Jake. I think he's getting at something here. If you just try to imagine a good faith version of this, there are some jobs where the utility of that job is just readily apparent. If you are sweeping the floor

The benefit that you provide is a lot more immediate and clear than someone who is putting together decks on a marketing team somewhere. Right. Totally. When I was a teenager, like I said, I swept floors and if I slacked off for a day.

Someone would notice. Yeah. You had this very clear and discreet objective. Right. This would never happen. But if we were to not release an episode every single week, nothing would happen. The fans would get angrier. You have you started get I'm starting to get the mentions

When I tweet something like, Oh, so you have time to post, but you don't have time to make an episode? Well, when it comes to the amount that you post, they have a point. They have a point, Michael. Um he says one must assume that the percentage of nurses, bus drivers, dentists, Street cleaners, farmers, music teachers, repairmen, gardeners, firefighters, set designers, plumbers, journalists, safety inspectors, musicians, Taylor's. Who checked no to the question?

Does your job make any meaningful difference in the world? was approximately zero. But also, dude, don't get me started in a fucking school crossing guards. That's totally a bullshit job. The only reason they exist is because the streets in America are so unsafe. That's like one of those kludge jobs that he was talking about, like a duct tape job. I thought you were gonna be like survival of the fittest kids. Who gives a shit?

So there's also data in those European worker surveys on how people in those different industries view the usefulness of their jobs. Some of it aligns with what he's saying here. Like the percentage of teachers and nurses who think their jobs are useless is very low in these surveys, below two percent. But Some of the jobs that Graeber categorizes as clearly useful have higher rates of workers who say it's useless.

Nine point seven percent of garbage collectors said they don't feel the job is useful. Really? Okay. And then on the other hand, the percentage of people in like financial services who said their job is useless is about average. It's not below average like you think he'd predict. And so he thinks Well, people will agree with me. Yeah. I I think that you probably have a lot of people who have tedious jobs. If you're a garbage collector and you go from house to house grabbing trash

And then dumping it into the truck and then a couple days later you come back and there's more trash. Yeah, yeah. I can see some part of your brain, even if it's irrational. Yeah, yeah. Like, what the fuck is this? And I you know, I swept floors and there is like There is a part of your brain that loses it a little bit, right? Where you're just like, God damn it's dirty again. But also it's also funny because he he's kind of locked himself into this.

self report thing. Because a lot of people in the financial sector think that they're doing useful stuff and they fucking aren't. Right. If you're like chopping up mortgages and reselling them back to people, you might think that's useful, but it's fucking not. I think you're right. This the self reporting here

The self-reporting thing has blind spots because yeah, garbage men are obviously doing useful work. Those things do not make people feel useful, right? Right. And then yeah, there are people who are like just rent seeking who contribute nothing but make a fortune and like

couldn't possibly be convinced that their jobs are useless because their entire sense of themselves relies on the belief that they are valuable. Yeah, I'm drop shipping vitamin supplements, but I have to believe it's essential'cause I paid three hundred bucks for the seminar. There is research showing that like the more it's attenuated the impact of your job is, the lower your job satisfaction is likely to be. So like if you're not seeing the positive impact that you cause, even if you cause it,

That might make you think that your job is useless, right? Which sort of makes sense. It might it might make you think that your job's Yeah, this was my human rights career in a nutshell. We're like going to fucking UN conferences and giving speeches and stuff and like no tangible impact and like everybody would sit around at night just being like, What are we doing here? It's cool that you were like, This is

Podcaster. It's time to really reach people. Every extra hour of the Olivia Nuzzi episode makes the world such a better place. I wanna draw a distinction'cause this this came into my head a couple of times when he was talking about like the internal marketing stuff, like

you know, the fucking in house television channels and all that. That grinds at you when you if you're s if you're, I think, like us, right? Like when I worked at a large corporation or two and I saw shit like that, I'd be like, Ugh but The other end of that. Is the way that Elon Musk runs companies. Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. Where everything is stripped down to the bone and there's none of that. Yeah. And that

Does I have to say feel worse. It's like the uh you know the old saying is that uh half of all advertising spending is wasted. It's just hard to identify which half. Yeah, I think it's a good idea. I feel like a lot of this Cultural stuff within corporations. A lot of it is bullshit.

