Is Social Media A Scapegoat For Bigger Problems? — With Charlie Warzel at Unfinished Live

Charlie Warzel writes the Galaxy Brain newsletter on Substack, a publication he started after a career at The New York Times and BuzzFeed. Warzel joins Big Technology Podcast in a live recording at Unfinished Live to discuss what a nuanced conversation about social media's harms should look like. Stay tuned for the second half where we discuss Warzel's views on post-Covid workplace culture, the subject Out of Office, a forthcoming book for which he is a co-author. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Alex Kantrowitz?

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• 0:43Alex Kantrowitz?

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• 1:15Alex Kantrowitz?

  Hello and welcome to the Big Technology Podcast, a show for cool-headed, nuanced conversations of the tech world and beyond. And this is about as special of an episode as we've had to date because we are recording live at Unfinished Live with our very special guest, a good friend of mine, a longtime colleague, and now fellow media entrepreneur Charlie Warzel. Welcome.

• 1:38Speaker 01

  Thank you. Thank you for having me.

• 1:40Alex Kantrowitz?

  Thank you for being here. So you tweeted that showing up to a live event caused you to be somewhat excited and also a little apprehensive. Talk about the emotions that are experiencing right now.

• 1:52Speaker 01

  So many emotions. I'm trying to figure out my mask etiquette, right? Because I feel like there's, it's just, this is crazy kind of negotiation, right?

• 2:03Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah.

• 2:03Speaker 01

  No, I mean, this is, this is, it's... I feel like we're hitting a sweet spot right here where you had to sort of plan an event like this in times where you know, pre-Delta, all that stuff and get people to you know, want to come and be here and then we have a book coming out in December and the plan is for that, me and my partner and Helen Peterson and the book tour is slated to be virtual. So I think we're in this like kind of great little sweet spot where we can all see each other, feel good about it and you know, we might have to retreat to our corners for winter.

• 2:40Alex Kantrowitz?

  So, I want to get into so many things, but let's start a little bit with your biography because I'm kind of fascinated by your career trajectory. I don't know if everybody here, the masses that are on hand know about it, but it is worth going through again because we both started at the ad trades. You were at Adweek, I was at AdAge. Then you went to BuzzFeed on the tech desk, then I went to BuzzFeed on the tech desk. Then you got one of the most premier jobs in the media world, a job that a lot of people would be extremely jealous of, an opinion writer at the New York Times, big audience, big platform.

• 3:22Alex Kantrowitz?

  And you left to go to Substack. What happened Charlie?

• 3:26Speaker 01

  It might have been, what happened? It might have been a little like COVID madness.

• 3:32Alex Kantrowitz?

  You did during COVID?

• 3:34Speaker 01

  I left the Times in April to start a newsletter on Substack and you know, essentially what ended up happening for me personally was, I love the Times, I love the people there, I love the platform and the work and it's, I mean, genuinely a privilege to be in an organization like that. And you know, at the same time... Working at a place like BuzzFeed really kind of taught me how to be on or like how to want to be on the bleeding edge of like, you know, the net, the next thing, you know, like the weird ways the internet is changing us, warping, evolving culture, you know, shaking the foundations of democracy, whatever it is, right?

• 4:19Speaker 01

  And The Times, I found myself in a moment sort of post-Trump, you know, a lot of like really interesting stuff happening in like the, like the NFT craze was just kind of like, you know, in its, in its media like bubble portion. And I was, I felt like there was a new, like, there was a next thing that was kind of happening. And I felt that being in a place like The Times, it was really hard for me to do that work in the way that I wanted to do it. The work that I was-

• 4:52Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, yeah, why don't we go into that? I mean, we could spend the whole day talking about The New York Times, but-

• 4:56Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 4:57Alex Kantrowitz?

  At least a few minutes at the beginning makes a lot of sense.

• 4:59Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 5:00Alex Kantrowitz?

  How did it limit you? And then I also am curious, did you have a moment where you had to balance the influence that you might have at a publication with that amount of reach versus just being a newsletter guy?

• 5:11Speaker 01

  So, the way, the first part of the question, the way that it's limiting, again, like I had all this great freedom there, but you're always trying to do this thing where you're, you know, you're explaining to a really broad, general audience. And I was finding myself not really wanting or being that interested in those types of explanations right now. I was finding that a lot of the pieces that I was pitching were like, didn't have like a thesis statement, you know? Like, there was no, like, I was trying to think out loud and, and, you know, develop my own opinions on things. I didn't have a lot of, you know, definitive, declarative ideas, you know?

