BEN STILLER: I think what we hit on is something that just is, for me in a way is a little bit of a metaphor for just life of what we’re all doing here and making our way through life and following our impulses and trying to be good people and loving people and having relationships and doing work and all those things, but ultimately we don’t have the answers as to what it’s all about or what we’re doing.
GABE GONZÁLEZ: Welcome to We Disrupt This Broadcast. I’m your host, Gabe González. Today we’re talking about one of the most unique and unsettling shows around, Severance. It’s a mind bending sci-fi thriller and sometimes dark comedy that explores one of the most terrifying places known to humanity: the corporate workplace.
But we’re not just talking about passive aggressive emails and having your non-dairy creamer stolen from the communal fridge. Severance explores the limitations of compartmentalizing our emotions. And more importantly, what happens to workers when corporate technology colonizes their minds in the name of productivity?
In the world of Severance, select employees undergo a procedure that disconnects their work selves, or their innies, from their personal selves, or their outies. Two minds existing in the same body, on different shifts, if you will, with each half none the wiser to what the other knows, or does. It’s work life balance taken to the extreme. And it has shocking consequences on the workers’ relationships both in and out of the workplace, bringing up the essential questions, what is a self? And who counts as a person?
Today, we’re talking to actor, comedian, filmmaker, and the person who brings the dystopian world of Severance to life.: it’s executive producer and director Ben Stiller. We also talked to the show’s star and executive producer, actor, comedian, and workplace comedy legend, Adam Scott. To help us understand why the sci-fi themes of Severance have real world significance, we talk to Dr. Allison Pugh, a writer and professor of sociology whose work focuses on economic trends and how they influence the way people find meaning and dignity at work. She’s also the author of The Last Human Job and the perfect person to talk about why the dystopian future depicted on Severance might be closer than we think.
So grab your finger traps and get ready for an episode that’s better than an office waffle party. That joke was for the innies only.
GABE GONZÁLEZ: Welcome back. Today we’re talking to comedy legend Ben Stiller, whose work on classic movies such as Zoolander, Dodgeball, and The Royal Tenenbaums has inspired a generation of comedians. Stiller has taken his career in a bold and darker direction lately, with his excellent directing on the limited series Escape From Dannemora, and now with the genre bending show Severance.
I had the privilege of speaking with him about Severance, now in its second season. Take a listen to my conversation with Ben Stiller.
GABE GONZÁLEZ: Hello and welcome. I’m so excited to be talking to you about Severance today. I loved what I got to see of season two. I’ve been waiting years for it. So really thrilled.
BEN STILLER: Thanks. Yeah, I know. No pressure, right? It’s crazy.
GABE GONZÁLEZ: Oh no. My boyfriend is furious. He knows whenever the show is on, it’s all I’m going to talk about. But Ben Stiller, I would love to kick us off with a question about the show’s concept of innies and outies, a vocabulary that has become quite popular with fans and viewers. Do you feel like people already have created innies and outies to cope with work in our world? Are you kind of giving a name to something that might in some iteration already kind of exist?
BEN STILLER: Well, when you say that, it makes me think that we all have, you know, the way we are when we’re with certain people then we’re different with other people and depending, not even just a work environment, just. different, you know, sort of social interactions that you have. I think actors in particular deal with that in their lives where you go in and, you know, you do a role and then all of a sudden you’re that person, and then you’re not that person.
And I know at work as a director, you’re going and telling people we should do this, we should do that. And then I go home and nobody wants to hear me tell them what to do or cares what I say, you know, which is, it’s very humbling in a good way. We are different in different situations.
I also was thinking about how, you know, the last four years, cause we made the show, you know, the first season really in the midst of COVID and the second season kind of coming out of COVID and then really post COVID. And, you know, that sort of difference in terms of who we are, now; as opposed to what we were dealing with four years ago in the height of the pandemic, and how we have naturally kind of wanted to sever ourselves from that memory, which I think is just a natural human instinct that we all seem to have of just wanting to go forward and not live in that very tough time.
But yet we’ve really, as almost a whole country, kind of like really put that in the rear view mirror in a way that we’ve forgotten a lot of what’s going on. So I think that’s just part of human nature is that we adapt in that way.
