We're back with another edition of The Federalist Radio Hour. I'm Emily Jashinsky,
culture editor here at the Federalist. As always, you can email the show
at radio at the Federalist dot com, follow us on x at FDR LST,
make sure to subscribe wherever you download your podcasts, and of course to
the premium version of our website, The Federalist dot Com as well. Today
we are joined by David Boson. He is the managing partner and the founder
of the Bonson Group. You've probably seen him all over Fox and Fox Business,
CMBC, all those places. He's also the author of a new book,
Full Time Work and the Meaning of Life. David, welcome to the
show. Well, thank you so much for having me. Great to be
with you. Of course, could you tell us just a little bit of
background. I mean, you have such an interesting background, but could you
tell us us a little bit about how you ended up founding the Bonson Group,
becoming a commentator on the markets for all of these different networks and news
outlets. You've also worked with Acton Institute. I've read you a national review
many times. Tell us about how you ended up where you are. Well,
I essentially spent the bulk of my career at a couple of different Wall
Street firms until I was about to turn forty years old and decided that I
was either going to start my own firm then or I was never going to
start it. And I felt that I was at Morgan Stanley. I was
a managing director there. I would have been content if I were going to
stay at a big firm to be there, but I wasn't content to stay
at one of the big Wall Street firms. I would love to say that
I was prescient and prophetic about how woke and challenging it was going to be
for people in my faith and of my political orientation to be at the big
firms, but really it wasn't even that. It was just that I felt
an entrepreneurial itch to start my own firm. I was totally convinced that we
could serve clients better on our own, and so nearly ten years ago I
made that move and since have seen, you know, really wonderful growth in
our business, and a lot of it open up the doors to what you're
describing, where you know, I'm able to go on TV share our point
of view. I can write books that are about topics I care about,
you know, generally have a point of view, and that's kind of how
we've run our business. And it's really what I do day by day is
wake up and have the things I'm passionate about. I kind of have a
platform now I can talk about those things. And if I were still working
for a big fortune one hundred company, I wouldn't be able to. So
that's sort of my story. So interesting. Now, tell us about the
book again, full time work. I would imagine a lifetime of full time
work inspired this book, David, But tell us a little bit more about
the inspiration behind writing this book at the specific time too, because I'm sure
there's something to that as well. Yeah. I'm actually really transparent about it
in the book. I freely admit that for me, pouring myself into work
and the early stages of my adult life was very therapeutic. I lost my
father when I was twenty and he was forty seven. My mom was already
gone, and my dad was my best friend and my mentor, my hero.
You know, it was just I almost incalculable position to find oneself in
as you're getting ready to begin adult life, and I found work to be
a very healthy diversion to some of the trauma, some of the challenges.
And the reason I think it was healthy was not merely that it distracted you
from kind of the sadness and the difficulty. I think work rechannels energy into
more productive things. You become more useful, and it helps you to formulate
your identity, your self confidence. And it only does so to the extent
that in work you're able to be valuable to other people. And so experiencing
that living that helped me to kind of better understand now what has been thirty
years later, why it works that way, And as a man of faith,
I'm convinced it is how God designed things, how he made the world
and made mankind for the purpose of mankind working using its labor to be creative
and innovative and productive. And I think that there's an economic glory in all
of this, whereby we uh and through the process of producing goods and services
that enhance quality of life for others, we enhance our own quality of life.
So that that is something that animates me. Professionally, of course,
I am in the business of applying that to the world of financial markets,
giving investors an opportunity to put their capital to work in a way that sees
their quality life enhanced by how their capital is enhancing quality life for others.
I think work gives us a chance to produce positive feedback loops when so much
of the world seems stuck in a negative feedback loop. You know, I
hear more and more, and I'm sure you paid close attention to these trends
as you're writing your book, especially from members of gen Z or anything to
that extent. You know, as manual labor has been automated out of existence
in some particular sectors, especially that you know, what the future looks like
is a lot of what people derisively refer to as as laptop work, the
laptop class, and you know that is a real change for humanity so over
the course of you know, the last one hundred two hundred years. But
at the same time, you just made a really important point about just the
importance of purpose and how work, whether it's a laptop job or a welding
job, can bring people a sense of purpose. Do you worry it's shifting
with technology if people feel less purposeful, you know, sort of scrolling through
spreadsheets endlessly or sending you know, an infinite what seems like an infinite string
of emails. Where do you see the future of that going? Are you
worried about that? You know, sort of making people feel like they just
want to put on their VR headset every morning and you know, take their
xanax and get on with things. Well, I think that if people read
my book and adopt a theology of work the way I'm describing, we can
get rid of xanax altogether as well. But I digress. It's funny,
how yeah, I mean a lot of these things seem to go together.
