Survival rules for the stagnant office

0:00This episode is brought to you by Google Chrome. You think you know a browser, but Gemini and Chrome? That's new. It can help you with practically anything on the web, like restoring a vintage motorcycle from a 50-page restoration block, or finally break down that long article you've had open for weeks. Gemini and Chrome is here for it. Ready to make anything online makes sense? There's no place like Chrome. Check responses set up require compatibility and availability varies 18 plus. College football is back. So, Hilton called to me the superstition concierge to make your fan rituals a reality. Need a room to match your lucky number? We got you. Want to make sure our team doesn't wash your lucky jersey? Oh, that smells lucky. Hilton's unmatched hospitality can keep up with any superstition. Even a marching bandwicker call at 555 and 55 seconds. Hit it! When you need a team that will do whatever it takes on game day, it matters where you stay. Hilton, for this day. Good things come in force. Like ukulele strings, boy band members, and PayPal payin' for.

1:05No fees, no interest, no impact on your credit score. Just the flexibility to pay the way that works for you. Strum it, hum it, pay it in for. Download the PayPal app to get started. Subject to approval. Learn more at paypal.com-payin' for paypalling NMLS 910457. John McNeil, a board member at Lulu Lemon. Advises that if you want more pay when corporate budgets are stretched, you need to first demonstrate performance and then use humor. Yeah, I mean, that is just an intensely awkward piss of advice given the current environment. Because, you know, the job market is slowly rebounding, but white collar workers are largely staying put. Right. Which makes any conversation about money inherently tense. It's not a joking matter for most people. You try to visualize the actual mechanics of that advice in a real room. Like, you walk into your manager's office. You both know there was a hiring freeze. Yeah, the unspoken reality. Exactly. You both know the department budget was just slashed. So you sit down, you present your performance metrics, which are strong, and then you,

2:08what, you attempt to land a joke about inflation. Or like, you do a bit about the cost of groceries just to smooth over the request for a 5% raise. The discomfort in that hypothetical room is just palpable. You are attempting to disarm a systemic structural issue with a personal social grace. And it doesn't work. No, it really doesn't. Because the budget constraints are a hard reality set by the executives. The performance is an individual metric. Combining the two with a lighthearted approach essentially asks the employee to manage the emotional discomfort of the manager. The manager who, frankly, is inevitably going to deny them fair market compensation anyway. It's wild. You are basically asking for a larger share of a shrinking pie and doing a stand up routine to make sure the person holding the knife does not feel bad about the size of the slice. That's exactly what it is. American workplaces are just in a profoundly weird existential murk right now. Yeah. If people like Chip Cutter, Alson Poll, and Lauren Weber trying to document this.

3:10Yeah. And Ray Smith, Lindsey Ellis, they've all been compiling rules for navigating this exact chaos. They're gathering insights from CEOs, academics, and thinkers. People like Adam Grant, Ethan Mollick, Ariana Huffington, they're all just trying to figure out how to operate when the usual career mechanics seem completely frozen. Because the traditional corporate playbook relied entirely on a fluid market. You perform well, you ask for a raise. And if the answer is no, you just take that demonstrated performance to a competitor. But that mobility is largely gone now. I mean, white collar workers are looking around seeing the slow rebound and just deciding to anchor themselves to their current desks, which changes everything about the negotiation. When you remove that mobility, you completely remove the primary leverage an employee has. You can't threaten to leave if everyone in the room knows you are probably going to stay put. Yeah, that structural immobility creates a highly compressed environment. When people can't move laterally or upward by changing companies, they look upward within their current structure. But the structure is pushing down with equal force.

4:12The money just isn't flowing the way it was. So the individual contributor is just trapped in this dynamic. They are performing, maybe even overperforming, just to justify their retention during a slow market. But the financial reward mechanism is totally broken. The entire concept of meritocracy starts to feel slightly hollow when the only reward for excellent work is just keeping the job you already have. Which leaves us with this massive hanging question. Because everyone is feeling stuck and anxious and totally hesitant to move. How do you actually reclaim any joy at work without just quietly checking out? If you're not subscribed yet, take a second and hit follow on whatever podcast app you're using. It helps us keep making this. We appreciate you being here. So getting back to the lack of raises and that compression we were talking about, it directly connects to the people tasked with enforcing these tight budgets. The middle managers. Basically, you have the frequently overwhelmed, often chaotic middle manager standing exactly on the fault line.