• 5:53Speaker 01

  And, and so, and I was just like, my work was getting longer and more sort of meandering. And it was just something that really fit like the newsletter style.

• 6:01Alex Kantrowitz?

  You were perfect, perfect for the newsletter industry.

• 6:03Speaker 01

  Yeah. And, and, and I, you know, I, what I find the work now that I'm doing- Is a lot more exploring these these curiosities at length with this community that I've built of people who are similarly curious, who are constantly giving me feedback in this way. And it's, you know, I'm like reading more books and, you know, like reading like more papers and sort of, I sort of almost feel like I'm in school right now.

• 6:31Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah.

• 6:32Speaker 01

  In a way. And I feel like I kind of had to go back to that in order to, you know, sort of get grounded in whatever's going on. There's like a lot of stuff. I think crypto is a really interesting example of that. Like, I don't, I'm skeptical of a lot of it. I don't, you know, necessarily know that I trusted, but I also don't want to miss, you know, important, smart things in that space. And I don't want to be left behind.

• 6:53Alex Kantrowitz?

  The reading books more often definitely resonates. Because when I did the same thing as you did, I left BuzzFeed and I went to go do Newsletter Life. And I definitely remember speaking to our former editor, John Pachkowsky. And he's like, why do you want to do this? And I was like, well, I'd like to learn about monetary policy. What's wrong with you? But it does give you a little bit more of that freedom, which is nice.

• 7:15Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 7:15Alex Kantrowitz?

  I want to talk a little bit about your interests, because I find it even more interesting, your intellectual journey than than your career path. You started out writing about the ad industry.

• 7:27Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 7:27Alex Kantrowitz?

  We were both like writing about like the digital side of the 2012 election, where it seemed like, you know, people campaigning on Twitter was novel and a waste of time. And people were live jiffing the Romney Obama debate on Tumblr. And then you moved to BuzzFeed and were writing pieces about the broader tech industry. But I think there was a moment, maybe in 2015 or 2016, where you must have said to yourself, all this is bad, because your pieces got a lot darker. What happened there?

• 7:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, um, well, it's a good, it's a good question. I mean, I think that as I watched this, so the cool thing about the job at BuzzFeed was what they were trying to do there in the, you know, 2012, 2013, when I joined, was trying to really, you know, get away from at that point, which had been like the main type of, you know, tech reporting, which had been like gadgets and stuff like that and, and kind of a bit like, you know, celebratory of the tech industry. And the way that John Herman, Matt Buchanan, and Ben Smith kind of visualized this coverage,

• 8:41Speaker 01

  that was the original tech team, and Ben is the editor, was this idea of like, you know, technology is just culture, cover it as culture, try to, you know, figure out what's going on. And, and I think, you know, looking at that lens, you know, in, at a time like 2013, 2014, it gave me this ability to sort of see some of these bigger platforms in a different way, right? Like, you know, the big one was, the first piece that I remember writing about like Facebook that in 2013 that like stuck was trying to figure out why Facebook doesn't show you how many people saw your post. And that they do show on advertising posts, they show you the backend analytics. And so I started like looking into it and it was really, you know, it was actually that

• 9:25Speaker 01

  sources and people, it was like, people actually aren't reading your Facebook posts, like most of the time. Like, most of the time you're just kind of shouting into the ether.

• 9:33Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, most of social media is like that.

• 9:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, and that was at the time, and, and that actually pissed off a lot of people at Facebook because, you know, I don't really know why.

• 9:43Alex Kantrowitz?

  They got mad at that.

• 9:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, there wasn't a lot of negative coverage, but I was, but I was curious on that, like that effect, like what is, what will people think if they realize they're kind of screaming into the void? So like Facebook invited me out and I started talking with like some of the engineers at like News Feed and stuff at the time, again, 2013. And just the way that they were describing the power that they had, turn a knob here to do this, and again, it didn't feel nefarious or anything, but I was like, this is such an effect on this. And so I started really interrogating that line, like, what are these platforms doing to us? How are they changing the way that we talk to each other? Is it shorter? Is it more terse? Is it smarter? Is it dumber? Is it angry? Or is it whatever?

