So we're in the situation where we're, you know, worried about automating work and the most human work is the most difficult to automate.

And we're essentially turning humans into autonomous, autonomous by measuring every aspect of their behavior as if they're machines.

Humans are not machines. That's why they're great. And we shouldn't lose that. We shouldn't lose sight of that.

Are we yes? Where are we here? Why are we here not entirely clear? We are misfits thrust into existence by random chance with no hints at all as to how we're supposed to make sense of it all.

It's immensely bizarre. Here we are.

Hello everybody and welcome to the here. We are podcasts. I am Shane Moss and I am putting together many of you that have been following along might have known that I also have a show called Mind Under Matter with me and my artist and comedian friend remain nasa where we kind of take take a lot of things from this show and and make it more philosophical loose less accurate and more funny.

And that sort of that sort of thing because we're wrong about a bunch of things. But we have a we have a camp out festival coming out in Raleigh 20 minutes southeast of downed on September 9th through 11th with camping until Monday the 12th.

There's day passes available as well. But we encourage you guys to camp out for the communal vibe and my guest today is coming all the way from Purdue to attend and participate in the festival.

So I am exceptionally excited to welcome my guest Tara bear and everybody Tara. Thank you so much for joining me. Thanks for having me.

So tell everyone about yourself.

Oh gosh, sure. So I'm an organizational psychologist. What that means is we study people at work, what makes them motivated, how to help them perform better, how to shape them through their careers,

train and select people for that for open positions. So quite a range of different applications. But the common thread is how do people behave at work and how can we help them optimize their well-being and performance.

Amazing. I've heard about this work stuff. It sounds like it sounds like from a psychological perspective that there's just a whole lot going on there, especially in

we talk a lot about evolution on this show and kind of the various pressures that shaped our physiology and our minds. And one of my favorite topics is some of the mismatches with our more modern society.

And this is this is the very first time in the sliver of time and existence that any organism has kind of organized itself in some sort of cubicle structure and been able to have these things called corporations and and we know about like worker ants and things like that.

But what we're doing now to build this very impressive and complex society that we all live in in these massive cities and these massive organizations is is strange in so many ways.

And I think that I think that intuitively what from like a business standpoint or a CEO standpoint would consider a healthy work life and productivity is not always necessarily what gets the most productivity and creativity and well-being and employee retention and things like that out of people.

You're totally right. I mean, there's there's nothing natural about spending 40 hours a week in a window. It's cubicle. And organizations were certainly not designed thoughtfully. I won't even say that they were designed at all in most cases. I think in a lot of cases, it's a game of follow the leader because you hear about a corporation trying something.

You know, remote offices or open offices or whatever and then you want to try it. But there's there's this funny aspect of our perception, which is called the naturalistic fallacy. It means that we assume that whatever is around us is right that it should be that way.

And so we don't really question, is there a better way to design work? We assume that this is normal and because it's always been this way. But of course, if you look in history, it's not always been this way. There's no reason that it has to be this way in the future.

Yeah, yeah. I thought I had a guest on another person that's going to be at the at the camp out who studies human evolution and so paleontologist Steven Churchill at Duke who kind of send it up at the time that I heard it, you know, it didn't it didn't seem all that profound really.

And then it just keeps on popping up in my mind, but he kind of talked about human existence that we're all sort of born into this thing that's like some sort of amnesia of sorts.

...