The Entrepreneurial Ethic & How We Work Today (w/ Erik Baker)
Added 2025-01-21 12:00:13 +0000 UTCThis is a fascinating episode that takes up thinkers that the podcast has covered before—the Koch brothers, Austrian economists like Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek, and others—but from a different angle: that of the entrepreneurial work ethic. Historian Erik Baker's superb book on the topic, Make Your Own Job: How the Entrepreneurial Work Ethic Exhausted America, offers a genuinely absorbing tour of this most American of ideologies, one that has emerged again and again, in various guises and in different circumstances, to reconcile workers to the contradictions of the U.S. economy, especially the shortage of jobs that has come with its many "innovations" and changes. What are the historical and even spiritual sources of the entrepreneurial work ethic, and what ideological needs does it serve for bosses and managers? Why is it so seductive to Americans? How does it relate to deeply American impulses relating to responsibility, guilt, and shame? In what ways did the entrepreneurial work ethic serve U.S. aims during the Cold War? And how has it endured in our age of Silicon Valley tech overlords and Donald Trump, entrepreneur, being re-elected? We take up these questions and many more in this rich conversation.
Sources:
Erik Baker, Make Your Own Job: How the Entrepreneurial Work Ethic Exhausted America (2025)
— "Fairytale in the Supermarket," The Baffler, Jan 14, 2025
Dale Carnegie, How to Win Friends and Influence People (1936)
Norman Vincent Peale, The Power of Positive Thinking (1952)
Sarah Jaffe, Work Won't Love You Back: How Devotion to Our Jobs Keeps Us Exploited, Exhausted, and Alone, (2021)
Listen again:
"Bomb Power" (w/ Erik Baker), Dec 19, 2023
...and don't forget to subscribe to Know Your Enemy on Patreon to listen to all of our premium episodes!
Comments
Another thought. If you want to understand the deeper social implications of Erick’s book I recommend Byung-Chul Han’s 2010 book The Burnout Society. He is a Korean-German philosopher that has garnered admirers across the political spectrum for his understanding of the devastating impact of the entrepreneurial ethic.
Jim Potterton
2025-03-19 22:41:28 +0000 UTCI worked as a union organizer for many years. One of the most effective anti-union consultants I encountered was industrial Psychologist M. Scott Myers author of “Every Employee a Manager.” He designed programs in the 60’s for keeping unions out of Texas Instruments and spread his ideas with seminars around the country. He drew on the ideas of Maslow and McGregor to promote an approach to union avoidance that was rooted in the same ideology described in Erick’s book. Thanks for this important discussion. More important than ever in understanding and defeating this scourge to worker solidarity.
Jim Potterton
2025-03-19 22:17:56 +0000 UTCI saw this in the Atlantic. I thought it’s very theoretical. Possibly bullshit. . https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2025/03/american-geographic-social-mobility/681439/
Holly Kallman
2025-02-12 13:08:18 +0000 UTC"I wonder if there’s a parallel phenomenon where the Silicon Valley bosses are looking to keep the entrepreneurship for themselves, but bring their workers back to the old industrial ethic." You betcha. Just because it's software doesn't mean it can't be a sweat shop. The last job I had prior to retirement, we all worked in cubes - but it got EVEN WORSE when they "improved" the office to an "open plan" (no walls, just desks with your monitor/keyboard/mouse). Essentially no way to "make it your own" - no place to put up a picture of your family, nothing. And they tried to tell us this was "improving productivity." Horseshit. Sit in your cube, handle the bugs in your Jira queue, and keep your head down. Ideas? We have smarter people than you to worry about "ideas".
Jerry Callen
2025-02-10 00:44:22 +0000 UTCThis is spot on: whether you’re an actor, a writer, a painter, a podcaster, a social media influencer, a programmer, an academic or an aspiring silicon valley founder, there are few options in our economic system to make a decent living without embracing the entrepreneurial dictums of self promotion. Transcendent talent, maybe?