But it's difficult to find exactly where the bullshit is and where the non bullshit is. Yeah, it's a balancing act and on either side is an abyss. Yeah, I feel like both of us are just not joiners in that way. Like I've never gotten invested in like the corporation I work for or the

School I go to. I mean I do participate in sports fandom, so I do understand this. Would you have an emotional response if Kansas City won the Super Bowl? Because I had no response whatsoever to Seattle winning. Not only that, when I watch a team I like in a high stakes game and like the playoffs or whatever, my anxiety levels are Through the fucking clenched? Yeah. Like real physical anxiety.

That would be almost impossible for me to replicate outside of like super high stakes work situations and stuff. This does make no sense to me, but also I watch Elden Ring no hit randomizer runs and I'm like clenched the entire time. So like I do get it on some level. Yeah. So much worse.

Uh No, it's all fake. No I love it when sports people are like, ooh, this is fake, like, oh yeah, like putting a ball in the hoop isn't fucking fake. I know I know that you think that it's all fake, but I do feel like there's a spectrum where like a No Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Sports is dumb, makeup tutorials are dumb, twitch streamers are dumb, it's all dumb. It's all bullshit jobs. No, that it's a spectrum. It's a spectrum and sports are just a little bit farther away.

Then then no hit Elden Ring speedruns. Yeah. False. You're watching you're watching a thirteen year old like who's like sitting on a a gamer chair slash toilet play and you're like this is like sports whatever. Both of us are watching someone else do something that we are incapable of doing and getting invested in it. It's precisely the same That's not the definition of sports. The quarterback

Fucking like Dan Marino or whatever is the same level of bullshit as like the nineteen year old Twitch streamer that I'm watching. Dan Marino. Brett Favre? Who's a fucking who's a who's a quarterback? Dude, these these are who's a quarterback? These are all athletes from the eighties and nineties. At least they're football though. I know some people. But they are they are quarterbacks. You're right. You know what? Credit where it's due. Now what's the name of a no hit Elden run

I'm not gonna say'cause that it's too embarrassing. Yeah. Exactly. There's a kernel of truth there. There's a kernel of truth I'm not giving it to you. What makes sports a little more real is that I am eng because it is popular. Whatever then what the fuck a difference then it's just like a a question of scale. Well I do think there's a slight difference in that I feel like

Any thirteen year old who tried really hard could do what what the Elden Rank streamers. That's not true, because they can't do it. There's only like only a few people have done it. I'm not gonna name names, but I know the names. There's only a few people have tried, Michael. Other people other people are out there getting their dicks sucked. It's crazy how far off topic we are right now.

You're just trying to say the word bullshit sometimes so we can tie this back in. Exactly. That's exactly what I'm doing. Alright, there is another if you sort of take a step back and look at his big picture thesis, there's a testable claim that he makes, which is that technology has

resulted in us working more, not less. Right? Remember he said that Keynes predicted that technology would lead us to wait, Keynes? Fuck. What is it? Yeah, whatever. Okay. Yeah, well don't say whatever because I'm gonna get I'm gonna get

strung up for this. I'm gonna keep the one where you're wrong. I'm gonna look it up and then we keep the take where you're incorrect. So don't don't worry about it. That's why I'm saying this. But he basically has um gotten to a point where it could lead us To lives of leisure, but instead, quote, it has been marshalled, if anything, to figure out ways to make us all work more. This gets at something that

feels instinctively kind of true. Yeah. Which is that technological advances result in more productivity, but not a lighter workload, right? Although it does seem like bullshit jobs is the wrong way to look at that. There's like sort of specific Political science reasons for that. This is the heart of the episode because we've been going back and forth with like, well, he's kind of onto something, but not really. But there are actually

coherent theories of this. Yeah. It's tough to measure this in in a big picture way, but you can just look at average work hours over time. Over a long enough time frame, you do see that. Uh i in eighteen seventy The average American worker worked over three thousand hours a year. Now that's down to about eighteen hundred. And obviously that's not just the result of tech technological advances. There are a ton of variables. You have workers' rights movements, legislation, cultural changes.

