Episode 83: New Work with Guest Frithjof Bergmann

0:08 Mark: You're listening to the Partially Examined Life, a philosophy podcast by some guys who are at one point set on doing philosophy for a living, but then thought better of it. Our Questions for episode 83 are, is the current job system good? And if not, can it be changed? And we read large chunks of Frithjof Bergmann's New Work, New culture, written in 2004 and due to be released in English this year. We are joined in this discussion by Frithjof himself. You can join the discussion, get links to Fritjof's works, and get loads of supplemental information@partiallyexaminedlife.com this is Mark Linsenmayer speaking to you from Madison, Wisconsin.

0:42 Seth: This is Seth Paskin with a mild illness in Austin, Texas.

0:48 Wes: This is Wes Alwan in Baltimore, Maryland.

0:51 Dylan: This is Dylan Casey in Middleton, Wisconsin.

0:53 Richard: This is Frithjof Bergmann in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

0:57 Seth: Welcome, welcome, Frithjof.

0:59 Dylan: Yes, welcome.

0:59 Richard: Thank you.

1:00 Mark: We're very excited to score this interview. We had planned this episode for a while, so I read several other books that I will probably name drop in here at some point, but then found that we could actually get Frithjof to come on. So we focused entirely on the big Book, which you were writing even when I took classes from you in ann arbor in 92. 93. Right. This has been in the works for a long time.

1:22 Richard: Many good books are. Yes, I have said a number of times, and I want to now, at the beginning of this, reiterate that I have said that I find the idea of doing this together with you downright thrilling. And I think thrilling is not a bad word for that. So right now I'm thrilled we are as well.

1:47 Mark: So I guess a place to start is why is this a philosophical issue at all? It's not epistemology, it's not metaphysics, it's not ethics, at least not obviously ethics. And yet this is something we can tell s. Frithjof, that you were, when I was there, the senior most continental professor teaching Hegel and Nietzsche, and you'd written famous books and papers on those folks and Sartre and other things. But at some point in the 80s, you decided that you would not pursue the traditional academician's life, writing papers and things, and instead turn not only your studies to this problem of work, but then to actually doing projects that would make a difference in people's lives, that would test out some of these ideas in the real world. Tell us about that progression.

2:23 Seth: There's.

2:24 Richard: Well, thank you for asking that, because that is crucial. Yes. I decided that there were more important things to do in life, and I am now being somewhat provocative than to teach either Stanford or Princeton or Michigan undergraduates. So the decision that you are asking about came very much out of the conviction that dawned on me with greater and greater clarity that not only is work one of the philosophical topics, and I say that with a little bit of a smirk on my face, but on the contrary, I became convinced that work was the topic in the near future for philosophy.

That work took center stage. And of course, I was teaching at that point in a department, the Michigan department, which is a very conservative analytic philosophy department. And lots and lots of people did talk to me and said things like, look, you really are quite talented and you have done good work in philosophy. Now, why do you want to waste your time on work? And even then, and this was actually 81, 82, 83, I said, please wait. You will see that work will become an enormously important subject. And I wasn't all wrong. Work has become an absolutely central and maybe the dominant subject.

And I don't just mean in philosophy. If you listen to television and radio, if you listen to Obama, if you listen to anything that is going on in Egypt, or if you listen to what's going on in South Africa or virtually all the countries on this planet, you cannot listen for a very long time without running into Unemployment is the big issue in virtually every country, and unemployment is one of the pathological syndromes that beset work. But it's by no means the only one. And there's much more to be said than just unemployment. And if I may connect that with Detroit, there are some newspaper articles that were published in Detroit and 87, in which I said, in 87, that caused a stir.

I was asked to address General Motors, their uppermost floor on the 10th floor of the General Motors building. They invited me to talk, and I said in that context that I thought General Motors would go bankrupt. And of course, at that point, to say that General Motors might go bankrupt was heresy. In the meantime, I run into numerous people in Detroit who I met when I was working in Flint and who I met in the early 80s. These people who I've known ever since these long ago years now say, well, you were right. Sometimes they use big words. For a person who was right 15, 20 years ahead of time, many years ago, this was all very problematic.

But it has now come to pass. And that's the point. It has come to pass.

5:16 Seth: So I read your book with great interest, and I've perused your site, and I kind of Want to get clarification on sort of the problem statement about the job system? Because it seems to me there's sort of two different problems that you highlight. The first is that we're dependent or the economy is dependent on big businesses to create jobs. And the fact that jobs can be created and destroyed or moved is one issue that causes the equilibrium problem. And then there's the second issue of the type of jobs that are created, or more importantly, I guess the type of work that is required by those jobs.

So I think I understand some basic economics about the division and specialization of labor. And you mentioned that the job system is only about 200 years old, coinciding with the industrial revolution. Did I understand that correctly? That those are the two primary problem statements? That essentially it was industrialization and the rise of what I'll call more global corporations or corporate culture in which these types of specialized jobs exist. That is the predominant sort of centerpiece of what you're concerned about.

6:29 Richard: There is something very right about what you say, but actually, from the perspective that I have been trying to develop, the most important aspect is missing. The really most lamentable aspect of the job system is that the idea of work as something that can be enormously energizing, that can give people strength, that can make people discover what they really seriously want to do, and turns their whole life into something quite radically different from what normally is attributed to work. A sentence that I have used quite a number of times is that for many people work is the equivalent of a mild disease.

They experience it as something that they hope will be over. The analogy is too cold. And in contrast to that, a sentence that has sometimes been picked out is that I have said sex must be very good indeed, much better than it very often is to hold its own against really good work. That good work is perhaps the best thing, the most energizing, the most life giving thing we have in life. And it's that dimension of work that has been really what I have tried to make visible in ways in which it wasn't visible before.

7:49 Mark: Right in reading other sources to sort of support this general dialogue. There's a lot of literature. There's even a book that just came out of people that want to reduce the work week at this point and on the precognition for this. So if you want to hear just sort of a straightforward audience members, if you want to hear a straightforward presentation, at least the best I could do in 10 minutes of Fritjof's thesis, then go look back in the podcast feed A couple items, and you'll see that by me. That came out a couple weeks ago. And one of the things I start off in there is an essay by John Maynard Keynes from 1930 where he was talking about the fact that productivity continues to increase.

Technology has enabled us to. Has gotten rid of scarcity, at least in the wealthy parts of the world. And so isn't it time to reduce the work week? And so there's a lot of discussion, especially as unemployment becomes more of a problem with the current recession. Apparently there was a boom of talking about this I hadn't realized in the 90s there's another recession going on for a bit about, you know, are we going to run out of work? Maybe we should lower the work week. But what's missing in that is, as you say, the idea of, well, what are we going to do in the meantime?

I mean, there is a concern, and people even use this to completely discount, like, no, we don't want to lessen the work week because people will just lie around and waste more of their lives. But essential to your program is the notion that we need, whether it's some kind of therapy, some kind of social institutions to help us understand what we might really, really want to do if we have more free time, whether it's lowering the work week or some other way to then fill that in ways that will make things much, much better.

9:13 Richard: I want to address two things. First, the word recession. This comes up a great deal, and I try to emphasize that whatever we experience at it is certainly not a recession. I am very influenced by Keynes and admire him a great deal. And the idea of what we now have as something that is cyclical, and I'm not attributing that to Keynes. I'm just saying most people think of recessions as a cyclical phenomenon. And we now have a recession, and we will pull out of the recession and we'll be okay after we have pulled out of the recession. I find that outrageous because in my view, there are three factors, none of which have anything to do with cyclical ways of thinking about economics.

One is automation, which is not a cyclical phenomenon. The other phenomenon is globalization. Globalization is also not a cyclical phenomenon, but something, if anything, you can think of it as linear. But the third one, which I have tried to put especially strong light on, maybe partly because I was a farmer several times in my life, is the migration away from the rural areas into the cities. And what that really means, as you of course know, is migration into the slums, the slums which surround virtually all the big cities, most especially in the so called developing world, the world that is now supposedly catching up.

