I am going to vich somebody until they bleed three to one. Ask not
what your country can do for you, Ask what you can do for your
country. Mister Garbuchow, tear down this law. It's the Ricochet Podcast with
Peter Robinson and Rob Long. I'm James Lylyx. Today we talked to David
Bonson about his new book, Full Time Work at the Meaning of Life.
So let's work ourselves a podcast. I'm well meaning and I'm an elderly man,
and I know what the hell I'm doing. I'm in president, and
I put this country back on his sheet. I don't need his recommendation it
totally. My memory is fine. As you know, Initially the President of
Mexico CC did not want to open up the gate to allow humanitarian material to
get in. I talked to him, I convinced open the gate. Welcome
everybody. It's the Ricochet Podcast. I'm James. Oh you're wondering what number
it is. It's number six hundred and seventy eight. And we got that
far. I know got that far thanks to listeners like you, as they
say in National Public Radio, or members like you wh've gone to ricochet dot
com and discovered that whoa, Please do what I've been looking for all my
life. Here it is there, it is Go there, you'll love it.
But in the meantime, I'm here with Rob Long and Hey Ron,
how's New York? Hey James good, how are you well? I'm I'm
disconcerted because it's snowing and it's been fifty degrees here for a fortnight or so.
It's been very warm, which of course people ascribed to the end of
the world. And now it's snowing, and you know, the old historical
cultural i mean, climate norms are reasserting themselves, almost as though these things
are cyclical and work themselves out. Yeah, almost, as if we have
seasons. Yeah, seasons. That's a great idea. Well, tis the
season to complain about a lot of things. And everybody's mad about the border
dealer and the lack thereof. And I mean, having watched these things come
and go over and over and over and over again, I don't put any
stock in anything that they passed whatsoever, because it seems to me that there's
this weird feeling that unless we get a particularly tailored bill exactly to these minute
specifications, we just got to let everybody in in the absence of a bill,
we can't actually send anybody down there to say no, you can't come
in. We got a lot of you guys now, and we're gonna we're
gonna stop for a while, maybe a year. Sorry, But we are
under no obligation whatsoever to let you in and then drive you to Montana and
give you a phone and a gift card. We're just under no obligation to
that. So or are you of a different mind, Rob, Do you
think that? Actually? Well, I mean all of this was very very
important to tell about seven pm last night when it the entire political conversation became
about something else, which isn't whether the president is doing any the right thing
on the border board. The president is there inside the president I mean,
I mean, just to finish the border thing. The argument for the border
bill is that, no, of course the current president is going to do
anything. And yes, of course the number five thousand is very high,
but it might help set up the next president or the future presidents who may
be a little bit more inclined to protect the border to do so. Yeah,
that's a perfectly good argument. It ended up being about presidential politics.
And then I just don't think the presidential politics right now are going to be
about the border. They're going to be about what we You know, one
candidate is borderline, has a borderline personality disorder, and the other candidate is
Scott scrambled eggs up there probably, so you know. The best line I
heard about last night was from Paul Begala or begel or whatever you on CNN.
He said, he said, look, I'm a Biden supporter, and
last night I slept like a baby, meaning I woke up every two hours
and wet the bed. He said, it is terrible, you know anyone
paying attention to politics. And I was, this is a huge, huge
disaster. I heard about it. I was like, I was out and
then you know this, like Twitter was going crazy and some I got some
text people saying are you watching this? And then as I was going home,
I was going to turn it on and watch it, and I all
the tweets are saying, oh man, it's so great. Watch people and
CNN they're they're, they're, they're they're falling apart, they're stunned. They
don't have to say. But by the time I got home and turned on
the TV and watched was watching CNN. They had already collected themselves. I
missed the part where they were uh stunned and didn't know what to say.
It had already gotten whatever the marching orders were, and they were saying no.
He looked fine, he looked, what are you trying about? It
was? I mean, usually there's one president, there's one candidate in every
president on selection for whom. This is a high wire act. Right,
We're watching a guy and we're like, I don't know this is going to
be I don't know, let's hope. This just feels like elder abuse.
Now we have these two guys running and I, you know, I just
don't understand how anybody the Democratic Party could see what happened last night and say
we'll turn this around between now and Labor Day, because it's going to get
better. I just don't think all together, only so many be twelve shots
to the shanks. Iired a little throaty chuckle under there, a little gentle
throaty chuckle, which means Peter's with us. Peter Robinson, thank you,
gentlemen, could do What is this? You're talking about politics? What could
this possibly be? You know, we have we have we had a compare
and contrast between Putin and Biden. Putin, who is obviously all there that
there happens to be on the throne of Hail in the lake of fire,
but he's all there. And then then you have Biden who was ranting and
shouting and saying things and stumbling in the rest of it last night, which
some people are saying. And again I don't subscribe to the conspiratorial models that
to have great machiavellian machinations here because I don't think they're that smarter, that
good. But some people are saying, well, this is how they're clearing
the deck for Newsom. They're just putting them out there and show they're intentionally
showing that their major character, their main character, is not all air,
so that there will be setting the stage for getting them off the stage.
Do you think that's true. I have no idea what they're up to.
What's surprising to me is that anybody, let's see how to put this.