• 10:26Speaker 01

  And then I think it just, it started to become very clear. The way I got into all of it was really harassment. You know, I was, for a time, editing at BuzzFeed, the tech section, for about a year. And one of my direct reports was Joe Bernstein. And Joe was covering the video game industry, sort of in that same cultural lens. And then Gamergate happened. And I didn't know anything about a lot of these worlds. And he kind of dove into it to do the coverage. And I got really interested in places like 4chan, and what, you know, sort of these like fever swamp areas, some of these really awful Reddit communities dedicated towards essentially misogynist harassment. And it's just sort of like opened

• 11:09Speaker 01

  a door of the underside of these platforms. So I started investigating that. And then it just kind of, it went from there. It was like a very, interestingly enough, straight line from Gamergate to these toxic message board communities, to the rise of the pro-Trump media apparatus and Trump trolling and stuff, to QAnon, to just sort of like, you know, stop the steal, to all this stuff that's happening, and this real focus that people have now on the platforms and the way that they're destabilizing democracy potentially. And yeah, so it got darker, but I think it grew out of, it grew out of actually the

• 11:52Speaker 01

  exact work that I was trying to do, which is like, how do these platforms shape us in any way?

• 11:58Alex Kantrowitz?

  Did you feel like you were yelling out into the void for a while, and then eventually people started paying attention, or?

• 12:05Speaker 01

  I think there's always

• 12:05Alex Kantrowitz?

  What do you think, was it, yeah, sorry.

• 12:06Speaker 01

  No.

• 12:07Alex Kantrowitz?

  Answer that.

• 12:07Speaker 01

  I think there's always been people who are really interested in this and there's obviously like, you know, I actually feel like there's, you know, a lot of scholars out there who just don't get their due, who've been interested in this for so long and been doing sort of the frontlines work, especially on, you know, like the field of writing about online harassment. Like, there's, you know, so many black female scholars out there who have pioneered a lot of that work, you know, monitoring their own communities and, you know, kind of get steamrolled by, you know, journalists jumping in and taking that over. But, I mean, you definitely can tell that there's, post 2016, it was, there was kind

• 12:49Speaker 01

  of a rush, right, to like, explain how all this stuff happened. And I think, I think some of that is great. You know, some of that is like, it's put a lot of pressure on a lot of these companies, you know, holding their feet to the fire. And I think that that's helpful, that's, you know, what the industry's supposed to do, the journalism industry.

• 13:10Alex Kantrowitz?

  We've heard a lot of chattering, and speaking of this, we've heard a lot of chattering inside these companies. I'm sure when you speak, you know, on background of some of these folks, where they say, you know, "Everyone is holding us responsible for all the ills of the world, we're not the boogeyman." In fact, The Wall Street Journal, when they ran their set of stories a couple of weeks ago, there was a statement from Facebook that said, "People were divisive before Facebook and will be after," or something like that. I guess they didn't acknowledge there will be an after, but there will be an after. What do you think about that argument? It does seem like it is, people, we're a story-based species. It seems like a very convenient story to say, "Everything wrong with us is the platforms. We very rarely talk about the underlying conditions in society that make us the way we are."

• 13:55Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 13:57Alex Kantrowitz?

  You must be thinking about this. What's your thought?

• 13:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, I wrote about this recently and I think that kind of statement from Facebook, you know, people were divisive before that, is both true and like just a huge dodge at the same time. You know, I think it's disingenuous in the way that it is, that it is, you know, that they're trying to slip out of responsibility in some sense. Like, I think it's true that there needs to be sort of proportional criticisms, right, of these types of things. And, you know, I think like, I think the Cambridge Analytica story was actually a really interesting example of this. So like Cambridge Analytica, when it, when that story broke, you know, all the reporting was factual, but there was this sort of feeling that came

• 14:43Speaker 01

  out of it and a little bit of like sensationalizing in the way that it got aggregated, et cetera, of, you know, scary Russian data science disinvolvement, you know, sort of like hinting at like the Kremlin, you know, peeking over the edge, or like this idea-

• 14:56Alex Kantrowitz?

  It was interesting. All the aggregation seemed to get it more and more wrong.

• 14:59Speaker 01

  Yeah. And there's this, yeah, it's like a game of telephone. And then there's this idea of, you know, that the psychographic profiling is mind control, right? Like they just like, that Steve Bannon and this, you know, shady, you know, English defense contractor guy got a bunch of Facebook data and like brainwashed some people in Wisconsin to, for, you know, to vote for Trump. And ergo, there you go. And it's like, you know, that's, I think it gave a lot of people this idea, you know, around like what we can do with data and, you know, whether, how manipulative it can be, that was a little bit false. But directionally, the story's correct, right? Directionally, like, there's a huge breach of privacy. This company, you know, has this unchecked influence and a lot of power

• 15:42Speaker 01

  and the way that it's mingling with politics is concerning. So I think like that's a great example of, you know, we have to be, you know, very careful with the, you know, the blows that we choose to strike on these companies and not, you know, over assign, lest we are, you know, the journalists who cried wolf. But, but, you know, I think- What I wrote in this piece about all those Wall Street Journal revelations, etc., from last week is what I thought was really interesting is they showed that when people were doing too much passive consumption of video content, Facebook researchers were saying, "Well, this actually makes people feel really miserable."

