Joel: It's Future Perfect Book Club.
We are reading Careless People by Sarah Wynn Williams.
I'm Joel Goodman.
Ron: And I'm Ron Bronson.
Joel: We're in Person
Ron: Wild Time.
Shout to producer Jess also here with us.
Joel: Producer Jess is on, as she said, the ones and twos, which is
something completely different, but.
Happy to have her sitting next to us, making sure we
talk about the right things.
Um, yeah, Careless People: The Story of Where I Used to Work by Sarah Wynn
Williams has been making its rounds.
I feel like, uh, it was explosive and sort of, I mean, it was, we'll
talk about it, but I, it was, uh,
there was a lot of chatter in the, in the social media and news sphere
because this is essentially Sarah Wynn Williams' memoir about her time working
at Facebook, before it was Meta and maybe a little bit after it was Meta.
And I think the main thing Ron and I learned is that when we're doing a
book like this, specifically a memoir, we need to make sure that, uh, we
don't just talk about the memoir.
We need to talk about the ideas it brings up, because I don't know, I feel bad
commenting on someone's life, and actual shared experience, but I don't feel bad
commenting on the societal issues that come up through something like this.
So, I guess let's start it where we always start it.
What'd you think of the book, Ron?
Ron: Uh, this is mostly for like, you know, like you do reality tv and
you're trying to like, Creates drama.
So I just wanna say this for the record.
This, this is mostly about, you don't, you don't know us.
So you hear it and you think, ah, I didn't wanna read this book.
Yeah.
Uh, but it's hot in the streets and so we gotta do what the people need.
So we read this book and then buy the stupid book from this Facebook
person who took no accountability or anything in this book at all.
She's kind of like, yeah, I thought it'd be cool.
It wasn't cool.
Joel: Yeah.
Ron: So, um, so I, I don't know.
It's a memoir.
I see your point.
It's a memoir.
You can't, like a memoir or hate a memoir, right?
It's your life.
You told your story.
It's hard to be vulnerable.
Sure, you got a really big advance and your book's a bestseller.
You already rich.
Joel: A little bit of a payout.
Ron: I mean, you were already rich.
But you know what?
It's hard to write a book and it's hard to tell your story.
So, you know what?
Shout out to you for telling your story.
Did I like your story?
No.
I think it was interesting tidbits in here, but the things that I found
interesting were like the random anecdotes of like, oh, we were in Brazil and
Hillary Clinton was at the club with us.
Joel: Yeah.
Ron: Like, I enjoy stuff like that 'cause I just enjoy like matter of how matter
of how regular people live regular lives
Joel: want that, that BTS content.
Ron, you want to sign the scenes?
Yeah,
Ron: my favorite thing is so I'm just like, oh really?
You were out the blue out the club.
Your coworker was definitely coming onto you.
And also Hillary Clinton was at the club with y'all turning up.
Yeah.
Like give me that, like a whole book of that would've been great, but.
Joel: Yeah, I agree.
I, the memoir thing.
Was it written well?
Mostly like, yeah, I, I thought there were parts that were engaging, I thought
there were parts that were not engaging, but I do, I agree with you, Ron.
I think the, hard part with this is that
I think it just reinforced for me that like, there shouldn't be anyone with
idealism as their, as a central tenant of how they approach the world in tech,
or in these positions of power because like, so I think the big problem is
that people that kind of base their entire understanding of the world or
approach the world with this idealistic mindset aren't really cut out for
the cutthroat, evil, terrible place.
And I, and I, I don't wanna say that those people are stupid.
I think they're kind of maybe a little gullible.
I mean, I understand at the beginning, so the start of her story, right?
She's talking about how she's from New Zealand, she's coming out of
work for New Zealand at, the UN.
She's tired of things not happening and like working on things that
seem inconsequential and wants to do something consequential.
It's like, I understand like that starry-eyed sort of stuff.
Like that's how you get into these positions of wanting to
apply to a place like Facebook or Google or, you know, whatever.
The part that is frustrating to me is, as you said, the lack of accountability.
Like there are so many spots in this story where she says, yeah,
this bad stuff was happening.
I learned this passive stuff, but I shrugged it off.
I figured, well, maybe it's, you can't let the idealism get in the way.
Like it just ends up compromising whatever ethics and morality
you thought you had anyway.
And I don't know how you come back from that.
Like you're complicit at that point.
Right.
Ron: She had been in government.
So I'm like people like that, especially, you know, you are in high powered
in the government of any country.
You just learn stuff, right?
You become a level, A level of cynicism that is hard for us to
conceptualize, like what we do, right?
Because it's just such a different, like having only had like a small, tiny
glimpse of life into what that, that, what that world is like for those people.