GABE GONZÁLEZ: Yeah, it’s almost like a more extreme iteration of a behavior or I guess survival tactic that might already exist within us. One of the biggest mysteries in the series is what Lumon employees actually do. What is macrodata and how does one refine it? We actually have a clip of the employees speculating about this very topic. Let’s take a listen.
CLIP: Severance
What even are these numbers? Like, do we even know what we’re supposedly cleaning?
My theory? The sea.
The sea?
Yeah. Think about it. Okay, if our outies are out there severing their brains, shit must have gotten pretty bad. Famine, plagues, etc. So what is a desperate humanity to do?
Populate the sea?
Populate the sea. But first, they gotta send probes down to the sea to clean up all the deadly eels and shit, cause we can’t cohabitate with that. So we send the probes down. They send us the data coded, we sense what’s eels, and then we tell the probes what to blow up.
This is the leading theory?
No Irv thinks we’re cutting swear words out of movies.
GABE GONZÁLEZ: Why was it important for you and Dan that the Innies not know exactly what they’re doing for Lumon?
BEN STILLER: Well, I mean, I think that’s part of the whole mystery of the show, you know, it’s like the idea is you’re just part of a bigger, you know, machine that you’re not even supposed to know what you’re doing, which, you know, they don’t. But yet what that other layer is, that’s in there is this sort of intuition and feeling of what they do while they’re just sort of, you know, refining and finding these numbers and putting them into bins, that comes from some sort of an emotional reaction to these numbers that they have that they don’t even understand. What is that? I have no idea how Dan came up with that but I think what he hit on is something that just is, for me in a way is a little bit of a metaphor for just life of what we’re all doing here and making our way through life and following our impulses and trying to be good people and loving people and having relationships and doing work and all those things, but ultimately, we don’t have the answers as to what it’s all about or what we’re doing.
GABE GONZÁLEZ: Yeah, absolutely. But I do think that within the story, Severance provides a pretty powerful critique for very specific types of corporate abuses, some of which we might recognize and some might be new to us. But why do you think this viewpoint resonates so strongly in our current moment?
BEN STILLER: I think people are trying to make a living trying to get by and it’s hard. And you’re forced to get a job and work sometimes for a company that you don’t really necessarily align yourself with but you have to work, you have to make a living; and you don’t have that luxury of making that choice.
And so. And it comes back to the wealth gap. And I mean, you’re seeing it in the culture right now, you know, the anger and the frustration people have at how hard it is to get by and wanting these bigger entities and institutions to do the right thing and looking to different places and leaders and people that, you know, who knows if they really are the answer at all, but everybody is so frustrated, they want change.
I think maybe, you know, there’s an aspect of that, that if you’re doing a show that deals with that part of it, but it’s also not the forefront of what the show is about; it’s not hitting it right on the nose. I think that allows people to kind of fill it with their own interpretations and resonate with them in whatever they’re going through in their lives. They, if they find that in the show, that’s wonderful. You know? ’cause I feel like that’s what the fun part of the show is that it can allow you to fill it in a little bit in terms of where you’re coming from.
GABE GONZÁLEZ: And I think to sort of circle back to this bigger theme, as bleak as the Lumon severed floor is, our core cast does still find humanity in each other and they defy the rules to develop a sense of community with each other. So I’m curious, what do you think this ability, right, the ability to connect or to act in solidarity for common good in the face of oppressive forces say about people’s capacity to find humanity and to support each other under circumstances like that?
BEN STILLER: Well, I think human beings are going to be human beings and we need to connect with each other. And I know that in my life, that’s an important thing. And even beyond that, to have compassion for other people, I think that’s just like kind of a core human need and whether it’s in a cold corporate climate or in a prison. Any place where people are, there are barriers that are put up to that connection people are going to figure out a way to connect with each other. And I think that’s why we’d like stories about that because you’re seeing the human will and the human need for connection and how it can overcome those different barriers.
GABE GONZÁLEZ: Yeah. It keeps the hallways from being too bleak for sure. Ben Stiller, thank you for being with us today. Really appreciate getting to talk more about Severance. Really appreciate your time. And thank you again for the amazing show.
BEN STILLER: Thanks, man. Thank you. Really appreciate it, too.
GABE GONZÁLEZ: That was my conversation with Ben Stiller. And now I’m talking to the star of Severance, Adam Scott.
