Ted Audio Collective Hello everyone, you're listening to After Hours.
I'm Felix. I'm Meir.
And I'm Sarah Green Carmichael from Bloomberg.
Welcome back Sarah.
It's so great to be back with you guys.
It just feels like ages ago, but do you guys have some particularly resonant summer memories that are going to keep you going through the dark days of fall and winter?
Oh, I think I have one.
I saw Tears for Fears at Jones Beach in New York.
Wow. And I don't know if you've ever been to that venue, but if you go a little early before the concert starts, you're looking out on the sea and it's just like this amazing environment.
I think you could listen to the worst band in the world and it would still be an amazing memory.
Wow, that sounds great.
That's great. What about you, Sarah?
We got to take our little more than one year old daughter to the beach this summer.
We did take her to the beach last year when she was a newborn, but she just sort of hung out with me in the beach chair under the umbrella.
This year is totally different.
She got to splash in the waves and watching her sort of approach the ocean in Maine, totally fearlessly splashing in the water, playing with the sand, I think was just really, really great.
That's wonderful. That sounds fantastic.
How about you, Amir here?
So I took two trips for family purposes and it included a wonderful afternoon at Punto Race in California, which I recommend so, so highly.
It was a beautiful, brilliant kind of Sunday and that spot is one of the prettiest places I've been.
So where exactly is it, Amir?
It's about an hour and a half north of San Fran.
And was that the first time you've seen some of these people since a long time?
It was and it was also a wedding at a beautiful venue, which is San Francisco City Hall, which I would recommend for a wedding for everybody.
And then just a wonderful time to like be with extended family in a way that we haven't in a long time.
Yeah, sounds really fantastic.
So what do we got today?
I really would love your thoughts on quiet quitting.
Oh, God! Is it a fake workplace trend?
Is it the fakest workplace trend of all time?
I'm really curious to know what you guys think of this, because it was in the news constantly over the summer.
I have questions. Such a big topic.
Excellent. And I would like to talk about an old topic of ours that we've debated before.
But that seems really pertinent at this moment.
And I'm curious to check in with you content moderation.
What do you make of what's happening on the Internet?
What are your desires or inclinations to intervene?
Or maybe not so much.
Fantastic. That sounds great.
Let's do it. So, Sarah, quiet quitting.
I hope you're not quiet quitting after hours.
It would be very interesting to quiet quit a podcast.
No one would see you go.
Yes, that is true. Here's what interests me about quiet quitting.
So this summer, it sort of started with this TikTok trend of Gen Z talking about doing the minimum at work, just meeting the requirements of the job, and then leaving work on time.
And then there were all these hand -wringing articles written by older people, like, the kids of today, you know, what's wrong with them?
And so is there a thing happening with employee engagement where people are mailing it in?
Or has Gen Z just discovered work -life balance and boundaries?
Or is there something else going on?
It was essentially fabricated out of nothing.
Everybody's reference is this Gallup survey, which shows both people who are really engaged at work and people who are actively disengaged.
And when you look at the time trend, if you look at the numbers, there's nothing at all.
Things move by a few percentage points.
And of course, as a smart journalist, you take the ratio.
The ratio moves more than you would expect.
And all of a sudden, it's a story that's everywhere.
So to me, the most interesting question is, why did it resonate so much?
How did it become a story in the first place?
I think that's exactly right, Felix and Sarah, which is it's kind of interesting in and of itself as a phenomenon.
But the question is, why did it become a phenomenon?
I think there's two answers.
On one side you say to yourself, fantastic.
It's workers sticking it to the proverbial man by disengaging and like, you know, workers of the world unite.
And on the other hand, it's as you put it, Sarah, the older folks being like, these darn snowflakes don't know what it means to do work.
And so I think it became this thing which encapsulated underlying feelings that people have.
I actually think there is something there, which is if it's about right sizing your life in a way that is more in balance with where you want it to be.
I'm all for that. That's got to be right.
And I think if people are moving in that direction, that sounds great.
My concerns about it are, it feels like a recipe for more disengagement as opposed to engagement.