All of this seems to me very, very mistaken and very wrong. What we now have is not a recession, not something cyclical, not something that we will come out of by stimulating the economy. But there are three enormous factors which I just listed, namely globalization and automation and the migration away from the land. And those three combined compel us to come up with entirely different solutions to the problem than those that are being discussed. And there I am, a little bit presumptuous, if I may be, that are being discussed worldwide. Because at the moment, if you listen, it doesn't make any difference whether you listen to the radio in Turkey or whether you listen to it in South Africa or whether you listen to it in India.

Everybody talks about recession and getting out of the recession. And I think that is fundamentally a deeply mistaken diagnosis of what we now have.

11:34 Dylan: This kind of talk makes me just think of the problem of growth versus sustainability. One criticism of our current system, whether it be the job system or the economy in general, is the way in which it relies on the notion of constant growth, correct? So the stock market and investors and so forth. It's not a question for them of having a sustainable business that makes money every month. It has to actually be growing in order for it to garner investment. So the model there in our big financial industry is not a mom and pop store that you can keep moving along and send your kids to school maybe and have a vacation and just sort of take care of yourself, which is a sort of sustainable model. It's really one that that store has to look constantly to get bigger, expand square feet, get more custom customers. It's a model of deep consumption.

12:31 Richard: Absolutely. There is, of course a very close link between the issue of making the world unsustainable, that is the issue of pushing growth and growth and growth, and the issue of jobs. It's the job system that coerces us to constantly have the economy leapfrog to still greater speeds. And that lies behind my having said earlier on that I don't think jobs are just sort of one marginal issue. But on the contrary, if one looks hard enough and long enough, it becomes obvious that including the whole ecological issue is very directly linked to the issue of jobs.

And so are six or seven other things. So I see jobs as the central, if you want to use that sort of metaphor, as the really great devil in the peace. The most awful thing that the job system has done is that it has split humanity into 20% who are insanely wealthy and 80% who are sinking ever deeper into the morass of poverty. That's part of what I would include in the pathology of the job system. But that adds to the calamities about jobs, the job system. So it's not just the two things that you mentioned right in the beginning, but the job system is responsible for a whole panoply of calamities that surround us.

And the expression that I use most often is that we are facing six tsunamis, that they are towering above us and they will crush us. And all six of these tsunamis, of which the waste of resources is one, but poverty is another, and the financial crisis is another and overproduction is another, and so forth. All of these ultimately are the result of the job system. That's why, to my mind, it is mandatory to change the job system.

14:32 Dylan: Seth brought up the argument that you have is that the job system is pretty new, sort of a consequence of the Industrial Revolution. And there's talk, which I'm very sympathetic with, of the idea of freeing ourselves through the work that we do, having a flourishing of our lives with respect to our engagement with the world and that underpinning which goes back a long way. But it did make me think, thinking about the notion that the work system started as we know it in Industrial revolution. While that might be true, it makes me wonder, isn't there something of sort of a upper class concern or possibility that's at the center of this ability to have work that is freeing?

And that if I think about even before the Industrial revolution, a lot of those economies fundamentally just rely on some form of slave labor or indentured servitude that have people doing all the jobs that no one else really wants to do in order to allow relatively few people to be free. This goes for the Greeks, this goes for the Romans. This goes for all kinds of societies.

15:37 Richard: Correct.

15:38 Dylan: And that this job system might not be that new, but in fact it's just another variation of that.

15:44 Richard: No, I don't agree with the way you say it. And that is what I have been trying to do ever since I worked in Flint. I'm now talking 82 and 83, which may be before you were born.

15:57 Dylan: Not me.

15:59 Mark: We're all 40ish.

16:01 Dylan: Yeah, I lived in Flint in the 90s.

16:03 Richard: Oh, well, then we might have run into each other, for heaven's sakes. I emphasized as much as I possibly could that of course, to get people to do work, in addition to what we now just call servitude work or the work that people were forced to do or whatever grew and still resembled to some extent, slavery, that it would take an enormous amount of effort to move people beyond that. And that is actually, to my mind, perhaps the most crucial part of new work. That may even be one reason why it is called new work. That from Flint on, but certainly in all the other places that I have worked, I've always emphasized that, no, no, no, no, no.

This will not happen by itself. Far, far from it. If we hope to have people do the indispensable, the necessary work, given the technologies we now have, what we really need can be done with very little effort. So the possibility of not working looms very large in front of us. And there's, of course, the connection to Keynes, but my view, contrary to Keynes, is that it will require every ounce of will and pedagogic skill we have to get people to make use of the free time in productive and creative and interesting ways. That is really what a center for new work most essentially tries to do.

To make it possible for people, or to raise people, or to educate people, or to goad people into work that is liberating work. That doesn't happen by itself. That only happens in a community.

17:40 Mark: Maybe we should characterize some of these projects and what these new work centers amount to. Just because this is a philosophy podcast, people expect us to be talking about philosophy. And now it's sounds like that we have L. Ron Hubbard on here and we come to a Dianetic center. We just want to clarify what this whole thing means. This is not some weird cult. This is a matter of that you've been doing these projects. The first of which you've already referred to was the project in Flint when they were having a lot of layoffs due to automation in the early 80s, proposing to the management, proposing to the labor unions, getting town meetings going.

There was a radio show, there was a whole bunch of things to facilitate an alternate arrangement between workers and the management that. Well, in that case, and this is certainly not typical of all new work situations, but you were saying, hey, instead of laying off all these people, why don't you just have them work half the time, that there's still plenty of work in the factories for, and virtually everybody in town, you know, a large portion, it's a factory town, right? So instead of laying off all these people, have them work half time, and the other half of the time they won't just be sitting at home on their waterbeds, as you say, but that you will Work with them.

You and your people. Other folks are involved here, of course, would have essentially counseling, sounds like group counseling to help these people figure out, okay, given that you have this six months, what do you really want to do? Do you want to start a business? Do you have a passion you want to pursue? And then help them take the next steps in pursuing that?

18:59 Richard: I can hardly tell you how I welcome what you just now said, especially because it gives an opportunity to make clear that. No, no, no, a strange cult, to put it very directly in every center for new work to whatever extent is possible. And there are of course, limitations, but we work on three things. One is what in the book I still called high tech, self providing, but now we call it community production. And that has everything to do with the development of technology. That is, we now have, and in the early 80s we didn't have that, but now we do have technologies and we start using these technologies in Detroit and please come and look at them that make it possible for people to manufacture the things they really need for their life with relatively very few labor hours.

But that is one of the things that we try to foster and to develop. We try to develop in the community the possibility to use technologies so that people will spend much less time making the things that they need. And that includes, at this point, things made out of leather, to electricity, to refrigerators, to what have you. That is one aspect of new work.

20:21 Mark: Well, and weren't you saying that Detroit is now more or less self sufficient in terms of food production? Can you say a little more about this latest project that you're working on most?

20:29 Richard: Yes, and again, I'm grateful for the question. Actually, a sentence that I use a great deal that doesn't always go over so well is that I ask the question, well, what comes after vegetables? Because I think growing food, I mean, I've been a farmer myself several times in my life and it is a wonderful thing to do and it is even in some ways therapeutic. But it is of course not enough. It is impressive. If you come to Detroit, it is absolutely true. The results have been quite, quite amazing. You can walk from one urban garden to another urban garden and all of that.

The self sufficiency as far as food is concerned, is thriving. But I'm the person who says food is okay, but not by food alone. To paraphrase the New Testament. If you actually came now to Detroit and you participated in a conversation in the nascent center for New Work in Detroit, you would hear mostly talk about electricity, mobility. Those are the two things that, to my mind, are really what Detroit right now needs to develop and needs to develop so that it becomes something Detroit people can make for themselves. So one aspect has to do with manufacturing things that now, and I emphasize this, was simply not possible in 83.