• 16:21Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, I read this on this.

• 16:22Speaker 01

  And they're like, "Okay, so now we gotta tweak the knobs, right?"

• 16:24Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah.

• 16:24Speaker 01

  And then it's like, "We tweak the knobs and now you're with friends and family, now you're arguing and it's getting into this harassment territory and all this misinformation and manipulation on a personal level and it's making people feel bad." And so my feeling is like, "The problem with Facebook is Facebook," right? To some extent. Like, we gotta figure out, they gotta figure that part out of it. And so, anyway, it's a very long way of me saying I think it was a dodge.

• 16:49Alex Kantrowitz?

  Okay. It was definitely a dodge. But go to the core of the question, though.

• 16:55Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 16:55Alex Kantrowitz?

  Which is, in these discussions, we'd already talked about how much of the nuance gets lost. So do you think there needs to be a little bit more nuance in terms of these companies being one part of the problem in our society versus they're often portrayed as, "Oh, like, you might have read," and I think the Wall Street Journal did a pretty good job framing its stories, "but you might have read that story about Instagram and teen girls and said the only reason why teen girls are depressed or killing themselves is Instagram."

• 17:25Speaker 01

  Sure. And I mean, there's also, you know, you gotta, I think what those stories showed on one end, which kind of did get lost a little bit, is the fact that Facebook has teams of people inside it who are working really hard, who are good people, who care about making these platforms better, and they're trying to understand it. Like, they know there's problems.

• 17:46Alex Kantrowitz?

  In fact, that's where the leaks came from.

• 17:47Speaker 01

  Yeah. And the bottlenecks happen to be at the top with a bunch of people who don't want to change or, you know.

• 17:54Alex Kantrowitz?

  And the product organization, I would say.

• 17:57Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah. And so where was I going with this? I totally lost my train of thought.

• 18:03Alex Kantrowitz?

  The question was, do we need to be a little bit more nuanced when we talk about the ills of the world and where Facebook in particular, maybe Twitter too, fits in that picture?

• 18:13Speaker 01

  And YouTube.

• 18:14Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah.

• 18:15Speaker 01

  So, yeah, I actually... Think about it, and I'm trying to develop like a mental model around this to some degree to write better about it. But I think that like looking at, you know, our information crisis, let's call it, our information problem, platform problem, from like a supply and demand perspective is actually pretty useful, right? And the platforms are the distributors, the amplifiers, those, you know, there's a lot of supply. What is the demand side of that, right? Like there, you know, awful content gets created for people because oftentimes there is some sort of demand. And I'm not saying that like, you know, people necessarily want all of these things that they're not being manipulated a little bit, but, you know, a thing that I've been thinking

• 18:57Speaker 01

  a lot about is that the internet is reflecting, internet feels miserable in a lot of places, right? And if you go to the heart of a lot of these conversations that are happening in, you know, these really divisive Facebook groups or whatever, or the, you know, all the kinds of harassment and bullying on Twitter and things like that, the, you know, the, the, um, the sort of toxic neo-Nazi adjacent debates happening on YouTube, things like that, like there's a lot of, you get a sense of a lot of misery, right? And a lot of misery finding company. And so something I've been thinking a lot about is like, I think that there's real reasons. Life expectancy has declined, you know, for, for numerous years in, in, in America. There's a lot of, I mean, just rampant inequality.

• 19:40Speaker 01

  And I think, I think we're seeing some of that misery manifested, right? In, in the way that we're talking to each other and I think these platforms amplify it, et cetera, but I think there's also to some degree, you know, maybe a demand for that. And I think that some of these fixes have to go well beyond, you know, like I, I don't think winding Instagram out of Facebook and, you know, taking WhatsApp and making it its own company is going to change any of that.

• 20:04Alex Kantrowitz?

  Right.

• 20:05Speaker 01

  And so it's like when we think about this, and I, I also don't know that we can like content moderate our way out of this problem.

• 20:10Alex Kantrowitz?

  I, I think we definitely can.

• 20:12Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 20:13Alex Kantrowitz?

  And that's, it's lost in the conversation about content moderation is like, this is only solving the manifestation of the problem, doesn't address the core problem itself.