So as a trend, if it's real, it feels like we're going towards less engagement, which as a general rule, I'm not for in work or play or family or friends.
I just don't think it's healthy.
And then the second thing that I've struggled with is you and I and all of us can kind of laugh at these fake trend pieces.
But if you're a young person and you take this seriously as a recipe for what you should do with your life, like, I don't know, it feels bad.
It feeds on itself.
It feeds on itself.
And then this is exactly the opposite of what young people should be doing, which is really investing.
What did you make of it, Sarah?
You guys have sort of captured, I think, a lot of why I was skeptical about it.
And I am skeptical, also in part because first, there was the great resignation people talked about.
That didn't really take place.
That didn't really take place, exactly.
There was additional turnover in the hospitality industry, but it's not like people were resigning on mass economy -wide.
Then there was lying flat, which was sort of the next iteration of this trend, which also wasn't necessarily really a widespread trend.
And now there's quiet quitting.
And I think that there is a higher feeling of burnout now among many people, but to me, that is more caused by everything that's going on outside of work, the pandemic, restrictions, decisions, school closures, all that stuff that we've been living with, and not just what's happening between nine and five.
So that's one thing.
And if you look at the sort of rate of engaged employees, that's been modestly but steadily increasing over the last 20 years.
If you look at unengaged people, that's pretty stable.
So there does always seem to be this core of people who's just not feeling it at work.
And it's really interesting to think why that's the case.
Is it a personality thing?
Are there for whom people work is just always gonna be a grind no matter what they're doing?
Is it a bad management problem?
So there's a lot more to dig into there, but I'm not convinced that this is a new problem or a new phenomenon at all.
The Harvard Business Review had a fabulous follow up on the quiet quitting story where they looked at how much does it vary across managers?
And the most highly rated managers, they have almost no one on their team who has quietly quit, quote unquote.
It's just one or 2 % or so.
And the not so great managers have significant portions of their teams that are just disengaged.
And I think Sarah, this is exactly the right question to ask.
What are the kinds of environments in which people thrive?
And it seems a lot to do with the kind of social interactions that we have.
In particular, the kinds of social interactions with those who manage us.
If they're doing a great job, we're willing to give more.
And if that's a miserable experience or you think the person is only thinking about their own career and not about your well -being, then I think every extra hour worked becomes an extra hour that you don't really want to work.
And to your earlier point, Mihir, I think that's no different in your church choir.
That's no different in family life.
Everything depends on a sense of give and take.
The moment reciprocity breaks down, the levels of engagement break down pretty fast.
And so that begs questions about why it is that so many managers struggle with this basic task of motivation, which has gotta be the most elemental task that you have as a manager, right?
You'd think, right?
And then the second question it begs is, again, to return Sarah to your original question, is there something new here?
Has it become harder?
Are those managers struggling in a way that they didn't use to struggle?
And then you have to, I think, go a little bit to the pandemic, you have to go a little bit to technology, and you have to think through the role of those things in making poorly performing managers perform more poorly because they're even worse at it in these settings.
I am very interested to see over time, can we pull apart some of the specifics of what's happened to people's motivation during the pandemic?
We tend to make a set of assumptions about satisfied employees must be engaged employees, must be happy employees, but that's not necessarily true.
People can be very engaged in their jobs and dissatisfied.
People can be very engaged and almost too engaged and burn themselves out to the point of exhaustion.
So I'm really curious to see kind of where we go now and especially as people get more and more used to hybrid work and managing a hybrid environment.
There's a really interesting study that looked at the nature of communication inside Microsoft during the pandemic.
And one of the things that you see is that the nature of communication becomes much narrower than it used to be.
So you're spending more time with fewer people and your social network now relies on your immediate team.
And so one of the things that I find very interesting to think about is if work is essentially just your team because you no longer have the serendipitous encounters that you typically have if you're physically in the same location, does that increase demands on the quality of managers?
Because now you are basically my conduit to the firm.
Yeah, I gotta believe that's a big piece of what's going on here at Felix.
The nature of work and the role of technology is leading to some very fundamental changes in the way people experience work.