5:12If the C-suite is holding the line on budgets and the employees are demanding financial recognition for their work, the middle manager is the person who has to absorb the impact from both sides. They're the ones who have to sit in that awkward room with the high performing employee, the one we just talked about. Right, the one doing the grocery inflation jokes. Yeah, they had to sit there, listen to the joke, and then deliver the rejection. And it is so interesting because recently the prevailing management theory was all about flattening hierarchies. Turning the org chart. Yeah. Right, the idea was that middle management was just bloat. We saw a lot of companies aggressively stripping out those layers to supposedly speed up communication and reduce overhead. But now you look at places like Meta and they've realized they actually need managers after all. Well, I look at that reversal and I kind of have to ask, are companies realizing they need actual leaders or do they just need shock absorbers? That's a good point. Like, do they just need someone to handle the anxiety of the rank and file? Because when you remove those middle layers, the executives suddenly have to absorb the

6:14ambient anxiety of the workforce directly. And executives definitely do not want to do that. No, they don't. Or worse, the workforce is left entirely unpethored. They're just floating without any buffer between the top level financial realities and their day-to-day experience. Meta realize that a purely flat structure fails to account for basic human psychology. People need a buffer. But the actual function of the managers they are bringing back or keeping around has fundamentally changed. If you think about your own manager right now, you really have to ask, are they actually managing the work or are they just managing institutional stress? This episode is brought to you by Google Chrome. You think you know a browser, but Gemini and Chrome, that's new. They can help you with practically anything on the web, like restoring a vintage motorcycle from a 50-page restoration block, or finally break down that long article you've had open for weeks. Gemini and Chrome is here for it. Ready to make anything online make sense? There's no place like Chrome.

7:14Check responses set up require compatibility and availability varies 18 plus. Good things come in force. Like ukulele strings, boy band members, and PayPal paying for. No fees, no interest, no impact on your credit score. Just the flexibility to pay the way that works for you. Strommit, hummit, pay it in four. Download the PayPal app to get started. Subject to approval. Learn more at PayPal.com-payin-four. Paypalling. NMLS 910457.

8:16It completely changes how we view the role of management, especially when the primary function shifts from operational efficiency to emotional containment. A manager who excels at optimizing a supply chain or streamlining a software deployment pipeline, they might be completely unequipped to handle the psychological toll of a team that feels permanently stuck. The skill sets are just entirely different. I mean, an operational leader looks at a bottleneck in production and builds a new workflow to clear it. A shock absorber manager spends their week trying to soothe bruised egos, explaining why the cost of living adjustment was only 2%, and basically trying to keep their best people from quietly quitting. Yeah, they're functioning as corporate therapists. And when the primary directive is emotional containment, actual productivity inevitably suffers. You can't innovate or drive hard toward a goal when 80% of the management bandwidth is just spent preventing the team from emotionally fracturing. The manager is just trying to keep the lights on, keep everyone in their seats.

9:16Right. And that dynamic forces a lot of very talented people to look around the office and realize they are trapped in a holding pattern. And honestly, nothing exacerbates the feeling of being in a holding pattern, quite like watching someone else suddenly break the sound barrier. Oh man, yeah. We have a very specific modern workplace emotion to examine here. It's that feeling of trying to disguise your jealousy when a colleague gets hired at pre-IPO and tropic. The psychology of that specific jealousy is so fascinating to me because it is entirely manufactured by external market forces. I mean, we know in videos weighing a $10 billion investment in Anthropics IPO, the amount of capital swirling around the specific company is just staggering. To put that in context for anyone who maybe isn't watching the AI space daily anthropic is one of the absolute heavyweights building frontier models. The big ones. Right. These are the core brains of AI, the massive systems pushing the absolute limits of compute and reasoning, trying to rival or surpass open AI.