• 20:21Speaker 01

  Yeah. And so, and I don't think we know exactly what the core problem is, but I know, I, I really feel this deep in my bones that there is just, there's a lot of this misery and inequality and, and I think that, I think that, you know, people want to share that, these platforms allow that to be inflicted on others and... You know, there's some bigger societal issues there. And I'm not trying to absolve. I think we get, you know, if you talk about this like on Twitter, like, you know, people

• 20:49Alex Kantrowitz?

  Can't tweet about this.

• 20:50Speaker 01

  People will try to say, you know, like, oh, you're, you know, you're trying to, I'm not trying to, I'm not trying to, you know, excuse like the horrible things that go on or anything. But I do think like we have these deeper root societal problems and the platforms are making them worse. But we also have to figure out what those are and the ways to potentially address them. And that's where I get kind of really depressed.

• 21:14Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, yeah, I feel like that's how I usually end a lot of the stuff that you write.

• 21:20Speaker 01

  There you go.

• 21:20Alex Kantrowitz?

  No, it's spot on and the stuff in the newsletter is great. All right, why don't we take a quick break and return to talk about what happened after this, you know, long run that you had writing about the social media platforms, which is that you wanted to write about the workplace or what it used to be.

• 21:36Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 21:37Alex Kantrowitz?

  So, which is a totally normal straight line between the two of them. Let's take a quick break and we'll be back right after this on the Big Technology Podcast with Charlie Warzal. This episode is brought to you by Avpoint. Everyone's racing to roll out AI right now. Copilots, chatbots, agents doing real work. But here's the part nobody loves talking about. All that AI runs on your data and most teams have no single way to see it, secure it, and prove it's under control. That's exactly what Avpoint does. For 25 years, they've been the trusted layer beneath the world's most demanding data, now extended across your entire AI estate. Your data, your cloud, and the agents acting on your behalf.

• 22:20Alex Kantrowitz?

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• 22:47Alex Kantrowitz?

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• 23:32Alex Kantrowitz?

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• 23:48Alex Kantrowitz?

  And we're back on the Big Technology Podcast with Charlie Waisel. Second half of our show. We're live at Unfinished Live. Great conference here in the heart of New York City. Charlie, you're in from Montana.

• 23:59Speaker 01

  You bet.

• 24:00Alex Kantrowitz?

  How's life in Montana? Can you tell everybody the story about the bears in the trees? That I feel like this is the best way to start off the second half.

• 24:08Speaker 01

  Sure. The Montana in the fall, where I live, I live in sort of an area on the edge of Missoula that is nice and wooded. It's also the like black bear migratory path to go and hibernate in the woods. So every fall, there are lots of bears. We have an apple tree in our backyard. And one morning I woke up and I went outside. Or actually, no, I just looked out the window as I was like making coffee. And there were two black bears just in a tree like 10 feet from my house. And I was, this is the first year that I moved there. I moved there in 2017 and I was like, ah, so that's a welcome to the neighborhood.

• 24:52Alex Kantrowitz?

  Your neighbor was like, oh, you'll see them. Just look up. And then you looked up and there they were.

• 24:57Speaker 01

  There they were.

• 24:57Alex Kantrowitz?

  So you, in some ways, or actually not in some ways, in all the ways, got a really early start in the work from home.

• 25:04Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 25:05Alex Kantrowitz?

  Lifestyle, is that why you wanted, so you and your partner have this book coming out about it shortly, is that why you wanted to write about it because you had this head start?

• 25:14Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 25:15Alex Kantrowitz?

  What makes someone so passionate about the way that social media ecosystems work decide they want to write like a workplace book?

• 25:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, like honestly, it's opportunity and the moment, I mean, so yeah, we moved in 2017 and started working from home and you know, the sort of the short story is for the first eight months of it, my life was just terrible, like I was so worried about working remotely and not blowing this opportunity that I collapsed my entire life into just just working, you know, it was to the point where I was on the couch all day, you know, doing emails, writing stories, whatever, talking to sources, that at night I'd be on that same couch watching Netflix and I'd be, I'd have like a cold, I'd have a cold sweat going because truly, because I felt like I was like I was laboring or I was like

• 26:08Speaker 01

  watching TV in my office, you know, it was like it's, it was this real collapse and that's when I sort of realized something was wrong, Annie, my partner, was struggling a little less, but also, you know, we were working way too much, it was

• 26:20Alex Kantrowitz?

  Why did you move to Montana?

