“Sometimes you #SleepWhereYouWork”

"Well, push them to just before they die." - Elon Musk. 

Productivity theater, toxic work cultures, and death from overworking. 

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:08

Welcome back to Death by Doctrine. I'm MJ.

SPEAKER_03 0:11

I'm Holly.

SPEAKER_00 0:12

So last episode we did the Protestant work ethic and we wanted to do something that's related to it. A natural thing that came up was I call productivity brain rot because this was a while ago, but this is during the Doge cuts when they were going around the government saying, like, this is not productive enough, etc. etc. That came to my mind. But then you have a better term that you came up with.

SPEAKER_03 0:34

Yeah, I can thank Elon Musk for this. We'll get into it, but I've been generally using the term productivity theater because I think a really big part of this doctrine is not actually about being productive per se, but it's about appearing productive.

SPEAKER_00 0:48

Yes.

SPEAKER_03 0:48

To yourself or to your bosses, or wanting your employees to just spend a lot of time looking productive. I think the best thing that sums it up is I would say the now infamous Twitter employee post from Elon Musk's takeover in 2022, where she posted an image of herself sleeping at Twitter headquarters uh with the hashtag sleep where you work.

SPEAKER_00 1:11

Yikes. Here's the thing: she didn't post that out of satire or uh what's another term for satire?

SPEAKER_03 1:18

Yeah, it's not like look how ludicrous our work situation is right now.

SPEAKER_00 1:21

She was serious.

SPEAKER_03 1:22

She was like, we're rallying the team, we're getting things done. And uh that is tough.

SPEAKER_00 1:28

That is dystopian at its finest. Okay, so today's doctrine is sort of this productivity theater, the idea that you need to be productive at all times, but in a very specific way, as we're about to get into it's not just doing things. Because I can argue the drive to do things is relatively human. It's actually more normal for people to want to do things than it is not. That is not the type of productivity that we're talking about as we're going to get into. So let's break this down. What is it and why are we here, Holly?

SPEAKER_03 2:01

All right. So my definition of productivity theater, I'll get into, but I want to set some groundwork first because I think we talked about this when we were talking about the Protestant work ethic, but there's a lot of historical rooting here that is responsible for this. But there's also a lot of change that we just really didn't adapt to as a country. So the definition and even the measurement of productivity, especially in business, has changed really dramatically in the last century. And I don't think a lot of our concepts of what productivity means has adapted along with it.

SPEAKER_00 2:36

I could totally see that.

SPEAKER_03 2:37

So let me take you through that theory.

SPEAKER_00 2:40

Let's do it.

SPEAKER_03 2:40

Because I have mentioned this a couple times in this podcast before, but I work in human resources in a modern business industry. So this is a huge part of my life, actually. I have read a lot of modern business books. Um especially early in my career. It was incentivized, and I love doing things for prizes. So I've read a ton of books.

SPEAKER_01 3:04

That's all it took to get you to read these junk.

SPEAKER_03 3:07

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 3:07

Okay.

SPEAKER_03 3:08

And you know, you start out, you want to succeed, right? You're like, okay, how do I do business? And you're like, well, I majored in English, so I better just start reading books. That's how I learned things, right? And it didn't take that long for me to discover that modern business books, the self-help book industry, are hot garbage. Yeah, hot garbage to be polite. Some are okay. Okay only. Some are terrible.

SPEAKER_00 3:32

Most are terrible, yeah.

SPEAKER_03 3:33

I would say many are terrible. And only a few, even if they're otherwise okay, feel like they actually do have enough material to justify being a book instead of an article. I think this is not necessarily every author's problem, but as a publishing industry, right, you might have a pretty decent concept for like good advice, and it just can't really hold up to more than 25 pages. That's a big part of the business publishing economy as well.

SPEAKER_00 3:57

It's like you gotta stretch that idea out.

SPEAKER_03 4:00

You gotta sell books. So when I was looking into this topic, what caught my eye was an article in The New Yorker from Cal Newport, a name I recognized from my business book journey. Uh, you're familiar with him as well?

SPEAKER_00 4:14

He got viral, might be the wrong word because he has his own niche, but he got into the popular consciousness when he published his book, Deep Work, which made its round in the book space.

SPEAKER_03 4:25

Yeah, I agree. And that's how I heard of him as well. He's like a computer science professor, so he's not like a psychologist or anything, but I would say he approaches things a little bit more academically than some of these authors do. And his work is more about I think things that seem pretty straightforward concepts for anybody's work.

SPEAKER_00 4:43

The bar is low in this space.

SPEAKER_03 4:44

Like I've read Deep Work, that was pretty good. Essentially, it's about the significance of having uninterrupted blocks of time to do significant brain-powered work, minimizing digital distractions. And I think that's like pretty good advice for anybody, especially if you work with a computer. His stuff is really in this kind of productivity sphere of modern business, but I would say he's one of the better voices in it.

SPEAKER_00 5:07

Yeah, he's more grounded than some of the others that I'm sure you'll get into.

SPEAKER_03 5:11

Yeah, my gosh. I've read so many productivity books. I've read one. I hate the version of these books that are like about having the right attitude to succeed the most. There's this one I read.

SPEAKER_00 5:21

Red flag.

SPEAKER_03 5:22

The only thing I remember about this book was it's all about having a good attitude can get you ahead in business. And the author's bio is like, I'm six feet tall, and I was recommended by Tony Robbins. I'm like, yeah, if you're a six-foot-tall man, then yeah, I'm sure that does help you. I'm sure if I, a 5'4 young woman, embodied some of these tips, it would not go the same way.

SPEAKER_00 5:42

Definitely not. This space is so saturated with pseudoscience is putting it politely, but sometimes just cult or personality junk that someone like Cal Newport can really stand out because the bar is very low.