He’s long been known for his ability to play everyman characters, curiously enough, in some of the greatest workplace shows, like Parks and Recreation or Party Down. In Severance, though, he brings his grounded persona, as well as his experience in both comedy and drama. To the role of Mark S., the widower at the center of, well, whatever is going on with these severed employees at Lumon Industries.
We’re here with Adam Scott, star of the series Severance. Adam Scott. How are you?
ADAM SCOTT: I’m good, Gabe. Thank you. How you doing?
GABE GONZÁLEZ: Doing great. Really excited to be here with you. We got the pleasure to talk to Ben Stiller a little bit about Severance, and I’m excited to hear about the series from the other side of the camera.
I think before we dive in, I did want to ask about your body of work, if I may. You’ve definitely been in some all time great workplace shows like Parks and Rec and Party Down and in a very dark, satirical and twisted way, Severance. What kind of coworker would you describe yourself as?
ADAM SCOTT: That’s a really interesting question. You know, it changes from job to job. When I’m on a show and I’m also producing it, I feel responsible and protective of the cast. And, you know, I’m always sort of thinking of them and wanting them to be comfortable and happy. What sort of encourages creativity and relaxation, all this stuff where people are going to be doing their best work.
I’ve certainly been on plenty of sets where creativity isn’t particularly encouraged and things are tense. And the best sets I’ve been on are the ones where everyone feels like they’re a part of this thing and making this thing great.
GABE GONZÁLEZ: I really appreciate that, you know, coming to a producing role from an acting perspective. It’s a really heavy weight to think about as a coworker, right? Like, my greatest concern in the workplace is, am I the guy who takes too many protein bars? But like, I’m never, you know, that’s some really high stakes to be thinking about in a workplace. I imagine that Severance does require a lot of that vulnerability and checking in because it is a show that can feel so existential and dreadful and weird. And I imagine that finding that tone together as a cast with your four co-workers, that sort of core cast has got to be a pretty wild ride, right? Like it’s a lot of trust falls maybe.
ADAM SCOTT: Yeah, it requires a tremendous amount of focus and we’re in that kind of oppressive environment, and I’m just talking about the set and how the set is designed, it’s designed to be slightly oppressive and intimidating. And it is. The ceiling is a little low. The fluorescent lights are always on. The carpet is pretty bright green. And we’re at these sort of monotonous workstations. There’s nothing on the walls other than maybe a picture of Kier or a clock. And we’re in there. You know, 15 hours a day.
So on top of that, there’s usually like seven things going on for all of the characters. And the scenes are always challenging in a really good way. It’s really always fun. And I find challenging and fun to often be the same thing, but it’s always a puzzle to work out. There’s no simple scene to play in Severance. That’s sort of what we’ve found time and time again. Something that on paper looks like, oh, okay, today we’re just doing the thing where I walk into the place and I have to pick up the thing and talk to Turturro for a second and then I leave. And then we’re on the floor doing it and we realize that there’s nothing simple about this and this thing is happening. And then there’s this thing underneath it. And. It’s just always, there’s always a lot happening. So it requires a lot of this focus, like I said. But with that, you obviously at some point need to let off some steam and hopefully you’re with a group of people that you feel like you can do that with.
GABE GONZÁLEZ: So, you mentioned challenging and fun, and it brought to mind something the Severance cast recently did. You and your cast members promoted the series by working inside a glass cube in the middle of Grand Central Station. What was it like taking your character from a TV set, where you can shoot multiple takes and kind of, you know, take a moment to take in your surroundings and the meaning of the scene, to kind of a live, improvised experience in front of an audience?
ADAM SCOTT: It was so fun, and we were all so charged up afterwards, it was like we were treating it like it was like a play, like a performance of a play where we weren’t going to break the fourth wall, we weren’t going to acknowledge the people, we didn’t know if anyone would stop and watch us, we didn’t know what was going to happen, but we made the decision that we were going to keep it within those four walls as if it’s another day at work.
But then as the crowd grew and we started to kind of construct a narrative in there, just by sort of screwing around and improvising together, it was so fun. But also we were in a way cut off from everything. We didn’t know that it had spread like on social media and stuff. And it was a thrill in the moment doing it. And then it was a thrill afterwards seeing the reach it had.
GABE GONZÁLEZ: Yeah, I love that. I call that rush of the live experience, the theater kid at Steak and Shake Energy that I felt when I was in high school. It’s like opening night of Into the Woods. We’re all still wearing our eyeliner. And we are impossible to the waitress, but we’re having a great time.