• 26:21Speaker 01

  She's from that area and we were looking kind of for an adventure, she was doing a lot of reporting out there and we thought like there's no way BuzzFeed will let us move, we were working both at BuzzFeed at the time and they did to our surprise and, and yeah, and so, you know, we had this period where it was essentially what we were doing was like our own kind of like COVID lockdown, remote, you know, work situation, like we were just stuck in the house, we don't have kids, but, and then we realized that we weren't actually working from home, you know, we were just like laboring in confinement essentially. And so we actually started trying to figure out like what does it look like if we try to, you know, get the perks of this, if we try to actually make our, our work flexible

• 27:06Speaker 01

  or and, you know, fit it around our lives instead of our lives around work and we developed a system that really, really worked for us, that really allowed us to, you know, like Be more active participants in our, in the community and you know volunteering and stuff like that, developing a lot more hobbies, friendships outside of you know, the realm of like media and tech and all that stuff that, and it was just this three, more three dimensional life. Anyway, cut to the pandemic. I noticed, I mean, everyone obviously is working from home, but also everyone was doing what we were doing, which is this kind of, you know, like collapse. On the couch. Yeah. And, and it's like this, you know, this collapse. And there were sort of two things that

• 27:48Speaker 01

  happened. One, we were like, well, you know, we, we have this experience. I think we have something to say that might help other people feel seen or what have you. But the other was like, it just felt like there was, you know, I, I just like new, interesting ideas, right? Whether it's the tech stuff, whether it's whatever. I, I'm interested in the way that different forces shape our lives. And I felt like the most interesting idea at the time really was that there's this moment of promise, right? Where, I mean, what a crazy control experiment it is to have, you know, everyone in, in the knowledge workspace pretty much, like stop working in offices at the same time. Like, it's just a wild thing. And there's so much data we can,

• 28:30Speaker 01

  you know, gather from that and we can see, you know, we've been told for so long that, you know, that without offices, without these centralized spaces, that, you know, work is gonna, like our ability to work, our productivity is all gonna collapse. You know, we're not gonna be able to do that. And it proved this wrong, but it's like, so what do we do with that information, right? Do we snap back? Or do we see there is some promise here? There's, you know, there's maybe another way forward, especially with this idea that we're all very burned out, you know, like, like our jobs are incredibly stressful. It feels, if you talk to a lot of knowledge workers and, and obviously people, essential workers in the service economy have this, I mean, order of magnitude, you know, harder. But there's this, there's this notion

• 29:16Speaker 01

  A lot of modern work doesn't really seem tenable right now. You know, you have to subsume your life for it. And we, we really wanted to, you know, pick around that, that idea and see if we could kind of, you know, not develop a how to book or anything, but like, I think we, you know, the term we use is like, it's like a, it's like a map, right? You get to choose your direction, but like, we're going to try to lay out everything. And so that's why we did it.

• 29:41Alex Kantrowitz?

  So it's interesting that you decided to write a work from home book because it was sort of predicted that we'd all be back to the office now.

• 29:47Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 29:48Alex Kantrowitz?

  So, um, how did you think about the longevity of your book? Do you anticipate there'd be another pandemic or were you rooting for a variant or something? Like, how did you end up predicting?

• 29:59Speaker 01

  Definitely not rooting for a variant. Um, you know, I, I, as someone who publishes pretty frequently and rapidly, you know, who writes for the internet, like, book, this worried me a little. I was really worried when, you know, we, we turned it around as quick as we possibly could. We wrote it, pitched it, uh, everything in about three and a half months. Four months, maybe. Um, and, and then that was, we, we basically turned it in, uh, March 1st of this year, the first draft. And they were like, okay, it's going to come out in December. And I was like, oh, everyone's going to be so tired of this conversation and like, maybe back in their jobs or, or, you know, have figured out some of these things and

• 30:44Speaker 01

  this is going to seem like, you know, stale. Um, and then life has, you know, has sort of, you know, made a, made that, uh, made the book a little more relevant in a way that's, you know, obviously unfortunate. But the thing, the thing is, I, I don't worry about it with longevity because the book, at the end of the day, isn't really just about, I know this sounds kind of like corny, but it's, it's not really just about, you know, where we work. It's, it's about like, it's about how we do it and what the expectations need to be. And it's basically, I mean, I don't think work. Whether or not we, more people are in hybrid or whatever, or going back to the office or all at home, I think it's going to continue to be broken because of a lot of, you know,

• 31:28Speaker 01

  a lot of our, our cultural attitudes towards it, a lot of the way that we, you know, like, a lot of the ways that managers, especially older managers and executives are set in their ways and, you know, want people to reproduce the sort of coming up through the ranks. And so, I, I'm not too worried about it being out of date or obsolete anytime soon because the real idea is like, what, what does your life look like if it doesn't revolve around work, if it's not the primary axis of your life and it is a meaningful part of it?