And as a consequence, it's manifest in these feelings.
Sarah put her finger on something I think very important and which is part of what's happening here is there's some sense of ennui and disenchantment with the world.
And then it gets projected onto the different parts of our lives.
So it gets projected onto politics, it gets projected onto work, it gets projected onto many, many things.
I guess what I don't like is I don't like the idea that meeting your job requirements and leaving it five is a form of quitting.
That is a form of living.
That's not quitting.
So I'm curious Felix, if you had a relatively young person come to you and say they were contemplating some form of quite quitting, I'm curious what you would say to them about that decision.
To really lead a healthy life means having some point of engagement.
And for some people it's work, for other people it's family, for someone else it might be sports.
But if this was a person who seemed generally disengaged across all kinds of activities, frankly I would worry about the person.
And I think for a society as a whole, having a mix of types of engagement is actually really healthy.
Even as someone who's really engaged with your work.
How do you get to experience magical moments outside work?
Well, typically the answer is because someone else is engaged in exactly that, if that Gallup poll for some reason all of a sudden showed that everybody has their main source of engagement from work.
I don't know that I would want to live in that society.
Yeah, Sarah, what do you think?
I think if a young person came to me and asked me about, should they quite quit?
I would have a lot of questions for them about why are you framing it this way?
Do you feel burnt out at work?
Have you been working too hard for too long?
Do you feel unrecognized by your boss?
All that stuff. But I think I would also try to reassure them that motivation does wax and wane over the different phases of your life.
There will be times when you feel pulled in other directions and that might be okay.
And it may not mean that you need to quit your job.
It might be okay for you to focus on something else for a little while.
But if it goes on for longer than like three to six months, then maybe it is time to reevaluate and at least ask about getting some new projects that might bring back your attention to work, make you feel a little bit more excited to go to work on a Monday morning.
That's such a good point.
And I think it puts the emphasis also, why quiet?
Yeah, why quiet? Why not make it a point of conversation with your boss that you feel you don't get the recognition that you deserve for you feel there's maybe not much attention paid to the obligations that you have outside work.
I think the quitting part is not great, but the quiet part is maybe as problematic as the I'm only going to do the minimum that I have to do.
Yes. So like I hope Sarah wasn't quiet quitting, I'm hoping you're not feeling like we need to moderate the content here differently.
You want to talk about content moderation, tell us Felix, what's going on?
Yes, there are two really interesting things going on at this moment in time.
One is political. You probably saw that Florida and Texas now both have laws that essentially make it more difficult to moderate content online.
It cuts back the social platform's ability to demote messages, not share messages, maybe block messages more generally.
And I think it's born out of a sense that conservative political messages are more likely to be cut back, are more likely to be moderated than more liberal messages.
I don't know that there's any systematic empirical evidence, not that I have seen anything ever that looked like that way, but that's definitely the political motivation.
It's tangled up in the courts right now.
The Texas law looks like it might go into effect, the Florida law maybe less so.
So that's a push towards less moderation.
Let's go back to an even more freewheeling internet.
And then almost the opposite happens on the side of content moderation online harassment.
A recent example you might remember involved Kibi Farms, one of these online web forums where there was just a nasty, nasty campaign against Clara Sorenti, an LGBTQ activist.
They spread a rumor that she planned a mass shooting and she got arrested as a result with terrible personal consequences for Clara herself, but also for her family.
When you see the response, it's essentially helpless.
There's so few things you can do.
What worked in the end was a campaign directed at CloudFlare, the internet plumbing, internet infrastructure company.
CloudFlare really matters because one of the things that they do is they hide the host.
So one typical way to go after websites that you don't like is to make sure that the company that hosts the website no longer provides these services.
And when CloudFlare hides the host, that's not something you can do.
So I have two questions that I wanted to talk about that I'm just interested in how you're thinking about it.
Is your sense that this is really a first -order importance right now?
Are we looking at something that really matters?
Or this is, there's a million stories on the web.
There's 50 ,000 things going on all the time.
And then some of them get public attention.
Most of them don't.