I was surprised, and I wasn't surprised. Here's what surprised me that after
all that we've been through with the James Comy machinations during the election of let's
put it this way. I tend to agree with Holman Jenkins of The Wall
Street Journal that James Comy, director of the FBI, saying of Hillary Clinton,
We're not going to bring charges, but she did something really, really,
really bad. May have elected Donald Trump and represented a grotesque violation of
the ordinary prosecuateur prosecutorial standard, which is either you bring charges or you fall
silent. And if I were the Biden campaign, I would be few.
Excuse me. I'm not the Biden campaign. I'm whatever is the opposite of
the Biden campaign. I'm still furious with her. Hu R I believe is
the way the name is spelled. Doing this. Either you bring charges or
your shut up. You don't say, well, actually we should bring charges.
If you were younger and more vigorous, we'd bring charges, he willfully,
But we're not going to bring charges, but we're going to drop a
political bomb in the middle of the American system months before. That is outrageous.
That shocked me. What didn't shock me was a straightforward accounting of the
president's state of mind, so to speak, which anyone, any ordinary person
looking at him on television in the last six months, could see for himself.
What's amazing is that. As Rob said, there seems to have been
a moment when MSNBC and CNN and a lot of professional Democrats actually were surprised.
They seem to have talked themselves into supposing that the President of the United
States is a well man. He's not. I just don't understand. I
don't see. Honestly, I don't see how the Biden campaign recovers from this,
because we now have footage for these Republican ads. Donald Trump, even
his own DOJ says he's a doddering old fool. And Furthermore, bb Netnaho
said yesterday or the day before, I've been traveling a little bit, so
I've lost track of sequence this past week that he expected the war in Gaza
to last several more months. That means it's likely that the Democratic Party will
be ripping itself apart pro Palestinian pro Israel. We already have a permanent encampment
outside the Secretary of State's House in Northern Virginia, a protest encampment. We
have Heckler shouting genocide, Joe. I just can't we get this unwell old
man at a convention in Chicago, where the Democratic Party is likely to be
ripping itself up. None of this is an argument for Donald Trump. It's
not even an argument that he would necessarily win. What am I saying saying?
I am saying what Rob said with bells on. This is just it's
a mess. It's a mess, and I don't see quite how we get
out of it, except so Gavin Newsom, excuse me to answer your question,
James, after a long round about venting the question. The President is
unwell. We know that he got angry during this thing got released. He
called a press conference to prove that he's compass. Meant each I mean,
it was just a catastrophe. He's not there. Who's making the decisions?
That's the question. That's what I don't know. And I also don't know
how you get rid of him. I have assumed that it's doctor Jill,
that if they can persuade doctor Jill that it's for his best that he stepped
down, then it'll happen. But I just don't know. We're in this
weird position where the most reported on man in the world, the president of
the United States, actually isn't where the action is no the country's being run
by a seance that channels the ghost of Liberal Wilson's wife, only James.
In fact, I'm going to just shut up and listen to James, because
James, your interstitial comments are the most powerful thing anybody said. Ah,
no, you're right, it's just it's absolutely because somebody is running it.
Somebody's running show, and we really don't believe at the strategic level that it's
going to be Joe. Now on Twitter, Rob is right. By the
time that they composed themselves, they were able to make a wide variety of
arguments. And there was somebody on Twitter who is saying, oh, you
know, a little bit shaky at the margins. Okay, do you know
where your left ear pod is? Have you ever your car keys in the
last week? And everybody's you know, there's like four hundred responses a good
point. The left air pod is in the case. It's in the case.
It's in the case, because everybody knew it's in the case. We
are not really and some people would point out that well, actually, not
only do I know where my AirPod is, but I am not in charge
of the nuclear control in the nuclear codes, which which makes you want to
ask, is job do they actually actually entrust him with anything of importance these
days, which seems to be like the worst thing you want to ask yourself
about the country, and it's leadership. Who's got who has the football?
Well? The guy who is well, but I mean who who has the
authority? We don't know, we don't who has the authority? And why
isn't the press asking where is is he? Just too? Maybe he's two
well, but it's where three years almost three years into this administration, so
it's about time for the Bob Woodward inside the Bride Biden White House book came
out explaining all this to us. Somebody should have been interviewing these people.
They should have been leaking to Bob Woodward or whoever Bob would There's no curiosity
and part of the press about who's running the country, especially a a A
an administration that's been so weirdly incompetent in so many ways. I mean,
it does seem like you're I'd be interested, you know, I was surprised
at how I've said this before in this podcast, how just how like Keystone
Cops it is over there, like these are people you know, you'd think
it would just be if anything could be bland and boring and exactly what you
expect, but it seems like it's a little bit. It's just it's kind
of good. Like the d team is in. The strange thing for them
is going to be I think to the exactly one is that they're going to
try this. I think they're going to try this business of oh, well,
you know, it's gonna it's gonna go like in the Kubler Ross.
Like first it's gonna be like, well, so what Trump thought that Dicky
Haley was Nancy Pelosi. This's gonna be that for a while, and then
it's gonna be the way there's a little something to that. There's definitely seventy
seven years old exactly. And then it's gonna be uh, well, yeah
are you, Oh you're so smart, and a bunch of people saying,
oh, he's a whip smart the guy. And then it's gonna be some
silence, and then they're gonna have to figure out. They're gonna look at
some numbers and they're gonna say, Okay, what do we do? And
it may be too late, but it's also you're talking about a distributed party
control system now for both parties, So there's nobody nobody's gonna make the call
like there's nobody gonna go sit in the office and say, hey, no
one's gonna do that unless it's doctor Jill. Maybe I'll give you a contrast.