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

I'm gonna share a chart with you. This chart is annual working hours per worker. Uh yeah yeah. So basically since What is it roughly nineteen eighty?

Almost every other country has seen reductions in working hours, especially in Western Europe, and we've stagnated. So we're basically working the same number of hours that we were in nineteen eighty. That's right. So there are massive decreases in working hours from eighteen seventy to about nineteen seventy. After that It's been largely flat, slight declines, but really hovering at about eighteen hundred hours working.

per year in the United States. Whereas Germany is below fifteen hundred. So now it seems like maybe Graeber is getting at something, right? There have been a ton of technological advances since the seventies, but this has not reduced American working hours. Uh so he may be wrong that bullshit jobs are proliferating, but he's right that better technology and more productivity has not led to more leisure time for Americans, at least in the last several decades. Which is a big deal.

Frankly, rambling explanations of why it occurs at like the micro level within organizations. A lot of it revolves around his idea of managerial feudalism. You know, where where he argues that corporations have grown to resemble feudal relationships where wealth and power is distributed for political reasons rather than economic reasons. We've sort of talked about how this doesn't quite

Click. Yeah. It's an interesting angle, but I do not believe that corporations have just created twenty to thirty percent fake jobs out of like a feudal spirit. I th it feels more like they've just lobbied against Things like more vacation time, you know, maternity leave. Like this is why hours are so much reduced in Western Europe. Let's not get ahead of ourselves and start talking about Western Europe, all right? Okay. I mean

So his macro explanation is is a little more coherent and it's cultural. It's a basically like Protestant work ethic stuff. So I'll send that. But the captains of industry, first in America, then increasingly everywhere, have been able to convince the public that they, and not those they employ, are the real creators of prosperity. One could call it a revival of Puritanism. But as we've seen, this idea goes much further back.

To a fusion of the Christian doctrine of the curse of Adam with the Northern European notion that paid labor under master's discipline is the only way to become a genuine adult. This history made it very easy to encourage workers to see their work not so much as wealth creation, or helping others, or at least not primarily so, but as self abnegation, a kind of secular hair shirt.

A sacrifice of joy and pleasure that allows us to become an adult worthy of our consumer toys. This argument is basically that we're a society where people get their dignity from work and that has created incentives to pursue work Even if it is pointless. I don't actually after living in Western Europe for twelve years, I don't actually think that's the case. They have the same thing there, but they have fewer working hours than we do and they have like interesting paid vacation.

I d I just don't think this works for like we work fifteen percent more hours than other yeah capitalist countries. Like they also get a sense of self-worth in fucking Denmark, but they just work less than we do. So here is my attempt.

To synthesize bullshit jobs. with the best research I could find. Okay. There's this economist, Juliet Shore, who studies this and wrote a very influential book in nineteen ninety two called The Overworked American. And she was also trying to understand this very basic phenomenon. Why did productivity stop reducing hours in the nineteen seventies or so? And where did that extra productivity go? Her main explanation is that in the United States around this time

the extra productivity stopped turning into more leisure time and started turning into consumption. In nineteen seventy Household consumption was under sixty percent of GDP by nineteen ninety. It's in the mid sixties. And for the last couple of decades after the publication of her book, it's been about seventy percent, just south of seventy percent. She points out that if you survey people, they are not.

materialist. They actually value free time. Yeah. She conducted a survey of people making around thirty thousand dollars a year, which is about seventy thousand in today's money. and asked if they would trade a day of work each week for an equivalent reduction in pay, 70% said yes.