SPEAKER_03 5:56

Yeah. Like he's just genuinely interested in like work history and and how people can do actual meaningful work, which is not the focus of all these writers. But all that groundwork being laid, I saw an article in The New Yorker he wrote called The Frustration with Productivity Culture. And I was interested in his take because I thought it was kind of interesting. Like in the article, he is discussing how he has seen increasing frustration from a lot of his readers about the word productivity at all, which is something that he writes a lot about. And he kind of goes through some thoughts he has on the way our relationship to productivity has changed, particularly if you work in knowledge work or adjacent to the tech industry. So Newport's argument in this article is that earlier American economic booms stemming back to the Industrial Revolution had a much simpler and more systemic relationship to productivity. I can see like the microeconomics 101 profit line graph in my head.

SPEAKER_01 6:53

Don't take us there.

SPEAKER_03 6:54

Like it's just so simple. It's like if you work in a factory and the factory produces widgets, more widgets is more good. So more widgets and less time is like the simplest possible equation, right? Profits increase. And I'm not saying that because that was good for workers. We know historically that is not the case with manufacturing and industry. But when we're looking at productivity, it's not really about how fast or hard individual workers are going. Don't get me wrong, they were exploited to reach that false equation as much as possible. But real productivity gains came from things like the assembly line, like systemic innovations that changed the way we can manufacture products. So if you implemented an assembly line, industry efficiency became unbelievable. And it's not really about one person's heroic efforts, it's not about sleeping at the factory. It's really like, oh, we implemented some new technology and it's really changed the game.

SPEAKER_00 7:51

Yeah, and that was the era where the worker was simply a variable, almost assumed to be a constant. Like you can nudge workers up and down a little bit, but it was a constant. Like this is a rate limiting factor that we have, and all the productivity was sort of designed to work around it. There wasn't much to do regarding an individual worker's productivity, and obviously, how do you go around it? You build machines. You can see the microeconomics 101 graph being the root of how we think about productivity for like decades to come to sometimes devastating consequences.

SPEAKER_03 8:24

Yes.

SPEAKER_01 8:24

Yeah, number go up good.

SPEAKER_03 8:26

And I would say, and Newport argues in his article that the shift to knowledge work and American culture has reoriented what productivity means for those workers. Because productivity is still an important economic concept. Like it's something that is real in some sense and is going to be measured. But when work is less outcome-oriented, less tangible, and it's more focused on creativity and strategic concepts and workers having really variable like skill development and what's going on in their own brains. That line graph is muddled. So Mora Goods is good is like really skewed in the modern work sense. If you are like engaged in knowledge work, which a large proportion of Americans are at this point.

SPEAKER_00 9:11

We're not dealing with the widgets anymore, but you can see that they're still trying very hard to think in the widget production mindset. And that's probably where you're about to go to next.

SPEAKER_01 9:21

Like, what happens when you try to make abstract widgets using previous methods?

SPEAKER_03 9:26

Yeah, it's something that modern knowledge workers have to personalize now. It's something we take on ourselves. Like, are you thinking efficiently? Are you doing this the best way? Are you creating value? Is more still better? What does more mean? Is there an upper capacity? It's like all kinds of trade-offs constantly about what productivity means. And I think for a lot of industries and a lot of work cultures, it's asking people to like strive for more at a personal level, which inevitably means taking more away from your own life and putting it into work.

SPEAKER_00 9:57

You can see the more pernicious side of this when your outcome goes from a physical object requiring manual labor into an abstract stuff. If you're making a physical widget, there's only so much you can squeeze out of a person. But when your outcome is abstract, the squeezing is also abstract. And abstract squeezing is kind of limitless. You can squeeze yourself in that abstract as much as you want almost because it's not physical anymore.

SPEAKER_03 10:24

It's kind of an interesting thing when you're working not on developing specific products. It's like, when am I done? I think it's a it's a hard thing for people to learn when they start working. It's like, when am I done with this project? When is it like good enough? That can be really vague. It can be something that you have to learn to strike a balance on. And in some cases, you're not going to be encouraged to strike a balance on.

SPEAKER_00 10:47

As we're about to find out.

SPEAKER_03 10:49

Yes. This shift for a lot of white-collar workers radically changed the way a lot of Americans work, right? We have the tech boom. We have all these new kinds of companies. We're really oriented around the internet and new technology, but it also didn't radically change the way a lot of Americans work. And I think that's really the crux to where we see this productivity issue at a societal level as a doctrine. Some companies still attempt to measure output in that more traditional sense. Okay, more work is better.

SPEAKER_01 11:19

It never went away.

SPEAKER_03 11:20

We're not really thinking through what it means for that work to be meaningful or transformative.

SPEAKER_00 11:25

Just number of hours you put in, right?

SPEAKER_03 11:27

Yes. And some companies are saying, uh, okay, maybe we don't even really measure output. It's just like come in, work your hours, clock out. If you're there, you must be doing work. And both of these approaches have their pitfalls.

SPEAKER_02 11:40

Sure.

SPEAKER_03 11:40

But then I think we get to like a new breed of toxic productivity that we're seeing in a lot of our Palo Alto tech companies today that is taking those pitfalls to a new, very extreme level. And that is where we're gonna talk about the concept of productivity theater.

SPEAKER_00 11:59

Productivity gurus is another term that comes to mind. Biohacker is another term that comes to mind. The Silicon Valley landscape has really gifted us with a lot of really dystopian terms.

SPEAKER_03 12:10

Yes.

SPEAKER_00 12:11

Yeah, and this being one of them.

SPEAKER_03 12:12

It's so interesting. I didn't really dig too much into the formation of all of this. I'm mostly gonna talk about what we're seeing right now. But definitely, I think so much of the mythology of like modern tech founders is so wrapped up in how they spent dozens of hours developing new software and they spent all night coding. And that, much like our Protestant work ethic, has really bled into some damaging ideas about what productivity actually is that don't translate very much at all, but especially don't translate from like a one-person startup in college to a 500-person company. Like those have to be drastically different work environments.