Supposedly, hard work is hurting the mental health of our society, and yet
all I see are those that are least interested in participating in hard work seem
to be the most medicated. So I think that the correlation goes the other
way. But your point about technology is a really interesting one, and all
at once, I have a desire to be informative and useful in my answer,
but also maintain some degree of empathy for the reality on the ground.
There will be people whose jobs become obsolete, and there will be even greater
opportunities that open up out of various societal changes and transformations. This is the
story of our economy since the beginning of time, from the point at which
mankind invented the wheel and learned how to start a fire, to the point
at which the more recent times they invented an iPhone and an awful lot of
things in between. There is a sense that is progress that can be disruptive.
There's not a historical precedent for progress eliminating jobs at a greater length than
it created a greater ratio than it creates them. The Industrial revolution made certain
things obsolete and by an exponential factor, opened up more doors and more opportunities.
I wish I could say that everyone who participates in a certain activity now
that has some marketability to it, that it will never change. They'll get
paid the same or more. They'll do the same thing in the same way
and in the same place. I don't know that. I know that I
have written all my books on a computer, and my late father wrote several
books. He was a tremendous Christian intellectual. He wrote his books on a
typewriter, and I view that progress as a good thing. A lot of
people used to work for typewriter companies, and they don't anymore, and so
the advent of digital technology and automation didn't start two years ago when we started
saying the words AI every other word. It started fifty years ago, and
from the mainframe computers to a personal computer, to eventually the Internet, and
then the cloud, and yes, now into AI. There's a lot of
things we do that require less hands and will require less bodies. There's still
an awful lot of need for hands and an awful lot of need for bodies.
And then there is work that gets done in a way that then requires
other work. I want a dynamic workforce. I want a workforce by which
there is mobility. Some people may end up needing to move. Relocation used
to be very normal, and now we operate as if the need to relocate
is out of the question. I think there will be a need for some
retraining. But I just want to be really clear, I'm not doing this
learned code kind of thing. I'm not saying every welder and plumber needs to
go become a computer programmer, because I don't believe that there are a lot
of things the technology is never ever, ever going to disintermediate the human parts
of the economy are not going to go anywhere. There will be things we
do more efficiently. That's been going on for fifty years. The speed is
picked up a bit. But I do not worry that we will eliminate entire
jobs altogether. I think we will replace jobs and that it will be a
net positive for economic opportunity. And you know, you wait in. And
I thought this was super into the debate that was sparked by a segment on
bench Repair of podcast sort of viral on Twitter x whatever we want to call
it, that was interpreted by some people as insensitive and you know, ignorant
about whether people are should retire at the age of sixty five. Ben was
talking specifically about the retirement age, like the government retirement age for Social Security
and benefits. And you know, he said, you shouldn't retire at sixty
five. It doesn't you lose that purpose in your life for so many people.
Will you end up dying really quickly after you quote unquote retire. Others
said, well, hey, if I'm a roofer, I really need to
retire at sixty five, I'm not going to work until seventy five. And
I saw you wait into that debate, wait in on that debate, especially
given the top of your book sort of a perfect thing for you to address.
Could you tell our listeners a little bit of what you made about that
exchange. Yeah, I really think it's a great point, and I think
the two things can be true at once, and in fact are true at
once. I have a whole chapter in the book about this, so Ben
was kind of reading my mind because I wrote about this, you know,
a year ago. I am totally against the idea of retirement. And yet
I do not mean by that that a person who works with their hands when
they're thirty three should be out hammering and welding and drilling and all of the
kind of physical manual labor that is involved in a lot of construction and blue
collar work when they're sixty eight years old. And nor did Ben mean that
either. What I mean is a mentality that the purpose of work is to
stop doing it, that you work for the purpose of not having to work
anymore. I fully accept that there is a difference, a differentiation across different
sectors, different industries, different professions, in what usefulness will mean in one
senior year, in your years of life. The idea of getting to a
point where you end your life in a twenty or twenty five or thirty year
retirement that is really a twenty five thirty year vacation. I think has been
counterproductive. I think it's taken a lot of people away from a usefulness.