I find that fascinating.
So I can only imagine like, you become detached to a certain
level from like, real stuff.
You know, if they joke about presidents going to the grocery store, when's
the last time they shop for themselves or drove for themselves, right?
Like, they don't, because you just get so divorced, you think you're normal, but you
just get so divorced from normal stuff.
And so like, I'm not willing to give her a pass, but I
understand that for her, right?
Like, she's already rich.
She was already, she had done what she wanted to do.
You know?
You think you can change it, right?
I can change her baby.
You're not changing Facebook.
Like, no, this was evil from the start.
And it's like, I have friends who worked at Facebook, like if we have
friends that work at Facebook, I'm, this isn't about like people making moral
judgements on what people choose to do.
Like we're all complicit, living in this kind of system.
Oh shit, it's a communist podcast.
But like, who?
No.
Marxist.
It's not chill out.
Don't, don't tell your friends.
But, just, but like I, but I just think that especially by the time she joined
Meta, right, because just, or Facebook at the time, I guess certainly you would've
had some understanding like, Hey, I understand these guys are, you know that
this place is yada yada, but I wanted to do this 'cause I thought, what a cool
opportunity for me to blah, blah, blah.
And I just feel like she talked about that a little bit.
But I didn't get, I said I never got a sense even at the beginning
or at the end of like, maybe I should have thought about that.
Or Here's what I wanted to do instead.
Or Here's what I learned from that ex. It just felt very like
detached from the experience.
Everything happened to her.
Yeah.
Not she was part of it.
And I just, you know, she was, and I've read a lot of the critique about this book
from people who had worked there with her who said at times she put ourselves in
situations that weren't really about her.
Right.
She made, made herself the center of a narrative that she was
only a part of the narrative.
And I could get that from the book that I'm like, that makes sense
and, again, she didn't own stuff that she was a part of and, that
was part that bugged me the most.
As someone, obviously if you're, you know, you read these things, a lot of the stuff,
stuff we're, we are aware of a lot of these stories we knew about, you know, the
stuff going on in Myanmar and so forth.
These are things that were well reported.
And I just feel like she didn't take any ownership over any of it.
Just, yeah, I was just doing what they told me to do.
Joel: I think that's probably all we should say on the memoir side of it.
I don't wanna like Yeah, really get into tearing, apart the author too much.
But I do, I do want to talk about some of the, serious topics that I think
were brought up, regardless of who was, at fault for, them happening.
Mm-hmm.
and there, you know, there's quite a few things that, come to light here.
I think, you know, we mentioned kind of that idealism versus
reality thing, and the fact that tech companies do oftentimes.
And not just tech companies.
I think big corporations in general.
I mean, government was this way and was actually very good.
Uh, it was a very good thing for quite a while until recently.
But this idea that people that want to have a big impact and change
the world, get attracted to these places that have lots of money and
lots of power and lots of influence over people, over society, over the
different means and methods we use to connect with each other or communicate,
and like, there's no denying that Facebook and Meta are hugely important
in the modern history of the world.
You know, like,
Ron: Can't tell the story without it, especially at this point.
Joel: Right?
And the problem is that it's not good, you know?
It is, it's the hindsight question.
It's looking at it saying, oh, we could, but should we have done it?
You know, and I think that that happens with a lot of people, especially people
that come into these companies very young and think, oh, we're a part of it.
And like when Facebook was a startup, they get together and it's like a band
of pirates and we're, you know, it's punk rock and whatever, but eventually
that just becomes window dressing and talking points from an earlier time.
It's no longer this change the world ethos that powers what you're doing.
It's as much money as possible, as much power as possible at whatever cost.
And that cost today, especially for large corporations, is mostly people.
The cost is ruining lives and some of the things that I think were interesting
is just how this, it ends up being sort of like a, a kind of slave labor
in sort of, you know, in some senses.
There are people that, made obscene amounts of money.
And other people, they still made like good amounts of money comparative to other
industries, but like also people that really weren't that making that much,
and were having to do a ton of work, especially their international employees
for some of the, terrible jobs like content moderation and things like that.
And it's purposeful.
Like it's similar to what we talked about with Spotify.
It's similar to what we've talked about with Cyber Boss.
These things are done on purpose to make sure the company is
the thing that makes money.
And that's something I've been wrestling with the last week as an entrepreneur.
I, I saw recently, an extremely talented developer that's done a ton
for pushing the CSS standard forward was laid off from Google without warning.
And the outpouring of people like going and supporting this person
saying, oh man, I'm so sorry.
Like, you'll, you'll be fine.
But wow, it's terrible.
And I mean, they're shook up about it.