In nineteen nineteen forty nineteen forty four, FDR is running for president again.
He's been through already. He's been through, as I recall, two
vice presidents. We now know that he wasn't well. Insiders knew that he
wasn't well. He's waging the war. He's absorbed with the details of the
war, and his view is that he should either run that his vice president
should remain Henry Wallace, who was very far to the left and a Soviet
sympathizer and known as that at the time, or he would drop Wallace and
take on William O. Douglas, who was another figure of the left.
Four as I recall, it was four. It may have been five,
but as I recall, it was four Democratic Party bosses, guys who ran
the party machine in four urban centers sent a delegation to FDR and said,
no, this is just not going to flow. It's not going to work
with our people. You need Harry Truman. And that is how Harry Truman
was chose as vice president. Now, am I defending party bosses? You
know what I sort of am. What I am defending is coherent parties with
decision making capacity, with decision makers who were in touch with ordinary Americans.
And those days it would have been largely union workers, labor, the guys
who actually ran a big democratic cities. And that is gone that Harry Truman
was a great president and they were right about it. Henry Wallace would have
been a catastrophe. William O. Douglass was a figure of the left until
he died in the FDR put him on the Supreme Court. They got it
right. There is no decision making apparatus left. Well, A lot of
it has to do with this weird attitude people have towards the political leader of
the moment, which is sort of a post I don't know, maybe kind
of a post jfk ish kind of thing maybe or biggest FDR the idea that
this guy, this chief executive of the administrative branch of government, frankly,
is you know, the father of the country. You know, he's there
and we must love him and we must support him. And you I used
to think it was exclusively liberals, right because that, you know, they
had that horribly weird slavish attitude towards Obama that you could never ever criticize the
precious president. And the same thing now with the Trump supporters, which is
he's the Jesus. You know, it's all Kim Jong un stuff like uh
seventeen holand ones for the Great President. And it's just bizarre to me.
And I think that there were people in the party systems back then who felt
like, no, no, I worked for a bigger organization than the president.
I worked for the party. The president's come and go, the party's
got a last. But you know, every senator looks at every president thinks
this guy he's going to be gone, and I'm still going to be here.
And I think we I think we missed that the Senate was an alternative
source of power in those days too. I mean, yeah, when an
LPGA is majority leader, he's in some ways as powerful with regard to domestic
politics. Of course, not a president is also commander in chief. The
idea that Chuck Schumer is in any way kind of offset to whatever is happening
down at the White House is, as far as I can tell, it's
just visible. Well, they'll be happy to get rid of Biden and swap
in newsom. I'm saying this forever because now it's apparent to them that they're
dealing with a guy who is going to get up and say I just spoke
the other day with Grover Coolidge and he reminded me that the business of America
is damage or something like that, and everybody will let go back and explain
that what your business is, I don't know. But here's the thing.
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for sponsoring this the Ricochet Podcast. And now we welcome to the podcast David
Boson, Managing partner and chief investment officer of the Bonson Group and a contributor
to Forbes and that National review that we all love so much. David,
Welcome, well, what wonderful to be with you. Thank you for having
me. I'm at the office right now in Minneapolis, where not too many
people are, and I'm here because I love my work. And sometimes you
go ask me if I'm ever going to retire, and I cannot possibly see
why. As long as I'm be able to hold a panter type at a
keyboard. I can't imagine not working. My work, I dare say,
defines me, and I would be bereefed if I laid down my tools.
You've written a book about the necessity of work, and we've been told and
over again that we work too much here in the West. We put too
much stuck in it. We identify with our jobs. We should have four
day work weeks, we should be like the French. We should be more
spiritual. In the rest of it, you make a philosophical and spiritual argument
for the necessity of work, and lots of it. Tell us about your
book. Yeah, it's interesting when people say we should be more spiritual and
work less, because the fact of the matter is that the country used to
be a lot more spiritual, and it used to work a lot more.
The spirituality of America was where the work ethic came from. It's also the
work ethic that we're still living off of. We live from a DNA that
our forefathers had that has created some of the greatest prosperity and quality of living
the world's ever seen. I do agree with what you said that living and
working are one and the same. And the notion of retiring being defined as
the removal of oneself from reductive activity is a travesty and it's doing great damage
to a lot of elements in society. It's doing a lot of damage to
retirees. Their lack of self worth and engagement, I think is a really
tragic byproduct. But it's doing a lot of damage to the economy. It's
doing a lot of damage to businesses. Gen Xer is like myself. I'll
turn fifty this year. I love my twenty six year olds, but I
don't really need them to give me a whole lot of advice and wisdom and
experience. But they're going to do it anyway. Yeah, you know,
it's funny, actually, Rob, the twenty six year olds are a lot
better than the thirty six year olds. The gen Z's in a different place
than the gen y. But I wish I had sixty six year olds and
seventy one year olds to give me more counsel. They're not going to work
the same hours, They're not gonna have the same pressure. There's going to
be different physical and mental and agent stage dimensions that change one productive activity.
