#11: Megan Carnegie - History/Future of Work, Freelance Writing, and the Metaverse

Hello, welcome to another episode of Brain Blast. Today we got Megan Carnegie on. She is a writer for Wired, Courier Media, Time Out London, much more. Today we talk about the future and history of work, the metaverse, and the business of freelance writing. I hope you enjoy.

Hello.

Hey Megan, how are you?

Good. How are you doing?

Not too bad. Not too bad. Thank you for coming on. I already hit record, so hope it's cool. We could just hop right into this.

Yeah, of course. Let's do it.

All right, cool. So would you be down to tell the listeners a little bit about who you are and your background?

Yeah, of course. I am a freelance journalist. I've been freelance for now 5 years. And at the moment, I guess I would see myself as a generalist and write about all kinds of topics. I guess things that kind of touch all areas our lives, but blending lifestyle and culture, I suppose. But in the last sort of 6 months, 8 months, I've started writing a lot more about tech and how we work and the future of work, which of course is like changing at a very fast pace at the moment. I did a master's in magazine journalism right at the start of kind of my career, and that kind of set me off on a path, starting working for Time Out in London. And then I moved to Paris to edit the Time Out site there. So yeah, it's been sort of, yeah, 5 years freelance writing about all kinds of topics. I really like the variety and I'm not really ready to specialize at this point, but I do like going kind of deep into certain topics for 6 or 7 months and then kind of re— You know, seeing if that's the right approach for me.

Got you, 100%. So I actually quitting my full-time job in an hour.

Yeah.

'Cause I go into full freelance. I have a bunch of gigs lined up right now and I'm making more money writing than coding. And I studied English in college. It's always been my dream. I just learned how to code to pay the bills. And so I Twittered my way. Into writing. So yeah, thank you.

Exciting that you're at that point that you're kind of ready to—

yeah, yeah, I appreciate it. So this, uh, this is definitely timely. Um, I definitely want to hear some advice for, for freelance writers. Um, and, uh, and yeah, any advice you could give?

Yeah, of course. Should we start with the advice now or?

Yeah. Yeah. We could hop right into that. And then I definitely wanna talk about future of work and the history of work as well.

So, yeah, definitely. So kind of advice from my side, back to the point about specializing, I feel like there is a real pressure to have a niche and I kind of push back against that. And I guess I would say that, you know, provided that you're someone who is interested in you know, telling stories in a way that you find fit, and that doesn't have to be, you know, heavily case study-led or heavily data-led. I feel like there are so many different ways to get stories out there and read, you know, things like Substack, and, you know, journalism is everything. It's not necessarily, you know, 2,000 words. It could be, you know, really interesting social media content. I think storytelling has many forms. So rushing to specialize too soon, you know, when you first start out, maybe hold back on that, I think. But if there are topics that you want to go deeply into and you can offer expert insight because of your background, then absolutely do that too, because there are absolutely benefits to playing on your own experience. You know, if you're someone who your first job was You know, in something, a very specific industry, you're the perfect person to write about that industry as well. If you know it back to front and if you have kind of insider contacts and links there. So yeah, I guess sort of first point would be don't rush to specialize even though the industry maybe pushes you to do that.

Fair enough. Yeah, right now I'm writing about Web3 quite a lot for multiple different clients doing some ghostwriting and non-ghostwriting journalism. But yeah, let's hop into the Wired article, the hybrid working, and just the history of that. I thought that was really cool. There's been a lot of articles about the future of work, but none about the history of work. So would you mind just explaining that a bit, or maybe giving a summary for those who haven't read it yet?