Carpenters Gothic
2025-02-09 20:01:14 +0000 UTCYeah. The guys are usually pretty self aware. But they really missed the opportunity to discuss the entire phenomenon of social media entrepreneurship that they participate in and benefit from. Even more so than writing there’s an intimacy with podcasts that trades on personal branding. Is there any more obvious example of making your own job than a podcast? On a related note, i find it impossible not to view academia through the same entrepreneurial lens. Academics are intellectual entrepreneurs, yet entrepreneurs nonetheless. The slow dissolution of academic solidarity (adjuncts vs tenured, diminished power of academic senates) is a major factor in the decline of our universities. Anyway, i wonder if Matt and Sam are going to share the wealth with the less fortunate members of the nascent podcasters local they are sure to organize? :)
Carpenters Gothic
2025-02-09 19:24:30 +0000 UTCLate to the party on this one, but whew, what a great, insightful episode. Thinking about it in the context of the the recent Ross Douthat / Marc Andreessen interview, I wonder how much the “revolt of the bosses” is also something of an “entrepreneurialism for me, not for thee.” If Baker is right that the entrepreneurial ethic in the U.S. is not just about starting your own business, but is also about finding fulfillment in your work and bringing your values into your workplace, then maybe millennial software engineers bringing “wokeness” and irreverence to their workplaces is just an extension of that ethic. What Andreessen et al. have diagnosed as some insidious “cultural Marxist” entryism is really just professional workers doing what they were told—finding meaning and self-expression at the office. I wonder if there’s a parallel phenomenon where the Silicon Valley bosses are looking to keep the entrepreneurship for themselves, but bring their workers back to the old industrial ethic. It would seem to comport with the Valley’s renewed fixation on hardware over software, on “building things.” They want to go back to the old industrial capitalism, and they want their workers showing an appropriately deferential, drudgery-embracing attitude along with it.
Nicholas O'Donnell
2025-02-08 18:41:27 +0000 UTCYall shouldn’t hesitate to post lengthier episodes, I feel like you’re able to get deeper into the content and have more satisfying discussions (although that might just be bc of the guest you have on for this particular episode, which was fantastic!)
Burdperson
2025-02-06 14:08:58 +0000 UTCOnce I got around to listening to this episode, I found myself so torn by it. I started making notes about 10 minutes in; here is a distillation. One of my first thoughts was - hey, KYE guys - if what you are doing doesn’t count as entrepreneurship, what does? You have your own “brand” that you have to carefully curate and protect, you set your own schedules and workplaces, and (I think?) you thoroughly enjoy what you do, putting in very long hours to make it successful. What’s the difference between art, advocacy, and entrepreneurship? When you talked about “influencers” turning their lives into their livelihood, I immediately thought about the people I know who do what we do (living aboard a sailboat, traveling to exotic places), but do vlogs or write lots of magazine articles about it. While I DO consume some of what they produce, it always feels voyeuristic, and it seems that many of them stop sailing after a few years, while we are still at it after almost five. While I blog occasionally (particularly about technical and maintenance issues), I have NEVER been tempted to open up my life as some do. I was amused to hear that Matt’s father worked at PPG. My step-father worked at PPG for his entire career. Finally - I found myself really conflicted about this episode as it wound down. I was a computer programmer before I retired, starting in the early 70s up until 2019. I changed jobs a lot (I got bored…), but the happiest time of my work life was in the late 90s, when I worked for a small startup in Cambridge, MA (I was employee number 5). We were making some of the earliest software to process what is now referred to as “big data”. I worked very long hours, at least 5 and often 7 days a week. Given that I had young children at the time, this probably should have annoyed my wife intensely, but it didn’t - she was delighted that I came home HAPPY every night. There was a deep sense of being in it together among my coworkers. We were paid well, but never had the big payoff of going public. I never felt like “just an employee” - yet I wasn’t an owner, either (though I had stock options). Was I exploited? Hard to say. Your discussion of Amway made me think of two things. One was a fraternity brother who tried to sell me on Amway in the mid 70s. He and his wife (of course) gave my best friend and I (and our respective GFs) the whole spiel; it was an agonizing evening. The other was the saga of Glenn Turner, of “Dare to be Great”, an Orlando resident (I went to college there) who was convicted of fraud, and responsible for wrecking many lives. This all played out shortly BEFORE my fraternity brother tried to sell me on Amway, and was on my mind that entire evening. But I could not bring myself to puncture my brother’s dream. I have no idea how things worked out for him.