But total removal from the marketplace to do nothing but golf and drink I find
to be very depressing. So yeah, I mean I've heard the same thing,
David. By the way, this is Rob in New York. Thank
you for joining us. The book is called Full Time Work in the Meaning
of Life, and we'll have that in the show notes too. For listening,
and you just go to Ricochet. People I know who are approaching retirement
or retired or thinking about it, they almost always say the same thing,
which is like, what happens then I got to do something? What am
I going to do? And I think people who are entering the workforce have
been told something about how, you know, you have to find your passion
and this and that, and we have all these little ways to do it.
We have all these quizzes and tests and stuff and counselors and HR.
The HR business has become I mean, you know, the human resources is
now a department that ten even ten years ago, no corporate executive today would
really recognize. It just was a different world. So how come is this
disconnect between people enthusiastically finding their passion and going to work. We're spending a
lot of time trying to fit people into the right pegs. Why and how
are we failing? I think one of the problems has been a generation in
the making, which is the notion that the Boomers had, which was a
very hard working generation, a very productive and a very successful one. It's
quite materially prosperous, but it was the first generation that had this idea of
retirement that first of all, just because of mortality. Post World War Two,
mortality went up about ten years, and then since then it's gone up
another ten so people are living about twenty years longer than they were at the
time the Baby Boomers were born. And that's coincident with the time period in
which the material prosperity of the society exploded. Real GDP growth for seventy years
was over three percent per year net of inflation, so resulted in a tripling
of the economy in that time period. So you had this potion available to
boomers of living long enough to have a twenty or twenty five year retirement and
having enough money to do so. That's all well and good, except for
this. I think it messaged to the younger people you're asking about this notion
that plenty of boomers were more than willing to communicate and almost explicitly state that
the purpose of work was to not do it anymore. People were working for
the purpose of exiting the workforce, getting the RV, getting the golf club,
getting the various essentially a sort of twenty five year vacation. I don't
know why a twenty six year old enters the workforce with the right passion and
diligence if the message they had is that the only reason they're doing it is
to not do it anymore. I mean, I went to a I did
this executive health thing years ago about you know, I don't know, five
years ago. I was Sony made me do it, and I went and
he spent a whole day. And the first thing the doctor said to me,
after the whole day of tests and all this stuff to me, he
said, look, you're in pretty good health. Your real problem is going
to be you're going to live a long time, you probably need more money.
We're talking about every time people talk about raising the retirement age or any
of those things, there's this giant reaction about how terrible that is. But
you're arguing that work in general is something that is important not for yourself,
but also for your society and for your spiritual life, for your soul,
for your sense of purpose and belonging in the world. How do you convince
people of that. You know there's going to be some you don't convince.
I think part of the issue with the book, Rob is I'm trying to
give a permission structure a lot. There's a big target market for the book
amongst people of faith, and I think that Evangelicals, Catholics, and Jewish
people are all going to have a certain common ground in one of the premises
of the book, which is this sort of creational account of how God made
us. He made us to work, he made us to be productive,
and he said so, and that it's modeled in sort of this creator creature
design. Not everyone's going to buy into that, and there are people.
We may have different faith traditions, but it doesn't change the fact whether people
believe me about the reason or not that this is inerrant with nature. And
so this view that has become really an economic problem, that part of the
society is meant to be productive and part is meant to be consumptive, is
creating the income inequality and wealth inequality that the left says they're very upset about.
I no longer believe them that they're upset about it, because the cultural
prescriptions are the very things they are exacerbating it. The view we have a
work right now, Here's the thing I'll say about gen Z whatever's going to
happen. You can do whatever you want with a thirty two hour work week,
a four day work week, twelve weeks of siesta, or whatever the
hell they call it, quitting do all of it. The top twenty percent,
the next Elon Musk, the next Mark Zuckerberg's, the next junior level
programmers in Silicon Valley, they're not going to cooperate. The next investment bankers
down here Park Avenue, private equity guys, they're not going to play along.
They're going to be working eighty hours. So what are you going to
do? You cannot hold back the engine of productivity that's embedded in the human
spirit. What you can do is make it more contagious. I can't catch
the bug of laziness, but other people can catch the bug of hard work
and productivity and success. What Arthur Brooks refers to his earned success the greatest
feeling in the world of knowing that you did something and you can now get
to enjoy the rewards and you earned it. It's it's really I think about
reframing the conversation onto logically that this is the very being of humanity to be
productive and capable and self sufficient. Is it hard to catch the bug?
Though? I mean, I'm talking about gen Z when you're working from home
talking to a zoom. Let's let's just you got to tell you. You'll
have to understand Rob has never really worked hard. Yeah, Like he's sort
of like dancing around good jobs. What should I do at this stage in
my life? And all those of us who've known him in other stages in
his lifes, what what? What You're going to start working now? Well?
No, obviously not. I'm really more of a thinker, as you
know, Peter. I git out an idea every day, That's what I
do. But okay, my young cousin your second because I guess she is
my cousin's daughter. She gets a good job, she's working here in New
York. She gets a great, great job, new job at a big,
you know, new cool finance company, and they tell her, uh,
you come in. You know, you got to come in the office
just to you know, two days a week. She's like, okay,
great, yeah, and we'll always have dinner. I'm talking to her.