Yeah, of course. So I think lots of us hadn't really heard the term hybrid working before 2020, maybe. And it might have been a new term for us, but it's definitely not a new concept. The idea of going to a place of work, be it an office or a factory or, you know, anywhere like that, but then blending that with working in, you know, a privately owned space, i.e., your home, that's actually been happening for a long time. The first sort of iterations of it were came along kind of with the mainframe computer because it allowed people to kind of be untethered from that place, you know, to do the work. And I was tasked with finding the original hybrid workers, who was doing it in the '60s and '70s. And there was actually a huge kind of swathe of academics who were exploring it by getting companies involved to basically, you know, take part in experiments. So there was kind of one layer of the academics who were doing it themselves, working from home and at the universities. Then there were the offices that were trialing it and kind of seeing how that was going, and their employees were working between the downtown office, let's say, and a smaller, you know, regional office, and often their homes as well. And, you know, as soon as those experiments began, they began, you know, they started to see the benefits of something like productivity went up by 15%, you know, attrition rate went from 35% to zero. You know, they saw these results pretty quickly. It was a good system and it worked, but there was a lot of pushback against against these experiments because, you know, people high up don't necessarily like the idea of employees doing their own thing and managing their own time, you know, timescale. So this piece that I wrote was with 3 academics who, once I found one, the next one, you know, he put me in touch with 2 others, and they all were kind of counterparts, they worked together on different projects. But I suppose the kind of original seed of the idea came from this particular academic, Jack Nilles, who was flown to the Pentagon when he used to work for the Aerospace Corporation. He was flown to the Pentagon, they decided that they would cancel the meeting he was there for, and he wasted, you know, 2 days flying, waiting around for this meeting. And I think that's when he started to think like, there must be a better way. There must be a better way to do this. I think interestingly about hybrid working, these academics were very pro-environment and they really wanted a way that would stop people from having to commute in their cars. And I wonder if that may, you know, kind of re-emerge as a narrative that hybrid working doesn't just benefit us as employees, but also the world that we live in.

Yeah. Yeah. I definitely haven't heard that angle recently. Most of the angles that I hear about hybrid work are mental health, which, you know, in my opinion, I agree, definitely helps me. Yeah, I guess. What do you think kind of the future of work looks like for, for you know, remote workers, hybrid workers, tech workers, that kind of field?

I think it's still quite splintered. I think there's going to be a lot of experimentation in the next couple of years. I think there's going to be employees having more of a voice than they've ever had in this because they had almost 2 years of working in a completely unprecedented way. So I think employees are going to have a lot more of a say in how they work. And that's going to come with some interesting friction, I think. But in terms of sort of hybrid work, I think there are certain industries that have been doing it and will continue doing it. Tech in particular, they'll be doing it kind of very skillfully within, I would say, a year or two. It's other industries that that may never actually adopt this. And others will adopt it at a much slower pace. Have you kind of enjoyed hybrid working? Has it been something you've enjoyed?

Yeah, so I've been a full remote worker at American Express for the last 6 months. And I mean, personally, I love it. I learned how to code because I could never do an in-person job. I don't like people breathing down my shoulders. I like being able to go on walks when I need it. I like standing up and stretching and playing with my dog. So it was kind of fully necessary for me. And now, you know, writing full-time, like, you know, I write from either my couch, my coffee shops, or wherever. And that's honestly the dream for me. Yeah. Personally, I love it. I would say that I think hybrid work might be better than full remote work just for socialization and like getting to know employees and coworkers. If I had a choice, I would say like, you know, in the office one day a week, maybe one or two days a week. I think that would be really beneficial. Yeah. What are your thoughts on that?

Yeah, I agree. I think remote work is really hard. And, you know, I've been reading studies recently of digital nomads who, you know, work completely remotely around the world. Like, sounds like the dream, but they do it really well for, you know, maybe 5 or 6 years, and then they start to drop off because they feel, you know, not connected to communities. There's an element of loneliness there. So I think we've got to treat remote workers with caution, you know, and kindness, because that's a very difficult existence to have, the hybrid work. And let's say it is one day a week, it's almost like that day in the office should be focused around meetings, socialization, just kind of fun stuff that you maybe miss from that part of, you know, pre-pandemic life.

Yeah, 100%. Do you have any favorite places to write or work?