I also think it has deprived a lot of younger people, including Gen X
fifty year old business owners like myself, from some of the mentorship and seniority
and expertise and wisdom that we want from our senior people. And then I
also think that the younger generation has ended up having to go about things without
the sort of institutional DNA, institutional knowledge the benefits of that experience. Now,
what do I say to a literal blue collar worker works with their hands
that sixty five years old is not able to do it anymore? I think
that they are very much in a position to try to take advantage if they
have the economic means to do so of not having to continue work in the
same physical capacity and to transition that into a different usefulness. And it may
be coaching, advising, teaching, mentoring people in the same industry, and
maybe a different quality or category altogether. It's the difference between micro and macroeconomics.
Ben was talking about a macro economic principle I'm talking about a macro fundamental
idea that the purpose of work is not to stop doing it. But in
the micro there's going to be different examples, there's going to be different manifestations
of how these things play out. I hope to put a suit and tie
on and come to the office for the rest of my life. I understand
that I don't work with my hands, and that there's a difference between,
as they say, people who take a shower before work and people take a
shower after work. I'm not oblivious to that. I am completely aware that
what one does in the senior years of their life will be different. I
merely want a framework by which we maintain usefulness, we maintain productivity. And
I will tell you, even though I'm not an expert in construction, that
there is significant amount of opportunity for people who worked in a blue collar environment
the of their life to have usefulness and productivity and hopefully even at a lower
scale, not do the same time commitment more margin. Even white collar professionals
I think would be better served by having more margin but still staying in the
game, so to speak. That's all I'm referring to, and I think
the beneficiaries of that framework are the people themselves that are into the senior years
of their life, the younger workers the benefit from their experience and expertise,
and then the economy at large that is much better served by multi generational talent.
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seventy five dollars or more. And what is your advice for people looking to
find that sense of purpose in their work? You know, it's really it's
an easy answer for me because I get to do, you know, one
of the coolest things ever, and it's very easy to kind of identify a
sense of purpose for me. But when other people say man, I cannot
wait to quit work. I cannot wait to stop pushing papers and you know,
maybe putting shingles up, whatever it is, How David, can people
find jobs, or maybe find purpose within jobs that isn't obvious to them at
any given moment. Well, I don't think that my advice is perfect if
the standard would be that everyone is satisfied by it. But I do think
this is helpful. One of the things we have to do a better job
of is just understanding economically what work is. When someone says it's a futile
endeavor, it's meaningless, it's not doing anything. I get that it can
feel that way, I can feel mundane. It is categorically untrue, though,
that there's anybody out there paying you to do something that's meaningless. It
may be tedious to you, but it is serving some purpose. In the
value creation process, we produce goods and services that meet the needs of humanity
or we don't get paid. And I believe that some people may say,
okay, well, I'm just sitting here putting widgets in a box, and
on one level, I would say, okay, you might be helping a
million people right now. You might be serving the needs of a million people
around the world that you're never going to meet working on an assembly line.
Now, you also may have skills that enable you to do something that you
would consider bigger and better, something that more aligns with your skills and passions.
Others may not have developed the skill set, or have the education,
or have the readiness they could build it. There are very few jobs that
don't allow you to move your station in life. That to me is why
every one of us should be waking up in the morning and going to bed
at night praying that we preserve a market economy, Because if there is a
macro concern about mobility, that one could move their station in life, there
is no surer way to ruin that than to take away the freedoms of a
market economy a free enterprise. But within a market economy, we all have
the opportunity to advance our station. Some end up needing more education, needing
a certain certification, Some have to network more, some have to pay their
dues. I'm not suggesting it's easy. I'm not suggesting that the entire process
feels fun every moment. But I am suggesting that all work is meaningful,
that all work is serving the needs of humanity at one level or another,
and where somebody wishes they had a different opportunity. I think they need to
start with where their skills are. The person who says I have an office
job, I get paid pretty well. I go to work, I do
my deal. But I got to tell you, I've just always wanted to
be a Broadway actor, actress, or I've always wanted to be an NBA
player or something. I think we have to quit romanticized and the idea of
our passions leading the way and start with our skills leading the way, because
I simply do not believe that people whose skills lead the way do not eventually
lead to fulfillment. It's a funny thing about human beings that we all seem
to really like doing things well when people compliment us all the time, pay
us, give us bonuses, give us promotions. You know, when you're
good at something, you end up loving it, And I think that that
is got to be the focus, as opposed to something a little bit more
romantic. I'm almost fifty year old, man, I've loved basketball my whole
life. I was never going to play in the NBA. That was never
on the table. It sure sounds nice, but you know, I was
pretty good at managing money, and then that's why I pursued and I love
it with every ounce of breath in my body. I understand that there are
certain occupations that do not carry the socio economic strata that being a corner office,
you know, Wall Street guy comes with. But I want to be
clear, I didn't I didn't start where I am. You know, this
was a journey, and for everyone out there frustrated with where they are in
their journey, that's really the best advice I have. That the journey itself
is filled with ups and downs, and yet that earned success over time more
than the destination itself, it creates a journey that leads to human flourishing.