Okay. She also points out that polls asking people to rank their priorities between things like health, family, life, etc., always result in material things ranking very low. One obvious explanation for this is that people are lying, right either to themselves or to the pollsters. They think they want more leisure time, but when presented with the choice, they'll choose more money. Right. But

Shore's broad argument is that these choices are shaped by institutions and norms. So not only are there social and cultural pressures to work. But even if you wanted to reduce your working hours, it's not always easy, right? Most people cannot trade their job for a part time version of their job. Right. Right. There's also a finite amount of well paying part time work in general.

the job market is built around full time work, right? I also I I do this for everything, but I also think the decline of unions, people don't want to get fired in America. So you do what your boss tells you. I mean I mean this this kind of feels obvious and like this is like it's where it's sort of obviously going, right? But like

In Germany, they're now under fourteen hundred hours per year on average, right? France hovers around fifteen hundred. And and you you look at like well what would account for this gap? And she says Stronger unions. Labor law protections, mandatory vacation. Right. Why are they working less? Well, they all take a like a month or two off every single year. I I will say like culturally, when I worked in Denmark, I was part of a unionized uh NGO.

We would have meetings where my boss would be like, Oh, I need you to get me that by Monday and people would just be like, Oh no People come into the like my boss's office. and be like, oh, it's sunny out. I'm gonna leave at like three thirty today. That rocks. People are not afraid of getting fired. People are so afraid of getting fired in America, so you lose health healthcare.

Oftentimes you're not like you you can get evicted much more easily. Like losing your job is just objectively much more devastating here. And so you have to do whatever you can to keep your job and like you just don't have that in Western Europe in the same way. Right. And a lot of that is unions. I mean uh you know, it's also like labor protections. It's it's other things too. I mean they go hand in hand. Yeah. So I think she's making

An argument that like half supports Graeber and half doesn't, right? He's basically saying our capitalist overlords want us to work. for this like sort of like abstract reason, right? Where they maintain this like feudal control over people and it benefits them. She's basically saying No, what's happened is the money goes to consumption. So it's not that bullshit jobs are being sort of like created out of the ether by corporations. to keep us working or something along those lines.

It's that we now consume more, which creates demand. Right. So like we got richer, but instead of saying, Oh, hey I'll trade that for free time. We trade it for consumer goods, which creates demand, which creates more jobs, right? So you could you could sort of view those as the bullshit jobs, right? The the excess consumption that goes beyond what we actually need. And and that's

that's sort of vague in and of itself. The repairman on the laboo boo vending machine. Right. Yes. The laboboo is perhaps a great example, right? Like demand has been created out of thin air for a thing that literally no one needs, right? I I think that is sort of a category of of bullshit as just like needless consumption. Watches, for example. People are buying watches. That we do not need. That we do not need. I was just watching uh a TikTok by a like a a watch.

TikToker. Dude, I think we've reached the ultimate bullshit job. A watch TikToker. I can't think of anything more bullshit than that. How else would I learn about watches? The funniest type of guy. is the guy who's like, I like a Rolex because

that will get you into the room where you can do more business. Oh, it's like an investment in like my it's like a LinkedIn post. Yeah, I'm I'm spending twelve grand on a watch because it opens doors for me and God knows how much that's worth. And it's just like

I can't imagine how much of a fucking pervert someone would have to be to be like, yo, that guy's got a Rolex. Yeah, I'm definitely going to that guy's seminar now. So there is one um sort of final thoughts section he has. Okay. The final chapter sort of

Touches on policy. He says, I don't usually like putting public policy recommendations in my book. One reason for this is that it has been my experience that if an author is critical of existing social arrangements, reviewers will often respond by effectively asking, So what are you proposing to do about it then?

Search the text until they find something that looks like a policy suggestion, and then act as if that is what the book is basically about. So if I were to suggest that a mass reduction of working hours, or a policy of universal basic income, might go far in solving the problems described here,

The likely response is will be to see this as a book about reducing working hours or about universal basic income, and to treat it as if it stands and falls on the workability of that policy, or even the ease by which it could be implemented.

I mean that's fair, although that's a what we're about to do. Yeah, it's sort of like what am I, the fucking smartest guy on earth? I don't know. Yeah. I'm just pointing out a problem, right? I do respect somebody that has a book that's just like, hey, this sucks.