ADAM SCOTT: Yeah, that’s, you know what, Gabe, that’s part of what I loved about it is it felt like such a drama kid drama camp thing to do. It felt like I was back with my friends in my high school theater in the little theater at Harbor High School, and we were like throwing together a show and surely someone was gonna start making fun of us, but we didn’t care we were doing our thing. It was such a blast.
GABE GONZÁLEZ: Yeah, I mean it sounds like such a fun experience. And I think part of what resonated with people, we talked a bit with Ben about this, is the idea of innie and outie sort of naming something that might exist in the real world without the technology of Lumon, right? Like the way we do sort of sever our lives into work and not work. And I’m wondering, were there any personal experiences or moments of research that you used to ground Mark in the world of Lumon?
ADAM SCOTT: My first instinct was that maybe the innie could be everything that I like about myself, and the outie could be everything I hate about myself. And just sort of go from there. And that felt like a good place to start, you know, and then I just kind of got more and more specific, but that felt like a good sort of base to work from.
GABE GONZÁLEZ: Do you feel like there are any particular physical cues maybe in your body or your voice that you use to distinguish innie and outie? Kind of like, okay This is outie stance. This is innie stance, like kind of getting into character. Is there anything that kind of helps you click back into which Mark you are?
ADAM SCOTT: Yeah. You know, there’s this interesting thing between the two, you know, and because the outie is like had 40 odd years of happiness and sorrow and love and hate, all the things that go with a full life has all of that sort of weighing him down. And then the specifics of what’s going on in his life at that particular moment as well.
And the innie is for all intents and purposes, you know, like two and a half years old. So there’s just a bit of a lightness to the innie. And so just based on that, I was sort of shifting my voice a little bit. And it wasn’t until later that I sort of realized that the thing I was doing with my voice was like my party manners voice from when I was a kid, and sometimes I would talk on the phone with a relative or my grandmother or something, and it was when I was trying to either impress or create a certain impression. And yeah, my voice would go up an octave. It wasn’t until I was deep into shooting that I realized that’s what I was doing.
GABE GONZÁLEZ: I’m sorry. I’m laughing because I love that you were like, my voice goes up an octave. And I was like, Oh, around strangers, mine goes down an octave. I was like,
ADAM SCOTT: Does it really?
GABE GONZÁLEZ: I’m playing a very different role around people I don’t know. I’m like, suddenly I answered the phone and my voice goes down. You know what I mean?
ADAM SCOTT: You’re like, stay away.
GABE GONZÁLEZ: Absolutely. I was like, I am a straight man living in Florida. Yeah, absolutely. You know what I mean? So I love that the social instinct kicks in to adjust for folks, but can go in vastly different directions. You’ve got your stranger’s voice. Yeah.
ADAM SCOTT: I’m sure when I was on the water polo team in high school where I didn’t really feel entirely comfortable, I’m sure it went way down; and I was trying to put on airs of a different kind, you know?
GABE GONZÁLEZ: Absolutely going full Stone Cold Steve Austin, Dwayne the Rock Johnson. Yeah.
ADAM SCOTT: That’s right.
GABE GONZÁLEZ: Okay. So shifting gears a bit here. I wanted to dig a little deeper into Severance‘s darkly satirical take on the shifting social attitudes toward contemporary work culture. I think Severance really does explore the merger of largely unregulated global capitalism with corporate hero worship in a way, not a lot of other shows do. So how do you think that this combination creates what one of our writers described as a Lord of the Flies culture in the United States or globally?
ADAM SCOTT: I think we are in process of finding out what the answer to that question is. And I think the beginnings of an answer to that question, I thought the beginnings of the answer to that question were already settled. But then at the inauguration, when I saw who was sitting in the front row, who had better seats than the incoming cabinet, I felt like this is the beginning of something rather than the result of something. I think that we shall see.
GABE GONZÁLEZ: I know I’m really trying to scry into the future here. So I do appreciate that. It’s, you know, we’ll see is really…
ADAM SCOTT: What do you think, I mean?
GABE GONZÁLEZ: I’m, a tentative we’ll see is definitely where I’m at right now. You know, I think we see echoes of what’s happened in history before I mean, we’ve there’s a whole chapter on the robber barons in my U.S. History book. We really will see .
ADAM SCOTT: It’s wild.