Even if we had been smarter than we were, the technology wasn't there and we sort of knew that. But we anticipated that eventually the technology would be there to make it possible for people to manufacture a great deal of what they need in small spaces. That is the phrase that constantly comes up. Another dimension of new work, to my mind, at least as crucial and maybe the most crucial aspect of new work is something that we work even with very small children, sometimes four year old children, six year old children, sometimes handicapped children, we work with whoever we can work with on the idea of helping people to discover, to unearth, to dig up what it really is that has been buried in them for a very long time.

That was an intense and to some extent, yes, a very highly aiming desire. There are those who think in addition to that, because I actually have studied economics some and I'm in many ways a very practically oriented person, I always insist in these conversations that yes, we can do many things for ourselves and we can also aim at something that we really and seriously and passionately want to do. But in addition to those two things, we also need to create enterprises. That's why technically, on my business card, I am chairman of New Work Enterprises.

Because to my mind, creating new enterprises is indispensable, when to put it brutally, because without money you can't do it. So we try to create enterprises that will result in revenue that makes something like a real development of new work, let's say on the east side of Detroit at this point, within reach. And we are not there, but within reach. Yes.

23:48 Mark: All right. So a lot of these projects, in fact most of them are focusing, not like the one in Flint, on people who were making good incomes, but then are having to work less hours. That's certainly a chief appeal. That was the appeal that carried me through these many years. Thinking about this is, wow, I really hate working. Sitting at a desk for, you know, eight hours a day. Isn't there a way that I could work much less and pursue my passion?

24:09 Richard: This is now Mark speaking, right?

24:12 Wes: Yes.

24:12 Mark: So this high tech self providing was certainly nothing that I could make use of during these many years, but was always a promise. Is there a way that without having to start a farm in my backyard, that one could make enough of the things that you need so that if you want to work less hours, then you just won't need as much income.

24:29 Richard: Absolutely.

24:30 Mark: So that's sort of the goal. But then most of the projects it seems have been focusing on not people who are already well to do and kind of don't want to work quite as many hours, but with the homeless, with whole countries that have very high unemployment rates with what you're talking about in Detroit. So the picture always seemed to be that there's a job component still. You're still working some hours a week for money like before. But then also you're pursuing this passion, this calling and figuring out what this is and maybe that'll make some money for you too.

That would be great. If it's producing value. Probably it will eventually. But then supporting yourself with this high tech self providing, which as you say, has to be done by community, really you can't just do it yourself. All those things together are supposed to give an outline of what the new work life would look like in this future.

25:14 Wes: Right. The community thing seems to be critical there. Right. So it's not like we can ourselves just figure out what we want to do and a way to do it outside of some communal effort like a new work center or something like that.

25:27 Richard: That is absolutely true. I mean that is something we have learned, but also something that we emphasized from the beginning, that you cannot be a solitary new work person. There can be new work communities and new work platforms and new work cities and new work countries, but there cannot be, you alone cannot do new work. And for some people that is a little bit of a difficult thing to swallow.

25:51 Mark: We had a friend of ours post on our blog that his reaction on reading part of your book was this is nothing new. I've never had a steady job. I've run my own business, I've run my own farm, blah, blah, blah. But then he's describing like the many, many hours and really how difficult it is and how many sacrifices he's had to go through to live this kind of life. So there are options besides the 9 to 5 job for people right now?

26:12 Richard: Absolutely.

26:13 Mark: But the idea is to have a society to make that actually feasible, to make it so that everybody, it's not just people on the outskirts that don't want to have families, you know, don't want to have to pay for somebody's eventual college tuition. A lot of work needs to be done socially for this to be something that absolutely readily available and how, and you shouldn't have to bust yourself and do, as you say, the work that you'd have to do to run yourself own farm to do this self providing that there really are technologies which should be like going to the Kinkos to, you know, run off some copy. Well, okay, do that for when you're getting a new appliance or even generating food.

26:48 Richard: There is one word that sums up a great deal of this, and that's a simple word. Organize. I mean, it has to be organized. People have to get together and work together and organize. But let me emphasize something that I feel. I almost become romantic when it comes to that. Or I still feel I want to invite all of you to come to Detroit. And I want to put my arms around you and show you some of this. Because the thing that has changed, the thing that was not true in Flint, the thing that we couldn't do in Flint because it didn't exist at that point yet.

Our technologies that now have arrived. And to my mind, they are technologies that should make us dance, that should make us celebrate, that should make us throw flowers all over the place. Because we now have technologies that do exactly what we all are now talking about. Namely, it's become possible with these technologies, with relatively very little work to create, to manufacture, to make, to produce almost everything that in any. I'm now also appealing to sustainability. Not every insane luxury, but what one really needs for a pleasant and cheerful life.

Almost all of that at this point, with the sort of technologies that now are available to us, can be manufactured with very little work. And that is, of course, part of what Detroit is all about. I mean, I sort of alluded to this before. I'm sometimes downright a little unhappy when all kinds of TV people come and take pictures of the Detroit Urban Gardens. The Detroit Urban Gardens are okay, but there are ultimately no. Lettuce is lettuce and spinach is spinach. And it isn't that different in Detroit from how it is anyplace else. What really is amazing is that in Detroit there are at this point in use, a number of what people call 3D printers or fabricators.

What I'm trying for with the people I'm working with is to get to the point where, quite literally, almost everything that is inside of a house, from the toilet to the electricity to the basement to the vacuum cleaner. All of those things can at this point be made by people with the kind of machines that are now available.

29:15 Dylan: I was wondering if I might ask

29:16 Richard: a question that don't feel you have to be polite. You can also say, Frithjof, shut up.

29:21 Dylan: Oh, being polite, Wes, just Said that this sort of requires community. And you were emphasizing again that this is both a hard project and there are a number of features that require a lot of work to make this kind of thing happen. I wondered if we might talk a little bit about the difference in underpinnings between this kind of thinking and what kinds of things need to change in the way we understand, not just our relationship to work, which might be a little bit easier because the idea of a calling or something like that is out there, but it has more to do with the way we think about human nature.

And the way we think of human nature is our economy is tied up with human nature. And the way this new work mode challenges that. One piece of it is the idea of competition, and a peculiar kind of competition in which our economy is, in some deep sense adversarial. And that entrepreneurship, the good, positive version of it, but the other version of it that is part of capitalism, even a kind of mild capitalism, is that there are winners and losers and you have a finite number of resources. And part of our human nature is to dominate. And so that the idea in capitalism is that you tap into that and that you free people to do what they naturally would do, which is they want to acquire and accumulate and win.

And in that way, capitalism, properly understood, is a natural way of running an economy because it ties in with our own human nature. And in your book, you have some discussion of how, maybe not capitalism explicitly, but going back to an interpretation of the Enlightenment, that there was something wrong about their Cartesian understanding of ourselves as being free from the beginning and that we really need to free ourselves, but also that we are not Hobbesian creatures of war and desiring to dominate. My disposition is that it's not a question of whether we are by nature dominators or by nature passive, but that some people are both to certain extents, and that that makes this kind of cooperative economy versus a competitive economy a complicated problem.

31:38 Richard: I want to say one more wish we were sitting opposite each other, because you would notice that my face has cheered up tremendously in the last 10 minutes. Because maybe there is something really significant about philosophy after all, in spite of all our misgivings, that philosophy does have a way of helping people to get at the bottom of things, and we are now reaching closer to the bottom of the things. And to me, this spells utter delight. So, of course there's something right about what you say. It's not 100%, it's not black and white and so forth, but that really isn't quite how this thing got going.

That is what has exerted tremendous effect. And not only. And please, please don't go back to cultish groups and things like that. I appeal to you, read some around in what is now biology. And there's, of course, a great, great deal of very solid scientific work being done that demonstrates that, no, no, we are very far from the sort of Hobbesian creature that sometimes raises its head in all of this. There are books and books and books about the origin of altruism and so forth. What impressed me very much when I was still teaching philosophy is of course, Kant.