10:17So when a colleague gets hired there and gets equity before an initial public offering, they are potentially holding a lottery ticket. Which completely changes how peers view their own career stagnation. When movement is slow everywhere else, a colleague hitting that potential windfall creates deep, deep friction in the social fabric of the office. Suddenly, the fact that you are staying put feels less like a prudent decision in the slow market and more like a personal failure. You're sitting at your desk, right? You're trying to figure out how to use humor to get a tiny raise from your stressed out middle manager. And meanwhile, your colleague is leaving for a company that might mint millionaires overnight. The contrast is just blinding. It is. It's the sheer volume of money flowing into AI that drives this specific brand of jealousy. The numbers are so large they become abstract. Which just makes your own standard salary feel entirely insignificant. The envy is completely understandable on a human level, but we really have to question

11:18the actual stability of it. The entire situation is just rife with contradictions. Also. Yes, Nvidia is looking at a massive investment. But at the same time, open AI has explicitly stated they will not go public. And more importantly, the CEO of Anthropic, Dario Amode is actively calling for a slowdown on the development of these very frontier models. Which is the ultimate paradox of the AI gold rush right now. The people building the technology are telling the world to hit the brakes while the market is throwing billions of dollars at them to go faster. Right. So why be deeply jealous of a colleague jumping to a frontier model company when the CEO of that company is begging for regulatory or development slowdown? The colleague is boarding a rocket, but the pilot is asking ground control to cut the engines because they aren't sure the heat shield will hold. That's a great way to put it. And jealousy is based on a projection of this limitless upward trajectory. But the reality inside those companies is highly volatile. It is fraught with existential concern about the technology itself. The envy is directed at a financial mirage that may or may not materialize in the way

12:22the market currently expects. But the mere presence of that mirage completely warps the daily reality for everyone else. It forces a reaction because it's not just about the money. It's about the perception of relevance. Exactly. Relevancy. If you are not working at one of these frontier companies, you feel an immense pressure to prove that you are at least adjacent to the revolution. Academics are actually having to provide advice on how people can say something original about AI at work right now. Which is just wild to me. When you have academic stepping into teach people how to sound original in a weekly status meeting, you have reached a peak level of corporate performativity. It's all theater. It means the technology is no longer being evaluated purely on its actual utility for the business. It's just being used as a social signifier. And this severely limits genuine intellectual exploration. It shows that AI has become a mandatory talking point. Rather than just a functional tool, you use only when it solves a specific problem. It forces workers to perform a specific type of innovation just to signal that they are

13:25keeping up with the trends. Performative innovation. Yeah. If you do not have a unique take on how generative AI is going to revolutionize your department, you are viewed as obsolete by leadership. And the real world consequence of this forced performive adoption is severe. AI is actively causing distrust among colleagues at work. People do not know if the email they received was actually written by their peer or just generated by a prompt. They don't know if the quarterly report they're reading represents actual human analysis or just a well-formatted hallucination from a language model. Furthermore, top mathematicians are now openly decrying AI-powered problem solving. See, I think a lot of that distrust comes directly from a fear of replacement. If an employee can't tell the difference between their colleagues work and a machine's output, they immediately start calculating how long it will take for the company to realize they only need the machine. Sure. That fear breeds suspicion. You start looking at your co-workers, not as collaborators, but as people who might be accelerating your own obsolescence by secretly automating their jobs.

14:29The fear of replacement is definitely present, but I think the deeper issue is actually a loss of shared reality. Collaboration requires a baseline of trust in the authenticity of the interaction. When top mathematicians decry AI-powered problem solving, they're pointing out that the process matters just as much as the result. Because mathematics is entirely about the proof you have to show your work. Exactly. The machine solves a complex equation, but the human mathematician cannot retrace the steps to understand the logic. The foundation of mathematical truth begins to crumble. You have an answer, but you do not have knowledge. Now, apply that exact dynamic to a standard workplace. If you and I are collaborating on a project, and I submit a block of text or a string of code that I didn't actually write and cannot fully explain the logic behind, our collaboration is broken. You lose the chain of reasoning. Like, if I ask you why you chose a certain phrase or a certain function, and your internal answer is literally just because the AI gave it to me, we can't actually debate the merits

15:30of the work. Because there's nothing to debate. If you don't know what I actually solved, and I don't know what you actually wrote, we are no longer working together. We are just two people managing the outputs of a black box and passing them back and forth. Yeah, you're just routing traffic. And that loss of shared reality is what causes the deep, insidious, distrust among colleagues. It degrades the social fabric of the office faster than the fear of a layoff, because it attacks the fundamental assumption that we are experiencing the same objective workplace. Well, speaking of the social fabric degrading, we really have to look at the social toll of the current market conditions. All this economic friction we discussed earlier is creating a very real problem for people off the clock, like knowing what to say to a friend who has been laid off again. It is a totally unique kind of social exhaustion. We aren't talking about a friend who lost their job once during our session. We are talking about people who are getting caught in reduction in force events two or three times in a short period. It really opens up a conversation about the complete erosion of career permanence.