SPEAKER_00 12:51

Like all this talk about like, oh, this is what the founders did. They worked so hard on this, and that's why they're a billionaire. It reminds me of a Mark Cuban quote that I think really encapsulates the fundamental issue with this sort of perspective. Like Mark Cuban said famously, like, oh, like I didn't take a vacation for seven years, and that's how I got to where I am today. Like he's playing off the same cliche of it's hard work, right? I'm putting 80 hours a week, 100 hours a week. I didn't take a vacation for seven years. And what I just want to add to that is for every Mark Cuban who didn't take a vacation for seven years, there are many people who also didn't take a vacation for seven years and got nowhere. You need to take into consideration the connections that they had, the background that they had, hell, their skin color and gender, but also luck. Luck is a huge part of upper mobility. Like, were you in the right place at the right time? To just focus on how many hours they put in in their 20s is an incomplete picture and is that survivorship bias of we keep looking at successful people, but we don't look at the control, which is people who did similar things but gotten nowhere. And we have this skew perspective of, oh, it must be what they did is what got them to success, instead of these other factors like luck, connection, background, your parents' wealth being particularly a big one for a lot of these founders. We love hearing stories of Mark Cuban and Elon Musk working how many hours a week. I'm telling you, there are people who also did that, but you don't hear about them.

SPEAKER_03 14:24

Right. And there's a fundamental difference between owning the capital, right? If you put in some hard work, you're going to become a multimillionaire due to the position you are in as the founder of a company with investment that is just simply not going to be the case for most people, and not something you should expect from your employees who will not have that same kind of radically life-changing outcome from putting in the same amount of work. So, yeah, the thing that tech founders do where they have to self-mythologize is, I think, really poignant and interesting because it's like, no, the cause is not X, I put in 80 hours a week, why I'm a multimillionaire. Like, you have to understand that is far more complicated than that.

SPEAKER_00 15:05

Absolutely. So, what about this new era of productivity theater inspired by Palauto?

SPEAKER_03 15:12

So the productivity theater idea, the hashtag sleepwhereywork doctrine, to me is defined by these couple of tenets. One, appearing to dedicate more time and more of your life to work is more important than whether that time makes a difference.

SPEAKER_00 15:29

Input oriented instead of outcome-oriented.

SPEAKER_03 15:31

Yeah. Um, looking like you're working hard is very important. The next one is working hard is a virtue, and therefore success must be tied to working hard. That's what you were talking about with the self-mythologizing of like Mark Cuban. And hello, we have talked about this. That's the Protestant work ethic at play here.

SPEAKER_01 15:48

Yeah, alive and well.

SPEAKER_03 15:50

Then we have productivity at work necessarily needs to sacrifice your personal life. Work life balance should bleed for those truly committed to advancing their careers.

SPEAKER_00 15:59

Yeah, and there is a very interesting gender component to this. Work-life balance means very different things, depending on what gender you are. There are certain things that if a man sacrifices, it's seen as positive. However, if a woman were to sacrifice that same thing, they would be viewed as, oh, you're not doing your job as a parent.

SPEAKER_03 16:24

Yes. A man working 80 hours per week is sacrificing for his family's well-being and betterment. A woman who does the same is sacrificing her child's happiness.

SPEAKER_00 16:34

Depriving their child.

SPEAKER_03 16:35

Yes. Those are views that are really common and really hard to root out, even if we have the tools to identify them.

SPEAKER_00 16:41

The bleeding of work-life balance, it doesn't cut evenly. It definitely is not an equal standard applied to depending on who you are, gender being the obvious one, but also like what class you are, what race you are, also really plays a big role into what counts as a sacrifice.

SPEAKER_03 16:56

Yes. So it's like a really unfair doctrine, too, right? As you're pointing out.

SPEAKER_00 17:00

Yeah, you don't say.

SPEAKER_03 17:01

There are all these barriers. So not only do you have to appear to be productive, that's really important in the eyes of a lot of these industries, but also you're not going to be recognized for all of the other things going on in your life that might make that even more challenging. You're not going to be recognized if you're also trying to juggle doing the majority of childcare at home or overcoming financial obstacles in your life that made this all the more difficult. Or if it was hard for you even to get this job in the first place because of rampant racial discrimination. So yeah, all of that is getting lost in the sauce because it's all about performative productivity.

SPEAKER_00 17:37

And sacrificing your life is considered a virtue. That's sort of the core of that.

SPEAKER_03 17:41

And to reiterate your point earlier, the toxicity of this doctrine is that extremity. I don't think it's harmful to care about productivity in like a really basic sense. Obviously, some people can do this in a healthy way and some people can't. Some people like are naturally going to go to one extreme or the other, which can be tough. I am a little bit type A, so I can relate to that. While I'm here criticizing productivity culture, I'm also like updating a spreadsheet of my baking hobby and setting goals for how many minutes I want to spend doing strike training this year. So I myself overmeasure my productivity. But on a personal level, I think that's really natural. Yeah, it is. We have a lot of things we're interested in, especially if you're fortunate enough to like have the capacity to invest your time in hobbies and in your personal life and in work. You kind of like want to hit a good balance there. But as a society and in the structure of a lot of our modern workplaces, this toxic productivity doctrine has become misaligned with anything that's going to be helpful for workers. And in some cases, like we'll talk about in our case study, it's not even obviously aligned with a doctrine that's good for the company. It's really about, especially as we're seeing in 2026 now, we're seeing a lot of influential tech companies and CEOs have revealed a preference for conservative political conditions and regressive management tactics that are not benefiting their business in any real way. But it's really about expressing control over the workforce.

SPEAKER_00 19:12

Yeah, I imagine you're going to talk about the return to office thing, because that's also another thing that I'm very vocal about being a bad idea. You're sacrificing actual productivity to appear to be more productive. Yeah, let's get into it. Let's get into how this is actually terrible for companies, but I don't know why they keep doing it.