She's chuck her her job because the good thing is I only have to come
in two days a week. And I said, well, what do you
mean, said, well, that's what they you know, my my,
my boss wants me in two days a week. And I said, why
don't you go in five days a week? And why? She's young enough,
so this is all new to her. Why they want me two days
a week. So, well, my guess is that your boss is there
three days a week or something. And what she doesn't want is you do
there five days a week when she's not there. You know, no boss
wants the bright underling to be walking around the office solving problems and doing stuff.
But how do you catch that virus of exciting competitive employee if you're at
home? And how do you put the if I made Rob's question what I've
observed with my own kids who are at the age of the young woman Rob
is describing, how do you put the pieces of the working world back together
for kids who just went through COVID where working at home was enforced. Well,
the entire appendix of this book is my critique of the work from home
movement as itself an anti work movement, and having been here in the city
entire time, five days a week required. We have seven offices around the
country, sixty three employees. There was that brief period in spring of twenty
twenty where you couldn't go into the offices, but at the point starting around
May of twenty twenty when we could get stuff reopened, everybody had to go
back. Did go back. I've never had a single complaint, And I
think Rob's right that there are some of the companies. It's less so in
finance than some of the tech cool type companies, but almost every one of
them is throwing in the towel, Netflix, Facebook, Google, Amazon,
growing in that home towel. Yeah, they've all said, okay, this
whole thing, and we're going to let you work in your pajamas forever.
Well, now we need you in three now, we need you in four
now. A lot have gone to Oh, we realized by saying three days
a week that we just created a four day weekend. Every single person is
taking Monday and Friday off. So we're going to now require you to be
in the office three days a week, but Monday is going to be one
of the required ones. I'm sitting here looking outside Park Avenue Jamie Diamond,
JP Morgan. You know he's an old school boomer, David Solomon who runs
Goldman Sachs Downtown. They got everybody back. I didn't understand some of the
companies Google and Facebook. Facebook over by Penn Station, Google down, I
think it's near Chelsea signed the biggest leases in the history of New York City
for office in the middle of COVID, and then they're telling people are oh,
yeah, we're going to do work from home forever, and then they're
signing billion dollar leases. Salesforce built a billion dollar tower in downtown Chicago in
the middle of COVID. All of these people were full of it, and
they know human nature, you're not going to get maximum productivity. But what
they did is create the perfectly self centered trap. Where As much as they
want to not go to work, they can have a permission structure and flexibility
for their younger people to not come. But to Rob's point, which I
agree one hundred percent, the answer, unfortunately, even if he meant the
question rhetorically, is you're not going to get people to embrace the full orb
of work of office work, in particular, what we're talking about here if
you're not in the office, the culture, the brand, the collaboration,
the real time interaction that can only take place at the water cooler, in
the kitchen, walking down the hallway, popping your head in someone's door.
Our ability to manage money. Do research have traders talking to advisors, talking
to investors clients. This is that you have to be in office. And
I'm a conservative, largely because I believe in conserving norms and traditions. I'm
biased towards that we act as if this office thing came out of nowhere,
like someone just made it up. And then twenty twenty virus told us,
well, the office thing sure was a bad idea. It came about for
a reason, and unfortunately we went on a two or three year temper tantrum,
and it was childish and it needs to stop. You mentioned JP Morgan.
I don't know if you can see it from there, but they're building
their gargantuan, into my eyes, ugly structure on Park Avenue. There's no
way they're spending that much money and building that much space without requiring everybody to
come in. I'm looking right now across at a building here which was largely
empty after COVID until the major tenant said to all of his employees, all
right, here's the thing. Your presence is necessary for your continued employment by
this firm. I'm going to pay for your parking. I'm going to give
you a ten dollars lunch voucher every day. But you got to be here.
And you know what, They all came in our building, which is
a newsroom. It's largely empty every day except for Tuesday, when everybody shows
up and pretends. There's a picture on the wall of if the staff of
the newspaper outside our old building before it was demolished. Big group of people,
big wonderful group of people who all worked together, knew each other,
had that sort of cainetic little synthesis that you get of ideas and the rest
of it. It's a wonderful image of the community that you can build when
you are all together in the same place. I'm not there because I was
working from a moment that day, as it turned out, and actually about
that, I've been hybrid all my bat I've been hybrid all my life,
and I see the advantages of both. But that said, when you talk
to kids today and you tell them this, and I see this over I
was just reading this on the subredit for Minneapolis because once again one of the
major employers is said, we want you back, and everybody riles up.
Why should I have to drive? Why should I have to sit in traffic
or on a bus? Why why should I Why should I have to do
anything connected physically in meat space with other people? And these are the people
who were born and raised on glass screens, on glowing glass screens, that
they've been looking down their entire life at this narcissistic pool in their hand.
And I don't know if they're temperamentally or intellectually capable of catching that virus.
They may just have so many antibodies that they're never going to understand the virtue
of shared physicality in a basic location unless they're Unless they're forced to. So
what do you do I mean, is it going to get to the point
where the economy contracts so much that people will take every you know, will
actually take a job that requires them to be in for five days a week,
he said, ending his long speech with what sounds like a question but
probably isn't. Well, but see, it doesn't have to be the macro
economy shrinking that much. It has to be the microeconomy. IBM announcing last
week people need to move closer to work. They didn't say you got to
come to work, they said you got to move closer to work. Ups
said we're laying off ten thousand people, and we're starting with the folks that
haven't been coming to the office. That these weren't drivers, obviously, they're
about corporate jobs. And they're just announcing that we're going down the list,
and it's we're looking at key cards of who's coming and who's not. Well,
what is the answers to how you give people come back to the office.