What is telling. And of course this is now terribly abbreviated. What was major is the idea of the Enlightenment. Getting rid of God. Getting rid of God was okay, but when it came to morality, people were getting nervous because if you get rid of morality, then the next thing you get rid of is the police. The next thing you get rid of is organized society and so forth and so on and so on. So it became very important in the development of the Enlightenment to say, okay, God is one thing. Maybe we can be deists. You all know this terminology. There was, of course, Kant, and there was, of course, the idea that morality stands on very solid feet.

Now, here's a point that I think usually does not get made, but I have written about it a great deal, and I would like to make each other even more of it. What really was the idea that made it possible for somebody like Kant to insist, and obviously Hobbes more so, and so forth and so on, that morality had this enormously important, weighty role to play in the next stage of society. The answer to that is that Kant and a lot of people around him thought that man was primarily egoistic. I don't have to explain to you that Kant said that if you do something that is to some extent the result of an impulse, then it is already not a really moral action.

It has to be separated from your impulses to be truly moral. Well, the point I'm making is that that was all part of the Enlightenment, against which that is where Hegel comes in. Hegel made in a thousand different ways the point that the idea that man is centrally and essentially a rodent that bites off everybody else's hand when the chance comes around to biting off people's hands. To Hegel, that seemed completely absurd. And now I am pushing things because I'm saying if you read any biology, any evolutionary theory, anything recent about the evolutionary and biological underpinnings, people no longer believe any of this.

So what I'm now trying to give some idea of is the contemporary view, not the view that was prevalent in the 18th century and since then really has become, to my mind at least, discounted and disreputable. Human nature is fundamentally different from the assumptions that the Enlightenment fostered in us. And the most fundamental difference, and I say it in just about those words, is that many people are frail, many people are shy, many people are easily discouraged. Many people go to pieces in situations that really don't quite seem to warrant going to pieces.

But that is a much more adequate picture of what human nature really is like. Now, put that into the context of new work and put that into the context of Detroit. It is unmistakable that people are frail. I beg you to come and look. You would see that the people we are working with in Detroit, whom, of course the vast majority is black and many of them young, if you think of these people as small, rapacious animals, you couldn't be more wrong. So because people are frail, because people are easily discouraged, because people break, because people need a tremendous amount of support to begin to say, I.

Sorry, I am getting carried away. Obviously, that is. That, of course, was now quintessentially Hegel, sort of. What does it take for somebody to develop a sense of self? That is very much what goes on in the context of Detroit, to support people to the point where they eventually do have a sense of who they are.

37:03 Mark: Well, that raises a methodological point. Somebody who's a psychoanalyst chimed in on one of the blog posts I've written about your work and said, what evidence do we have that there is something that people really, really want to do? Getting a calling like this is one of the goals and in fact, the word calling. I was looking at Alain de Botton's book on the pleasures and sorrows of work, and he objects to the word calling because it makes it sound like, well, if you don't have a calling, then there's something wrong with you. But according to you, no, that's entirely normal.

We have the poverty of desire. We don't know what we want. And whether you're discovering a self or building a self, and that's what I call a stable ambiguity. That it almost doesn't matter how much it is creation and how much is discovery, but. But just that there is a process that's necessary to grow the self. So I guess the question again from this psychoanalyst friend of ours is how do we know that there really is anything there? I think a common response to this is sort of an elitist response is why would you think that these people that you're talking to in Detroit, that there actually is something deep down there, maybe this poverty of desire is an evidence of just something about their nature that's different.

How do we justify the assumption that there is actually something to dig for?

38:05 Richard: Let me first say in double parentheses for me, this is wonderful that there are are also in this conversation now people who are very influenced by psychoanalysis or psychotherapy. And somehow the conversation has opened its arms so that that can be included. So I'm just saying that that is a personal reaction that I have. But I'm now addressing what you said and I'm sorry, Mark, but I think there's really a deep misunderstanding on just that point. The last thing I believe is that everybody, as it were, has down there the calling. That is his calling or her calling.

And all we need to do is have a nice little set of shovels and then it will be found that is completely inimical to the spirit of new work. Now, the spirit of new work, this is extremely problematic, extremely difficult, rare, but nonetheless it makes tremendous sense to make an effort to help people to discover something, Think that will give them a very different quality of life than most people at this point in our culture, especially in our culture with all the discouragement and all the cynicism and all the disappointment at this point have.

But I don't for a moment believe that that is a given. The for us important part is that the idea of people to begin with being easily discouraged, easily overcome. I think most of us live in a world where that's become fairly obvious that most people really have some of those qualities. With a great deal of effort and a great deal of support and the kind of institution of which the center for New Work is an example. Some people can achieve a calling. I think of a calling as not at all something everybody, of course, by nature has. On the contrary, by nature we are very far away from that.

40:04 Wes: I also happen to be a student of psychoanalysis and I'm surprised at that comment. Just because Freud emphasized the importance of sublimation to people's psychological well being. The two basic things that people go to therapy to work on are love and work. They want to find work that's more satisfying and love that's more satisfying. So whether or not everyone has this one true calling, I think, I think the important thing is that arguably people have productive things they like to do that are satisfying to do. And that could be many things. People are also often inhibited in their work.

So it's not simply a matter of finding out what one really wants to do. Because often when people come into contact with what they really want to do, that's when they get conflicted. That's when certain problems arise. Dylan started this sort of train of, well, there may be obstacles to this in terms of human nature, and now I'm thinking human psychology. And then one could also bring. Bring up cultural obstacles. I mean, these are all things that are potentially solvable. But it's not simple in the sense that one of the reasons we have the kind of work system we have is that people are actually averse on some level to doing what they love.

So that, I think, is one real obstacle.

41:16 Richard: Those are things that I think we agree on. In all of the work I have done in the last 30 years, the fact that this is fraught with. With problems has been absolutely in the center. I have turned it perhaps especially in the direction of. Because of what you say and because that is so true. We need a different community structure. And let me put it very strongly now that nothing less than to really change work from the bottom up can get us anywhere near where we want to be.

41:50 Mark: Obviously to deal with the unemployed or something. Or if you think there's going to be a job apocalypse and the number of jobs is going to be very ra and those that retain them are overworked. That's all empirical information which would force an adjustment of some sort on us. There's also, though, just the issue. You know, a lot of people would respond to some of these things that if you're having trouble with your job, well, get a different job. If you're unfulfilled, it's because you haven't tried enough things or looked deeply within yourself or discovered yourself.

But the ultimate goal then should just be to find people a job that fits their sensibilities, not to get rid of the job system altogether. But it seems like you've been arguing in your book consistently that even the best jobs, they're just not ultimately structured to fit a human constitution. That's the way I feel anyway.

42:33 Richard: Let me go back to a word you used. You said job apocalypse. Frankly, that sort of makes my hair stand on end when you start using language like that. Sorry, Mark, if I am going to be a little blunt about this, but most of the countries on this earth at the moment are in the middle of what you call job apocalypse. As all of you know, I have spent time in India. I have spent time in Russia. I can go on and on and on. In all of those countries, unemployment is somewhere between 80 and 85%. We are not living in a world in which everybody is in the Midwest, not by any stretch of the imagination. So I'm sorry if I'm being somewhat emphatic about this, but I think this has to be gotten straight.

43:23 Mark: Actually, I put that in my initial summary, your assessment of job rates. And an economics person came right back at me and said, no, actually, if I look on the web right now. So I pulled up on Wikipedia a list of countries by unemployment rate. There are a couple like Zimbabwe, that are really high like that. Or I see Vanuatu is at 78%. But most of them, you know, maybe this has to do with how they're measuring things like India, it says that 3.8% unemployment. Here I ran 11%. That's Wikipedia. Who knows how where this comes from? Oh, yes, statistics are from the World Factbook, according to this.