GABE GONZÁLEZ: It feels like art is one of the few cathartic places for me right now, which is you know?
ADAM SCOTT: Me too. And I really escape into the shows and movies that I love and it’s so valuable. There’s nothing better, nothing that I’d rather spend my time watching, particularly when things that are going on in the real world are bumming me out.
GABE GONZÁLEZ: Perfectly understated. I love that. All right. Well, Adam Scott, thank you so much for joining us and talking to us a bit about Severance and your other work.
ADAM SCOTT: Thank you for having me. And it was great questions.
GABE GONZÁLEZ: Thank you so much. I really appreciate you joining us. And if you’re listening, you can watch seasons one and two of Severance on Apple TV. So thanks again, Adam.
ADAM SCOTT: Thanks, Gabe.
GABE GONZÁLEZ: When we come back, Peabody Executive Director Jeffrey Jones talks with Dr. Allison Pugh about why the dystopian future depicted on Severance might be closer than we think.
GABE GONZÁLEZ: Welcome back. Today we’re talking all things Severance. Is HR on the line yet? One of the most chilling aspects of the show is that the characters exist inside of Lumon Industries with absolutely no concept of who they are as a person outside work. They lack outside memories and are considered less than human within the confines of their office. So is the perfect worker, one that lacks humanity? Is being a person antithetical to efficiency.
Dr. Allison Pugh, author of The Last Human Job, joined us to help answer some of these questions. Let’s listen to her conversation with We Disrupt This Broadcast executive producer and executive director of the Peabody Awards, Jeffrey Jones.
JEFFREY JONES: Welcome to the broadcast. This is Dr. Allison Pugh, professor of sociology at Johns Hopkins University and author of The Last Human Job: The Work of Connecting in a Disconnected World. Welcome to We Disrupt This Broadcast.
ALLISON PUGH: Thank you so much. I’m glad to be here.
JEFFREY JONES: Well, we’re talking of course about Severance, but you and I are going to talk about your work, and for our listeners, if you would, summarize what you’re studying and why.
ALLISON PUGH: My latest book is about that kind of special, humane interpersonal work, like therapy or teaching or being a primary care physician. And I came to the notion that they have in common the need to see the other person and have the other person feel seen. And I came to call that connective labor. And when I was doing this work, the only other people who were interested in my core question, which was kind of like, how do we scale this work up? How do we make getting a good teacher or getting a good doctor, not only based on whether you’re lucky or very rich? The only other people asking that question in 2015 were AI engineers. I started it quite agnostic. You know, you could hear that. I’m like, we need to scale this up. Inequity is a problem. And I ended the experience much more critical of AI’s claims to help us in this regard.
JEFFREY JONES: So you mentioned AI. And my question is, how bad is this about to get?
ALLISON PUGH: When you ask what the future is, there’s really three futures I see. All of them are not great, unless we make this big stink right now, basically.
One future is you know, AI does the easy work and then the complex work gets given to human beings. And you see that right now with, say, you know, customer service bots, you know, where you’re like shouting at the airline on the phone saying, you know, “agent, agent,” to try and get a human being. That’s that future right there.
Another one is, you know, the kind of inequality future. If the first one’s more of a triage model, there’s an inequality model where low income people get bots to deliver their humane interpersonal services, and then rich people get human personal services. And that’s happening also right this second. You know, personal services to rich people are the fastest growing set of occupations, according to economists. So you have like personal chefs, personal trainer, personal investment counselor, anything with the word personal in it. But when the chatbots are the ones offering that to poor people or the working class people, and the working class people are the ones offering it to the affluent, that’s an inequality model whose seeds are being sown right now.
And then the last model is one where the machines do the thinking and the humans do the feeling. And you can hear that when people say, we’re going to work together, humans and machines work together. AI will free us up for more meaningful work. The problem with that, couple of problems with that. The first problem is that it’s pretty naive about employers. Like, will employers wait around to give more meaningful work to employees that are not busy because AI has taken over their jobs? Like, I don’t think so.
But another issue is that, are feeling jobs without thinking? Like, the notion that you can split those is maybe a fallacy. And as an example, I want to bring out the idea of mercy. Mercy is an idea in which feeling and thinking come together. And can we separate them? I’m not sure. So anyway, all three of those futures kind of depress me and I think that we don’t have to opt for them. We can fight them back if we take a more active stance towards what’s okay for AI to be in and what’s not.