What is the reason that most people who have worked in office their whole
career used to go because there was table stakes for the paycheck. I'm not
a real big fan of the deal of people even saying we're going to give
you a lunch voucher. We're gonna, you know, put an arcade in
the break room, We're gonna have a yoga class two days a week.
I don't think you have to bribe people to come to work, but maybe
some do. I don't like treating adults like children, but I do know
this. It's not the kid's fault that when they when COVID happened, their
boss is quit going to work. I mean the portion where my office is
moving to in the fifties on Sixth Avenue, all of those skyscrapers there mostly
filled with law firms, and the reason why they weren't open is because the
senior partners were not there. And now they've gone back and look. I
think that there is a certain kind of organic solution to this. Over time.
You won't personally Rob's niece. You're in your twenties, your talent,
and you're working hard. If no one's there to see it, it doesn't
matter. You have to be seen. And so I believe a lot of
this will correct itself. But you made a comment about for years you'd already
been doing a kind of hybrid deal. See that's not what we're talking about.
I'm referring to jobs that were forever time, eternal places that people went
and worked together, and that allegedly something changed at the point of the pandemic.
There was always a certain work from home component. There were always people
that would grab a laptop and go into Starbucks and that kind of stuff.
Well, I'm not talking about everybody needs to go for the sake of it
into some bureacrack environment. But there are companies that we know operate more efficientcy
And you know, the thing that has never come up in this conversation is
when the young people say what's best for me, when the bosses say what's
best for me? Does anybody care anymore what's best for the customer of the
business. It's just surreal to me how self centered it is. Well,
I kintd a question. So the strangest thing is that for just before we'll
say March twenty twenty, right the high water mark of COVID, where everybody
went home and never came back, the workplace had gotten really nice. I
mean, there were these famous stories about the Silicon Valley. You gonna go
like I give you a pizza and I'll do your dry cleaning for you and
drive you around, and even like down here with these hard nose spots that
are traditionals, seem kind of nice. You know, if you walk downtown
on Broadway and great by Zaccati Park, you look up at the Brown Brothers
Harriman building has got to be like, what could be more austere than that?
And you're like, you can look in the window there and it's it's
kind of nice, and there's like easy chairs, people sitting around. It's
kind of like a really high end Starbucks. Right. So, and at
the same time, the sort of HR machine and HR philosophy took over everything
so that you could you knew you were going to have certain kinds of understandings.
Your main, uh, your main relationship in the company was your HR
person, who would be the inter loper between you and your supervisor, would
guide all the the reviews that you had to have. Right, so,
it seemed like we were in a direction of making work more fun and more
human and more all sorts of more good stuff. But did we end up
doing the opposite? Was that a mistake? Yeah, that's a good question.
I mean, obviously it was a mistake. Economically for the good people
we work. You know, they added the kegs and the lobbies and the
lounges. And then I was at a WE work once for like for a
month, and let me tell you, there was a lot of jewelry making
and beer tasting, and there was nobody was working at the we work.
It's very ironic, and I do think and I you know what, I
know, I sound so old saying all this. I just don't care because
there's a big Silicon Valley thing. Google would brag about how you can skateboard
around the office and there's no dress code, and they had the full cafeteria.
You know. Musk went into Twitter and just said, to hell with
all this stuff. He fired seventy percent of the people. We're doing breakfast,
lunch, and dinner. I mean a ten dollars voucher, like these
guys were probably getting a hundred bucks of food a day. You know.
I mean, it's just I think it's infantilizing. And it's not because I
want everyone walking in the snow two miles of back and forth every It's not
that kind of thing. It's that work is supposed to be something in which
you go with a collective purpose to produce goods and services profitably that meet the
needs of humanity, and the idea that we have to pamper everyone with these
things. And apparently in pampering them, we don't even get a payoff.
We don't even get a built a loyalty, you know. So I think
societally that this will adjust because it was a failed experiment. You just mentioned
no dress code out here in Silicon Valley, and that is true. Of
course, in California. Nobody ever dresses what our viewers can't see. We're
looking at you on zoom, and you are dressed in a suit and tie.
There you sit in the middle of Manhattan Island. I am told that
even at Goldman these days, Rob and I I disclose a little more about
Robin me than anybody cares to hear. Rob and I both had the same
dream as juveniles coming out of our college that we too wanted to go work
on Wall Street. Of course, we had no idea what they really did
on Wall Street for the American economy. We didn't. But they ate at
nice restaurants and they dressed well, and that appealed to both of us.
I'm told that even at Goldman. Nobody wears a tie anymore. What's going
on here? I think it is the end of the world, although it
isn't true. It isn't true of all of Wall Street. Goldman is struggling
with this complex of being so austere and so traditional. Now they feel like,
oh, we can be the cool kids by saying you don't have to
wear a tie. So they do way Friday business casual, which most of
Wall Street does. But then they do a Monday through Thursday where you're not
even wearing a tie, but it's still a suit with just open collar.