So I've joined a coworking space which I go to 10 days a month, and I do really like that. That's just to be around people. I've got a lot of respect for anyone who still works from a sofa because my back is just like, I can't do it anymore. But now that things are back to being open here in London, I do really like to work from cafes. That's a very lovely thing that I've missed quite a lot. But mixing it up, really, you know, if I happen to have my laptop and I'm kind of killing time somewhere, sometimes that's the best work because it's, you know, time boxed. You know, I've got an hour, okay, let's just do this, and suddenly feel like really energized to do it rather than a day sat in the same place, which can feel rotten sometimes.

Yeah, I need to be like switching up. Sometimes I'll go to 2 coffee shops in one day and just kind of switch it up. Do you have any favorite places for reading?

So I really— one part I really miss about pre-pandemic life was reading on the commute. So I used to have kind of an hour commute to where I used to work. So I do like reading on public transport, but just my sofa, actually. That's a great spot. I'm a big— big into the Kindle. A lot of— there's a lot of Kindle refuseniks out there, but it just means that I can carry around loads of books and not really feel like I'm doing that.

Yeah, Kindle is the best investment I've ever made. And the Readwise app, I'm not sure if you use that. Yeah, it adds all your Kindle highlights into an app, into a note, and then it could also import it into software like Notion or Roam or wherever. And that's how I use all my stuff for my writing and everything. It's amazing. It's like, I don't know, $2 a month, $5 a month or whatever, but best use of money. Is there anything you're— Yeah, two-part question. Anything you're reading, I'm sure you are reading, but anything good you're reading right now? And is there any current articles you're kind of hacking away at?

So first piece, I've been trying to read a bit more nonfiction this, like start of this year. I find it quite I get through really easily, non-fiction I struggle with a little bit more, I think because it feels like work, even if it isn't. So I've been reading In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts by Gabor Maté, and he is a kind of addiction specialist who works in Vancouver, and this is a really deep dive into addiction, based on, you know, his personal story, as well as the work that he, you know, does with patients in downtown Vancouver. So I'm really enjoying that, but it's a heavy read, so I'm still kind of still getting through that. And then another one I've got— this is unusual for me to be juggling books at the same time, but there's a book called Bourdain in Stories, which is an oral history of Anthony Bourdain by, I think it's Laurie Woolover, and it's a format I've not experienced before, but she's interviewed everyone who maybe ever knew him about their experiences with him, and it's written very much as if they were all in the same room. So, you know, it'll have, you know, so-and-so's initials, they'll have their piece, it will follow on, and the whole book is written like that. So although it's not writerly and it's not you know, it doesn't have that maybe descriptive narrative. Every person's voice is very, like, true to life. I think the format-wise, that was interesting to me because I see a lot of maybe newsletters and things like that that are interview-based, just conversations, and I think they work quite well. So I'm enjoying that and do recommend it if you like Anthony Bourdain or Parts Unknown or anything that he's— he created.

Nice. And are there any articles you're working on, if you could tell?

Yeah, of course. So one of the ones I'm working on at the moment is about location-based salaries and the idea that now that we're all— not all of us, some of us are working fully remotely by choice. You know, maybe people might have moved from, you know, downtown New York to, you know, somewhere slightly more rural, or anywhere outside of the typical kind of city, companies are thinking, just rethinking location-based salaries, because there's always been, in tech at least, they've benchmarked salaries and they've done that not by living costs in the city they're benchmarking against, but but just competition. So if you were to work in New York, you know, you would get paid a competitive salary for New York, and it sort of begs the question, if everyone is everywhere, then why would someone who's actually not in New York get paid a New York salary compared to someone who's, you know, in another genuinely kind of cheaper cost of living city? Interesting. Yeah, I think there are going to be some people out there who are employing juniors, you know, for new roles, juniors in different cities, and those juniors are going to get paid more than them. And what kind of tensions does that throw up for companies, but mostly employees, I think?

Is that for Wired?

Yes. Yeah.

Got you. How did you start writing there?