JEFFREY JONES: Karl Marx, almost 180 years ago, wrote about our alienation from our labor. And of course he was describing the shift from craft and artisan labor to industrial labor in the 1840s. But he’s talking about some of the central themes here that you’re talking about, that we’ve lost a connection to our labor, to our activity, and even to our human nature in that process.
So jump ahead all these years. What I read with connective labor is that this process has now found its way into service economy. In healthcare, and in education, and in therapy, like you described. So my question for you is, as we’ve shifted from industrial economy to the service economy, and really in the 70s, 80s, 90s of the last century, why has it taken so long for this alienation to catch up? Is it the advent of technology? Because I think this was pre-AI. Am I correct?
ALLISON PUGH: Yes, absolutely. I mean, one of the central findings of my book is that it’s really the degradation of this labor that makes automation by AI appealing to people at all. But you asked why it’s taken so long. And that’s because for, you know, years, we thought this work was impervious to the industrial model of, you know, greater and greater efficiency and standardization. We thought these were the jobs that were kind of, you know, the last human job. These were the jobs that were going to be free of all that standardization that you could see in manufacturing.
And as it turns out, these jobs are not free. And much as we might wish that they were, or there might even be some pundits saying, Oh no, this will never happen. These are, you know, impervious to those trends. Engineers are a hundred percent gunning for this work. And we’ve seen that you know, accelerated with chat GPT and its use in teaching and in therapy and in healthcare for sure.
JEFFREY JONES: We have a clip from Severance that illustrates perfectly the way that the work self is dehumanized. Let’s take a listen.
CLIP: Severance
I understand that you’re unhappy with the life that you’ve been given. But you know what, eventually we all have to accept reality. So, here it is. I am a person. You are not. I make the decisions. You do not. And if you ever do anything to my fingers, know that I will keep you alive long enough to horribly regret that. Your resignation request is denied.
JEFFREY JONES: So Alison, you use the word degradation, but I want to talk about the word dehumanization, which is central to the theme of Severance. You’re a sociologist. What did your subjects report about dehumanization in this process?
ALLISON PUGH: Yeah. Dehumanization is a central theme when people talk about feeling like their jobs turn themselves into machines. And that’s something that happens even before AI. That happens when we ask doctors to turn themselves into data collection machines. So they have to figure out how to both type into the electronic health record and try and keep eye contact with you while you’re telling them about, you know, why it’s hard for you to eat vegetables or control your sugar.
And I had doctors tell me that like, see, I’ve mastered this capacity to type without watching the screen so that I can, you know, connect more easily with my patients. And primary care physicians now show a 50 percent burnout rate. And there’s a lot of work that shows that it’s directly tied to the requirements that we have newly given them to become basically data collection machines.
And it’s all about billing. And so they just felt really dehumanized by these new requirements. And what I’m describing is not just for doctors. I had teachers say the exact same thing. And some teachers, some scholars have reported that, you know, an administrator will say, I know the kids by data, but not by face. You know, that’s a dehumanization statement right there.
JEFFREY JONES: So one other great social theorist to mention here is Michel Foucault, the French intellectual. Foucault talked about the ways in which power works to create the conditions whereby we not only agree to our own control, but also that we do it to ourselves. And so this is a theme that’s in Severance as well. So my question for you is what did your subjects report in that regard? Do they feel helpless or did some actually consent and say, well, this is just the way it is and there’s nothing I can do about that.
ALLISON PUGH: Yeah, that’s a great question and a great use of Foucault there. It’s absolutely true. When we ourselves kind of discipline ourselves, it’s something quite insidious. And yeah, I found that some people did that more than others. So for instance, therapists were more resistant, and maybe that has to do with their greater professional autonomy. Whereas teachers, I did hear a lot of stories from them about like, you know, well, the way I can be most efficient and connect is if I ask my kids, you know, okay, on a scale of one to five, and five is you’re going to Disneyland, and one is you feel terrible. Where are you? And she’ll have a whole class going like, you know, raising their hands with threes and fours. And then if you’re a two, look around and we’re a community. And if you see some twos around you, be nice to that person. You know, like, so it’s like this kind of quantification of feeling applied to, you know, elementary school students in Oakland, California.