But JP Morgan doesn't do that. Morgan Stanley doesn't do that, and then
a lot of private equity doesn't. When you are on Manhattan, California,
you're right Silicon Valley, so it's different everywhere. Most of the law firms
aren't requiring it. So some day, wait a minute, you mean you
can go to Sullivan Cromwell as a junior associate without a tie. I would
imagine it would be a very bad idea for a junior associate to do it.
And I would imagine anyone in the legal world is going to court or
deposition it was still tie in front of a judge. Okay, yeah,
because you're a grown up and you're in front of a grown up and you
have to act like it. But then I think in the offices it's a
much more casual culture. So yeah, I'm a god. How am I
doing it? Not sounding old? No, you're not doing great, You're
uh okay, now I'm gonna sound really young. There. There past week,
two weeks, two viral videos I saw as I'm a dedicated, devoted
TikTok you know. Consumer one was a woman. It was on Twitter show.
She she recorded, she videotaped or videoed or whatever we say now her
firing. She knew she was getting called onto zoom call with somebody. It
was less, you know, it's like, please be on the zoom call
at to twelve oh seven pm. That was three weeks ago, your virality,
Yeah exactly. So uh so she did it. She she recorded the
whole thing, and she keeps saying, hey, listen, I I this
is unfair. I did my I just I did I met all my requirements.
My KPIs right, I met him. I just started in August and
she had all these and it's a very awkward, weird call. The HR
people with their weasel word hr weel wor And the response was really interesting from
some people. It was half people said, you know, I will never
hire this woman for like recording this interview, and the other half said,
you go, you fight. And then the second viral video somebody I don't
know what his mom or what it was, some young kid young I mean
maybe early teens, maybe right early teens at a fast food restaurant. I
couldn't tell. Eich On. It was smiling, happily going through with the
customer all the different choices and then kind of robotically staying what he's supposed to
say and recalling it back and asking for Earth. And the comment was how
depressing more McJobs, And half of the people on Twitter, I mean you
may have seen it who saw that proudly talked about their first job and how
much they admire this kid. So I guess my question is how do we
get how do we keep that kid from turning into that woman, and how
do we do it and still be America with where we reward risk taking and
you know, swashbuckling pirate capitalists doing crazy stuff with their money that's going to
either work or like you know, how do we get how do we how
do we get more elon musks. What a great way to start is the
sixteen, seventeen, eighteen, nineteen year old at the fast food restaurant that
first job. There's a war in our country on teenage employment. There's a
lot of parents don't like it anymore, a lot of schools don't like it,
and then most of the laws don't like it, regulatory minimum wage.
You know. I did a panel the other day at my book release with
a National Review event League Club, and Andy Pusner was the CEO of Carl's
Junior, and Hardy's was on the panel, And Brawley's a PhD economist at
George Mason, And there was another guy who was a Treasury Department economist in
two different presidential administrations. All three of them their first job in high school
was an hourly wage job at Baskin Robbins. Just a coincidence. All three
actually started not only in an ice cream fast food kind of environment, but
the same one. Andy became the CEO of one of the largest fast food
companies in the world. The sub one of the reasons in my book that
we were talking about earlier, full time that just came out every chapter.
I started with a little cute thing at the beginning of my first jobs in
order, and so there's, you know, twelve chapters, and I go
through the various jobs I had in those teenage years. That kid, you're
talking about, how's the ability to serve a customer? And they think it's
a McJob. I think it's demeaning. No, it is the ability to
interact with human beings, to meet a need, to formulate adult conversation skills,
to have a boss you don't like and you have to get along with
them, to navigate being on a team. These are life skills that will
parlay into all sorts of other creative and productive endeavors. Taking away the minor
league system, if careers and vocations are major leagues, taking away teenage employment
is like taking away Triple A minor league baseball. Okay, it's an absolute
disaster. Culturally, I think we have to facilitate more teenage employment. I
think we have to get rid of the entitlement that has a college Why did
college people stop working when they're in school or why has it gone down so
much? The student loans were never meant to pay for your room board,
tuition and your beer money. You were supposed to have to go work for
that stuff. Right now they've supplemented in the student loans. People are living
off of it. And I think a part time job for college students is
a very good thing as well. Some since scenarios and situations are going to
be a bit different. But I'm more speaking macro and culture. So I
know we got got to let you go. But so you're not just talking
about work being a good a foundational piece of a working, flourishing capitalist economy.
You're talking about it being a foundational piece for a flourishing human spirit.
Yes, that is right, and the reason being that we are made innately
to work. We are not made to merely be passive and recipients of other
people's work. That what we are made to do involves proactivity, It involves
agency. And I think the words, and again I share this as a
result of my own Christian faith. There are different analogies people can find.
I think we share with our creator his attribute. So being productive, creative
and innovative work provides the avenue for production, innovation, and creation. You
take away those things, you end up getting people that it becomes dehumanizing,
it becomes alienating, and it leads to this crisis of despair oftentimes drug and
alcohol abuse, depression, mental health. But let's say some of those more
severe things are not there. Take opioids out, suicide, all of this
unimaginably depressing stuff. And you just have someone who's not hyper depressed, but
they sleep into eleven, they get up, play video games, smoke pot
and rinse and repeat every day Robins in other words, exactly, you know
what the tragedy there is a wasted life. Yes, and all I'm trying
to do is get people to not waste their lives. Yes, David.