I pitched a piece back in summer of last year. It was about digital anxiety and the idea that we're not communicating very well with Slack, email, you know, all of the various tools we're using. And that was the first piece I got commissioned, you know, for. And ever since then, it's been a kind of, you know, I pitch some ideas, I also get commissioned ideas. So it's a really nice relationship and one that I you know, I get a lot from, but equally it feels like myself and my editor put equal amounts into the work that I do. And yeah, it's something I'm really enjoying actually, having that relationship with an editor. I think I'm at a point maybe in my career where there has to be a payoff for working for certain publications because the pay in journalism is not stunning, and if I'm learning something and working with an editor who, you know, the editing process becomes a collaboration rather than a, you know, one-sided battle, and that's a really good thing to feel each piece I'm growing a little bit more, and so I can be a bit more choosy in that way, which is good.

Yeah, yeah, I definitely feel that. I I started ghostwriting for a very prominent Twitter person and I'm getting paid less than some of the other clients that I have, I guess is the word. But he just like, he comments on all the Google Docs. He tells me what to change. Like he just, he's got it. Like he is just the king of threads and stuff. And so it's such a valuable relationship, you know, and like, I don't have my name on it and like the threads go viral and my girlfriend is like, Aren't you pissed off you don't have your name? I'm like, no, like, I'm learning so much. Like, you don't even know. Like, you know, when I have the time to put it on my account, like, that'll be great. But like, I'm getting a lot out, so it's all good by me.

And also like to learn the cadence of, you know, a voice like that and, you know, to be able to try things, you know, with, with the sort of protection of someone else's name must be quite a nice thing. you know, in the frame of ghostwriting as it is.

Yeah, yeah, it definitely is. It's cool. I get to be a little experimental and, you know, with my account, I kind of keep a certain voice, which is a little bit fuck you, a little bit, you know, goofy and witty sometimes. But it's kind of cool hopping into other people's voices for a bit and trying to, you know, fit their brand. You know, everybody has a personal brand, so I'm trying to fit that kind of ideal. It's a fun experiment in almost psychology of writing or whatever.

Yeah, it is the psychology of writing. I think I did a little bit of ghostwriting towards the end of last year, a totally new thing for me and not something that I'd kind of gone out for. It sort of came my way, and I think it's definitely something that if you are a kind of Yeah, I guess even advice for other writers is like, you know, there's so much to learn when you don't have your name to it and you're actually trying to emulate a voice, because anytime you're writing for a publication, you have to learn to write in that voice anyway, and ghostwriting is just another type of wearing that different hat, I suppose.

Oh, 100%. I definitely agree. Yeah, it's weird. I'm trying to balance all the ghostwriting with my own writing and, you know, I got to make sure that all my own essays still keep coming out good.

Yeah, it must be sort of like that blended voice, like, whose voice am I speaking in right now?

Exactly. Are there any writers that you particularly look up to or admire, either current ones or past writers?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, definitely. So I kind of have a few in mind, and I've realized, like, what links them together is their ability to sort of write about all kinds of topics in a very human way. I've been loving Anne Helen Petersen's work for years, and she has written a lot about work and the future of work, but her newsletter, I don't know if you've heard of it, it's called Culture Study, and it, you know, she treats anything from, she covers anything from like a really intense deep dive into Peloton's, you know, ups and downs of the last couple of years, to a very interview-heavy piece about, you know, what people do with their children during the summer break, you know, the summer vacation, so I feel like what she's doing with the newsletter is sort of like gold standard of creating a community around writing and topics that engage everyone at all levels. I think an important thing for me is that, you know, she writes a lot about parenthood and she is not a parent, but it's, it's that sort of, sort of the topics that should concern everyone because they're about society. So I definitely recommend like Any of her books are great. I haven't read her new one actually, that's more about kind of office life, but certainly check out her newsletter Culture Study as well. And then another fave of mine is Shirin Kaleh, who is— she writes now for The Guardian, I think mostly The Guardian, but she has, I think, delivered some of the most, sort of, powerful journalism around COVID-19, and did a series of profiles of people who lost their lives to the virus. And I think maybe she did 10 or 15, and, you know, just the level of detail and interviews, and, you know, connections that she has with her case studies, I really see her as, sort of, at the top of her game. And anytime she writes something, I'm clicking on it almost instantly. So yeah, those, those are sort of, yeah, top faves.