SPEAKER_03 19:30

Yeah, I have one specific company in mind for whom this was extremely terrible. And no one's gonna be surprised to hear this is what we're getting into, but I'm really gonna focus on Elon Musk and his Twitter takeover in 2022.

SPEAKER_00 19:45

So long ago.

SPEAKER_03 19:46

It really is. When I was doing this research, I was like, it's almost quaint to talk about this now because as I'm talking about the Twitter takeover, he's done the same thing to the federal government. Yeah. Um, so we'll touch on both of them.

SPEAKER_00 19:59

The federal government cuts had a such a profound, disastrous, negative impact on all of us. But he essentially just did Twitter part two, but with the entire government.

SPEAKER_03 20:10

Yeah, this was one thing I found not surprising, but really stark when I was looking into it, because the first thing I'm going to present in my case study is a 2018 memo uh that Musk sent out to his employees at Tesla. So 2018, it's a few years before I think the wider public has an idea of what Musk is really about. But as we know, when he was running his other companies, Tesla, SpaceX, he had some extremely damaging ideas about what productivity meant that he would carry into his future work.

SPEAKER_00 20:45

Yeah, the thing with Tesla is I'm always surprised how much of a public image it had during all of this. Anyone who actually knows about what's going on in Tesla, the worker abuse, the lack of labor protection, but the public at that point sort of just didn't care about these news for some reason. Yeah, we won't get into that. But Tesla was awful.

SPEAKER_03 21:05

I was complaining about this while I was reading this memo. This is from 2018, and I was complaining about it to my husband, who's often the source of containing my frustration while I'm doing this podcast. And he was like, Well, never forget. He's like, I hated Elon Musk in 2018. He really turned on Elon Musk over the cave diver controversy, if you remember, which is one of my husband's hyperfixations.

SPEAKER_01 21:29

Maybe as a bonus, he can talk about it.

SPEAKER_03 21:31

Yeah, it's it's too off topic. So back in 2018, Musk publishes a memo to his Tesla staff, and in the memo, he congratulates his staff for achieving a 100% increase in year over year production of Model 3 vehicles, which is a lot. 100% increase in production is pretty big year over year. What they had reached that he's congratulating them on, it's 2,000 Model 3 vehicles produced per week. In the same memo, he goes on to tell his staff that he He expects them to ramp to six thousand Model 3 vehicles per week within a couple of months. And he warns them that any quote Tesla department or supplier that is unable to do this will need to have a very good reason why not and prepare a solution and bring it to me directly, unquote.

SPEAKER_00 22:17

Shall we do some math?

SPEAKER_03 22:18

Yeah. What percent increase is that?

SPEAKER_00 22:20

2,000 to 6,000. That is a 200% increase in production, what they are currently producing, and he wants to do that in a couple of months. This man is unstable.

SPEAKER_03 22:33

I got the shakes just reading this. Like I was like, I would be dying if I was one of his employees.

SPEAKER_00 22:39

I would quit.

SPEAKER_01 22:40

I don't want to be here. Yeah. But I don't know. Obviously, a lot of people did in for some reason.

SPEAKER_03 22:44

But this letter is such a red flag. You can see in the letter some of the behavior that Musk would later implement at Twitter and then Doge. He mentions in the same memo he's going to comb through every single expenditure looking for waste, which I'm in human resources. That is an absolute freaking nightmare to me.

SPEAKER_01 23:01

It's a waste of time, by the way.

SPEAKER_03 23:02

He recommends going around policies and chains of a command if they don't make sense. Again, to me, that's like making me shake in my boots. I'm just imagining all the workers' compensation paperwork that doesn't get done if your CEO is telling you to ignore any company policy that's stopping you. And then finally he signs off this memo with quote, we are burning the midnight oil to burn the midnight oil, unquote. Which doesn't even really make sense to me as a statement, but it's just like an extreme productivity thing, right? He's like, We're not just burning the midnight oil. We're burning the midnight oil to burn the midnight oil. And then he signs off with his name.

SPEAKER_00 23:36

This was the beginning of when he really, in my opinion, hit his cognitive decline.

SPEAKER_01 23:43

Yeah, it doesn't make any sense at all. Toxic productivity at its peak.

SPEAKER_03 23:47

And I think you pointed this out, and I think it's a great point, is you would quit.

SPEAKER_01 23:52

Yeah, you would just quit.

SPEAKER_03 23:53

This is not a sustainable business. And presumably you're in a high-skilled position, and it won't be that hard for you to find another job. But I think one really significant thing you see in this memo is that he really leans on creating a circle of buy-in from his employees. You're in or you're out. If you're in, you're asked to burn the midnight oil, to commit to unrealistic and changing goals, and to be asked to justify every expenditure on the spot whenever your CEO feels like you're not making enough profit. If you're out, you're not worthy. You're not of the right caliber, and you don't deserve the honor of working at this company. So I think that dynamic we'll see again, and it can kind of reinforce a lot of toxic productivity cultures that aren't just in tech, but I think you see the same thing in corporate law, in finance. And these are often like more high-powered and high-paying careers than a lot of Americans have access to, but I think they do extract a huge toll on a lot of American workers.

SPEAKER_00 24:49

This is where you start to lean into the cults-ish language. You're either in or you out, creating an in-group versus an out group. Also, I just want to point out for anyone who, I don't know, happens to be in this position, whether it's Twitter or whatever, you working that hard does not give you the same level of wealth as it will give the shareholders. Because you're salaried, even if you have like a few stock options given to you as an employee, your labor will not translate to what it will do to the shareholders and the CEO because of their pay package. So the myth that, oh, if I work this hard, I will also get to where Elon is, is is that it is a myth because Elon is occupying that space. You cannot go there because he is there. Only one person can occupy that space.

SPEAKER_03 25:35

Right. And as we'll see, if your work culture is as toxic as Tesla, you're not even guaranteed job security for all of that.

SPEAKER_00 25:43

No, you might get fired.

