Make Me Smart April 24, 2023 Transcript

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Kimberly Adams 

Hello, I’m Kimberly Adams. Welcome to make me smart where we make today make sense. It’s Monday, April 24. Kai is off today because time off is important. But joining me today is Marketplace’s Megan McCarty Carino. Welcome back!

Meghan McCarty Carino 

Hey there. It’s good to be here again.

Kimberly Adams 

All right. Well, today we are going to do our news fix and then end on some make me smiles. So Meghan, let’s start with you what caught your attention today or over the weekend?

Meghan McCarty Carino 

All right. So today I’m looking at some new research on my former beat. I used to cover workplace culture, I’ve been filling in on the tech show, but I’m still keeping the pulse on the workplace stuff. So you know, a lot of what we talk about when it comes to remote work, you know, there’s a lot of anecdote, there’s not a lot of data points to draw on when we talk about how this massive change of 10s of millions of American workers going remote, how that has affected productivity and kind of, you know, long term career progression and all this stuff. So some economists at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, the University of Iowa and Harvard just published a working paper that looks at the effect of remote work for software engineers at a fortune 500 company over the last several years. And they found some downsides to remote work, which are kind of obvious, but it’s kind of interesting to see how they quantified it. So they found that sitting near coworkers, increases how much junior engineers learn from their senior colleagues, not only in person, but also online. So they also got more online feedback and kind of, you know, learning opportunities when they were actually sitting closer to their colleagues. Proximity particularly increases feedback to female engineers and young engineers, who are more likely to quit the firm when that proximity is lost. However, sitting together reduced the productivity, the programming output, of senior engineer. So this is kind of like the, you know, the various trade offs that we talked about with remote work, where a lot of companies found that their output as an organization, remained the same or increased when everyone went remote. But there are kind of these ephemeral things that I think have been harder to quantify. And this is what these economists are trying to do of sort of the career development, you know, long term human resource development. And I think it’s probably very different when we’re talking about different types of jobs and the type of learning that needs to happen versus the amount of independent work that happens, different personality types, you know. I did a lot of reporting over the last several years, some young people in turns, you know, actually found it easier to approach people in kind of a digital context, you know, people who may be felt social anxiety in person felt like it was easier to reach out to the Senior VP and set up a meeting and learn. Or, you know, found it easier to communicate over slack than they did in person, et cetera. But this study sort of found that there was, and particularly the interesting thing was particularly for women, young engineers, and then they sort of extrapolate that. You know, maybe this is because they don’t have the professional networks that, you know, older or, you know, kind of over represented people in this field, white men, would have. And so the very group that is generally thought to benefit a lot from flexible working arrangements, often because of family responsibilities and household responsibilities, which women are generally more often saddled with, are also sort of having the potentially, you know, having the worst effects from from that.

Kimberly Adams 

Yeah, I can imagine that, you know, the same flexibility that allows you to sort of adapt to the needs of childcare and taking care of folks, which, you know, as you mentioned, falls predominantly on women, that might also mean that your home environment is not set up for you to be successful at work. If you have all those, is similarly with young people who maybe aren’t in as spacious living arrangements, or the kind of living arrangements that might make it easy for you to be very productive at home. And I think one of the nuances that we’ve really seen in all of this, you know, everything we’ve learned about working from home with the big caveat that, you know, most of America is still not working from home. And that definitely does tend to skew towards wealthier people for sure. But that everybody’s situation is different, and different things work for different people. And I wonder how much workplaces are going to be able to sort of balance that, that there’s no one solution that’s going to work for everyone. And so how much accommodation are you going to make versus what is actually good for the way that your particular organization works and your particular team works. But on the other hand, you know, for all these companies demanding that people do go back to the office, you know…

Meghan McCarty Carino 

Just unilateral, yeah.

Kimberly Adams 

Are you paying your employees enough to, you know, live relatively close to where they work so that their, you know, their quality of life isn’t, you know, awful. So that’s pretty interesting.

Meghan McCarty Carino 

Well, something else happened, little thing, little news item.