43:58 Richard: Let me latch on to what you have used several times. These are matters of fact. These facts, to my mind, are extremely disputed. And I would assume that all of you are aware of the fact that people right now are talking about just how calamitously recent development in India has been. And I would invite you to read a few books about poverty in India and the picture you will get. There's a marvelous book written by a woman about the slums of Bombay. It probably will break you up if you read that. But that has nothing to do whatsoever with 3%. And of course, it's not that difficult to figure out why these optimistic statistics are, so to say, current and are being reiterated again and again and again.

Obviously, I'm sorry if I get a little bit emphatic, because all these statistics are of course, designed to reinforce the system that is now in question. And if this system can say, no, no, no, actually we're doing fine, then this system to that extent has been again, salvaged and we are all okay. And I will now use that word, we are all okay with free enterprise. But if one looks at the countries at all close, that just is grotesquely wrong. I want to go back to what seems to me important in this conversation right now. But what does it make sense to do?

How do we act vis a vis poverty? And let's now just assume that it is somewhere in the middle between what you said and what I said said. Well, the thing is that it cannot be done by stimulating the economy. And that is something where I would almost plead with all four of you to take seriously the following idea. There is a way for people in countries like India and like Russia, including China, by the way. There is a way out of poverty. And the way out of poverty has everything to do with the sort of technologies we talked about. It is possible to introduce into areas of extreme poverty technologies which makes it possible for people to make things for themselves.

What I'm trying to say is not at all that we are faced with an apocalypse or something like that, but what we are faced with is that the increase of poverty is not, not abating, not even in the United States. On the contrary, it's growing. And therefore what it does make sense for intelligent people to do is to say, are there alternatives to simply pushing the growth of the economy still further? That is, that seems to me a way of formulating the tension or the dialectic as it exists from all sides. People push in the direction of more production, more consumption, more waste, less sustainable.

What New Work stands for is the opposite of that, namely making it possible for people to use technologies to create for themselves what they need with ways that are extremely parsimonious and are not wasteful and don't depend on the growth of the economy, but depend on the country, on communities that do things for themselves.

47:21 Seth: Is it possible for a community like that to maintain and sustain itself in that manner that make all the things that you need at least 80% of the things that you need without some kind of political protection? And what I mean by that is you talked about having government officials who were sympathetic or not sympathetic and being in the thrall of big business. Business, something I think we can all understand. Even in the so called first world that we're in. If we wanted to go create a community like this and establish and say we're going to make Detroit the first fully sustainable or 80% sustainable new work city. Is it even thinkable that we could maintain that without getting crushed or somehow dissolved or attacked or demolished, somehow pressured from the outside?

48:14 Richard: I understand my picture is exactly the other way around. In the 90s, the kind of thing we are now talking about was a fantasy very simply because the technology that is required for that sort of existence just wasn't there. And therefore one couldn't do it. And I experienced this very directly. I tried this in Flint and it was obviously too. And that's why I went to Africa and started to work in Africa. But I'm saying it's the other way around. With every progressive month or with every year that passes, what we are now attempting to do is becoming more possible has more power to it and can resist the pressure from, let's just call it the big corporate world more effectively than in the past, precisely because of the technology that is now available.

The whole development of what People associate with 3D printing is designed to make it possible for people not to depend on big capital, but to actually, with relatively very small sums of capital, be able to manufacture things that are on an astonishingly high level. And I hope you don't mind if I, for the moment use a real example. In Austria we managed to manufacture an electric motorcycle that was very much a cool electric motorcycle, but we manufactured it in three very small rooms. And that would not have been even thinkable 10 years ago.

And that is sort of one indication of the possibility we are talking about.

49:56 Mark: One of the themes of your book is that the left is very fragmented, that there's no central goal. But one of the key points of your case here is to say, say your leftist cause is getting rid of drilling in the Arctic or something like that. Politically, you're never going to achieve what you want to achieve because big business has this job monopoly. We always need more jobs. So therefore businesses that provide the jobs will always have, as long as the situation stays this way, an ultimate veto over any sort of legislation. So don't make it your political purpose just to take on the world, the imf, the World Bank.

We need to take the money out of politics. Instead of a direct political solution to that which you seem to think is problematic, it certainly is proving that way in this country now your solution is more or less a market solution that once we don't rely on them for jobs. This is not a direct attack on big business. It's not saying big business go away. It's saying you no longer have the veto over everything and therefore we can actually make progress on other fronts.

50:54 Seth: I certainly have a tremendous amount of admiration for what Frithjof has done in terms of implementing the program. I think the question I'm asking is, is, is there hope for a grassroots or bottoms up approach like his to address the systemic problem, or is something else needed as well? That there needs to be some level of engagement outside of just the community level, which can ensure the viability of a new way of thinking about work and a new way of thinking about community. If you're going to create a community of new work, you also might want to create a community of, of new work media so that the people in that new work community were not exposed to Fox and MSNBC and CNN and all the other which is just a giant mouthpiece to enforce the status quo. So I'm not saying big business is bad or good, but you get it.

51:45 Dylan: And when Seth says something that is broader than grassroots, I would also add that I would not imagine some kind of particularly prescriptive change, but that just recognizing that part of the reason for the success or the way in which our system works will be understanding that there are rules in place that help make it a success. And that there's something about this understanding of new work that seems to me to require an understanding of a different set of rules that govern us politically, economically, and that the rules that we have now are roughly optimized capitalistically that help drive capital to aggregate.

And one piece of the new work stuff, it seemed to me, is it's unavoidable that you have to have rules that help capital to disseminate. There'll be economists to say that that characteristic is just a fundamental characteristic of an economy in sort of a fundamental, true way. I'm not sure that I believe that. I think it's more structural in the way we've made our communities.

52:50 Mark: So actual legislation, like what legislation should we be pushing for? Is that the question you're asking?

52:55 Seth: Or even protections for people who want to exempt themselves from the current system and create a new way of doing things?

53:02 Mark: Obviously, healthcare was one that jumps out, that if you say healthcare is tied to employers, even with the new Obamacare rules, it's still tied to employers and really requires people to work full time in order to take advantage of this. And that alone is a point that would stop a lot of people from, I make enough money that I could work 20 hours right now and pursue my calling or whatever, but I can't do that because of the health care system. It does seem that there has to be some legislative efforts on top of the grassroots stuff.

53:30 Richard: First thing is that there is not the sort of disagreement that I think you are right now resisting. Speaking personally, I have tried, especially in European countries, Germany and Austria maybe more than any place else, but also in Greece and in other European countries, to transform this into a political. I don't know whether to say message, a political methodology. And that is not as unlikely as in your language it seems to be. And I think I have to say we do live in very different worlds. I mean, if you are in Greece and you are talking about the success of capitalism, people will burst into derision.

The same thing will happen in Bulgaria. The same thing will happen in Romania. The same. I'm now not talking Africa and not Zimbabwe. I'm talking European countries where what you take to be the successful system has lamentably failed. But that does not mean, and we need to be clear about this, please don't crucify me on Detroit. That sounds funny. I mean, I've only come back to Detroit because it seemed important and necessary. It's not at all as if I sort of think that Detroit is the answer. I think it's quite, quite intriguing what's happening there.

To my mind, the countries I listed just now. Quickly, quickly. Are much closer to something that you are advocating, namely, in most of these countries, the idea that you have just now been advocating, namely that clearly we cannot do this just sort of out of a community center. We need a different government. Well, I mean, that's what everybody is talking about, including next week, probably they will even talk about that in Germany, if you listen to the papers.

55:28 Seth: Let me say that I certainly didn't intend it as a criticism, so I apologize.

55:32 Richard: I hope I don't sound offended.

55:34 Seth: No, no, no. You seem to be pretty robust to criticism, so I'm not going to worry about that. But I think what I was saying is. So first off, Frithjof, just to give you a little bit of background, I live in Austin, Texas, which has a very nice balance of technology industry, government, entertainment. We have not experienced the recession here in the same way that other parts of the country have. And there's a certain amount of energy around technology. It's a very different type of. And you mentioned this in your book, without going into too many details, in the parts that I read about your connection to Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and noting that people who work in the technology industry have a slightly different attitude about work and have a different sense of, I think, of empowerment about their work environment and their decisions.