16:34Layoffs are no longer viewed as a rare crisis, or like a once in a decade restructuring based on severe financial distress. They have basically become a recurring seasonal weather pattern in the workplace. The layoff season. Exactly. They are higher aggressively in one quarter, and then they trim 10% of the workforce a little while later, just to appease a margin target or signal efficiency to shareholders. It creates a sense of perpetual impermanence. When you have a friend who is laid off for the second or third time, the standard consolation sound completely hollow. You can't just say, oh, it's a bump in the road. Right, because the road itself seems to be disintegrating. It forces individuals to constantly maintain a posture of readiness. You can't ever fully settle into a role or a team. You can't ever let your guard down, because the organizational chart might just be wiped clean on any given morning with zero warning. And the psychological burden of that perpetual readiness is heavy. But the most bizarre countertrend to these repeating layoffs is the fact that work is coming

17:36full circle as boomerang hires increase. Yeah, that is strange. These are literally letting people go and then rehiring those exact same people later. It seems completely counterintuitive on paper. You pay the severance, you take the hit to morale, and then eventually you bring the person back into the exact same department. It happens because companies are trying to eliminate onboarding time in a strict budget. When you bring back an old employee, you don't have to teach them the internal software. You skip the learning curve. Right. You don't have to explain the company culture or the Byzantine approval processes. They already know the unspoken rules of the office. It is basically a pure cost saving measure on training and integration disguised as a happy reunion. I connect this directly to the broader theme of risk aversion that is permeating absolutely everything right now. No one wants to take a risk on the unknown anymore. In a booming economy, hiring a fresh perspective is seen as an asset. You actively want outside ideas to disrupt stagnant processes.

18:37In a constrained, anxious economy, an outside idea is viewed as a liability. Exactly. Hiring a new person requires a leap of faith. You have to trust that the individual will adapt, learn the systems, and produce value quickly. A boom ring hire completely removes that variable. The company is exactly what they're getting flaws and all. Think about the employee's perspective in this transaction. How many people in your professional network right now have bounced back to a previous employer just for the safety of familiarity? I could think of a few actually. They might have left seeking a better opportunity, got caught in the seasonal layoff weather pattern at the new firm, and decided that the devil they know is vastly preferable to the unpredictable void of the current job market. It is a retreat to safety for both the employer and the employee. The employer gets a known quantity without training costs, and the employee gets a reliable paycheck without the anxiety of proving themselves in a new environment where they might be the first one cut in the next round of layoffs. With this mutual retreat, completely stifles organizational progress.

19:41It creates closed loops of thought. You have the exact same people solving the same problems with the same methods they used previously. All while simultaneously pretending to have original disruptive thoughts about AI and their morning meetings, to appease the performative demands of the market. The cognitive distance is just staggering. And that performative demand bleeds into every aspect of the job, especially how colleagues interact off the clock. I mean, there is a specific plan detailed in these new workplace rules for escaping the tyranny of the three hour work dinner. Oh, the three hour work dinner. It's a fascinating artifact of corporate culture. It usually happens when leadership decides the team needs to bond or when clients are in town, and it essentially requires employees to sacrifice an entire evening to prove their dedication. This episode is brought to you by Google Chrome. You think you know a browser, but Gemini and Chrome, that's new. It can help you with practically anything on the web, like restoring a vintage motorcycle from a 50 page restoration block, or finally break down that long article you've had open

20:42for weeks. Gemini and Chrome is here for it. Ready to make anything online makes sense? There's no place like Chrome. Check responses set up require compatibility and availability varies 18 plus. College football is back. So Hilton called to me the superstition concierge to make your fan rituals a reality. Need a room to match your lucky number? We got you. Want to make sure our team doesn't wash your lucky jersey? Oh, that smells lucky. Hilton's unmatched hospitality can keep up with any superstition. Even a marching bandwink up call it 555 and 55 seconds. Hit it! When you need a team that will do whatever it takes on game day, it matters where you stay. Hilton, for this day.