But I mean, you know, and I, and I think the same for, I think the same happened
recently in a lot of the layoffs across the US government and continues to happen.
As an entrepreneur, I struggle with this.
There's this side of, I like being an entrepreneur because I can.
I don't have to go through that sort of stuff, right.
But I have all kinds of other struggles to go on top of it.
And then man, sometimes it'd just be nice to take a job and just take the
payout and be completely jaded and, only care about myself and my longevity.
And I, and I look at that.
And I wonder like from the viewpoint of someone that's coming into these
positions with an idealistic mindset, How do they, how do they reconcile
that when, they end up realizing that they're just, they're disposable.
They're, they're just there to be used and gotten rid of.
And that they, as a person, as a professional, as someone that knows
things, aren't actually valued because it's the corporation that they're
working for, they're not working for themselves or the world, or
Ron: I have two thoughts.
Um, I appreciate that deep dive into Yeah.
it's just bringing in more in the existential sort of, philosophical
thoughts about work broadly and the jobs we have and, you know, meaning,
and especially in this world where again, people are just faceless.
I may know a lot about the government and layoffs, but, um,
you know, illegal as they may be.
But, you know, I'm thinking a lot about, for the folks listening to this
who are familiar with, the history of Bell Labs in the seventies and how,
how ubiquitous they were at that time.
I mean, a lot of that came from much like Silicon Valley came from,
lots of government investment in technology and and things like that.
We reflect on that era and the, transformative nature of the work
that, I mean, there's a lot of toxic stuff going on in those companies too.
You know, the, the old IBM, but I do not feel we're going to look back on this era.
We already don't, but we're not gonna look back on this era of, you know,
the Web 2.0, the, the platform era with any of the same reverence or, happiness
that, that you have of the stuff from the past, because how destructive it's been.
Mm-hmm.
Right.
Bell Labs didn't I, as far as I know, Bell Labs wasn't involved in any coups.
Joel: Not overtly.
Ron: no.
Certainly not overtly.
Right.
They may, maybe surreptitiously, maybe they provided the phone lines for the
coup, but I don't know that they were involved in being like, Hey guys,
there's a thing going on here, la la la.
I don't think that was happening.
So I, I just think about that a lot Again, in the reflection of all this stuff.
Because it, that's really it to me, We really are at a, at a crossroads with,
you know, going from the, platform era to the platform era with ai, right?
Yeah.
Gross.
Yeah.
And, and we're gonna look back on the sheer innocence of social
media and being like, man, it used to be so simple around here.
Right.
All I can think about all the time literally is, In the movie version
of the Minority Report, how Tom Cruise is walking through the mall.
Being fed ads, personalized ads on screens in real time.
Everyone talks about Her these days, you know, and like the movie Her and you
know, the chat bot that decides to leave you to, to go be the other chat bots.
'cause it's, it's sentient now.
Um, and just thinking about how it didn't take us very long to literally,
you know, create this simulated world that we have to reckon with.
And how platforms are part of that.
You might be wondering, well, what that have to do with the book.
And, and I think it, if we're gonna talk about Meta talk Facebook talk about
again, any of the platforms that have evolved during that time in the last,
you know, sort of early to early two thousands, maybe in the mid, mid twenties,
sort of early tens to think about Where that leaves us, where it leaves us now
our own usage of mediating these tools.
We don't have an Instagram account for this podcast because Joel hates Instagram.
I also Instagram, but we don't want to, we don't wanna support
a platform in that way it doesn't really serve our needs or our aims.
Maybe get more mildly more exposure, but it's not really worth, you
know, it's one small thing we decided to do intentionally.
Joel: Well, yeah, I mean, I think that.
May, maybe this is this, maybe this is a little bit of my idealism coming through,
but I think that if if we're gonna wrestle with these big issues that face our
everyday, whether it's the platforming side of it, whether it's algorithmic
control of everything else that we're doing, what, you know, like I think the
least we could do is, put our money, uh, where our mouth is actually like,
literally go somewhere else and not, you know, not support those, those platforms.
And it's hard.
And I like, I, it was funny, I had a, a friend of mine read this
book, finished it before, I did.
And she said that it just made her, she was like, immediately, I've gotta get off
of Facebook, I've gotta get off of Meta.
I've already gotten rid of it.
I haven't had Facebook in a couple years.
'cause I like, it just isn't for me.
When Blue Sky picked up again, I got off of Threads.
Um, it was like Instagram's kind of the last vestige of a Meta
product that I occasionally use.
But I, I don't think that this book pushed me as far to be like, oh, I gotta get, I
think there are other, other things that kind of struck me more prior to this book
that made me want to get away from Meta.