So it's very true that I do not have direct experience that gives me the perspective that you were able to bring in discussing in your book. So it's a learning experience for me. The way in which I've been interpreting what I read in your conversation is I have to balance it against my own experience. And in my world, when people lose their jobs, it's oftentimes, as you mention in your book, a cause of relief, sometimes celebration. And that has a lot to do with the knowledge that at least for the technology information industry, there's always more opportunities.

And many people just do things entrepreneurial. They see being laid off as an opportunity to go and start a business or create something new. And you're not penalized these days for bouncing around at different jobs. You mentioned that in the book that the average person will now have seven jobs. Right. You aren't with a company for 30 years anymore.

57:26 Richard: That's what everybody says. Yeah.

57:28 Seth: So in a certain sense I look at it and I say, well, you know, from my perspective, where I sit, the system's not too broken. I get that point of view about capitalism, saying, well, it seems to be working for me. Now that being said, I would say that what we're doing here with the partially examined life is an example of new work. We're a community of four. We came together to do something that we were passionate about in conjunction with the things that we do for a paycheck, so to speak. It's something that was not possible 15 years ago because of technology, but is today.

And it's allowing me at least to do to a certain extent something that I really, really want to do. So while on the one hand in my waking life, if you will, I am part of the system, that's problematic. On the other hand, I like to think that we've kind of operate as an example of some of the things that you've been talking about. And so I am sympathetic to and trying to understand it from that perspective.

58:29 Mark: Let me add one detail about the same story from my perspective is that that the more of this that I do of the podcasting and the writing and the reading and stuff, the less tolerable my regular job seems to me by comparison. Not that I would have been satisfied otherwise. You know, I even have a wonderful, fairly interesting and not too demanding hour wise job that I do for the rest of the time. But when I'm faced on a moment to moment basis like do I want to do this thing that energizes me and you know, write about Fritjof's article or do I want to call somebody about asphalt, which is what I often do for my job. The calling is infectious. It seems like there's a problem with the balance there and maybe it's just me.

59:08 Seth: Yeah, it probably is you.

59:16 Mark: To make a calling economically work is to free up some time to do it. And you even sent me a little chart that would show you spend a couple hours a week high tech self providing you spend a couple hours a week doing job work and then you spend another chunk pursuing a calling or something equivalent. Maybe it doesn't have to be as highfalutin as a calling, but some work that energizes you. And part of it has been even for in the Flint project that hey, once people do work that energizes them, they're going to do their regular job work. They're now part time work. Even better, they're going to be that more energized about it. Whereas I found that's actually the opposite that I have less energy for my job work now that I'm energized by other things and I just want to do the other things all the time.

1:00:00 Richard: That was very much quite, quite verbatim part of the discussion in Flint. The management people said, we know what will happen. People will love what they're doing with you and they will hate what they're doing with us. They were alienated from the work they did before. And that of course, quite frankly was part of the industry. That was what I was shooting for that something like that would happen. Can I step back for a moment and maybe this is repetitive, but still I do feel we live in very different worlds. Actually I know Austin, Texas fairly well and that's of course true.

But what impresses me is more sort of the metaphor of islands or the metaphor of oe. Austin is an obvious island for that matter. There are any number of somewhat similar islands in the United States. I was rattling off about 10 minutes ago a whole sequence of countries that the minute you spend any amount of time, the aspect, the quality of life is almost totally different from anything that you would see in Austin, Texas. Somehow in our conversation we must also somehow pay heed to the fact that you have sort of said, well, you don't have the experience that I have.

Which makes it sound sort of privileged and not at all the way I mean it. I mean that there really are very large parts of the world that are very different from the world that functions. And it's those parts that I'm escalating try to address. And not without understanding that of course it can't all be done in the style of some community centers in Detroit. What has to happen, but I certainly in that part of my life so far attempted is to get to the point where what we are now discussing will become accepted mode of landing in the economy.

1:02:06 Mark: Just so the audience aware, Frithjof has been, is not just starting these random little projects in places. He's like an advisor to actual foreign governments.

1:02:13 Richard: That's true, by the way.

1:02:15 Mark: So South Africa, you'd mentioned in particular there as being of a disposition to accept new work.

1:02:20 Wes: Right.

1:02:21 Mark: That the revolution, the getting rid of apartheid was even Marxist in flavor. But yet within some years after that they're having to do the same. Sucking up to big business to try to get jobs created. And actually, the. The conditions have gotten worse for blacks in South Africa. You were saying in your book that you've had many of them tell you, you know, the good old days of apartheid, what's been going on? I know you were having some conference to discuss new work ideas there, or is there some other government in particular that you can give as an example of somebody that's taking actions like this, that actually is trying to run an economy this way?

1:02:56 Richard: That's a nice question. I appreciate that with all of my robustness. I do need. Lesotho is the exemplary, contrary example. Lesotho is a very small country, an island country in the sense that it's surrounded not by ocean, but by land, and tossing that in. For what it's worth. The minister of finance in Lesotho, who is a close friend of mine, used to be vice director of the World bank or whatever they call that they beauty the West. So Lesotho is very much as a country moving in that direction. But that's not really what I am particularly wanting to say.

I may even have said things like that in my courses. That is, I was very clear in my mind that if I was going to try to do anything like this, I would have to think about time the way the Chinese think about time, that to move in this direction would possibly really take a large number of years, possibly even generations. Actually, what has happened is different from that. What has been a surprise. Now, talking personally, a personal surprise has been what Mark just now brought up. Because actually, I was a bad student and I had a rough time with universities.

And the idea that, given my background, that I would actually sit with governance with no cabinets, a whole cabinet, like in the case of Lesotho, with everybody in the cabinet sitting around a table and paying attention to Frithjof, seemed, as you can tell, it seemed completely laughable to me that that would happen. But actually, that has happened and not only in such very, very isolated ways. I'm struggling at the moment, and actually my family is getting in the way because I have been announcing to my family that I know the place to go right now is Egypt.

And everybody says, you're out of your mind. They'll kill you in a week. But I'm not so sure they would. And I know quite a few people in Egypt. This is what I mean. You see, if you immerse yourself into the atmosphere, the ambiance life of Egypt, how that functions. If you were to talk in Egypt about changing into the Sort of thing we have now been discussing that wouldn't seem bizarre to people. It really doesn't. Not in Egypt.

1:05:31 Mark: I know we've talked a lot about Frithjof's project and a lot of different aspects and the different things he's doing in different countries. But what about the philosophical issues involved? And we've talked about human nature a little bit.

1:05:40 Unknown speaker: Bit.

1:05:41 Mark: But what are the other things that were bugging folks while you were reading this?

1:05:46 Seth: Well, there is a big theme where Frithjof talks about his rejection of classic leftism, if you will, or Marxism in the 60s, which wasn't a problem per se. It helped me understand and kind of put into context the criticism of the job system because initially I thought there was a bit of nostalgia here that he was looking to go back to a pre industrial, which I think of Marx as being somewhat nostalgic. Ultimately, he was looking back backwards for his model of how society was going to be structured in the future or people were going to work together. So I appreciated that he made a point in the book of distancing himself from that and saying, look, this is not what I'm talking about. It helped me to frame that up

1:06:27 Richard: some that is so essential to the way in which this came to be. The idea of doing something like new work only arose because of disillusionment with. With Marxism that I absolutely compared to something like the death of God.

1:06:44 Mark: Yeah, you mentioned in the book that people are going to take any sort of attack on the job system is, oh, this is just socialism, this is just leftism. And I think part of the emphasis on grassroots here has been that it's not a matter of the government giving everybody a guaranteed minimum income or diverting corporate profits to redistribute that. That's not the mechanism you're recommending. But more than that, you allege that socialism had the same problem with jobs that capitalism does. This is about the job system. It's not an attack on capitalism per se. Dylan, what else is bugging you?