• 32:03Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, so, do you have, like, well, first of all, can the stuff that you write in your book, can someone who's down the line, like, someone who's being over managed, take advantage of it and learn to do anything different? And is it, yeah, I guess, like, is the problem, I think you sort of hinted at this in your answer, but is the problem that we need to learn to work from home or is the problem that we need to just learn to work healthier?

• 32:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think, I think it's the second. I mean, and, and I think that that, that is, it's really hard work. Like, a lot of people think that we, that Annie and I, because we wrote this book, have like, figured that kind of thing out. And the way that I, I liken, you know, our attitudes towards work and productivity and all that, it's, to me, it's, it's similar to, you know, the process of, like, I go to, I go to therapy and I work out, and those things feel very, very similar to this in the sense that there are days when it's an extreme struggle, there are days when there's not a lot of progress, when you feel like you've gone, you know, you've backslid or something.

• 33:06Speaker 01

  And the only thing that really helps is continued dedication to it and trying to, trying to figure it out. And, and then I think that, you know, that's part of like, the, that routine, that pattern is, is what, what, you know, creates healthy habits. And I think applying that to our jobs, but, I mean, there's, there's so much that I feel... Um, you know, has been kind of drilled into us, especially like modern American workers. You know, the, the idea that more work is always better, more time spent is always better. I mean, it's, it's been extremely hard for me to like unwind that from my life. I mean, I, I, so I, I've tried experiments, right?

• 33:48Speaker 01

  I've been trying to work four days a week and trying to, you know, take time in my day to just like stop, like for two hours and just do something else, anything else that's not work related. And you start to learn these lessons that like, oh, wow. When my mind isn't totally shot and fried from banging my head against the wall on this thing, you know, I, I actually feel like I have a little more space. Um, you know, I think like the mind is, you know, uh, there's this, um, this writer, um, Jenny Odell, who wrote this book, How to Do Nothing. Uh, and she had a, a line during, um, a podcast that I listened to, uh, where she was talking about this, you know, during the pandemic, she's not really been doing a lot of work.

• 34:33Speaker 01

  Like she's, you know, she's not, like, she's also an artist and she hasn't, she hasn't been very inspired to do anything. It's this like fallow period, right? And so, you know, society and everything is telling us this is bad. Like this, you know, this, you're not being productive, you're wasting time, you're doing whatever. And she said that basically at the end of every one of those periods, she goes into, you know, uh, like a, a, a peak of just like productivity, inspiration, creativity, and the whole time spend working, you know, your, your brain doesn't really know it. And I think that that happens on a sort of a micro level with us, you know? There's a lot of times that especially in knowledge where I, interesting ideas click because we've given ourselves the space to let them sort of marinate when we're not constantly putting that pressure on ourselves.

• 35:17Speaker 01

  And I think it's, it's like that with the work week, right? Like, you know, this idea of working 90 hour weeks, like. It's the classic way to burn out. It's a short-term solution and the long-term solution is actually, you know, how do we air it out a little bit and, you know, treat ourselves, you know, with a little more respect?

• 35:38Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah. Do you think that's feasible in the American workplace? I mean, it is interesting because we do find ourselves in between two different types of workplaces, right? There's China with 8/8/6, 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. six days a week. And then there's Europe, which takes a month off in the summer or longer. So, America does seem like it might be a nice compromise in between the two. But obviously, our workplace is still extremely unhealthy.

• 36:06Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 36:06Alex Kantrowitz?

  So, it's also interesting because we are now in like more direct competition with China. So, where do you think we net out and how can we do it and stay competitive?

• 36:16Speaker 01

  I don't think that it has anything to do or like will have any massive, you know, impact. Again, some of these things are, there are equity issues, right? With like, you know, supply chains are made of humans, right? And a lot of those humans have, you know, like hourly labor jobs with not that great protection. Like, you know, like look at Amazon, right? It's like, you know, when you, when you look at, at the, you know, the workers' rights and all the issues that have gone there with like, you know, Alabama and the labor, the labor strike and all that stuff. Like, those, those issues are probably, when you're talking about competition, more pertinent, right? Like, how do, how do we treat people sort of lower on that supply chain line or sort of more on the front line of it?