My father went into the office every day of the business that he started and
founded until he was ninety three and died. And it was only later we
found that he was taking money out of the till, but still it kept
him going every day to have a reason to go. Thank you for joining
us. The book, the book that you got to go to Amazon and
get is Full Time Work and the Meaning of Life because they're connected, David
Monson, thank you for joining us on the podcast today. And you know,
if you ever change your mind and write a book about the necessity of
part time or something like that. Come by and we'll talk about last and
the interview will be half as short. Though. There we go, Thanks
for David, Thank you. The thing you might want to do those you
know you don't want to do the Japanese salaryman thing though, where you just
work and grind and die and the only possible joy you have in life is
going out somewhere and getting absolutely hammered. No, especially if you're older,
I mean, oh man, after a night with friends and in bibing,
you know, you don't bounce back the next day like he used to,
right because he so you have to make a choice. You can either have
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you. Zbiotics are sponsoring this the Ricochet podcast. Well tell them before we
go, you know. I was informed of this on the rundown that's passed
along to us Things we might want to discuss. It is the most exciting
news of the year period, and that is the Vesuvius challenge. Have you
guys been following this? No, Well what it is is they got these
carbonized scrolls from the Vesuvian explosions. Oh yes, yes, that's a go
ahead, explain that. That's fascinating. Yes, right, So they found
this vast library and I don't know if it's whose it was, I mean,
who did it belong to? Do we find out? Was it Pliny?
It was actually Pliny's library something? Anyway, it's a huge collection of
scrolls and they were just turned into carbon by the by the pyroclastic flow or
whatever it was, the buried Pompey and ericulaneum. But they're able now to
read them with this new technology, the MRI somehow there's a laser imaging whatever.
They're able to figure out what each individual letter is on this packed you
know, broad of coal practically, and they're finding primary sources. They're going
to find histories, they're going to find novels. They're able to bring back
this library from two thousand years ago, and it's I mean, it's the
greatest stop it is. So what do you think? What else is there
to say exactly? But I mean, what are you hoping they find I
know what I'm hoping they find. Rob is hoping to find some new recipe
for a martini, would be my guess. But don't we have my memory
on this is shaky, But we know that, don't We have only a
third or a quarter of the plays of Euripides. We know that two thirds
of that work has been lost. We know that much of Plato has been
lost. We have there are references in Plato to conversations to work. Well,
there's a lot that we have references to that have been lost or I
was listening to BBC in our Time podcast the other day on Tiberius and the
sources that we have on the reign of Tiberius. There are only four or
five sources on a rain that lasted for decades, and those sources refer to
bits of writing that have been lost. Some of this has to exist in
this vast library, absolutely so, charcoal scrolls in Pompeii. If so much
of the stuff that we know about the emperors is secondhand coming from people,
I mean they weren't there at the time. They're writing about what people supposedly
wrote at the time. If we find other primary sources about these things.
We may have our expectations, our knowledge up ended, and that's fantastic,
that's great. I also want to see I also want popular literature. I
also want to see what the you know, what the romance novels were like?
The what the I mean because guys are kind of sort of writing science
fiction in their own way in those times from some of the stuff that we've
been able to get. They're speculating on civilizations and the moon and the sun
and the rest of it, and having conversations about that. There was a
thriving book industry enrolled. Just because it was scrolls doesn't mean it was books.
So yes, this is very exciting. Rob's looking, of course,
for some sitcoms. He wants more comedy. He wants more of the comedies.
Right, well, who knows what is what is Latin for? Set
up joke? Set up joke? Well, there was a Menander, wasn't
he? Was it Menander? I don't know. One of those. Very
bad. The Roman comedies are pretty bad, the ones we have. Yeah,
hey, boys, listen, I just have to ask you because it
totally eludes me. We have the super Bowl coming up. I'm a forty
nine Ers fan. I have to root for the forty nine ers, although
I'm extremely worry where our quarterback has turned into a couple of shaky performances in
the last couple of games, and Mahomes is one of the greatest quarterbacks as
far as I can tell, who's ever lived. Set that aside Taylor Swift?
Oh what what? Where do we begin to in brief explain to me
A why she's a national phenomenon and b how she's gotten mixed up in the
Super Bowl presidential I don't understand, Robot, you want to take? Do
you want to take the appeal of Taylor Swift or the Siah? I feel
like it's time to wrap. There's no finish, there's no finish, there's
no way to make me understand. Nope, all right, we'll take this
talk, Mike. Then, basically, she's a thirty two year old woman
who acts like a sixteen year old and appeals to all the other unmarried thirty
two year old women who like to be able to believe there's sixteen and the
whole thing about this being a sy op to like Joe Biden's absolute complete stalking
nonsense. And you can read about that and why it's nonsense at ricochet dot
com, which one of our members did a very nice job of phill ating
the other day. So that's that. Go to ricochet dot com and of
course patronize our sponsors, which would be z Biotics and Shopify, and give
us that five star review at Apple Podcasts just to make everybody happy, and
stay tuned. Ricochet five point zero is coming, but from the meantime,
we'll see you all in the comments, said Ricochet four point zero. Co
niners Next week, Boys. Next week, fellow Kansas City, Kansas Ricochet
join the conversation