SPEAKER_03 25:45

So, yes, in 2022, we see this all repeated again, but more extreme and more terrible because Musk acquires Twitter. And as we all know, I won't rehash every single thing. It's really crazy. I was looking into a new book that's been published in the past year about the whole thing, which I have not personally read, but would definitely be interesting to revisit. It's called Character Limit.

SPEAKER_01 26:06

Yeah, good reviews.

SPEAKER_03 26:07

But this acquisition came with an obviously tumultuous period for Twitter's employees, rounds of firings, including a round that asked employees to opt into their jobs if they were willing to work, quote, long hours at high intensity, unquote, or else take a severance package. So we're seeing that buy-in culture again imposed on a team by Elon Musk, and really like saying, hey, if you're gonna take this job, this is the kind of treatment you're going to expect. And I think that is definitely like a psychological tactic he's trying to employ.

SPEAKER_00 26:40

Yeah, it's psychological and cultish in that if you choose to opt in, you sort of give up your right to complain later. That was implicit in that sort of language. And I will reiterate my point again: you doing this will not get you anywhere. Like you are being used, you're being extracted and exploited, like you are not a shareholder. Your productivity does not translate to the type of explosion in wealth that these C-suites and these shareholders will see. So please quit.

SPEAKER_03 27:08

Yeah. Case in point, we're gonna circle way back to the beginning of the episode and mention our famous Twitter product manager who is sleeping at work, hashtag sleeping at work. And I can always just see that image. To me, that was like the defining image of that period. Her in a sleeping bag and an eye mask laying on the floor of a conference room. And this was posted by a product manager at Twitter, and she wrote at the time, I love my family, and I'm grateful they understand that there are times where I need to go into overdrive to grind and push in order to deliver. Building new things at Twitter skills, very hard to do. I'm lucky to be doing this work alongside some of the best people in tech.

SPEAKER_01 27:48

She needs help. Like she genuinely needs help.

SPEAKER_00 27:50

And all the people who believe that need help. You have to understand the moment you break, you are disposable to them. This will get you nowhere. It will not earn you extra respect. You're not even vested as a shareholder. You're an employee. What are you doing? You're a salaried.

SPEAKER_03 28:04

Yeah. And like what happened to this product manager? Well, her team was actually in charge of implementing Musk's new blue check system, the one where you can now pay for a blue check.

SPEAKER_01 28:14

We can't get into this.

SPEAKER_00 28:14

This is terrible.

SPEAKER_03 28:15

So he gave them like 10 days to do that, which is obviously going to be very technically complicated.

SPEAKER_00 28:19

Borderline impossible.

SPEAKER_03 28:20

Her staff was so stressed out that they were like sending each other Apple Watch data of their unhealthy heart rates. And she told Musk that she didn't want her team to be like pushed to death over this. And he told her to push them until just before they die, then, which is a cute little Elon Musk statement that I'm sure he thought was very funny.

SPEAKER_00 28:40

This is a let them eat cake. Same vibe as let them eat cake.

SPEAKER_03 28:43

So that product manager, uh, she actually did eventually get fired. So for all of that, she wasn't saved from the over 50% employee layoffs at Twitter from the acquisition. And now she works for Meta. So I hope she's happy. I guess she just kind of changed environments there. But it really goes to show that for all that productivity and hustle and the sleeping at work post, it really doesn't do much for you to be performatively overworked. She did not gain from that. It did not protect her position to Musk or at this company. Feeding into it is not going to help you.

SPEAKER_00 29:17

Yeah, I hesitate to use the word cult, but this is not a normal line of thought for people to have. Here's the thing: as much as I hate the Silicon Valley tech space, if you were a startup company and you have this mindset, I would also view you negatively, but at the very least, you are vested in the thing that you're putting so much hours into. If this thing floats, you float.

SPEAKER_03 29:40

Right. And there are stakes in those scenarios. Yeah. Yeah, there are stakes. Maybe you believe in this, you're in or out of a job, but if you're an employee, the stakes are not that. Like it's just as a fundamentally different thing to be involved in creating a company that may bomb or like being part of an established behemoth company where you're one of 500 employees. Those are completely different beasts. And to act like a startup investor when you're a product manager at that scale is just a little unhinged.

SPEAKER_01 30:08

Unhinged to say the least.

SPEAKER_00 30:09

So yeah, we could see the negative effects of this doctrine in full swing, both in Silicon Valley, but also in our federal government because of our fascist takeover, right?

SPEAKER_03 30:18

Yes. Elon Musk did pretty much all the same things when he took over the federal government. Really didn't change his game plan. He did the mass firings. He did this fun new thing where he asked federal workers to send him a memo. Is it every day or was it every week? I can't remember.

SPEAKER_01 30:34

I think it's every week.

SPEAKER_03 30:35

Oh, reasonable.

SPEAKER_01 30:36

But either way, insane.

SPEAKER_03 30:38

Yeah. Every week with lists of things that they got done. Obviously, that's just busy work, right? That's about control, not actual meaningful work getting done. And then at the same time, we're seeing lots this in tons of other industries and examples. We're seeing tech companies with mammoth workforces suddenly enforcing five days in office regardless of relative productivity or success of the remote staff. So that's clearly about employee control, not about, you know, optimizing the best work environments for vast amounts of staff across the country. Think about even a more recent example, uh Barry Weiss taking over CBS, pulling a musk, and asking every news employee to send her an introductory memo about their work. She's not trying to identify impactful work or get to know her team. She's asking for them to participate in busy work so she can waste some time and make a wave. It's all about expressing control, showing you who's boss, asking you to self-report your own work when they have every means of measuring productivity or output or like work done on their own terms. And I think we're going to continue to see this rise because we're not in an employee-friendly market right now. We have no employee-friendly policies. We have the federal government itself violating workers' rights in our civil service, and that's going to feed down into all of our other industries as well.

SPEAKER_00 31:55

Yeah. At the end of the day, these are bad leadership, terrible leaders, and bad decisions. However, we are not in the economy where these terrible decisions face any consequences. Obviously, you see Barry Weiss, you see Eli Almust, they're still at the top of their organization despite making terrible changes to everything because it's performative.