But the compounding, evil, I guess that comes through the power
grabs and the manipulation of governments and the manipulation
of people and the manipulation of regulators and everything else.
This book does a good job of kind of encapsulating a lot of those things,
albeit, uh, could have done that a lot quicker, a lot more succinctly,
but the stories are the point.
Right, right.
Um.
But I, yeah, I really, it it, I think the ideas that we wrestle with on
this podcast do have extremely real consequences in the world and extreme
consequences for our own selves.
And if we aren't wrestling with how to react to those beyond just
talking, then you know, we're probably just as bad and just as complicit
in the system that's doing this.
Ron: That was deep.
Joel: it was the personal ethics thing, whatever, like, um, but I, you
know, I, I The whole, the whole saga here is what we've seen, play out.
You've said this to me offline, like these are the sorts of things where
like you already know the stories, you already know what's going on with
the same with the Spotify book, right?
Like, like you already, you've heard this stuff, you know what's going on already.
These books are a way to bring those things front and center, maybe get
a wider audience, get more people to hear about it, do more education on
the thing, but then when they just kind of, end and leave off and like, well.
What do you do next?
You know, without any, without any action.
That's, that's a little bit frustrating.
Um, but I think how this ties into everything else that we've been
talking about on this podcast, the power dynamic in today's modern world.
It's actually probably not much different than what the power dynamic has always
been, but I think it's a lot bigger.
It's at scale now, right?
They've weaponized power in different ways and, and have figured out how to,
how to replicate it and keep it going.
Ron: I agree.
And I want to add something to this because I think, and I'm pulling up
my notes on this, but the difference now there's several things that I
think, I think that are different.
One, the velocity of which things can happen now is different than in the past.
Yeah.
Friction has always existed.
Velocity has always existed.
Certainly could do things faster in 1960 than you could do them in 1900.
But now, because of the velocity of these things and because the
velocity is everywhere, it's in every experience, it's in every service.
The cost of a mistake is amplified because as quickly as it is for you to
be able to do something, it can be very difficult to undo the thing you did.
Mm-hmm.
Right.
And you can glom this on to any number of societal things right now.
I'm thinking very heavily about administrative systems right now,
but you could put this into anything.
It's really easy to destroy social security.
It's a hell of a job to make it.
Right.
It took the great depression to make it.
You know, and so, and they've been trying to kill it for all these years.
And now when you, you, you break it, you don't even have to break it all the way.
Right?
You could dismantle something.
You just take, it's like having a plant and some dirt.
If you take the plant outta the dirt, the plant will live a little
while, but eventually it's gonna die.
Will it be in a week?
I don't know.
Will it be longer?
I'm not sure.
The plant will figure something out, and it's like you do
that to every part of society.
And so yeah, these, these systems have always existed.
People have always been in a leadership and, control systems
and wanting to control things.
I think the other thing that's really difficult, and this is the takeaway from
not just Facebook, really we're gonna circle it back to Facebook here in a
sense, is that things started as a way for you to connect to people you already knew.
Platforms existed for you to connect to friends you already had to maybe
find people that had interests that mirrored your interests.
My favorite stories of friends that I made on the internet and nearly off
including you, but even before I met you.
Yeah, we're born out of, I'll be very direct.
A lot of my friends I made on the internet back in the early two thousands was like
Black people that I met on the internet.
We have a, we have a podcast where literally, literally my photos on
it, so shouldn't be a surprise to have the Black guy on the show, but
I was just like, oh, they know that.
Well, yeah, I guess the picture's on there, you'll figure it out.
And it was really neat to meet people that I never met before On live journal, you're
like, oh, we have all these cool different people with different interests and we can
talk about it and like connect about it and also connect about shared experiences.
And that was the early part of the internet for me.
And then it turned into other things.
But all around shared interests or things you learned about or that one
weird niche game you play that only other people play that weird niche game
that you play and you bond over that, but then it extends into other things.
And now over time it's become, people who go online to find
people to sell things to.
Right?
Going online to find out recommendations, curated from people you trust but
you don't know that you've developed a parasocial relationship with
over time, you'll never meet them.
They are legitimately celebrities.
Have a buddy, he's like internet buddy.
I've only known him from the internet, and we talk a lot.
We used to talk, we had a conversation years ago about
he does a, what do you call it?
What's the bike thing?
Uh, Peloton, he was talking about, this was a couple years ago when it
first blew up and we were talking about sort of the half life of a, of
a, of a, of a celebrity from that.
And he said one of them was on some ad and he's like, I didn't
realize her reach was that big.
But I guess it makes sense that that's kind of where they are.
You know, they can transform.