1:07:16 Dylan: One of the things that came to mind in reading this, that this idea of new work resonated with me is this whole things that I think of as relatively Thoreau, the notion of self reliance. And then I feel a strong component in myself of the do it yourself culture, the new maker culture. I'm by habit and constitution an amateur mechanic and carpenter. And I like to build stuff and fix stuff. And it's taking me right now like four months to get around to calling somebody to fix my refrigerator because I kept on Figuring that I should fix it myself.

And I have a lot of viscosity against actually calling people to take care of things. But the fact is, this week I did call them to come and fix my refrigerator. And I'm actually really glad that I did. And I'm thrilled about the fact that someone else is going to spend a half a day working on my refrigerator than me. So in that experience, I see a kind of tension. On the one hand, I really like the idea of self reliance and taking care of things myself and understanding how they work, but also being able to just do them. On the other hand, I find a certain delight in the division of labor now and being able to have someone else come and take care of these things for me.

1:08:33 Richard: Me.

1:08:34 Dylan: And I wonder if that isn't a little bit of more general tension. Part of the doing things yourself is sometimes you like doing them, but sometimes you end up doing the things that you don't really like to do, partly for the sake of taking care of things. And maybe you see that virtue in it, but it's not because of the thing itself. I did not really enjoy digging out the sewer pipe out of my basement, you know, in some deep sense. Right.

1:08:58 Richard: This just goes too deep into misunderstanding.

1:09:02 Seth: Ah.

1:09:02 Richard: I in no way think the things you just now distanced yourself from. There are very large numbers of people who really are on the edge of poverty or in poverty. And to my mind, the sort of figure that I use is not completely unrealistic. That is it maybe 70%. And the idea is doing things yourself is intended as a solution for those people. People. Not for people as intelligent as you are. So. No, of course not. But for people who can't find jobs. And that's not Austin, but that is Detroit and that is Romania and so forth and so on. And that is Africa.

That is Russia. I was in Russia very recently and I asked people how high is unemployment in Petersburg? And they said 90%. They may have been exaggerating, but it wasn't totally wrong. So there are those very different images. And for those people moving in the direction of doing things themselves, even given that they can't have jobs, not as an alternative to jobs, but they don't have jobs. So they need to do something and this works. This can be done. In the case of Detroit, that's very obvious. There are no jobs. Nobody needs to tell that to people.

And we talked earlier a little bit about food. For people to grow their own food is just the most goddamn sensible thing there is. It's absolute common sense. To start growing cabbages.

1:10:33 Mark: Another thing that was bothering me as I was thinking about this was my own experience. You know, I've been involved in a lot of amateur ventures. This is only one of them. And. But I've been in rock bands forever and, and have gotten an insight also into volunteer organizations. And even though it seems like the future in this post economy, much less of our time would be spent doing jobs, much more of it would be spent doing volunteer work of some sort. You know, if you don't have a calling, if you don't want to be a poet in particular, then probably going to your local old folks home to care for people, that might be something that actually you is much more accessible kind of service pleasure that a lot of people could find extremely energizing.

But when I think about sort of a whole culture where most of activity gets done that way, I'm just reminded of these amateur ventures I've been involved in which it's often very hard to get people to do things. And I know if it's a matter of my harassing my fellow podcasters here, it's because they have to spend time on their jobs and their other responsibilities and so they're not doing necessarily all the marketing the podcast. But even if we had much more time on our hands, money is a very powerful organizing force. Money makes the world go round.

So the thought that you could have elaborate industry of any sort that is not financially driven seems very difficult to accept. Is that even implied by new work that you'd have to have that kind of cohesion in the thing that I'm pining about?

1:11:56 Richard: I don't think so. What has emerged in quite a few countries is one of you used the expression makerspaces or something like this. It was in connection with the refrigerator. In areas of extreme poverty, fixing your own refrigerator in those circumstances would make sense. And I don't think that means that the money economy has somehow been separated from all of this. On the contrary, it's almost ironic because all of the people that I actually work with constantly are trying to get businesses to going that create a revenue, but they realize that they can't get revenue that is sufficient. So they in addition do other things. But it's in addition that that happens

1:12:42 Mark: and not exclusively, which it's probably worth raising. The point that you made in the book then, that a lot of people come away from this thinking, oh well, you know, I don't want to have somebody else be my employer, so I should become an entrepreneur.

1:12:55 Richard: Yeah.

1:12:55 Mark: And that that's Something that in general that you discourage just because of the failure rates of businesses. Do you want to elaborate on that? I mean, you're just saying that everybody's trying to start these businesses and new work itself is predicated on businesses to develop these technologies. But it seems if you're looking for calling, don't just immediately think, what business can I start?

1:13:15 Richard: That's right.

1:13:15 Seth: I thought Fritjoff's point was not that the failure rate is so high, but that if you don't know what you're getting into when you try to start a business, you may find that it isn't what you want to do. You may be passionate about the activity, but all of the things that you end up getting, getting caught up in actually make it less pleasant than perhaps even your wage job.

1:13:33 Mark: Every single customer is a boss demanding your time rather than one boss or something like that or. Or just even takes more time than a regular job.

1:13:40 Richard: That's very true.

1:13:41 Mark: Obviously we could talk forever about Frithjof's project and the various issues involved in that. I will refer folks to newworknewculture.com for a lot of his papers and information on the various efforts that have been going on in different countries and the specific technologies. The newer cars. Car is really cool. And I know you're very aware you referred to one of those articles that are posted there. Even though this is not demonizing industry, it's not a direct attack, but that these very technologies that you're talking about, you refer to them the who killed the electric car movie that you know. Of course industries do not want a build at home version of every single one of their products. They don't want a version of the iPhone that you can print from your home 3D printer and use that instead of a real iPhone. And they will take measures to prevent that.

1:14:27 Richard: The one thing that to my mind in this conversation is more missing than anything else is a real appreciation of what the future of technology does make possible. And I'm picking up on what you just said, Mark, namely, to my mind and given the people I work with, the idea of coming pretty close to making one's own iPhone is not at all nuts or something like that, but at the moment still out of reach. But steps towards it are, so to say, already in the making. Let me appeal to you one more time. I mean, the thing is, I'm trying to assist people who don't have the options that everybody in Austin, of course has or in the Silicon Valley.

I'm trying to create a path for the people who at the moment really are in great misery. And that's not a small number of people. To my mind, that is 70% of the world's population. And for those people, the idea of having a really close look at the technologies that are still being born so that they can become less dependent on making money, that makes tremendous sense to them.

1:15:36 Wes: And I think it also makes sense. I mean, I read this as someone just thinking about the job system in the United States, not even thinking so much about poverty. And I think think there's a lot of job dissatisfaction. And if there were a new work community around the corner for me, I'd be very interested. You know, I've been part of intentional communities before, taken time out and lived in a community where we built boats and sold those boats to sustain ourselves and did other things. And by the way, I enjoyed the book very much, but I struggle with a sort of conflicting optimism and pessimism.

And I take you to be thoroughly optimistic. But I'm optimistic about the fact that technology will make all these different things possible. So, for instance, yeah, it's perfectly conceivable that one day one, you can manufacture a print, your own iPhone. Of course, you have to give it a different name for trademark reasons. But I think I'm more pessimistic about the social barriers and the cultural barriers to some of this. Although I think if I knew more, I wouldn't be so. I feel really hampered in evaluating all of this by myself. I don't know a lot about what's going on in third world countries or economics or any of these things.

So I feel in a way hampered my ability to evaluate the plausibility of any of this. But my general sense, I could say this just as much about reading Marx as I could about your book. My general sense that technology has to change the way the job system or the way people work. That seems to me to be a kind of solid thesis.

1:17:02 Mark: Let's say if you change the material circumstances, then the social circumstances, a lot of the work in changing those already just happens. Nobody would have thought that change in the music industry that has happened could happen. Oh, no. Big companies in media will always be dominant, but yet with new technology, companies can barely stay in business.