22:21Well, when teams are distributed across different time zones, or when the physical office feels like a ghost town because of staggered hybrid schedules, sitting down for a long meal forces people to interact as human beings rather than avatars on the screen. You can read body language, you can have side conversations that just do not happen on a video call. See, I reject that premise entirely. Really? Ken Balco, the CEO of Inferday, looks at this dynamic and points out that making work better right now is actually quite simple. He argues it requires fewer unnecessary meetings, more trust, and giving people some room to actually get their work done. The three hour dinner is the exact antithesis of that approach. In a very long meeting, I'll give you that. It is a highly structured, inescapable meeting disguised as a meal. And it usually operates on a profound deficit of trust. If a company has to lock its employees in a restaurant for three hours, and apply them with appetizers to build the sense of cohesion, their daily operational trust is already fundamentally

23:21broken. But the argument is that you need the social lubrication of the dinner to build a trust that carries over into the work. If people do not trust each other while collaborating on a shared document in the middle of the work day, passing a bread basket after hours is not going to fix the underlying dysfunction. That's fair. It just creates a hostage situation with expensive entrees. The trust has to be built in the trenches of the actual work. Having people who are already anxious about layoffs and frustrated by stagnant wages to pretend they want to spend their evening together only drains the limited emotional reserves they have left. The toll of those hostage situations really does add up. And it brings us to a fundamental shift in how we evaluate employee capacity. Oksana S. Levin, the founder of PHI, who is often referred to as the Wall Street Trink, argues that the workforce now incorporates default personal states that simply were not part of performance metrics in the past. Default personal states. Yes. Specifically, she identifies a heightened level of uncertainty in related anxiety as a

24:21permanent baseline for modern workers. This is a crucial distinction to make. We are not talking about clinical anxiety disorders in a small subset of the population. We are talking about an ambient environmental anxiety that affects the baseline functioning of the entire workforce. Which changes how we view poor performance entirely. Yeah. We are no longer just about a lack of skill or poor time management. The energy to climb, the brain fog, the reduced mental clarity that managers are seeing across the board are directly tied to this ambient anxiety. It's physical. Exactly. Yeah. Mental wellness is no longer an optional HR initiative with a meditation app subscription. It is the critical domain for superior performance. If you cannot focus, you cannot execute. We really have to connect Levin's point back to the very specific things we've been discussing so far. The anxiety is not some nebulous cloud floating into the office from nowhere. It is highly specific and mechanically driven. It is coming from the friend getting laid off for the second time and wondering if you are next.

25:22It is coming from the jealousy over the M-Propic IPO and the realization that the economic ladder has pulled up for normal jobs. It is coming from the profound distrust generated by colleagues passing off AI work as their own. It is coming from the exhaustion of the boomerang higher loop where nothing ever changes. And pretending this anxiety does not exist is exactly what causes the brain fog. We can to think of brain fog as a biological failing, but it is also an overload response. Yeah, a system crash. When an employee is sitting at their desk worried about their job security suspicious of their colleagues' outputs and frustrated by their inability to ask for a raise without making a joke, their cognitive load is maxed out before they even open an email. They have no processing power left for the actual tasks of the day. The brain fog is basically a biological defense mechanism against the constant cognitive dissonance of the modern workplace. You are told the company is a family, but you watch the boomerang hires come and go like seasonal workers.

26:22You are told to innovate and disrupt, but you are forced to sit through three hour dinners that drain your creative energy. The uncertainty is constantly taxing the central nervous system. So in Levin says mental wellness is the critical domain for performance. She means that an employee who cannot regulate their nervous system in this environment will inevitably experience a severe decline in execution. Regardless of their technical proficiency, you could be the best coder or the best financial analyst in the world. But if your nervous system is trapped in fight or flight mode because of the organizational chaos, your output will plummet. To truly grasp the source of that uncertainty, we have to zoom out to the macro level. The existential murk that race myth mentioned is fueled by an environment that is objectively strange on a global scale. Oh, totally. We are looking at a landscape where the inputs are entirely erratic. Trump is urging the Fed to cut rates ahead of their meeting, injecting political pressure into monetary policy. A by Canadian movement is picking up steam as a trade war grows, threatening supply chains

27:26in international revenue models. It's everywhere. Even a stable, boring behemoth like Colgate, Palm Olive is seeking to sell three of its big legacy brands, which opens up a clear understanding of why corporate budgets are stretched so thin and why middle managers are behaving erratically. The top level economic inputs that CEOs are dealing with are incredibly unpredictable. When the geopolitical trade winds are shifting daily and consumer conglomerates are offloading reliable brands just to stay agile, the localized effect is a total free. These are operational spending. The CEO doesn't know what the market will look like in six months so they lock the budget. The middle manager gets told to do more with less. The employee gets told to use humor instead of asking for money. The macro weirdness trickles down into micro dysfunction. And you combine those heavy economic indicators with the bizarre cultural markers of this exact moment and the picture becomes even more disorienting. It really does. We are seeing behavioral shifts that reflect a deep collective exhaustion.

