What's a bullshit job? Yeah?
Okay, a bullshit job. You don't want to-- Do I have a bullshit job? No; this is the opposite of a bullshit job
I mean people watch the show. It's not a bullshit job, right?
Bullshit job. This is fun. One of the things that I told myself when the debt book was successful
was I was going to take advantage of this to
widen my opportunities of expression rather than narrow them. What I mean by that is
Gross saying this earlier before the interview you know, there's this weird thing where if you say something
that people decide is interesting and creative and unusual and actually people pay attention to it um
Say here's a person able to say creative and new things the world will somehow conspire to ensure that you never do it again.
So they will try to make you say the same damn thing over and over and over again.
But you don't get that much money for the book,
but you do get money for talks or articles
where you just say the same thing in a slightly different format over and over again until you just
become this robot miss repeating things um and I thought I'm not gonna do that. One reason I can't afford a house
Nonetheless, I think it's worth it.
They want you to just they want you talking about yeah
The same thing that same thing
And I could have made a lot of money because you know I rich people are interested in money um
They like that little problem. You know, if I got myself a personal assistant and arrange deals.
I could probably give talks all over the place, but I said I wasn't going to do that. Instead
I'm gonna see if I can't do the opposite. Turn this into an
opportunity to take, you know, all those crazy rants and obsessions and interesting things I've been thinking about that
no one would ever print and actually figure out a way to get it out there.
And that's why I came up with a thing about the flying cars and technology, or my analysis of neckties,
or, you know, all sorts of things like that um, but this one there are some people who formed this new
Radical newspaper called Strike Mag, and they said, "Got anything kind of oddball that you got lying around,
maybe that nobody else will print. This is your big opportunity. Well, we will print anything." So, I said okay, yeah, um
I had noticed over the years that you keep meeting people who are embarrassed by what they do
You meet 'em at a party and especially if you're someone like me, I'm an anthropologist and most people think that's kind of interesting.
So, they'll say," Oh, you're an anthropologist. What aside, you go to like foreign countries. You live in Villages like what's that like and yeah?"
So, they'll start asking all these questions, and I think so, what do you do?
Ehh you don't really wanna know
And you get 'em a little drunk. You press them. They'll say, "Tell you the truth
I mean, I got this job on the senior east coast like vision manager for this company,
and I don't really do anything. You know I just like file reports
so nobody really reads, and then we create these committees and pass things back and forth. It's some bullshit um and
so I started asking people you know like how often
You know what about your-- do you actually do anything at your job-- You know, how many hours a day
do you really work and a lot of people say,"Well, you know to be honest,
I think what I do it, you could probably do it in three hours
but a week you know um, but I stretch it out", and they always say, "Don't tell my boss, okay?
But, you know, a computer could do this whole thing." So, you get all these people and and I thought about it
I thought this is really interesting because this is exactly what capitalism isn't supposed to do.
You know, back in the Soviet Union they did stuff like that.
They made up all these jobs because they had a full employment program.
Everybody had to have a job whether or not you actually needed them to be doing anything.
So, they would, you know, set up these things where to buy a piece of beef in the store
you'd have to like go to one person to get the beef and then you got a ticket, then you have to take the ticket
on another line. They just make up employment. Um
But we're doing something like that.
Except it's all being done by the private sector. Most of these people weren't working for the government.
They were working for private competitive firms. So, how on earth. do we have a situation where private firms are
making up jobs where they pay people not to do anything.
That's exactly the last thing you'd think that a competitive firm would do
-- the opposite of capitalism-- yeah, except they're capitalist firms.
So, so, what's going on? Um and I thought about this and I thought, Well, you know, in fact, these jobs
constitute a pretty big sector of our economy. I don't know how much at the time.
I was guessing 20- 25 percent. It turns out it was more, but,um
you know, think about it. Like, there's all these industries that are, basically, if they disappear it wouldn't make any difference-- telemarketing.