Nice. Nice. Yeah, I guess that's, that's honestly all the main questions I have. I guess one more. The article on Zuck's metaverse. Can you, can you talk a little bit about that and your thoughts on it.

Yeah. So this was— I was commissioned a couple of weeks before Facebook changed its name to Meta and kind of laid out all of its intentions. But the idea was that, you know, lots of these companies are entering virtual worlds, you know, corporate metaverse has corporate metaverses, essentially. But where does that leave us as employees? And, you know, it's not necessarily a natural choice for everyone to, you know, choose an avatar and walk into the virtual office. Many people who, you know, have been gaming, that's a very natural behavior, but for others, maybe it feels a little bit clunky, a little bit strange. And I think the question was like, how do people present in the virtual world? Do they go crazy with hairstyles? Do they present as a different gender? What are the, what are the sort of, um, the steps that people are following to enter these new worlds as an employee? And when I dug into the piece, which involved interviewing employees but also companies in this corporate metaverse world, a lot of people were saying we're surprised how sort of, you know, how normal everyone presents. You know, they are still at work, it's a professional sphere, they're not dressing as like, you know, giant green birds, they are, they are, they are just, just hairstyle. And that sounds quite banal, but I think it's quite an interesting parallel for just what the corporate metaverse is. It does feel very boring and very— the spaces are so similar to the boring offices that we're used to, and I think we risk it just being kind of like a version of the world that we currently have but owned by, you know, a company meta that, you know, is slightly questionable. And, you know, what are the risks there? And do employees even want that world? I don't know what you think. Do you feel like it's something that feels like a natural step for there to be an office world that's in the metaverse?

Partly. I tweeted this a while ago, just the idea that I think Meta's going to win out the corporate metaverse. So other companies will use it, the Amexes and big institutions will use Meta just because of the infrastructure. But for the younger generation, for gaming, for just hanging out and doing artsy things or whatever, I think it's going to be some of the more open decentralized platforms, the Decentralands and whatnot. But I also, I think Gather is really one of the leaders in that space as well, if you've heard of that. Launch House is using that to run their platform. They have job fairs, they have pitch decks, all that kind of stuff, all in Gather. I actually wrote a thread for Late Checkout recently about the idea that Substack should have a Gather metaverse where it'd be a nice little coffee shop where writers could hang out and exchange ideas all across the world. And I've been messaging people at Substack trying to get them to do that, but I might have to take it in my own hands. I think part of it, I don't know if it'll ever be like Neil Stephenson's Snow Crash idea of putting on VR goggles and exploring the world and hanging out, but for some people, Mark Andreessen talks a lot about this and I tweeted about it the other day, just the idea of reality privilege versus online privilege. A lot of people have shitty realities. Like really shitty realities across the world. Like, you know, we live in pretty good places. We're on, you know, I'm on the East Coast, 20 minutes or 45 minutes from New York, have a lot of friends around, but a lot of people in rural India or wherever, like the online world offers so many more opportunities. So if there was a world where, you know, say I just put on, strapped on my VR goggles and walked down the VR street to the coffee shop where all the The writers and entrepreneurs are hanging out. That's better than some farm town. So I think it offers something. I have no idea what the future looks like, but I think we'll all be involved in some way, whether it's 20 minutes a week or 5 hours, 10, 20 hours a week. We'll all be kind of testing it out.