Jerry Callen
2025-02-06 02:11:42 +0000 UTCSweet jeezus, the whole entrepreneurializing one's self and identity is EXACTLY why I ran not walked away from the idea of acting professionally. I got my MFA young, went straight to NYC, but somewhere in that final year of grad school every time we talked about the career making part of being an actor, all I could think was, "I'd rather find out what gun metal tastes like." It's a hellish version of existence, and one no better exemplified by the actor and the "influencer" (the creepiest term yet invented by English speakers), which are increasingly looking like the same thing. At it makes me feel all kinds of oogie, ya know? Fucking hell. So anyway, I'm a writer now so I'm sure that's tooootally different, right? :D
KJ SM
2025-02-03 20:57:54 +0000 UTCHow about a Gilder/entrepreneurship/techno fascism episode? https://www.theguardian.com/technology/ng-interactive/2025/jan/29/silicon-valley-rightwing-technofascism?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other
Jason Judd
2025-01-29 10:55:01 +0000 UTCI was surprised this phrase never showed up! Combines life-defining entrepreneurship with bodily destructive industriousness!
Jesse Peterson-Brandt
2025-01-28 22:25:17 +0000 UTCWorking in a big box store on the floor I continously hear mangers tell us, "Own your business!" Where they try to get responsibility for the business success. It's absolutely ridiculous.
Rhianna79
2025-01-28 14:39:06 +0000 UTCGreat episode, guys. I'm surprised the slogan "Be Your Own Boss!" never came up. Fits right in with Matt's story about his dad. If you've ever had a boss you hated, it's easy to be sympathetic to that concept. The episode hit home for a few reasons for me: First, I got my MBA last year and some of the material was definitely the type of thing you guys discussed here. One hilarious example was a sustainability class where the professor, while we were talking about how to change the minds of CEOs to get them more conscious of social & environmental issues, discussed promoting mindfulness and meditation. He even alluded to the Hindu concept of brahman (universal oneness) without realizing it, it was just cloaked in western self-help form. I'm not sure that's going to make CEOs want to fix climate change, but it was a trip to listen to. Something else interesting was the idea in another seminar that entrepreneurship has evolved toward "entrepreneurship by acquisition". As in, the entrepreneur raises money to acquire companies rather than entrepreneurship being about starting your own business. What happened to capitalism as a force of innovation? Third, my own dad was never vocally anti-union like Matt's but I do often wonder if he would have had an overall better life if he had been a unionized Federal government employee at his job where he was merely a contractor for about 30 years. Might have turned out a very different guy.
Martin Oswald
2025-01-27 14:28:33 +0000 UTCThis was a really great episode! Throughout I was thinking about the show Shark Tank and how that is another hugely popular manifestation of this kind of thinking. It also made of think of how Kevin O’Leary ran to lead the Canadian Conservative Party a few years ago and the several mainstream lib acquaintances I have talked to that have pushed Mark Cuban as one of their top choices for the Democratic nomination in 2028. It really goes to show how entrepreneurial thinking has deeply infected the right as well as the center-left.
Brendan Kane
2025-01-24 19:15:54 +0000 UTCGood episode. The persistence of entrepreneurial ideology in this country, and the ways in which it reconciles disparate people like Matt's dad and Elon Musk only underscores my skepticism that working class support for the GOP (which, IMO, is often overstated/misunderstood) will necessarily make it more supportive of pro-worker or pro-union policy.
Chris Maisano
2025-01-24 15:03:50 +0000 UTC“Don’t let [the virus] dominate your life.”
Nicholas Haggerty
2025-01-24 14:50:51 +0000 UTCGrift is America's connective tissue, joining up not just managerial and individual entrepreneurship but almost everything else American, including theology, economics, politics and of course mythology. Grift, and charlatanism, meretriciousness, cant, pimping and predation. The everlasting night of the hunter.