Yeah, like you're all a bunch of flunkies and goons and I don't know how to fix it, but I'll see you guys later. I complain about like uh Hollywood making like sequels and remakes all the time. I don't have like a public policy solution to that. It just sucks. Why don't you make a movie?

Why don't you make a gay little indie film? Why would it make a gay little indie film, Peter? I love a gay little indie film. I'm uh I'm I'm on your side, Michael, and I will I will fund you, so don't get too angry. Wait, so does he just end by saying I don't have any public policy recommendations and here's my reason? Yeah, the final chapter has a bunch about

impact that he believes that this has on society, that it creates these like resentments umpa down the ladder and that you know, I I think this is sort of like a very basic lefty idea that elites take advantage of

resentments between non elites. Right. So yeah, I I think he sort of has this belief that these jobs drag on society. I don't think he is identified like a discrete and identifiable thing. Right. I do think it feels Hard to argue with the idea that the reason productivity started going to consumption rather than leisure in the United States. Is that we lack what they have in Europe, right? Yeah. We don't have the unions, the labor law protections. That is the big difference here. And I think

In my mind, that that's sort of like obvious leftist shit one oh one. Yeah. But that's kind of what I like about it, right? I kind of feel like Graeber did this whole thought experiment that ended up just landing me at like, yeah, we need labor laws. Yeah, like this need or this is why I'm I'm on the left and not on the right. It's'cause like these obvious things. Also, doesn't his thesis depend on Western Europe having fewer bullshit jobs than we do? Yeah. Um He doesn't explore.

As someone who lived there, they do not have fewer bullshit jobs than we do, man. Have you met a French person? Have you asked them what they do? He he's sort of navigated his way towards some truths here, right? In di different in different parts of the book. I do think that there are elements of our jobs that are bullshit. It it seems to be objectively true that we are

not pursuing leisure as a society in America, right? That w that we have not converted our productivity into leisure. These are like real things and and I think like in you know, in the micro he'll say these little things where you're like, that's true. Is the sort of phen the broad macro phenomenon of the bullshit job as he describes it real? I don't really think so. I will say I'm much more negative on this book than y it seems like you are. You said this is like an okay book. This

This thing's bad to me. I will s I will say that the experience of reading it is probably a lot better than the experience of hearing about it. Okay. Every few pages, you're like, that's an interesting way to frame that. Yeah. Even if it's not quite right. Like I do think it's like managerial, feudal idea of corporations, even though it's not an accurate way to explain what's happening with bullshit jobs.

is an interesting way to explain certain corporate dynamics. Maybe it's the opposite of Robert Kiyosaki where like he was just an execorable person to spend time with and David Graeber seems like an okay guy to spend time with. Even if you're like, eh, I don't really agree with that. Yeah. There's also another a lot of the book is anecdotes. that people send in about their bullshit jobs. And it's extremely boring to read because every single one you're like,

Yeah, that does sound like bullshit. Yeah, yeah. For the podcast it wouldn't be good to be like, and here's another person who said that they did useless paperwork. But like that's a large chunk of the book. And I will say It's kind of fun to read. Like it there's sort of uh there's something about it that's a little bit entertaining. It's like cathartic, yeah. Yeah, there's something like uh there's some like shared human experience in like

Oh, this fucking shit we have to do sometimes because our our boss thinks it's important and it's obviously not And that's also so relatable to the idea that some part of your job I think this is like universal, some part of your job is complete bullshit. Right. Right. I was able and I still am sort of on this train to convince myself that he's sort of

pointed out this social phenomenon and he's inaccurately diagnosing it, but it's a really interesting phenomenon. The idea that we as a society have had the option to turn our increased productivity into leisure.

And haven't done it. Yeah, I think that's true. I think it's true that we shouldn't get rid of the ska musicians, and it's especially true that we shouldn't get rid of the no hit randomizer Elden Ring streamer. I think that's not it's not bullshit, Peter. I want you to say What everyone listening wants you to say, which is that it's cool to throw a ball far.