Yeah, and I think the sort of people-led movements here are really interesting, like thinking about how people, you know, shifted to Gather during the pandemic to do very, you know, quite sweet normal people things like hold weddings and hold seminars and that kind of thing, and you know, a lot a lot of the academics I've spoken to who use Gather to hold seminars, they've noticed that the kind of modes that we operate in in the real world, the kind of politeness and the, you know, behaving very similarly as they do in the real world, and I think if these spaces do provide an opportunity to meet entirely, you know, new people and inhabit a different experience, like, you know, how could they be negative? And I think you're right, it's going to be, you know, I think people will use it as they see fit, and I hope that doesn't ever become a point where it's like, well, if you don't have the, you know, the headset and the tech, like, you're going to be closed out. I think it's just making sure that that it's still accessible and it's not a kind of elitist thing. If anything, it's more, hopefully more democratic than the world that we currently live in.

Yeah, yeah. It's hard to say. I think if the giant metaverse, like if Gather was open to everybody and it was just one big city where we could all walk around, that'd be amazing. I don't know if that's possible just because of the server limits. And right now they only let like a certain amount of people on, I think. But that'd be the dream. That way you don't need a VR headset or anything. You just need a laptop or maybe even a phone to use it. I think that would be the best case scenario actually. But I wrote about this idea very, very briefly, but it's just the idea of a metaverse monopoly. Gather CEO has said specifically, we need a decentralized, we don't want We don't want to be the only metaverse. We don't want that to happen. Whereas I think Zuck wants to be the only metaverse. And it's just interesting to think we don't want the exact same thing as Web2. We don't want just a few big companies. We want multiple metaverses that we can all explore.

Yeah, and I think we run the risk of the same thing happening with Web3 to a certain extent. And so I think there is, yeah, kind of caution there. And it's good that companies come out and say, like, we don't want to be the only people in this game. Gather are doing that. I also love the aesthetic of Gather. It feels very, I don't know, just retro, a bit of a throwback, whereas I find some of the hyper-real, even Meta's kind of video that Zuckerberg did, it's kind of gross because it's trying to be so much like a 3D human being. But the 2D, you know, quite, you know, pastel colors, like, I love that. It works really well.

Yeah, I agree. Gather reminds me of like being 10 years old playing Pokémon. Like, it just, it gives me such a good vibe. Yeah. Yeah, it's great. Whereas like some of the 3D stuff. Yeah, I agree. It's kind of weird. You know, it's like, I don't know. I know they're also working on a couple of things. I heard Zuck mention on a podcast they're working on for haptic gloves where if you put your hands down, it feels like you're on a desk, you know, which is like, okay, that's weird. And then they're also working on like two other things, which is making eye contact with people on camera and having it being able to follow you where like you and I, like I'm looking at you, but like I'm not looking at the camera. But if I look at the camera, I'm not looking at you. They want it so like you're actually making eye contact and then also being able to hear from somewhere else in the meeting, like which side the person's on. Like that's crazy. I mean, it's kind of cool, like the technology improvements that are coming, but I don't know. I don't know how much better is it than a Zoom meeting? It's probably more fun, but, you know, I don't know.

I think there's definitely like an inclusivity element that they're trying to build in there with like the sound, you know, you being able to hear that it's actually someone across the room and not someone next to you, meaning that, you know, people kind of get an equal chance to speak and stuff like that. But I agree, you know, does it really have to be that realistic? Would it not be better to make the transitions a little bit easier and the haptic stuff. Like, I think people will buzz off that, but I don't think it's going to necessarily improve like a workplace experience or improve productivity in a meeting or something if you can feel your hands on the table.

Yeah. I don't know. Some of it might just be Zuck's dreams. I'm not entirely sure, but. Yeah, I guess that's, that's honestly all the main questions I have. It's been, it's been really nice talking to you. I've enjoyed this. And are you, are you ever in New York?

No. I mean, I've got family in Boston. I haven't been to New York in a long while, but if ever I am, I'll definitely hit you up.

Yeah, I appreciate it. I know my girlfriend loves London like a second home. So maybe at some point I'll hop on the plane with her and steal a trip.

So do it, do it. And let me know and I'll give you the grand tour. All right.

Sounds good. Thank you so much.

All right. No, thanks so much. All right. Have a good day.