You mentioned this earlier, and I know that you've written about this, but
you mentioned earlier that sort of moment when it wasn't clear to a lot of
people, people who weren't paying close enough attention, or definitely a lot of
people like myself who didn't live in Manhattan or at the time DC or Los
Angeles, that there was an ideology migrating kind of from college campuses to you
know, those corner offices to the c suites to the newsrooms, and it's
kind of come under the catch all now of DEI. But I wanted to
see, David if you could talk to us a little bit about how you,
as a man of faith working in the industry, saw this coming and
whether you think that you know it's on its way out or some of these
corporations, you know, I think of the way Jamie Diamond now talks about
DEI and other top wall shirt guys talk about DEI, whether it's actually just
being kind of renamed, rebranded, What do you think is going on with
it? And when did you really start to notice it again as a man
of faith who had that interesting vantage point. Well, I believe that it
accelerated very quickly. There was sort of a few different factors that played out
at once. The kind of general woke social justice identity politics movement overlapped with
ESG and then of course found itself in twenty twenty out of the BLM,
and then the COVID lockdowns. Moments where various things that are not immediately correlated
or don't apparently seem to be part of the same dynamic kind of all overlapped
together. And I think that it did a significant amount of damage, but
I think it peaked. I don't believe that we face the worst into the
future of this insanity. I think that the worst is behind us. But
that's very different than saying our work is done. I don't call it DEI.
I call it die because I think it needs to die. And what
I'm referring to there is the general disdain for a meritocratic culture, and the
DEI movement, especially trying to codify this into HR manuals and to college admissions,
into various parts of corporate protocol. It essentially is focused on division and
attempting to organize society around race, gender, and class instead of around truth,
beauty, and goodness. And I don't think it is sustainable. I
think it dies the death of its own internal contradictions. And ultimately I'm very
optimistic that we will move on to what is a more American like DNA that
is meritocratic. But along the way it's done great damage to the culture.
I kind to think I was prescient about it, but I think I was
luckier more than anything else, because in twenty fourteen, there is no possible
way I would have predicted that things were going to get to the level of
insanity they did just five or six years later. So I'm certainly grateful that
I got out of harm's way, but I don't think I deserve credit for
fully reading the tea leaves. And yet I am convinced that so much of
the excess has caused the pendulum to swing the other way. And speaking of
the pendulum swinging the other way, a lot of people on the right again,
I know that you've written about this too, A lot of people on
the right say, well, the pendulum of free enterprise has sort of swung
too far in the wrong direction. We now have a culture that can't support
free enterprise. Because free enterprise or you know, even self government. Some
people will go so far as to say, you know, Patrick Denin or
somebody like Adrian Remual, the sort of extent of self government, republican government
that we have now small our republican government that we have now because we don't
have that sort of virtuous people that John Adams wrote about sort of famously.
And once you lose that kind of cultural cohesion, that sort of collective faith
in Judeo Christian ethics, then free enterprise becomes, you know, people trying
to sell your kids TikTok to take a very topical subject right now, or
trying to sell your kids. You know, people would go so far as
as a heroin whatever it is that you know, it's just sort of unfettered
from the cultural boundaries that used to prevent people from from doing things, you
know, whether it was stigma or law that were unethical. Do you worry
about that, David? And you know, what is the kind of balance?
How important is that sort of cultural cohesion as a balance to the market.
Well, it's incredibly important. But I would actually frame it a little
bit differently because I talk about my insistence on us advocating for a free and
virtuous society, and I don't think I'm balancing like an acid allocation, you
know, fifty percent freedom and fifty percent virtue. I believe we have to
have one hundred percent focus on the prize of liberty and one hundred percent focus
on the necessity of virtue and morality and character, or we will lose both.
So my critique of some of these quote unquote new right folks is not
that I disagree that we undermine our freedom with a lack of virtue. It's
that I disagree that the solution is in some form of coercion. With coercion,
I think we then forfeit, both because I don't think there's anything moral
about coercing someone into doing the right thing what I want ultimately, and the
old term, you know from this debate fifty sixty years ago was fusionism.