Matt Gately
2025-01-24 09:34:41 +0000 UTCThe comment about urban bias was tongue and cheek, and perhaps wrong... I did just want to bring up the phenomena of peasantry--more as an avenue to explore--in relation to this as peasant self exploitation cuts across historical periodization. FYI, I was moved by your father's commitment to attending your baseball games. As for #1, my comment was in reference to this mentality I recall from the time: Bush's aide said that guys like me were "in what we call the reality-based community," which he defined as people who "believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality." I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. "That's not the way the world really works anymore," he continued. "We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do."
his eyes just tell him lies
2025-01-24 06:40:37 +0000 UTCI’m going to get some shit for saying this, but I was reminded of Che Guevara’s “new man” when hearing this discussion. The idea that you can remake yourself into your ideal person is something that seems a universal part of human self-conception.
Chad Bailey
2025-01-24 02:59:13 +0000 UTCHmm, not sure about #2 — I think in the way I talk about my father, and even at one point note that, hey, is that crazy to want your work to be creatively fulfilling, etc, would cut against that! Erik even mentioned his grandfather being a traveling salesman. (Matt)
Know Your Enemy
2025-01-23 18:33:11 +0000 UTCUgh, this is a good one. Too fucking close to home.
Paul Bowman
2025-01-23 12:15:53 +0000 UTCI was thinking about that unhinged interview with Curtis Yarvin in the NYT the whole time I listened to this. I knew there was something Nazi-adjacent there!!!!
Courtney Minick
2025-01-23 01:47:41 +0000 UTCYes. Graduating in GFC and during the rise of the internet blogging-era exacerbated this unrealistic expectation to make it on one’s own
Jonathan Hung
2025-01-23 00:55:22 +0000 UTCI similarly felt Tony Hsiehs death marked a tragic turning point in the entrepreneurial mythos and burgeoning purpose driven business movement. The book “Happy at Any Cost” was too long by half but you’re able to glimpse into the light he brought into the world as well as his downfall. Cynical though we may be, Tony did break ground and led in very unconventional ways. I wish he had continued to flourish - felt like he was one of the good ones.
Jonathan Hung
2025-01-23 00:53:26 +0000 UTC1) George W. was keen on manifesting his own reality in Iraq. A connection? 2) Your urban bias shows. How to integrate this with Peasant Studies! Yes, that caste of characters who - for many of them - with great effort and self-exploitation attempted to avoid proletarianized routinization. Self-exploitation perhaps an important crosscutting category..
his eyes just tell him lies
2025-01-22 22:56:29 +0000 UTCPeople who sit around and critique these ideas have virtually no influence on society but the people who believe in whatever (literally anything) and go and do stuff have a big impact on society. I think that this is an important defense of the ideas of (whatever literally anything) which were all very important and required for the effect of the influential people
Sam
2025-01-22 17:38:02 +0000 UTCRISE AND GRIND BITCHES
Sam
2025-01-22 15:34:50 +0000 UTCDefinitely putting this book on my list. I’d really like to hear his thoughts on the military. Is the operator a manifestation or the next evolution of the entrepreneur?
Connie
2025-01-22 08:06:32 +0000 UTCOne of my favourite episodes thus far!
Theo Sterngold
2025-01-22 07:48:14 +0000 UTCI dug this - but I wonder why the story doesn’t start until after the Civil War. I’m seeing connections to the place of work in European colonialist rhetoric/discourse. I thought particularly of this passage from Derrick Jensen’s A Language Older Than Words: “We did not evolve working for others forty hours or more per week. We evolved, and one need only look at nonhumans or at remaining indigenous peoples to see this is so, spending a great deal of time doing not much of anything (or once again in the lingo of bee research, ‘loafing’). As the Dane Frederick Andersen Bolling said of the Khoikhoi of South Africa, ‘They find it strange that we, the Christians, work, and they say that we are all mortal, that we gain nothing from our toil, but at the end are thrown underground, so that all we have done is in vain.’ Another colonist noted of the same people that ‘their contempt for riches is in reality nothing but their hatred of work,’ and a third remarked that ‘the principle of the men is to laze about.’” (p. 325)
JimJim5122
2025-01-22 03:23:56 +0000 UTCAm I the only one who had an “ahhh” moment? Generationally when I reflect on my millennial age cohort it’s defined by intense anxiety and bouts of serious depression in relation to work esp for those college-educated and in elite sectors like tech and entertainment. So much of our intimate conversations circle around deconstructing the psychic damage this thought had on our lives.