It's like Flo from Progressive is like a million dollar actress.
Because she's so ubiquitous to that brand that they didn't
want that face anywhere else.
So they pay her a lot of money to be the base of that.
Right.
But we do this in social media with these Instagram, you know, with these different
influencers on TikTok and so forth, why the TikTok ban was so catastrophic, right?
It wasn't about connecting to cool stories or ideas.
It was, no, I have made this my entire profit center, and if you get rid
of it, it's like closing the store.
But you just close the store.
You close the industry.
But that's really bad when you think about how in 1990 you had neighbors.
Maybe you had a friend that in a town over, maybe you had a pen pal.
And this isn't, I'm not trying to say we should return with a V to the 1990s.
I'm not really, I wanna go to the mall, but like I'm not at the mall then.
Not the mall now I just wanna smell pretzel personally.
It's what I need.
I just need a functional candy store at the mall personally is what I need.
But nonetheless, I just think that when you think about where we're headed,
this isn't really about where we are.
Like we're probably in good shape.
But like you don't have kids.
I have a kid where the kids and the grandkids are going.
The world they're gonna live in will not resemble anything like we've seen.
Whereas our great grandparents could have functioned in this world.
Would it have been a little difficult to buy something?
Yeah.
What do you mean you don't take money, Sonny?
This is good old fashioned American dollars.
You know, I fought in the war for these us, these green backs.
Right.
But that could manage it.
My high school tennis coach was 96.
He lived till 2017.
Right?
Like he managed right.
He, I don't if he, he had a cell phone.
It was flip phone, right.
Like, but he made it work.
We will not exist in the same world.
Our grandkids will not exist in that same world.
And I think it's just, Facebook is just a, a conversation, but, but
there's a much broader story here about what world do you wanna live in.
Joel: Yeah.
It's.
So many things I wanna say about it.
Well, I, I think the, the platforming discussion is super interesting
and I don't think we should get into it here, but just to kind of
tack onto that, I, I, the early ts days of, you know, the Web 2.0.
A assumption by, I think the mass majority of people that participate in
it was around connecting with people.
It's about friends, it's about shared common interests.
It's, what the internet was created for to, you know, And then turns out that
10 years later, slightly less, oh, the Internet's actually just created as
another capitalistic, subjugation device.
Mm-hmm.
Oh, okay.
And it actually wasn't created for that.
I mean, like the, maybe that's what just fascinates me so much
about some of these thoughts.
I hadn't really thought through the idealism into power like the, the
idealism into, into greed aspects of what this has brought up, um, and
all these people that had very good intentions when they made a thing.
Not including Mark Zuckerberg, but like, you know, the people that, that pioneered
the internet and, and the worldwide web and those connection devices.
I mean, sure there is some military stuff behind it, but the stuff that really grew
out of that was about connecting other people and letting civilization flourish.
Except then it was given over to people that don't want civilization to flourish.
They want to strip mine it, of all of its benefits, take as much cash as
they can and decimate what's there.
And we're feeling the very harsh repercussions of the late stages
of that capitalistic drive.
And I don't know that there's a solution.
I think it's, it's been the hard part through some of these books is
that I don't, I don't know there's a, that there's a solution because
the, implicit trust that our society has in these large corporations.
It's not everyone.
'cause there's, obviously, there's you and me and there's people that we know,
but the mass number of people that are, that are voting for populist leaders
all around the world that are, happy to just use an app because it's the only
thing that they know and it connects 'em to some version of the internet that
they recognize, or, you know, can see.
I think the, the old school messaging of how good and cool and connected
and social and blah, blah, blah.
All this stuff is, is so good of a t people ignore.
or feel, maybe it's not just that they ignore it, maybe they, maybe
they feel they get a pass, you know?
And don't have to recognize those other things because they're not close enough.
You know, it's the same thing, the same problems we always have.
It's like, oh, well, wars in other countries, we don't
have anything to do with that.
Or, you know, there's famine in other countries and like, well, I might give a
couple bucks, but I don't really, have any personal connection to that sort of thing.
Just digitized back at scale and, I don't know how to turn society around from that.
if I'm completely honest, I think the cynical version of that is what you
see from Facebook in this story and the stories that we read in the news and
the, and the things that have come to light and the actions that they've done.
But not just Facebook is a thing.
It's also, I. All of Elon Musk's companies, it's also
Microsoft in a lot of ways.
It's also, I mean, honestly, even Apple, though, they ostensibly try
to do better, but probably aren't.
It's Spotify in different ways.
You know, it's,
Ron: I, I, um, this is gonna be, this is, this is Joel Bait is when, when you say a
thing that is definitely in Joel's lane.