1:17:21 Richard: Yeah, that's a wonderful example. I want to sort of, in the spirit that we now have reached, still try to say one thing. Namely, this is now autobiographical. You have to think a little bit what happened to this person, Frithjof Bergmann. He was a convinced socialist and communist until that came down. With a tremendous crash that I compared to the death of God. And my situation when I started new work in 83 and 82 was, well, there must be something else. There must be something other than this system which will increase all of the complaints about work, all of the complaints about. About not being sustainable, all of the things that go with the current system. To my mind, it was sort of do or die. I mean, isn't it possible to think of some alternative to what now lies in front of us? And out of that desperation came what now has become new work.

1:18:21 Seth: It's an amazing accomplishment.

1:18:23 Richard: I didn't mean to ask for compliments.

1:18:25 Seth: Well, you're going to get one anyway.

1:18:27 Richard: I feel I have been pretty lousy in this case conversation. I hope you forgive me.

1:18:31 Seth: Oh, no, not at all.

1:18:33 Mark: I like that. As a matter of tactics, when you said you pretty much stopped trying to work in the US when George Bush got elected, that this is if changing the law is a necessary part of bringing this thing about, work in the areas of least resistance work in the countries that are absolutely doing poorly enough off that they're open to a change. So that even though there's a lot of underlyingly Marxist ideas here, like that one that, you know, if you change the material circumstances, it will change the culture, that's a Marxist idea. You don't use terms like consciousness raising, which I would be tempted to use about this, that a lot of people.

You refer to people experiencing their jobs as a mild sickness. In other words, they don't like their jobs, but they're a necessary evil. They're fine. I would like this conversation to incite in our listeners, many of whom are probably, you know, I wish I could do more things. You know, I listen to philosophy podcasts because I need to work my brain. Maybe my job isn't so good about that. I need to flex other parts of myself. But I'm basically happy. Happy in this settled bourgeois lifestyle. I would kind of like them to reflect more and be as dissatisfied with their own situation as I am with any given job.

I would like Seth to be as hostile to the job system as I am.

1:19:44 Seth: So let me go ahead and segue and address that. So I've certainly had my share of dissatisfaction in jobs that I've had, and I've been satisfied as well. But again, I want to kind of give some context around why my interpretation is somewhat different. Different. I have right now a global job. I work with people from all over the world in my role, and so my touch points are a little different. I'm not as US centric in my experience, in my role as I might be otherwise. And for the last 15 years that I have worked in technology, I have worked predominantly with companies that have a global reach.

So I have seen the other side of outsourcing and I have seen the ways in which to a certain extent, a big company that goes and opens a manufacturing plant or a call center or what have you in another location actually can bring an increase in the standard of living and improve the lives and bring people, if not out of poverty, into prosperity, at least from mean circumstances into what resembles a middle class lifestyle. So my expectation for the way this was going to play out until recently was that there would be a series of outsourcing moves all over the globe to ever cheaper places until there wasn't any place else to go.

And that ultimately eventually you would start to see that there was no virtue in outsourcing because the standard of living of everybody in the world was raised to such a level. Now this is probably a naive view that comes from somebody who lives within the world. Technology that's a very optimistic world and only touches on a small percentage, probably of the people in the world. But since then, as I'm starting to like, I've been involved in the nonprofit here in Austin that helped ex offenders who have many of the same kind of challenges that people who are out of work have with respect to jobs.

And now am starting to get involved with an organization that is promoting an educational bridge between sub Saharan Africa and the United States. The one thing that I think the approach that Frithjof has taken with his organization is very exciting because I've seen that model work and I hear from people who live in Kenya or have been to, you know, the other places that that that type of model is something that they're interested in exploring. They're not interested in participating in capitalism or Western style democracy in the same way that we don't need to go impose it on them that if you give enough people enough incentive, enough education, the right tools, and as Frithjof says, you kind of cajole and persuade them that they'll build a solution that works for them.

And it may or may not look like the solution you decide to build for yourself, but that there's a notion of empowerment at that level that is extremely powerful. So thanks for this thought provoking book and conversation.

1:22:29 Dylan: Yeah, I enjoyed reading the book and I enjoyed the discussion.

1:22:32 Seth: So Frithjof, you should know that Mark has wanted to do this for certainly at Least as long as I think we have been together, which is four years and probably, as he mentioned, for a decade or so before that. So I want to extend a personal thanks to you to making yourself available and helping realize Mark's dream. Because I know this has a tremendous amount of meaning to him, even if he's unable to articulate it directly to you in that way.

1:23:00 Mark: You're just embarrassing me in front of the audience who are already like, why are you so.

1:23:05 Seth: Mark, you've made a career out of embarrassing the rest of us in front of the audience. So team there.

1:23:11 Richard: Really,

1:23:14 Seth: Mark can be sarcastic and indelicate at times when the rest of us, our delicate sensibilities, can be offended.

1:23:23 Mark: I don't know what you're talking about. That's ridiculous.

1:23:28 Richard: Well, as long as you all are uttering final words, I will repeat what I said all the way through again and again. Again. For me, this was an incredible experience. It was absolutely wonderful to have this opportunity to talk with you. I am not somebody who very often says words fail me. In this case, words do fail me. Sort of maybe think about it for a moment. That here is somebody who, after something like 20 years ago, really left this world behind and worked in all kinds of pretty wild circumstances. Now to have this conversation with you, it is absolutely the realization of a fantasy, of a dream, of something absolutely great.

1:24:19 Mark: Well, yes, we have Frithjof's debut, really, in attempting to get press in the U.S. right. There's a lot of discussion in Germany and other places. In fact, he just got a lifetime achievement award from some group in Austria. This should just be the beginning. People should read your book. We should get you on Econ Talk and other venues. You should be on the Daily show where you can go out and talk for three minutes with Jon Stewart. So hopefully these things will all open up when the book finally comes out. Next time we're going to read Friedrich Nietzsche's the Gay Science.

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Thanks and good night.

1:26:00 Seth: Thank you, Good night. Good night.

1:26:01 Wes: Good night.

1:26:02 Richard: Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

1:26:10 Unknown speaker: We who have escaped we will come back for you. Don't you lose that thought of lucky out we who have escaped are keeping track of you all your desperate thoughts are leaking out. Bet you they're soft Bet you they're dull Bet you they've got a common center Bet you they're bots I bet you they're nuts really of you I bet you you're stuck I bet you you're fucked I bet you you've got a whole lot more coming to you and fro Bet you feel dull though not always we who have escaped we will come back for you. You are not forgotten in these parts you the sad remains of western barbecue bought and sold and chewed up in your hearts I bet you they're good I bet you they're kind I bet you you've got a soul worth singing I bet you you've got a hundred novels piling up in your cell I bet you you're SM more than you think Bet you could stretch and reach the stars or just the sink if your cube had one and not just the smell of decay decay of wasted day A time you've lost forever in that godforsaken office where your soul is left to simmer A display, display, uncle whips and pray is all you get for dinner though you're getting paid it's you who's made a bad bargain with the winner those who rule your life they will not mourn for you when your husk is brought out for its seeds and hay all you ever wanted can come back to you but you've got to cut them out and not just make them pay you slightly more Bet you feel poor Bet you feel normal like your father Bet you he's altered on regardless because that's what they expect.

Bet you're next. Bet you barely feel your calling. Bet you're all hunched up and falling in a knot of rage of decay. Decay of a wasted day of time you've lost forever in that godforsaken office where your soul is left to simmer or display. Display of Richelieu, please. All you get for dinner. No you're getting paid. It's you who's made the bad bargain with the winner. A decay, decay of wasted day. A time you've lost forever in that God forsaken office where your soul is left to simmer or dismay. Display of a re is all you get for dinner. Don't you getting paid.

It's you who's made a bad bargain with the winner. Cause you want to be the winner. Wanna be fast and you'll never fitter. And maybe it will happen if you.