Should I be worried?
Are you concerned? Maybe we start there.
And then I have an idea how we might actually do it.
And we can talk about whether that idea is a good idea.
But I want to get started with just getting your sense.
How important is it?
I think it is important because I think, especially right now, we're heading into a midterm election in the US.
There'll be another presidential election that kicks off basically as soon as the ink is dry on the midterm results for the next president.
And we saw in the last presidential election that misinformation played a huge role in those events.
And I think any conversation about content moderation usually becomes a conversation about misinformation too.
We also saw that with the pandemic and global health and all kinds of misinformation spreading online.
So it's really important.
And I think the other place it's important, Felix that you mentioned, is when public figures or journalists or people with a public profile get really harassed online and not just sort of mean comments, but comments that are threats that expose them to harm outside of the internet world and the real
world. I think it's important for two reasons.
One is in some sense it's unimportant, which is these are like fringe actors who are way out on the margins.
And so one could dismiss it.
But of course, all these cases, especially freedom of speech cases, are ultimately about fringe actors.
But that's where the rubber hits the road.
And so we should expect it to be important.
The other thing I would say about this problem is it's so damn hard.
So I am delighted that you have an idea.
We will find out if the idea is a good idea.
So I was thinking mostly about what we could do about the fringes, the most extreme forms of speech that end up in physical harm.
And it's not gonna solve everything, but one analogy that I built from is we don't allow you to be anonymous when you drive a car.
And I think that in part has to do with this is not in the sanctity of your home, it's out in the public space, and we have different rules for public spaces than for private spaces.
And also it's probably in recognition of the fact that a car can be a pretty dangerous thing, and we have rules of responsibility and rules related to driving skills and licensing requirements and all of that.
And so I was thinking, what if we rethought the internet as just fundamentally a public space?
And if you want to take a particular role, and specifically if you want to be a producer of information in the public space, you can only do that if you are personally identified.
Go back to the Kiwi Farms example, if the people who orchestrated that attack, if they were known, oh, this is Marco so -and -so living in a particular place, I think it's much less likely that people would do it.
And as a result, the worst kind of harm.
I don't think it would be as frequent as it is today.
So less privacy in a public square.
Now, I want to be really precise about it.
It's not for people who consume.
You get to consume any kind of content completely anonymously.
But if you want to be a producer, where a producer is both someone who actually produces content or someone who shares content.
So I think it's both.
It's sharing and it's producing.
You don't get to be private.
So I think this is really interesting, and I'm kind of with you maybe halfway, right?
So in the following sense, if you go back to the Kiwi Farms case, you're right to, I think, identify the problematic part of the CloudFlare position is on keeping the hosting anonymous.
And I think your solution nails that, which is the hosting services have got to be accessible, because that's, I think, what you're asking for when you say no more anonymity.
What I wouldn't go all the way towards though Felix is, so now I want to comment on some article in some online publication.
Are you going to ask me to register and then the publisher, let's say the Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, is responsible for vetting to make sure that I am Mihir Desai and I'm not Felix?
I'm curious what Sarah has to say.
Well, I'm listening to this with both desire to make the internet less of a junkyard.
I don't want it to be immaculate walled garden, but I don't want it to be full of rusty nails either.
At the same time, I find the idea that there would be no anonymity for posting worrisome, in part for silly reasons.
I'll just say this, I have a Reddit account that is a pseudonym to allow me to comment on Trash TV without that being linked back to my professional identity.
While I'm happy to sort of chat over drinks about Trash TV with anyone who wants it to, as someone who also writes, you know, hopefully professional columns and has a public persona, I'm like, I don't really want anyone to be able to say Sarah Green Carmichael at Bloomberg has all these thoughts on Trash
TV. It's not my professional brand.
So in some sense, I think that because the internet has made our lives, in some sense, so public, we also need the ability to draw a veil over what we're doing online.
So let me say two things.
Do I think that the internet will be a poorer place where I say, I'm missing Sarah's really funny comment on what happened on Trash TV yesterday?
Absolutely. The internet will not be as valuable.
It will not be as funny.
