This week on People Stuff, Dan and Michael get their hands dirty—literally and intellectually.

💥 They tackle the big questions:

Should you go to college or learn a trade?

What’s it really like working in a modern factory?

Why are oil field jobs impossible to fill (and even harder to keep)?

Along the way, they talk about:

The myth of “college as transformation”

How AI is reshaping universities (and cheating’s golden age)

The decline of unions and the lost art of solidarity

Fixing professional sports through relegation (sorry, NFL fans)

And yes—what happens when your HR department gets too anthropological.

👷‍♂️ From Texas high schools to South Carolina factories, to Bakersfield oil fields, this episode explores how work shapes identity, class, and meaning.

Chapters:
00:00 – Intro
03:00 – Forbes 30 Under 30 and the Theil Fellows fiasco
08:00 – College vs. Trade School
22:00 – Life on the Factory Floor
38:00 – Fixing Sh*t: Professional Sports Edition
46:00 – Oil, Labor, and Truth in Job Ads
59:00 – Outro + Fake Sponsor (Robot Plumber)

Works Cited:

“30 under 30-year sentences: why so many of Forbes’ young heroes face jail” by Arwa Mahdawi https://www.theguardian.com/business/2023/apr/06/forbes-30-under-30-tech-finance-prison

“Breaching Experiments” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breaching_experiment

Studies in Ethnomethodology, by Harold Garfinkel (you may want to bookmark this one; Michael brings it up a lot)

That’s it for this week’s People Stuff — the show where two anthropologists try (and sometimes fail) to make sense of people.

If you’ve got a question, a dilemma, or just something deeply weird about humanity you’d like us to unpack, send it our way at people-stuff.com

Credits

Produced by Gabe Bullard
Music by The Endless Bummer
Art by Siobhan Henegan
Marketing by Bryan Haut
Legal support by The Law Office of Matthew Shayefar, the one true business uncle.

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