You know, the whole telemarketers vanished most people would not complain. They'd be pretty happy actually.
Corporate lawyers. If you talked to corporate lawyers,
I mean, there's one or two big shots who think what they do is important, but the vast majority uhhh say, "Well,
yeah, I mean, it's completely unnecessary if I didn't have this job like the world would not change in any way." Um
And some of these things are jobs where it's not necessary
You don't you know if nobody did it nobody would need to do it?
You only you know one guy needs a corporate lawyer, but somebody else as a corporate lawyer. You know, it's like armies.
Nobody needs an army.
No country needs an army unless other countries have armies
um the corporate lawyers are a little bit like armies or telemarketers are like that.
But there are other things that aren't even like that.
You know, like all of these middle management guys who just organize meetings or fill out forms or tell --
supervise the way other people are filling out forms, or um,
create meaningless paperwork and reports um
and I
I suddenly thought, Well, this is why people are not working 15 hour days because back in the 30's
Keynes the John Maynard Keynes wrote an essay
called
can't remember it was like um
economic prospects for the next century something like that. Where he basically said in a hundred years,
we shouldn't be working more than 15 hours a day technology will have improved to the point where we can have a society mainly based
on leisure. Um...
Work will be a relatively unimportant part of our lives.
And, I thought,Well, you know the interesting thing is you look at what jobs existed in the 1930s;
they could have done that if we'd kept up the same type of job profile.
'Cause back
then there a lot of people working in industry, there a lot of people working in agriculture, a lot of domestic
servants. All that's gone. Um
A lot of the domestic servants have now been replaced by service jobs in, um,
you know a
Starbucks, or whatever, but um,
Even, ya know, we have this idea that
Oh, yeah, well industry there
isn't as many people employed, even if you count the ones in China, um, and other places where the factories have gone,
but
actually, um, it's not so much service.
I mean the people think it's gone to serve, the service sector. What it's gone to is the administrative clerical
and supervisory sector.
Um So, if you count service on that together
It's gone from I think a quarter of the economy or quarter of all jobs to seventy-five percent now.
So, you have all these people administering other people, um.
--So what is going on here?
And why is happening --exactly and they're not really doing anything? They're just pretending and then think about it.
Think about all the people, you know, you have some company where all they do is
they take German forms and translate them into French forms.
You know, this is a completely meaningless job,
but then there's all the people who are cleaning their bathrooms, and like, you know, doing the reception of the car and then and the
Security for that building and um and those jobs are necessary, too. And like
how does this happen? Like huge swaths of our economy is completely unnecessary, and I tried to think about it, and I thought, Well
It's not the consumerism [not] [to] [use] most of these jobs have nothing to do of like giving us more sushi and more
i-phones and things like that. It's, it seems to be this idea that work is a value in itself.
Back in the 19th century, there was people really
got the idea of the labor theory of value. Social moods really made it to get that out there and became common sense.
Value comes from labor: we collectively make our world. We manufacture things and you know --Protestant work ethic
Yeah. There's a protestant work ethic. It kinda jibed with that, and you know if but if you like listen to speeches of
there's a protestant work ethic on jived with that and you know if but if you like listen to speeches of
Politicians may in the 1860's, 1870's they all sound like Marxists. Abraham Lincoln, you know, is like labor all capital comes from labor
You know, um, they had that idea and it was really and- but the idea of labor they had was industrial labor
I think this is part of the problem the paradigm for all work was like you know going hammering something and you know
casting steel
manufacturing automobiles, whatever um
Hard physical work that makes something, but, so, one of the problems they had is they they kind of focused on production as
if it were the paradigm of all labor, even though most people even then we're not factory workers, even working class people.
More of them, we're going to ca-cabbies and nurses and gardeners caretakers now.
I always say, you know, you produce a cup once, but you wash it like a thousand times.
You know, most labor is actually maintaining things. To watch the rest of this
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