So I'm gonna say a thing that is definitely Joel Bait.
Like we weren't on the phone or we weren't videotaping in front of each
wolf, recording in front of each other.
Right now.
I would text him this and it'd still be able, this is Joel bait, but, so
I'm saying that with knowing I'm gonna tee up a thing and he's gonna take it.
He's gonna dunk it like we're playing sports.
But the ths you're talking about, and I guess I just want to, what I want to do
is crystallize some of this for people listening as you think about, again,
this book specifically, and you think about like your, our own complicity
and using platforms and all that.
Right, and think about this.
If I'm a purely like I can, the beauty of all of the stuff that's happening
is, is I can give you like a market based, it's not really my politics
these days, but I can give you a market based framing for why, like you should
care about things like ethics or like systems actually working or whatever.
But what you're running into, what you're talking about in terms of people's
unwillingness to call a thing what it is, is that we've been so radicalized by hype.
The media environment is so distorted by pure lies.
Like we can't call the truth what the truth is anymore for all these reasons,
there are lots of people who have incentives to, to make it that way.
People's unwillingness to call a thing what it is, whatever that thing is, is
why we are in the pickle that we're in.
And until folks can start to have some kind of critical lens on the media
diet that you're ingesting, whether it is the funniest TikTok video you've
ever seen, whether it's your favorite influencer digesting and, parceling
out the news for you in bite-sized ways that you understand, you know, whether
it is John Oliver or somebody, right?
Like not hashtag do your own research.
That's not really what I'm trying to say here.
Yes, but that's not really what I mean.
What I'm saying though is, is that understand that it because the source
of truth are so distorted, we're living in a really weird place where
people don't really understand what's happening and it's causing us to
not have the trust that we, we once we're able to have in institutions.
Yeah.
Which leaves us where we are, and so this is going to get worse, but, so it's not,
I guess what I'm trying to say is, you can't operate on good faith anymore, that
people are gonna always do the right thing because that trust that you place in the
idea that, oh, well, it'll all work out because someone else is going to solve it.
I'm seeing a lot of posts on any social platform you're on now where
they're like, who's gonna come save us?
No one, nobody because.
What does save us mean in this situation?
Do we agree?
But I guess the last thing to say is whether it is tech bad actors, whether
it's the book we're gonna critique in a second, I don't want you to read,
or whether it's all the things that are going on on platforms right now.
The reason that we're in this situation we're in, in my estimation, having
again has sort of a sidecar view of the, of the, chaos happening in the
country politically at the moment.
And maybe not even sidecar.
I feel like I was like, you know, you're in a big, big, those two decker buses
Joel: And I was on
Ron: tour and I'm in it and I wear this, the vest.
I work for the tour company and I'm narrating what's going on and, 'cause
I've been there a long time and you're a shift supervisor at the double
Decker bus company and all of a sudden now we're driving through hell and
I don't know how we showed up there.
No one told me that was on the tour.
And then we come out of hell and we end up taking everybody
off the bus and they leave.
And newbie people get on the bus and every day we just go through hell again.
Yep.
Like that's what I got to experience.
But uh, these are not con the people that you're dealing with,
the things you're reading, nothing and this is happening in good faith.
And I think you have to concede that and have to understand that, you can't
expect that this stuff's going to be, uh.
Joel: Yeah.
Ron: all gonna, we're gonna get back to mean because there is no mean,
because we don't agree on what mean is.
Meaning the, you know, the mean not.
Yeah.
Joel: Yeah.
I've been thinking a lot.
Uh, I. About, I've been thinking a lot about narcissism lately.
Mm-hmm.
Um, and in a lot of different contexts, uh, family dynamics, I
think, um, you know, spiritual and church type of dynamics with people
that I know in different communities.
But I think it goes back to everything that has been read in this book.
And I think everything that you just encapsulated.
The good faith argument can't be true.
Because no one is looking out for you, right?
No one else is looking out for you.
These companies aren't looking out for their employees.
They're not looking out for the world.
They're looking out for their own corporate interests.
Investors are looking out for their money and their futures.
This is about a society that has welcomed, being shaped into a pseudo
society because society means that you have to look out for someone else
to, you have to keep other people that are living alongside you in mind.
Otherwise, it's not a society, it's just a bunch of humans
living in one spot, all working at different, you know, different odds.
So even, even in anarchist communities, they kind of like buddy up and work
for each other and like take care of the people that are with them,
even if they want to, you know?
Ron: more so.
I.
Joel: more and more so than I think we see today in our so-called,
you know, first world capitalistic golden, age, whatever that we're in.
But I think that's, I think that's the underlying premise of Careless People.