I believe we need the fusion of freedom and virtue. But my defense of
a free enterprise system, and what I'm willing to spend the next fifty years
of my life fighting for, is a political right that is aligned around an
economic right wingedness, a defense of free enterprise that understands, as Adam Smith
did, both the source of the wealth of nations and the theory of moral
sentiments. This sort of juxtaposition of freedom and virtue. I agree with those
in the New Right that bemoan what happens when virtue is taken out of a
society, and then what we do with our freedom is snapchat and TikTok and
pornography and other such things. The only solution I know of is for us
to fortify the mediating institutions. The family and church are the only institutions that
can help to properly fortify and equip us for that moral formation. The notion
of coersion creating adequately moralized society has never existed anywhere in human history. So
I want the state to protect the rule of law. I want the state
to function as a moral entity, but not using coersion. And therefore my
defense of a free marketplace is very much connected to how much better I think
a marketplace allocates scarcity, deals with risk and reward when there are those fundamentals
that we all desperately desire, such as virtue and character and morality. Today's
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do, if anything, to help their employees, their workers discover that kind
of sense of purpose and their full time work. What can be done?
You know, we've sort of talked about how people, the rest of us
as employees can approach this full time work and find purpose in it. But
is there anything that employers can do better corporations can do better at helping people
in that position feel fulfilled, feel purposeful in their full time work, especially
if you know it is sending those emails and working on the spreadsheets and maybe
not even interfacing with all that many real humans anymore. What can they do?
Yeah, So it's such a wonderful question, and it's something I want
us all to spend more time with because I wrote a book that's dealing with
individuals how they feel about their work. So many people are out there telling
the government what they can do in the policy arena that would be more pro
work and pro worker and all of that's important, But the employeer has a
lot that they can do as well. First, let me just suggest two
quick kind of internal policy things. I think these forced retirement ages at age
sixty or sixty two, sixty three. I'm not looking for the state to
come in and say they can't do it, but let me just humbly suggest
that it's a terrible idea and it's hurting their own companies. Now. I
understand at one point they feel like there's a certain position. The sixty three
year old might be a little more stale at some point, and kind of
their ability to bring in new ideas. They want to replace the sixty three
year old with a young friend, thirty year old who's more technologically savvy.
Okay, I get it, But do I think that forced retirement ages are
the way to accomplish that. I do not. I think creating positions for
mentorship, for oversight that might be more part time, it might be more
consultative. There's any number of ways that could be administered. But I don't
think a blanket forcing a people out of a company at a given age is
a good idea. The other thing I think is a terrible idea is this
nonsense about required college degrees. The companies don't even care about it themselves,
because anyone who's ever hired anyone knows that you're going to get nine out of
ten applicants that are terrible, whether they have a college degree or not,
and that their degree in gender studies from San Diego State did not make them
a better accountant or whatever it is you're hiring. For the reason they do
it is a filtering mechanism. There's just so many applicants. It's just easier
to thin the herd, to cut the pile by requiring college degrees. But
what you're doing is you're taking a whole group of people that maybe didn't want
the student debt, maybe had a tough family situation, young in life,
whatever the case may be, but would be really good workers, really good
producers, really good innovators, and you're taking them out of contention for no
reason. And so I think those are two ideas of where employers can benefit
the labor force by getting rid of two very stupid policies. Culturally, day
to day, for the workforce the company does have, they should be economically
minded. Remind employees when they're doing the mundane things with spreadsheets and assembly line
that it isn't mundane. Remind them that they're serving people all over the world.
And obviously I understand that people are there to do a job and that
the benefit is the paycheck, but creating a culture where people want to be
there, I can't get the state to help with this. I can't get
the government to pass law saying you must smile at your job, or you
must make everybody happy. Don't infantalize them by saying, oh, you can
be happy here, because we're going to have an arcade and we're going to
let you skateboard around the office and all these kind of you know, cool
tech company things. Treat them my adults, but make it a place people
want to work and communicate. To me, these things are not rocket science,
and there's a low hanging fruit for how people can enjoy their employment opportunities
far more. David Moonson, thank you so much for joining the show today.
Well, it's been my pleasure. I really enjoyed your questions. Thank
you so much for having me. Absolutely you've been listening to another edition of
The Federalist Radio Hour. I'm Emily Dashchenski, culture editor here at The Federalist,
and we will be back soon with more. Until then, be lovers
of freedom and anxious for the friend. I heard the fame voice the Reason,
and then it faded away. Mm hmm