SPEAKER_03 32:15

I think that is a stark difference too, is in 2022 when Elon Musk took over Twitter, that was actually like an employee-friendly market at the time for a lot of industries. A lot of tech companies were booming. We were like coming out of the COVID scare, at least at like a work level. So a lot of skilled employees in like tech and other professional industries had a lot of leverage at that time. And I think that's part of why the Twitter takeover was so shocking because a lot of these employees in 2022 did have other places that would take them. Now in 2026, we're having much more uncertain economic conditions. So employers are leveraging a lot more control over their employees. It's harder to find competitive offers. So all that same stuff, that same control is happening, and it's even more damaging in today's environment than it was a few years ago.

SPEAKER_00 33:02

Yeah. God, I hate all of these people. So that's sort of the doctrine. You see this in our government, in CBS, and also in obviously anything that Elon Musk touches. So that's sort of the doctrine, the productivity theater, the performative productivity instead of actual productivity. What is the individual and public health effect of this doctrine? How does that make our lives shorter on average? Before I get into it, you sort of touched on this, but I want to reiterate this point again. This is a very uh socialist concept that I think everyone should know. Do not confuse labor and capital. Those are two different concepts. The thing about this doctrine is there is an inherent paradox. The productivity is limited to money making and performative productivity instead of labor in general. For example, if you spend hours gardening, uh doing physical labor, building your dream backyard garden, or Holly, as you said, you have a spreadsheet of your baking or something like that.

SPEAKER_03 33:59

Yes, I do. I'm planning my hobby. I invest an inordinate amount of time to do so, but I'm not generating any capital from it. In fact, I'm spending quite a bit of money on King Arthur Flower.

SPEAKER_00 34:10

We do stand King Arthur Flower. If you spend all that hours in your hobby like I do with this podcast, I'm hemorrhaging money making this podcast just because I want to. That doesn't count under this doctrine because you're not monetizing it. That is a waste of time in this sort of productivity theater. However, if you have a lot of money and you make more money by purchasing a digital asset that rises in value in a few months, that is productive somehow in this doctrine. Under this doctrine, a billionaire on a yacht is being more productive than a house cleaner. The entire conceit is to make enough money so that eventually you don't have to do any actual labor. And keep that in mind, right? Productivity theater and actual labor productivity are two separate concepts, and do not confuse them. So, this doctrine, productivity theater, it's not about labor. How does that impact our health? The first thing that we need to establish is the link between mental well-being and physical well-being. We've touched on this in previous episodes, and intuitively this makes sense. The overt manifestation of mental well-being affecting physical health is suicide, self-harm, and increasing risk-taking behavior. That's sort of the more obvious manifestation for how our mental health impacts our physical health. A less extreme example of how mental health affects our health is you can think about diet. Imagine mood eating, but more serious. If you're suffering from depression, you're probably not eating well, if at all. Mental health can also affect your activity level. If you have depression, you're probably not moving around. There is a very clear connection between how you feel up here in your head and how you are physically in your body. If you self-medicate, that could be hazardous to your health as well. If you don't have access to therapy and actual medication, you might turn to alcohol, is a very common one. You might turn to other sort of medications to sort of help you through this period. Obviously, that's hazardous to your health in the long term, right? But there's also very subtle ways that mental health can affect our physical health, like stress. The health effect of stress is very well documented. Holly, have you heard of the term weathering?

SPEAKER_03 36:11

Uh, not in a public health sense, I think is what you're getting at. I get it means like wearing something down over time.

SPEAKER_00 36:17

Yeah, weathering is a well-known public health hypothesis popularized by Arlene Geronymus, fantastic last name, by the way, in the 90s. And it was initially used to describe the effect of racism on physical health as an explanation for health disparities. Racism is a health hazard for both directly, like police brutality, that's a very direct form of racism on the physical body, poverty, uh, redlining, etc. But it's also hazardous to our health in an insidious and indirect way. The daily stress of social exclusion, of negative media portrayal that you see on TV, the marginalization, like all that compounds over time and it is reflected in our biology. This hypothesis has some supporting data, though it's certainly not the sole explanation for racial health disparities. That's one of the critiques that people had with this. The point of weathering is that it's pertinent to our discussion today because the notion that these small things build up and our health can be affected by these more abstract forces is well understood. We have actual uh research to support this. This is not like something that we think is happening, we know it's happening. We are the product of our environment, and that includes the stress that we face every day.

SPEAKER_03 37:25

Yeah, that makes sense. And I like not to personalize it, but I've experienced that personally. Like during the like biggest, most severe part of the COVID-19 pandemic, and especially before we had vaccines, I was extremely anxious. I have health anxiety.

SPEAKER_01 37:40

People were not well during that period.

SPEAKER_03 37:42

And I at that time had I always have like some acid reflux digestion issues, but at that time it was so bad. I had chronic hiccups, and when I got my vaccines, that went away. So I was like, wow, stress really had a crazy effect on my body.

SPEAKER_00 37:59

Yeah, and I think a lot of people feel this viscerally. A lot of people have uh something called seasonal affective disorder. You are probably not moving around as much in the winter times if you have seasonal affective disorder because it's just so sad outside. The fact that the acronym for that is sad is two on the nose.

SPEAKER_03 38:17

It's so fitting. And imagine if it's winter and it's depressing and then you're going into a depressing workplace all day. Oh imagine the toll that takes.

SPEAKER_00 38:26

Yeah. So if you subscribe to this ideology, productivity theater, the sleep where you work ideology, you will engage in behaviors that negatively affect your mental and therefore physical health. The most obvious presentation of this is overworking. Now, as an Asian American, this concept is quite familiar to me because Asian work culture tends to lean this way. However, this trend is infecting American culture as well, as we've just discussed with Twitter, Barry Weiss, and all those, you know, kooky people that for some reason are in positions of power. We'll come back to this.