Steven Ngo
2025-01-22 03:01:41 +0000 UTCI have a friend who has his own Real Estate business and still to this day talks about how influential the book “How to Win friends and Influence People” was for him. He’s also obsessed with wellness and takes longevity pills talked about by David Sinclair when he was on Joe Rogan. I talk about this because I feel there is a throughline here with capitalism being a religion with not just from Christianity but with also Mormonism. Bryan Johnson used to be a practicing Mormon and the self help book “7 habits of highly effective people” by Stephen Covey was also Mormon. Not to say Mormons make natural Capitalist but I find it can’t just be a coincidence. Needless to say I bought the book and can’t wait to read it. Killer episode as always
Gregory Bryon
2025-01-22 02:11:23 +0000 UTCGood stuff! About Trump and New Thought, I'm reminded of the time he was asked his net worth and he said "It depends how I feel." I believe he meant it quite literally. Manifesting so often represents a spiritualization of boot straps theory.
genrepunk
2025-01-22 00:52:32 +0000 UTCWe really are living through the crisis of the self made man..
Dan
2025-01-22 00:41:09 +0000 UTCAbsolute slapper of an ep!
Joel
2025-01-21 22:56:15 +0000 UTC“Now, Fred's an intellectual, brings a book to every meal He likes the deep philosophers, like Norman Vincent Peale He thinks the army's just the thing Because he finds it broadening!” -Tom Lehrer, “It Makes a Fellow Proud to Be a Soldier,” from An Evening Wasted with Tom Lehrer, 1959
Big Honkin’ AG Fanboy
2025-01-21 21:42:18 +0000 UTCI love when you when moments in my own intellectual biography, in the 80s/90s context, intersects with yours. A lot of the targets for the early Baffler Boys, of which I was in the second wave, was the "brand me" business lit of the day. And a lot of the paradigm shift in 60s historical thinking that Tom Frank and I were participating in focused on the counterculture values of self-expression as consonant with the mainstream thought of the "post-scarcity" era. Now it comes around again in a fresh way, with the Trumpian accent.
Rick Perlstein
2025-01-21 20:18:55 +0000 UTCHa! When I saw this episode pop up in my Apple podcast feed (without the signature KYE Buckley image) where I also subscribe, I immediately assumed it was some sort of entrepreneurial self help propaganda or scam invading my feed. I almost deleted it in haste. So so so glad I didn’t.
Little Beruit Dweller
2025-01-21 16:19:55 +0000 UTCWonderful wonderful episode thanks again KYE!!
Where there’s a Wills there’s a Way
2025-01-21 15:43:26 +0000 UTCThis was great. I’m teaching a course on the history of spirituality and New Thought this semester, and the central question is “Why do so many Americans believe that thoughts can influence reality?” Sounds like I need to get this book on the syllabus next time around!
Charles McCrary
2025-01-21 15:42:54 +0000 UTCSo good. As a budding leftist, native Californian (I was chiding my childhood friend for being a Joe Dispenza stan over the holidays) and 'solopreneur' who escaped a corporate job and now helps people with their online marketing and personal brands, this episode is pushing all the buttons on my control panel! Debating whether to post about it on LinkedIn and/or include it in my client newsletter...
Eleanor Mayrhofer
2025-01-21 14:43:40 +0000 UTCThis really made me think about how in my life when I was struggling with finding anything of value in my first career more than one friend told me that it didn't matter to them that they find meaning in their jobs because they *had kids*. The meaning in their lives came from being parents and their jobs were just a means to that end.
Tyler Paziuk
2025-01-21 14:30:52 +0000 UTC