It will not have some of the most ridiculous, hilarious interactions that we have today that thrive on anonymity.
The way I'm thinking about it is you would probably have conversations with your friends in your home, where you banter and you talk about controversial topics that are very different from the kinds of conversations that you would have with your friends in a public cafe, because you know, in a public
cafe, the government cannot record you because they would have to have a wiretap, but any private person can.
And as a result, we're a little more careful when we talk in a public cafe.
What I hope is that we would come to see the internet more like a public cafe, where yes, do we lose parts of speech that is really valuable and interesting?
Yes, we will. This is why I started out asking the both of you whether you think it's a really important question, like all the misinformation and all the harassment that happens.
If we think that's not so important, then probably giving up the funny part of the internet is not really worth it.
But if we think really serious harm is done, then regulation will not be free.
So everyone with voice anywhere on the internet is gonna have to register.
Yes. That feels very costly to me personally, and it's not just about Sarah's use of Reddit, which of course is quite important, but it's a manifestation of a broader thing.
Here's what I want.
I want law enforcement to be able to find the people who make the threat.
But how do you do that?
Well, you make the hosting agency for that libel for the content on it.
Think about Facebook.
So someone is making a threat.
The law enforcement approaches Facebook and says, here's a threat.
We want to know who this person is.
If that person is cloaked, you will never know who the person is.
Well, but Facebook can shut that person down.
They couldn't necessarily find them, but they could say, okay, we're gonna deactivate that account.
I mean, Cloudflare did that with Kiwifarbs.
They just shut them down.
There's still gonna be online harassment.
They can go somewhere else, Felix.
They can go to eight channel or seven channel or six channel or five channel or whatever.
It's a little bit of a whack -a -mole game.
So we've talked a little bit now about police being able to track down someone who's making threats.
But my question is whether the idea of having to use your real name and real identity in some way on the internet, Felix, is your thinking also that this would be a disincentive to post really terrible things?
That's exactly right because I don't believe that the exposed cleaning up can ever work.
That's a little bit like the war on drugs.
As long as there's demand for drugs, there's always going to be supply.
And so my sense is you have to make it more costly.
Yeah, I think that in some sense, you look at a place like LinkedIn.
It seems like not a lot of harassment happens on LinkedIn because it's all, you know, here's my face, my real name, the jobs I've had.
It's like your resume.
You wouldn't post F bombs on your resume, probably.
Not for most jobs. I think in some sense, that's probably true.
And in other senses, though, I think that we have seen examples recently of people who have used their real names and real faces, commit crimes, Alex Jones with the Sandy Hook parents, or any of the rioters on January 6th who showed up and had no problem invading and trashing the Capitol building.
And every day I drive down the highway and I see, I guess the polite version is the let's go Brandon bumper sticker, but I see profane versions of that bumper sticker that is sort of right there next to the person's license plate, a car that they drive into work.
I hate to sound a million years old, but the coarsening of society and a loss of shame overall and a loss of a sense of reticence and concern, maybe for others feelings or for other people as human beings, but people are walking around doing this stuff in the real world.
I'm not sure it's just linking it to their names on social media is going to stop them.
Yeah, that sounds exactly right to me, Sarah.
But if the standard is let's come up with an idea that will do away with everything, there is no such idea.
That's true. Expos cleaning up will never work, so you have to do something ex ante.
That's a very powerful framing.
Although that's the framing that we use with every intrusion into rights.
We always have to balance that.
Do we want to expos clean things up?
Or do we want to ex ante prevent it from happening?
Sometimes ex ante preventing will never happen, but it's that balancing.
I'm not convinced that there's so much of this expos cleaning up that we're doing that is so much different than what we do in a lot of different domains, where we settle for that.
We settle for expos cleaning up in a lot of places because we don't want those intrusions on rights.
I guess that's where my instincts go, as opposed to the expos cleaning up has gotten so bad, which in some cases, according to my preferences, it has.
For example, on guns, expos cleaning up has just gone too far.
So that's the sense in which now I'm willing to do ex ante things that are very aggressive.