SPEAKER_03 38:59

For some reason, they are dictating every aspect of our life now, yes.

SPEAKER_00 39:02

Just want to point out in every dystopian literature, the bad guy are authoritarian. So just, you know, think about that. Anyway, overworking is a well-documented issue. The WHO and the International Labor Organization associated reports suggest that death linked with overworking may kill more than malaria every year. Around 750,000 deaths. These are typically from some form of stroke, heart failure, a blood vessel damage, like spontaneous coronary artery dissections, liver and kidney failures. Our body is not meant to be in flight or flight all the time because that releases cortisol and that cause our body to be in a state of stress. And if that stress is constant, there's wear and tear, right? For example, when we are stressed, our blood pressure goes up. The idea is that you flight or flight to get rid of that threat. And after the flight or flight, your blood pressure goes down and you have that like moment of high blood pressure, but then it eventually goes down. The analogy I love to use is we are used to tigers chasing us. And if a tiger were to chase us, we either die to the tiger or we live to see another day. However, right now in modern society, there is a very slow tiger that is always chasing us, and that's sort of how stress is. Your blood pressure is always elevated. And our blood vessels, surprisingly, they're not meant to sustain high blood pressure chronically. It's meant to be like a momentary thing, and then you relax or die in that analogy.

SPEAKER_03 40:29

Relax or die. That's a good alternative title for this episode.

SPEAKER_00 40:32

There is health impact of overworking, sleep deprivation. I doubt that program manager got sleep during that 10 days.

SPEAKER_01 40:40

Or if they did, it was not good quality sleep.

SPEAKER_03 40:43

No, I was getting stressed just reading about that deadline and that scenario. Like that is, and it's just completely arbitrary, right? That's the worst part of it. There's no actual reason that needed to be done in 10 days.

SPEAKER_00 40:54

How do you think their diets are during that 10 days?

SPEAKER_03 40:57

Well, Musk thinks that the cafeterias that Twitter used to have in their headquarters are a waste of money. So probably, I believe he got rid of those, and probably they were eating takeout at that point. Because these tech companies did use to work people long hours, but they would also be like, hey, and we're providing vegan food in our cafeteria.

SPEAKER_00 41:13

Yeah, there's a gym here, there's a cafeteria here, stay here, don't go home.

SPEAKER_03 41:17

You know, there were negative aspects to that work culture as well. But when you take it to an extreme where you got someone coming in and saying, not only are we working longer hours now, but also we're not expending any money on employee happiness or well-being, that is the worst case scenario for sure.

SPEAKER_00 41:31

Yeah. So poor diets. Some probably have insufficient nourishment during that period. Do you think they're sitting all day? Maybe. Maybe they have standing desks. Possibly. But either way, they're probably not hitting the gym. You know, they're probably not getting a cardio workout in, right?

SPEAKER_03 41:45

No, certainly.

SPEAKER_00 41:46

Their cortisol levels is probably on a constant high. And you said so yourself, their Apple Watch heart rate is kind of through the roof during this period. Yes. And again, our body is not meant to be in that state chronically. Either the tiger catches up to you and eats you, or you get away from the tiger. But now there's always a tiger, and you can't run away from this tiger if you believe in this productivity doctrine. And that's bad for you. Uh, I don't think I need to explain any more to why that's bad for you. Now, Japan has a cultural association with overworking. This was a problem prevalent enough that they have a specific term for it called karoshi, which occasionally is a plot point in an anime, Japanese TV show, and film because of how common it is. Several high-profile news stories about workers being found dead in their cubicles circulated during the 80s and 90s because it actually did happen. Are you familiar with this side of Japanese culture?

SPEAKER_03 42:38

Yes, yeah, I've definitely heard of this and some of these other economic powerhouse East Asian countries. Like I spent some time in Korea, and that's definitely an element of their work culture there as well.

SPEAKER_00 42:48

Yeah, also there's a something called the China's 996 work culture. Are you aware of this acronym?

SPEAKER_03 42:55

Uh I've not heard 996, no.

SPEAKER_00 42:57

So it's basically the same toxic work culture that you see in these high-powered East Asian countries. 996 stands for 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. six days a week.

SPEAKER_03 43:07

It's a lot of time.

SPEAKER_00 43:08

Yeah, a lot of time at work, not at home. This is, I believe if I do the math correctly, 72 hours, 12 times six.

SPEAKER_03 43:16

Sometimes if I work like a couple minutes past five, I'm like, ugh, I'm losing my mind. I cannot imagine doing it until nine.

SPEAKER_00 43:23

It's awful, and a lot of people are suffering health effects because of this. But it's the same thing that we see in Japan in the 80s and 90s, arguably now, just sort of translated it to China today. Overworking is heavily embedded in Asian culture. However, I brought this up because there's a distinction between the overworking crisis in Asian countries versus here in America. Japan's Karoshi peaked around the time of their economic nadir, while China's 996 work culture is intimately tied with their imbalance between the number of people and the number of available jobs. In an interview with a Chinese worker regarding the 996 work culture, they summed it up pretty well. They said, if I don't do it, someone else Well. And it's not just economics, obviously. There's also a very toxic work cultures in those countries that dehumanizes people and punish people who don't conform. Sorry, the productivity theater that we are seeing in America has an additional tinge of individualism that is not the major point in these Asian countries. It's not just working at work.

SPEAKER_03 44:21

Yeah, I see that. I mean, take our product manager, for example. She could have found another job. She could have left. But there's just something about her self-narrative or what she was believing about herself that didn't cause her to take that severance payout. And I do think this is interesting because certainly a lot of people in American culture are subjected to the productivity doctrine. But I think a lot of people also take it on themselves. And that's harder to kind of separate. And I do think it's tied to that Protestant work ethic we've been talking about too.