Kimberly Adams 

Little news item. Cable news was a mess today. So by now, everybody’s probably heard about both Don Lemon and Tucker, Carlson being fired from their jobs at, you know, CNN and Fox News respectively, in the last day or so. And both of them seem to catch everybody by surprise. Don Lemon was certainly surprised. The former now former CNN anchor, tweeted some rather unpleasant things that his former employer right after the announcement, basically saying that they blindsided him. We haven’t heard too much from Tucker Carlson yet. But it seems like this was a surprise, at least to the team. Because if you look at the show, which I didn’t, but I’ve seen clips of it, on Friday they seemed very much like they were planning to be back on Monday, that he was planning to be back on Monday. And according to a lot of the reporting, the Fox News staff found out pretty much when everybody else did. And, you know, yes, there’s sort of media gossip and all of this that is completely uninteresting to a variety of people. However, I do think it’s very interesting that all the both of these cases happen at the same time. You have two very polarizing figures, polarizing to different extent, because you can very clearly see how Tucker Carlson, you know, worked to try to promote that the election was stolen and played a role in promoting the insurrection and all of those things. And so, you know, that’s one thing. Don Lemon, very controversial because of his comments about women. And according to a very big piece in Variety that came out just a little bit ago, has a long track record where he has been accused of, you know, targeting women and targeting other black people actually and a lot of other colleagues, and being unpleasant to work with. And they’re so… the two stories are so different, but it also reflects how delicate of a situation cable news is in because cable is losing audience so quickly to streaming and advertising to streaming and this idea of shows that are at a particular time that is that are destination television, those spots that still are pulling audience has become so important to these networks that they really have to… making these decisions to cut somebody loose are… it’s two different pictures. You know, on CNN side, you are making a decision to cut somebody loose, who’s controversial just pretty much because you can’t deal with this kind of controversy, you know, in when you’re already in a precarious position from a media standpoint, from an organizational standpoint. And to sort of maintain your credibility after some of the comments that Don Lemon made about Nikki Haley and he obviously apologized for those things. But then all of these other things being dragged up, dragged up from the past… dredged, that was the word I was looking for, dredged. Tucker Carlson, on the other hand, has an extraordinarily popular show that was raking in money for the network. But did he start costing them more than he was making? Right? Because all of the things that we learned during the Dominion lawsuit about the fact that he and his colleagues at Fox knew that they were telling lies about the election and told them anyway, this has potentially tarnished Fox’s reputation, but it definitely cost them money. And now according to the LA Times, there’s another lawsuit in the works, you know, discrimination and harassment from one of his former producers, that could be even more damaging. And so the fact that Fox was willing to cut loose one of their big moneymakers says just how damaging this is and has the potential to continue to be for the organization. I’m very fascinated where he’s gonna go, because, you know, he’s gonna land somewhere.

Meghan McCarty Carino 

Well, it was interesting, you know, I, he’s obviously not the first Fox News commentator or host, to kind of leave under those kinds of conditions. Bill O’Reilly also left under, you know, cloud of…

Kimberly Adams 

Sexual harassment and all sorts of things.

Meghan McCarty Carino 

And to see like, where people end up going, he is going in the prime of his influence. And whether that audience follows him, or whether it’s sort of like Bill O’Reilly, you know, maybe he becomes a diminished figure or what but yeah, it’s definitely a bit of an earthquake.

Kimberly Adams 

There was an interesting anecdote at the end of the LA Times article, “Carlson, who did not respond to a request for comment has now been fired by all three cable networks having been pushed out from his previous stints at CNN and MSNBC.” So claim to fame I guess, you know if that’s what you’re going for. All righty then I guess it’s time for some smiles. Why don’t you go again first Meghan? I love yours.

Meghan McCarty Carino 

Okay, well, so mine originally it was kind of like a make me smile slash cringe. But the more I thought about what I was gonna say about it, the more kind of, like sad it made me feel. But so anyway, mine’s a few days old, but maybe you didn’t hear that a federal appeals court has allowed I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter spray to remain classified as a spray and therefore continue to say that it has zero calories, zero fat on its packaging. This was a like a 10 year long legal battle. A lawsuit that was brought by consumers saying that this was misleading because this is actually if you consider it as a butter product and eat a normal serving as if it were butter does not contain zero calories and zero fat. The entire bottle of I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter spray, I think has something like 700 calories and 80 something grams of fat. But because the application is a spray, it has a negligible amount of calories and fat which is sort of where my sadness with this comes in. Because I mean I I brought this as a make me smile because it’s kind of a nostalgic thing for me because you know, I grew up in the deep dark diet culture toxicity of the 90s. Yeah, when this product that was a mainstay of my refrigerator and the zero calorie, zero fat denotation was, you know, the best thing ever. And I put it on vegetables and like probably some like nasty toast that was also low fat even though toast doesn’t need to be low fat. But yeah, Fabio was in the commercials for I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter Because this was it’s an icon of a certain moment when our eating habits were extremely disordered. So

Kimberly Adams 

We have a bottle of this in the DC Bureau fridge right now.

Meghan McCarty Carino 

Oh good God. That’s not okay.

Kimberly Adams 

Doesn’t taste… it tastes, okay.

Meghan McCarty Carino 

It just tastes like salty water. Oily water. It tastes like salty oily water, I guess, pretty gross.