I honestly, and unfortunately think the author kind of
succumbed to some of this too.
Maybe not to the extent that, that the leadership at at Facebook did.
But the fact that everything that happened is for someone else's
personal gain and never for the other person that's with them means you
can't have a good faith argument.
All of this is done in bad faith because it is not for you.
And I think the reasons that people don't give up this stuff, that they
don't question the ethical side of things is that, they're entertained.
Like and this, these are the same, these are the same issues we've had in,
autocratic and fascist countries forever.
It's distract the mass populace while you go do the other things for yourself.
Because they're happy enough to be entertained by endless TikTok
videos and, TV streamed to their, you know, to their sets and
automatic music playing on Spotify.
You know, whatever comes up and food that can be delivered directly to them.
It's about me, me, me, me, me, me, me.
Only me.
And the occasional person that I really like, or you know, my partner, but
really it's not even really about them.
It's like they're in it with me.
And so like, I don't want them to leave because I don't want to feel
bad about them not being here.
It all ends up being self-centered, and I think the only way that these things
can change and progress is by us taking a step back and maybe reassessing,
because when we only focus on ourselves.
I mean, even from a narcissistic standpoint, that is, that's a
recipe for ruin because no one else is taking care of you.
And if no one else is taking care of you and you get to a point
where you can't take care of yourself, what do you have left?
When you don't have any money left to give to these large corporations,
they don't care about you.
You're gone.
When you don't have enough money to pay your rent.
You get kicked out of your apartment or your house.
When you don't have enough money to, get food, you don't eat and you starve.
But that is the society that we live in.
And so at some point it's the reason I'm not an idealist, I'm a realist.
I know this won't happen, you can't have community and society and all these
things that I think we once had semblances of and were maybe duped then too.
But there was, there used to be some semblance, as you were
saying, online of community and connecting with other people.
We just don't really have that.
Ron: Speaking of food and running out of things in scarcity.
We're starting a new segment called a book We don't want you to read.
This is Joel's idea is a good idea.
The reason this came up was because Joel says, Hey Ron,
should we read the book abundance?
Should we review the book Abundance?
I think I cursed a lot for sure.
We have my car.
I think there was a lot of cursing.
It all came from me.
And so he is like, okay, we're not gonna read abundance.
We should do a segment about, I you should.
What book we should read sometimes.
So not be every of every episode, uh, feature, but it is in this one.
So Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson wrote a book called Abundance.
It's been getting lots of critical media praise.
I'm not, you're on Blue Sky.
Everyone hates it.
But, um, but that's, that's how Blue
Joel: everyone on Blue Sky hates Ezra Klein,
Ron: how everything, everybody on Blue Sky hates everything.
But, uh, that's how it went down.
And so, uh, this book, basically the deal here is that, uh, those of you
who are not read into the abundance, economy, you should, or, you know,
the whole sort of philosophy on abundance, you should read about it.
I'm not gonna get into that today.
It's too long.
It'd be a whole new show and I would swear a lot, and you don't need that from me.
Short version is that basically Abundance is like, Hey, assess
administrative burden hinders things like housing, like transportation,
like energy, like scientific research.
And so the idea basically is like we should, make less, less, uh,
hindrance to these things and therefore everything will be great.
If you're like me and you're Star Trek fan, what they propose is
that if we just got rid of all the regulations, we could all live in a
post money society, like on Star Trek.
They don't quite say it that glibly or that idealistically,
but this, the general thought.
A lot of the people who critique the book basically are like, it's too simplistic.
Uh, it's like low key right wing, nor a little neoliberal.
I'm not gonna attack it from that perspective.
I'm just going to tell you that, there are so many folks who spent a lot of
time interrogating these kinds of topics.
If you're interested in learning more about Abundance or learning,
well, frankly, don't learning more.
Please, please just avoid that entire conversation.
I just, I, I trying to patch societal problems at scale with really glib,
easy to read, easily packaged.
If we just did this, it'll all solve that.
This is not a political statement, it's a statement of fact.
Conservatives have spent the last 50 years trying to tell us that if
we just did more austerity, that everything will be solved and that
magically things would've be unlocked.
We've not born witness to that, anywhere in the world.
Brexit, in the United States, throughout the global south.
we've just been cutting, cutting, cutting, and all folks do is
get harmed and injured by this.
So I know you don't need to read this, but, these topics have been covered
by folks who are much smarter than me.
And if you really are interested more about these ideas broadly,
you should read on those folks.
And then if you wanna read Abundance after that, you'll be
much more informed to tackle it.
'cause what I don't want you, what I would not want you to do, there are
a lot of books like this right now of folks putting these things out, and
this is like the first time and the only time anyone's gonna review this
book and talk about, Ezra Klein and Steve Harvey in the same conversation.