So, and I feel great sympathy. I’m not, I don’t want to like kind of denigrate her efforts at all. I think teachers, we ask too much of them, you know, but they are kind of subordinated to this kind of intensely dehumanizing standardization of their work as they’re kind of forced to turn children into widgets a little, and that’s what she was experiencing this kind of intense time constraint and having to kind of connect under great duress.
JEFFREY JONES: I guess lastly, how does all this affect trust, trust amongst humans and trust between humans and institutions?
ALLISON PUGH: Hmm, that’s an interesting question and it’s not actually not an easy question because as you know, as we all know, humans are fallible. You know, they judge each other, they misrecognize one another, they deliver shame and vulnerability and, you know, it’s like they’re messy.
Humans are messy and it’s actually a really robust finding that human beings actually often will trust computers more than other humans with shameful information. So that would be like children will tell a computer more than another human being, whether or not they are being bullied, for example, or adults will be more honest about their financial problems with a computer than with another human being.
Now, of course, they’re doing that because they think computers aren’t judging. And of course computers are judging. So that’s a kind of, that’s a mistake that people are making. And I think part of it is because the kind of judging computers do, it doesn’t feel like the moral gaze of another human being. I think trust is related to issues about shame and vulnerability, and I think it’s a complex story. We trust computers more, and I’m not sure that we should.
JEFFREY JONES: Well, Alison, thank you so much for being with us today. It’s fascinating work, and I think all of the listeners can easily make some comparisons between what you’re describing in the real world and the world that Severance creates, which is, it’s eerily, eerily similar.
ALLISON PUGH: Absolutely. I really appreciate being here. It’s been a great conversation for me.
GABE GONZÁLEZ: Well, thank you again for joining us today. I’ve got to say this episode has me feeling like employee of the month because we put in the work.
In our first conversation, Ben Stiller very rightly points out how our need for connection, in person connection, not these parasocial relationships or rivalries we develop online, is rooted in our humanity. And losing that means losing a little piece of yourself that learns how to empathize, to think outside your own little box.
That felt so connected to Dr. Allison Pugh’s conversation surrounding connective labor. Human interaction trying to be supplanted by AI feels like our own reality’s version of the Lumon ideal, finding ways to divorce the human, the emotional, the unpredictable from work that demands those things to get the job done right. And the crucial warning in Dr. Allison Pugh’s work is one that will stick with me: how our wildest dreams of what this technology could do has to be grounded in the reality of what employers will do with AI.
And finally, what a joy to talk to Adam Scott. Not just about the series, but the sense of play and exploration he brings to all his work. Learning how he thinks about and physicalizes both severed personalities within Mark S., how he and the cast navigate the twists and turns of this bendy, dark story together, and how he aspires to work toward creating a workplace that’s nothing like Lumon.
GABE GONZÁLEZ: Well, as you might know by now, the Peabody Awards are decided unanimously, so to close out our episode, I bring you the We Disrupt This Broadcast Unanimous Decision, where we unanimously pick the most disruptive line of the day:
We’re all still wearing our eyeliner, and we are impossible to the waitress, but we’re having a great time.
I’m Gabe González. Make sure to join us on our next episode, where we’ll speak with Tony Gilroy, creator of the Peabody Award-winning series ANDOR.
TONY GILROY: And I think the power that I’m representing in the show is my true feeling about it, which is it’s just a bunch of people and they have their own needs and they have their own fears and they have their own cowardice and they have their own careerism and the Nazis in this show are just as interested in getting a corner office as they are in any aspect of profession. It’s careerism and, I think that’s, I think that’s encouraging on one level, but incredibly sad.
GABE GONZÁLEZ: We Disrupt This broadcast is a Peabody and Center for Media and Social Impact production hosted by me, Gabe Gonzalez, with on air contributions from Caty Borum and Jeffrey Jones. The show is brought to you by executive producers, Caty Borum, Jeffrey Jones, and Bethany Hall. Producer Jordana Jason. Writers: Sasha Stewart, Jordana Jason, Bethany Hall, Jennifer Keishin Armstrong, and myself, Gabe González. Consulting producer: Jennifer Keishin Armstrong. Graphic designer: Olivia Klaus. Operations producer: Varsha Ramani. The marketing and communications team: Christine Dreyer and Tunishia Singleton. From PRX: the team is Terrence Bernardo, Jennie Cataldo, Edwin Ochoa and Amber Walker. The executive producer of PRX Productions is Jocelyn Gonzales.