SPEAKER_00 44:51

That's definitely the connection. In these Asian countries, there's more of a collectivist sense. Like we're all in this together. It's the same cultish language, but it's from a collectivist sort of angle rather than an individualistic angle, right? You're with the company, building good things in this company, and everyone's working together, right? That sort of vibe rather than the individualistic vibe that we see in the American overworking crisis. This tinge of individualism has impact outside of work. Another feature of this ideology is how it affects how we spend our time in general. You can't have hobbies. You can have side hustles, but you can't have hobbies in this doctrine. Under this doctrine, any labor that doesn't have any monetary gain is seen as a waste of time. And people with hobbies that they're passionate about, like you with baking, me with this podcast, even though we're hammering money, we're still doing it because it's something that we want to do. And lo and behold, people with hobbies that they're passionate about report better mental health outcomes.

SPEAKER_03 45:46

Yeah. People ask me all the time, out of niceness, right? Like they're telling me they see value in it, but they ask me all the time if I'm going to open a bakery or sell my baking. Wild. And I say no, because I want to enjoy my life and I know better at this point in my life than to make my hobby about making money. Because what makes me happy is baking whatever I want, whenever I want, and not doing it for some sort of external motivation.

SPEAKER_00 46:10

Yeah, and this makes intuitive sense. Like if you do things that you enjoy for the sake of enjoyment, it feels good. And that is a big part of leisure. That is a big part of relaxation. A lot of people look at me and like, do you not get tired working so hard on this podcast? And I'm like, it's a different type of labor. And the labor that I do, it is still labor. I'm arguably doing too much, if you know what's going on behind the scenes, but it doesn't feel that way.

SPEAKER_03 46:35

Yeah, I do know what you mean.

SPEAKER_00 46:36

It's labor, but it's different.

SPEAKER_03 46:38

Like I like my job for the most part. Sometimes I'm stressed about it, sometimes I'm not. But overall, I feel like I get to work on stuff that my brain finds interesting, and I like it. But there are things, times where I'm like, have to do my work because I'm gonna get paid for it and so I live. Baking it never feels that way. If I'm ever sick of baking, I'll just not do it for a while. And there's no like negative effect of that happening. So it's a completely different dynamic, even if you do like the labor that is your job.

SPEAKER_00 47:04

If you believe in this doctrine, you kind of can't do that because either you're being asked to stay in the office to sleep, like that project manager, or your hobby is seen as a waste of time. Like you're not advancing your career, you're not grinding, you're not part of the hustle. You can't have hobbies, you can have side hustles. And that is, I don't know how to explain to you, that is not a healthy mindset to have. People need to do things for fun.

SPEAKER_03 47:29

Or take care of their families. Not all of our families will understand you sleeping at the Twitter office.

SPEAKER_00 47:34

Debatably, I don't think her family understood, but I don't know. We're not part of her family, so who knows? To me, it's quite clear this doctrine promotes overworking to a very toxic level, and that definitely has an impact on our health. If you believe this, on average, you will have a shorter life because of the cumulative stress that you are acquiring year over year. I'm not saying it will happen to you. I'm just saying there have been cases where people were found dead in their cubicles. So maybe your job isn't everything. Maybe you should have a hobby, maybe you should take care of your family, you know?

SPEAKER_03 48:06

Yay! Wow, you maybe you'll die. Great way to end. That's pretty much how death by doctrine is gonna be, honestly. It's in the title.

SPEAKER_00 48:12

So that's the episode. No surprises there. I'll end on a happy note. There's this quote that I love. I can't tell whether I wrote this or someone else did. So, you know what? Maybe I wrote this. We work so hard to put food on the table, now we don't have time to eat. I love that quote because why are you working so hard? If you're working so hard that you can't spend time with your loved ones, why is my question?

SPEAKER_03 48:34

Yeah, it's this tension that I was thinking about while preparing this episode that's so interesting. Is historically all out of the wealthier classes, people who honestly didn't even have situations that we have now as not the top class of society, like a huge flex for them was not having to work anymore. Like wealthy classes used to be like, hey, we don't have to work. We hire servants, we don't do anything, we don't have professions. And today, our like our wealthy classes, our tech CEOs, they're doing this performative productivity. And it's like, I don't know, what's the point of all of it? You know, what's the point of being Mark Cuban if you can't even chill out for a second and spend time with your family? It's just really different. I think it's that doctrine that we're buying into where even if you have the wealth and the means to work less, we have to performatively refuse to do that. It's interesting.

SPEAKER_00 49:27

All right, microgrid segments unionize your workplace if you can. Power to the worker, that is one of the best ways to improve your working conditions and have some collective leverage over your employer. And I know that it's somewhat privileged for me to say this, and I know everyone's situation is different, but at some point you should just quit that job. Again, not everyone can do this. I'm aware that this is a privileged position, but like there is a line, okay? You need to find where that line is, and you need to know where that line is. And when your work asks you to cross that line, you need to quit. I don't know what's a better way to put this than these are all good microgoods, MJ.

SPEAKER_03 50:03

You know, to the extent that you do have control over your working environment, it's going to differ a lot by person and by where you work and the in the culture and that industry. But you wrote this down. I think it's meaningful. Like you can have boundaries on your work-life balance and still be productive and meaningful at work. You know, I get a lot done at work. I don't like doing nothing at work, but I'm not like spending overtime, right? I'm not being asked to and I'm not delivering it without being asked to. Like, I can get everything I need to done in the time I have allotted and spend all my free time making cakes. If you are empowered to strike that kind of balance, definitely do so. Like, don't let this individual productivity doctrine overtake your life. That being said, it's a privileged position to be able to say that. And we can vote and fight and protest for better policies for so many more Americans who are not in the same positions.

SPEAKER_00 50:59

Thank you so much for listening to Death by Doctrine. If you like the show, please tell everyone you know about the show. That is the best thing that you can do to help us. I have other podcasts as well, including Everything is Public Health, and Public Health is for everyone. For more information and all updates, please visit everything is public health.com. Thank you so much for listening, and we will see you next time.