• 37:03Speaker 01

  But in terms of like the knowledge work side of that, like, I, I don't think, I don't think it's even, it's really a question. The way we frame it again in the book is this like long versus short term. I mean, if you, to bring Amazon up again, like, listen to Jeff Bezos talk about the arc of his career and, and building Amazon. And it's like, it, it's obviously, there's this whole relentlessness to it. But there's also this long-term view of what the company's supposed to be and not to conform it into these like these short-term, you know, quarterly market gains or whatever. And like, Build, you know, build out that base and I, and I think you can sort of flip that and reverse it to the, the way that we work. We are burning ourselves out. People are miserable.

• 37:45Speaker 01

  There's so much turnover in the workforce. There is this great resignation thing going on, you know, quote unquote.

• 37:50Alex Kantrowitz?

  That's real.

• 37:52Speaker 01

  And unemployment benefits are, are going away and people are still saying, no, it's like, screw it. I'm not gonna work. Like, that is a signal that something is up. And I think that like, I, I think that companies and, and individuals who understand that like, we're not, you know, automatons or not robots who exist to work. That is, that's gonna be, that is a long-term solution. We end the book with a letter to employees or workers and a letter to executives. And both of, you know, what we try to do in both of those is, is show, and again, this is, sounds super corny, but like, show that there's, you know, like, to borrow the business term, like synergy is between those things. What

• 38:35Speaker 01

  is good for employees ends up being good for employers. If you look at the long run. If you look at the short run, no, you wanna burn people out into the ground, you know, get what you need from them, scale fast and, you know, get your VC money and get out. And, you know, I don't, I don't know how long that works for.

• 38:54Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah. And it is interesting that Bezos does have that long-term view, uh, but he burns everybody out in the fulfillment centers.

• 39:00Speaker 01

  Yeah. But his business is structured in, in that way that like, you know, like Amazon, the company is living, is, had a, had a lot of, um, you know, a lot of runway and the workers obviously didn't.

• 39:13Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah. I, I wanna end with this. Um, you, we've talked about it throughout this whole conversation, but you cover a lot of different stuff. You've made a lot of different stops. You've done it in a lot of different venues. What's the goal of your work, Charlie? Like, what are you trying to accomplish?

• 39:31Speaker 01

  Oh, wow. Yikes.

• 39:34Speaker 01

  Just interesting shit. I mean, seriously, like that's it's such a it's such a privilege like to be able to do this kind of stuff. I mean, I really I'm I'm I have an obsessive personality, but one that's like hinges on like, you know, I guess, short term obsessions, right? And then I want to bring people in in on it. I want to I want to meet meet those people who are involved in my in that obsession. You know, right now, it's kind of around work. I worry a little that it's like that I'm a little too much of a generalist sometimes. It's not, you know?

• 40:08Alex Kantrowitz?

  I don't know, Charlie. I think it's working.

• 40:10Speaker 01

  It's I don't I don't know. But but the but it's just it's just like, honestly, like, we were just talking about like about, you know, the idea of like, reading and stuff. Like, it is so cool to be able to learn for a living, or to be able to dial up the, you know, the people who are involved in in whatever it is, and have them teach you. And then it's such a privilege to be able to like, you know, disseminate that and and try to, you know, bring people along on your journey. So that's really like, I don't think about it in the long term scale of that. It's like, as long as I can keep doing interesting stuff. And hopefully, like, hopefully, there's an element of it that helps people understand,

• 40:51Speaker 01

  you know, our world a little better. I don't know. It's again, it sounds corny, but it's just actually how I feel.

• 40:57Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, well, I'm a very religious reader of the newsletter. I look forward to devouring the book. Everybody out there, you can get the newsletter, Galaxy Brain on Substack.

• 41:08Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 41:09Alex Kantrowitz?

  And tell everyone where to get the book.

• 41:10Speaker 01

  The book, I mean, shop at your local independent bookstore is what we'd like, since we were just talking about the Amazon supply chain.

• 41:19Alex Kantrowitz?

  And the title?

• 41:20Speaker 01

  It's called Out of Office: The Big Problem and Bigger Promise of Working From Home. It is out December 7. But, you know, those preorders, get those preorders in. They they help.

• 41:32Alex Kantrowitz?

  They help a lot.

• 41:33Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 41:34Alex Kantrowitz?

  Definitely. Okay, well, thanks, everybody for sticking around.

• 41:36Speaker 01

  Thank you guys so much. Appreciate it.

• 41:37Alex Kantrowitz?

  And I want to say a quick thank you to my editor, Nate Guatney, Red Circle for hosting and selling the ads. Thank you to Charlie for spending this time with me. And most importantly, to everybody who's listened. Thank you very much. And we'll see you next week on the Big Technology Podcast.

• 42:02Speaker 02

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