Kimberly Adams 

I think my palate is adjust to it for the same… adjusted to it for the same reason that you just described, you know, like growing up in the 90s households were it was like, and we weren’t, you know, super high income when I was growing up. And so like, you know, you were looking for,,, every message was telling you to have less fat…

Meghan McCarty Carino 

Snackwell’s. Remember those?

Kimberly Adams 

We had Snackwell’s cookies in my house, although I wasn’t allowed to have them because they were too expensive. But but, you know, you had all these products targeted at, you know, middle class people to, you know, in theory help you lose weight by cutting fat out of your diet, when really we were just replacing, you know, the fat with more sugar or other things that were also bad for you. So, I think a lot of us who grew up in that era have palettes that are adjusted to these things, which is, which is why it’s still hard for many of us to eat healthy to this very day. And, you know, I would… I still spray it on vegetables. I’m not mad at myself. It’s food, you know.

Meghan McCarty Carino 

You can see…. the federal appeals court says you just keep on spraying and just go right ahead and keep on spraying. Zero calories baby.

Kimberly Adams 

My favorite bit from one of the articles that you shared about that was the court assess that to get like a tablespoon of I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter spray, you had to do it, which is tablespoon would be like what people would normally cut from a stick of butter to use it. You’d have to pump 40 sprays, and nobody’s doing that. Which I was like, Yeah, that would be excessive. That’d be super excessive. All right, since we’re going back in time, there was a very entertaining article in Business Insider, titled “A TikToker explains why millennials are so bad at posing and Gen Z is so good at it. And it’s changing how I take pictures.” And basically there’s this trend pointing out how badly Millennials such as ourselves, are when it comes to taking selfies or for posing in the ways that Gen Z is very good at. And I’ve, you know, having had my nice laugh at me hysterically as I’ve tried to take pictures. I can 100% agree with this. But this creator online who has a account, Christine Buzan, I believe is her name. She has an account about looking good in photos and posing properly. And she’s a millennial. And she talked about some of the reasons that we’re so bad at it. And she said it has to do with the millennial relationship to technology and we pulled a clip of it.

Christine Buzan 

Our brains are still stuck in this mindset where photos are special and rare. And we need to look as good as possible. Whereas Gen Z, they’ve been raised with a phone in their hand and they’re able to express whoever they are at any given moment with photos. They’re just another means of communication just like language or text. And I don’t think it’s that we’re bad at posing. The issue is that we don’t give ourselves permission to experiment in the same way that Gen Z does. We still view photos as these really precious things that make or break our appearance.

Kimberly Adams 

Yeah, looks like we still haven’t fully absorbed that these digital photos are effectively disposable and endless. Right? And that you don’t run out of chances.

Meghan McCarty Carino 

I still have like to disposable camera mental model. Precious precious photos. But I’m also just bad at posing. I mean, I don’t know.

Kimberly Adams 

Exaclty.  Well, because you… the whole premise was that Gen Zers just don’t. Yeah, they don’t. They practice more. They give themselves as many shots as they need to get a pose that they like, whereas we start to feel self conscious if we’re taking… I think it’s a little bit about how, you know, it makes us feel like vain or conceited or something to be sitting there taking so many photos of ourselves. Like for me if I’m taking more than two or three photos of myself I’m like, oh my god, this is this is too much. You’re just being really like full of yourself here. Gen Z doesn’t care. They’re like I’m going to take as many shots as I need to, to get the one shot that I like without feeling any kind of way about it.

Meghan McCarty Carino 

Right. There also was a point in that article that you shared about, you know, just the fact that because they have this, they don’t have this scarcity mentality about photos that even if there is a bad photo of them, like they, like they’re not taking these canned photos with the bad, you know, smile and the weird pose because, like, if a bad photo happens, candidly, they don’t feel as you know, like, oh, that’s the only photo of me that’s ever going to exist. That’s how I’m going to be remembered in perpetuity because like, there’s 10 billion other photos of them. So yeah.

Kimberly Adams 

Must be nice to be so unencumbered. Alright, that is it for today. Tomorrow, please join us for our weekly deep dive. This week, we’re going into super serious topic. We’re going to unpack the current wave of anti-trans legislation in the US and take a look at some of the economic consequences that may come from all of these bills targeting the trans community.

Meghan McCarty Carino 

And as always, if you have a question a comment a suggestion, we would like to hear it leave us a voicemail at 508-UB-SMART. You can also email makemesmart@marketplace.org.

Kimberly Adams 

Make Me Smart is produced by Courtney Bergsieker. Today’s program was engineered by Charlton Thorp. Ellen Rolfes writes our newsletter. Our intern is Antonio Barreras.

Meghan McCarty Carino 

Marissa Cabrera is our senior producer. Bridget Bodnar is the director of podcasts …  And Francesca Levy is the executive director of Digital.  I feel like it doesn’t answer why Boomers take so many pictures though.