28:27France's champagne output is dropping significantly, indicating a pullback in celebratory luxury spending. College partying is getting a documented grow up as younger generations try to artificially manufacture the carefree experiences they feel they missed. And Bob Kulture too, practical magic too, just unseed inspired man at the box office, signaling a shift away from high stakes superhero narratives toward nostalgic comfort. Exactly. But perhaps most tellingly for the workforce, a rare job opening at the game show Jeopardy drew over 1300 applicants. That is wild. The sheer volume of applicants for a stable legacy job like Jeopardy perfectly encapsulates the current mood. Because people are looking at the frontier of technology, looking at the anthropic IPOs and the AI disruption and they are exhausted by the ambiguity of it all. They see a job at Jeopardy, a show built entirely on known facts, rigid rules and predictable daily outcomes and 1300 people immediately raise their hands. Jeopardy represents the ultimate antidote to the existential murk in the...

30:19Matters where you stay. Hilton, for this day. At studio, there is a right answer and a wrong answer. There is no gray area. No. There is no AI hallucination to entangle. There is no ambiguous mandate to be original about a generative language model in a status meeting. It is a highly structured environment where competence is immediately recognizable and rewarded. The rush toward that specific job opening is a massive cultural tell. It reveals a deep collective craving for reliability and objective truth. The workforce is just tired of navigating the fluid dynamics of a trade war and tech

31:22disruption. They just want a role where the parameters of success are clearly defined and do not change every quarter based on a new algorithm. Benjamin Mullin, a reporter at The New York Times, captured this feeling perfectly. He noted feeling entirely unmoored by recent events, but he found fundamental optimism in reading straightforward, practical workplace improvement advice. Which opens up a clear path forward for the individual. You don't need a grand philosophical awakening to survive work right now. You just need practical rules of engagement. You do not have to solve the macroeconomic puzzle of interest rates and trade wars to get through your Tuesday. Ashley Tanks, an integrated marketing communications leader, highlighted the hidden gem in all of these compiled rules for navigating the chaos. In rule number six, she identifies the mandate to simply be interested and intellectually curious. Curious. Just that. The single-trade curiosity acts as the ultimate defense mechanism against everything we have discussed. It defends against the jealousy of the anthropic IPO.

32:22If you are curious, you can observe the AI boom as a fascinating historical event, rather than a personal slight against your own career trajectory. You can detach your ego from the financial mirage. And it defends against the brain fog, too. Because genuine interest cuts through ambient anxiety. It is entirely focused on a theoretical future. What happens if I get laid off? What happens if I am replaced? Curiosity forces you into the present moment. You are analyzing the thing directly in front of you. Right. If you treat the weirdness of the current workplace as a fascinating subject to observe rather than a heavy burden to carry, you reclaim a significant portion of your joy. The three-hour work dinner becomes an anthropological study of corporate social dynamics rather than a hostage situation. I love that framing. The erratic behavior of the middle manager becomes a data point about institutional stress rather than a personal attack on your performance. Curiosity creates a psychological distance that allows you to operate within the merc without being consumed by it.

33:23You are no longer the victim of the chaotic environment. You are an observer charting its strange behaviors. You observe the boomerang hires, the performative AI meetings, and the squeezed budgets, and you just ask why it is happening instead of internalizing the stress of it. Creating work right now isn't about massive career leaps or fighting the AI tide. It's about protecting your mental clarity, avoiding performative traps, and leaning into simple curiosity to survive the chaos. If being intellectually curious is the best defense we have against workplace stagnation, what happens to our careers when companies optimize so much for pure efficiency that curiosity gets penalized? If you're not subscribed yet, take a second and hit follow on whatever app you're using. It helps us keep making this. You appreciate you being here. I'll also check out our YouTube channel for more business and tech updates. There's a link in the description.