But I'm gonna do it right now.
And I'm gonna say that, you know, in the old days, the game show host
was just the game show host, right?
Bob Barker.
You know, he had other shows, but he did The Price is Right?
Like that's how we knew Bob Barker.
By the way, all ever wanted in my life, be a game show host.
So this is why I'm making this metaphor, but it's true.
These days everybody wants to do five jobs.
So Ryan Seacrest does, you know, he is American Idol.
He is got this, he does Dick Clark's thing, he does the other thing.
He's got a radio show.
And so nobody else gets a chance to be the person to get the breakout
anymore because Stars can't just be good with doing one or two things.
Okay, fine.
Be an actor in a movie on TV and get a Tony Award.
I'm cool with that.
Live your best egot life.
But Ezra Klein being Mr. Calm.
This guy who also gets to talk about actually turns
out I'm a political theorist.
Are you though?
I don't think you are.
So this is a symptom of broader things going on in society, but I just, I,
what I would not want you to do is engage with a topic that's this dense
and frankly this multifaceted and rich and you know, like politically
complicated based on where you are.
Theoretically complicated based on where you live in the world.
Shouts my one, nor are one Norwegian listener, right?
Joel: And so,
Ron: you know, whenever I give talks about service design in Europe somewhere, I'm
like, I have to recontextualize everything I'm talking about for the fact that I'm
in Europe, not in the United States, and that these things are different, some
ways very, very significantly different.
All that to say, don't engage with this book without having some foundation
of what you're getting into, because you're gonna be disappointed.
And frankly, you're gonna sound, you're gonna be wooed by the siren song of
the things they're talking about.
You're gonna read it and go, that doesn't sound so unreasonable.
Why wouldn't we just give people money and build more things?
That seems really easy.
Without understanding all the constraints or that we're trying some of these things
and then they're working in some places, but that progress and growth is slow.
Even the most fast progress despite what we sing in the world, takes a long time.
Even these doge doof balls, who I'll have antipathy for for the rest of
my life are destroying everything.
And even they are finding that destroying things takes time.
No, you actually can't dismantle it all in one day.
You actually have to take time to break it apart.
And that frustrates them.
But that's what building also is.
Yeah.
So all that to say, don't read Abundance, you're welcome.
Joel: Alright, so Careless People, I. Am a, I'm probably a thumbs down on it.
Honestly, I don't, I don't really think it's worth the read.
I think there are enough people talking about it.
I think we got into a lot more consequential issues that the book
barely brought up and a lot deeper.
I, I'm a, I'm a thumbs down on reading it.
Ron: Yeah.
I'm also dumbed down on it.
I think that the beauty of that book, you know, it's almost like movies where
you, you didn't see the movie, but the sprint reviews so much and all your.
Friends saw it that you don't really need to see it.
If your library has it and you want to thumb through it,
support your local library.
But no, I don't think, I don't think you need to buy a copy of it.
Joel: Maybe they could make The Antisocial Network as a sequel to The Social Network.
Exactly, exactly.
And
Ron: Yeah.
And then you could watch the movie of
Joel: that'd be.
Ron: You know, like you could put, put, put Zendaya in it.
I don't know.
Right.
Like, that would be great.
Uh, yeah.
I, I don't think you need to, I don't think you need to, uh, read this book.
I think you can.
Frankly, folks have gotten more in depth obviously than we did.
We went somewhere else.
We intended to go somewhere else with this, cause I saw our show.
But you can totally get enough content on this.
Joel: If you want to interact with us at all on the topic of this
book, uh, you can find us on Blue Sky at Future Perfect Book Club.
You can also go to Future Perfect Book Club on the internet to listen
to past episodes and find transcripts.
For our next book, we're going to the mall, Ron Bronson.
Ron: Finally, all I wanted was a pretzel.
Can't eat
Joel: the pretzel, but
Ron: I want it.
We're gonna read, uh, Meet Me by the Fountain, an Inside History
of the Mall by Alexandra Lang.
Very excited to read this book.
Came out in 2022.
Uh.
This was supposed to be the pick me up book.
This is supposed to be the book that's fun.
It's not fun because the mall's dead.
Right.
But I, um, I'm looking forward to talking about it.
Uh, this is a book you definitely can get at your library and, I look forward to
talking with you all about it and also to have a little bit of my nostalgia.
Joel: Yeah.
And remember, you can read along like you've got a week or two
before that episode comes out.
So, if you want to prep, get the book, read it, come back and talk to us a ask
us questions on blue sky or whatever.
But, uh.
If not, come back and listen.