You have to make the case, I think, that the expos stuff is so bad now that we need that ex ante protection.
And I'm not there. But I think that's a very good way to frame it.
When you framed it that way, I understand what you're saying.
I'm not sure I agree with you, but I understand where you're going.
So I think I learned two things that I find really helpful.
The first one is, just your last point, Mihir, about when is it that we really need a system that discourages people from behavior that we find unacceptable?
Then I loved about your comments, Sarah, thinking about the costs that this would involve.
What part of the internet will we lose?
The platforms will definitely be much smaller, right?
So that's one direct business implication that we will probably never know how many bots there are on Twitter.
But once we remove the bots, Twitter will be a smaller platform.
That trade -off is maybe the most important part of the conversation that I would hope we would have going forward and thinking about the internet.
What is it that we really cherish and we love about the internet that is just so hard to replace because we can only build it on anonymity?
And then what is the part that is so terrible about the consequences of online behavior that we have to say, well, we switch from cleaning up ugly incidents exposed towards a system that really makes it much more costly to threaten others, to mess with other people's lives in ways that we find unacceptable.
Great. I have been spending all summer wondering what you guys are gonna have for our first set of picks together.
So tell me what your recommendations are.
Felix, do you wanna go first?
Yes. So my recommendation is a sci -fi drama television series called For All Mankind.
The premise is an alternate version of history where the Soviet Union is the first power to land on the moon, with dramatic impacts on NASA, both sort of a moment of big disappointment because of course you see President Kennedy and how he thinks after the Sputnik shock, the US really should win the race
to the moon, but also a recognition that maybe we have to do things differently.
You see the tensions within the bureaucratic organization and then the context has to do with just how the United States is changing at that point in time.
So being more inclusive for women in the space program, being more inclusive when it comes to different forms of gender identity.
So all of these topics are sort of mixed together, great acting, just really wonderful to watch.
I love alternative histories.
In a way they're very simple, but they're always so provocative.
That sounds great, Felix.
I love it. Awesome.
What about you and me here?
What did you bring?
So this is undoubtedly my most brilliant recommendation ever.
So brilliant .org is my recommendation.
But it is this spectacular learning site for all kinds of STEM topics.
Think Khan Academy, but like next gen Khan Academy.
Really interactive, super clean interface, advanced topics, all kinds of topics, but it's just done so well.
And as a pedagogue, when you see something done so well, my children had signed up on it via their school, but I started to mess around on it because it's for life long learners.
This is a geeky thing, but I was just looking at their calculus materials.
It's so hard to teach that well, and they taught it in this super interactive way with questions.
And I found myself just wanting to spend time on the site, which is just not an easy thing to do when you're trying to teach things like that.
So I recommend brilliant .org.
Wonderful. There's literally nothing that would get me interested in learning calculus at this point in life.
Check it out. But maybe you'll check it out.
Just test the concept.
Check it out. You might be surprised.
What did you bring, Sarah?
So I have another podcast.
It is a podcast called Country Stride.
It is something I actually really wish I had discovered earlier.
It's all about the region of England known as the Lake District, which is the County of Cumbria.
It's a beautiful mountainous county with a fascinating industrial history, as well as an important literary history.
The Lakes Poets, Wordsworth, and Beatrix Potter, and people like that living up there.
It transports you to this part of England I love so much.
I've hiked there many, many times.
I feel like during the months of the pandemic, when I was stuck at home doing jigsaw puzzles, I would have really, really, really liked to be listening to this podcast.
So I'm glad I found it now.
It's really wonderful.
There's lots of natural ambient sound of the British countryside.
So you not only learn a lot about history, and if you're interested in copper mining or poetry, there's episodes on those topics, but you also get to hear them trumping around and going for a walk in nature.
So I find it very restful and relaxing.
That's really fabulous.
There is something very magical about the British countryside.
So it sounds wonderful.
I sign up for that.
All right, good. And this is it for today.
Thank you for listening.
This was After Hours from the TEB Audio Collective.
Thanks so much. See you next week.
Bye guys, bye. We'll see you next time.
