In this conversational YouTube episode Sam Parr and his guest (Speaker B) explore the idea that a large proportion of modern white‑collar jobs are essentially unnecessary, drawing on David Graeber’s Bullshit Jobs thesis. They illustrate the concept with a real‑world anecdote from a Twitch acquisition interview, where the guest asked the CEO how many employees Twitch truly needs to meet its goals. The CEO’s answer (about 2,200 people) sparked a debate about redundancy, insurance, and over‑staffing. The dialogue expands to discuss how companies scale: small teams (<50) are mission‑driven and scrappy, while larger firms become bureaucratic, requiring leaders to “act like politicians” and sometimes lie to keep morale. They reference Dunbar’s number (≈150) and propose a personal “below‑50” threshold for effective, tight‑knit teams. The conversation contrasts the “hoodrat” startup mentality—rapid, low‑cost experimentation and bold hacks—with the slower, process‑heavy approach of big SaaS enterprises, suggesting that the optimal innovation strategy may be to fund or acquire external startups rather than build internally. Throughout, the speakers critique corporate bloat, question the necessity of many roles, and reflect on how leadership can balance honesty, redundancy as insurance, and inspirational storytelling.
Chapters
So there's this book that I've been meaning to read. It's on my, uh, uh, to-read list, and it's called Bullshit Jobs. And so it's this premise that, like, I, I think it was a professor, some guy from School of Economics of London or something like that, and his whole, like, I, I'm, again, this is from memory, I didn't research this much, uh, his whole idea here is that most jobs out there in the world, like, at least in white-collar world, Like, it's, it's just kind of unnecessary. Like, and, and to summarize it is like, take a company like HubSpot, Amazon, Twitter. Like, what would happen if you like laid off two-thirds of the people? Like, would it, would anything, do we, do we think anything would change other than the company would just make more profit? And this guy says, in, in most cases, yeah, it would actually, it would, it would run just fine. And most of the jobs that you have are just worthless. And I, I kind of agree with him. I, I, I agree. I kind of agree.
When I was—
don't have knowledge of it other than just personal experience, but I don't— it does sound like it.
And it's hard because there's no counterfactuals, so you don't get to run the test and actually, you know, you can't split test and run, run both versions and see which one ends up better. But I've had this inkling for a while when we were getting acquired and I— we were getting acquired by Twitch and as part of it, they're like, hey, you got to like, you know, basically like Your whole team is going to come in for a day of interviews and that's going to decide kind of like if we take your whole team or not. And I had to do my interview as well. And so I'm going in there and they're like, you know, the classic job interview question, job interview structure is like, well, I ask you a bunch of questions for 95% of it. And then the last 5% of it, I'm like, so do you have any questions for us? And then you're supposed to say something that's also just you showing off to like, you know, show some other strength of yours, you know, in a different way. And, um, And I had one genuine question. I asked it to every single person and they were kind of like taken aback slash they thought I was kind of a jerk. Some people thought they reacted kind of well, like, oh, that's refreshing. I don't know. I haven't really thought about it. But I could tell other people were slightly offended by my question. And my question was, I would say, how many people work at Twitch? And they would be like, uh, you know, I think we're at 1,800 or 2,000 people now. I said, and how many people do you think, I forgot how I phrased it, but it was something like, how many people do you think Twitch needs to hit its goals? And I was like, how many people do you think should work here? All right, that's how many people do work here. How many people do you think should work here? And people were like, and so I asked the CEO this question too. And he was, I give him credit because he's someone who prioritizes the truth over being right. Getting it right is way better than being right. But he's also kind of a fierce debater, so he's not just going to lay down and be like, oh, yeah, you're right, I changed my opinion about things. So he took the question and he didn't— I would say 9 out of 10 CEOs would get quite offended by this question because it basically implies you've mismanaged the company by bloating.
It's a great question. I would not be offended.
He was not offended either. And he was like, that's a good question. He's like, I think 2,200. So he was like, yeah, I think we're a little short of what we need to hit his goal. And he's like, And then his take was basically like, I'm not saying we have all the right people or the most talented people or that there's not people here who are underutilized or just kind of the fat. That wasn't really his point. It was like, I think we can be this much, this ambitious. And to do that, we would need 2,200 awesome people working in unison. I still think he was wrong. I think the company could have operated on a third of the people.
I would have followed up with a few questions. The first one would be, okay, but do you think that you need to hire 2,200 people because you know that only 10% of them are going to be actually value-add and you just have to hire the, the rest in order to find that 10%? And then I would say, and also, is it possible that you only— that you think you need 2,200 because you really only need like 20% effort from all those people and that's what your expectation is? And then finally, how much does redundancy come into play here? How much do people— are you just paying them and you just don't want to mention to them, but you're paying them to sit on the bench and when the person next to them quits, they just are ready to roll, right?
Yeah, I didn't, I didn't follow up that hardcore about it, but I think those are, you know, very valid, valid points. And also, you know, one thing I kind of learned from him was like, let's take that redundancy one, right? Sounds bad, right? Sounds like, oh man, you're paying a bunch of people to kind of do nothing, just sit around.
No, it's insurance.
And he's like, that was exactly his take, which was like, I think it was on speed. I was complaining how slow we were going. And he's like, speed, he's like, going slow is sometimes a feature, not a bug here. And he's like, or like innovation. I was like, ah man, we're not really innovating. Everybody else is. He didn't say this outright, but I gathered this through our conversations, which is like, there are some things we're going to innovate on, but actually the optimal strategy here is to let a bunch of startups go out and try to innovate. And then if anything works, either buy them or clone them. Like that is actually the best way for us to innovate. It's like the, it's free. We get way more experiments done by super caliber, you know, super hungry, motivated people like startup founders and their teams who are laser focused on just that one thing. And they'll try radical experiments that we would never otherwise do. And we don't have to fund it, but we can sit back and watch it. And then when we're ready, we can either go try to acquire them, partner with them, or if they don't want to do any either of those, we could build our own and just use our distribution and our brand which, you know, we have a— if we have, you know, X millions of users, then we should be able to outcompete them from there.
And my issue with—
I think that's actually— it is the optimal strategy.
I agree with Emmett, I think, on most things. I, I imagine I would totally—
by the way, I should, I should say, I'm not putting words in his mouth. This is like what I gathered from a bunch of, bunch of different conversations. I'm sure he would disagree with like, you know, 40 or 50% of what I just said, uh, paraphrasing him poorly.
Yeah. And it's just like your opinion on your takeaway.
My take of his takes.
And I, uh, I think I would agree with, uh, I bet I, I would agree with a lot of what he thinks. My issue is when you're like a small company, like under 50 people, you're all in it. A lot of times you're in it for a mission. You're in it to achieve something. I think that you can get away with just being in it because people just like being in the thick of it with their friends. Uh, like they just like the action. When you get a little bit bigger, I think it's less mission-oriented and you're in and it's just a job, but you still have to put on this face like this to inspire people. And it kind of sucks because the truth is, is like, well, you know, I, I know that, you know, a lot of you are only working 40% and that's okay. I'm okay with that. I baked that into this. I know that a lot of you aren't working at all, but you're really just here in case the guy next to you quits. And then hopefully you're going to train the next person. And I know that a lot of you want to innovate and try these new things, but that's not really what we're going to do. We're going to keep doing the same shit, just a little bit better. And then maybe every once in a while I'm going to have a team that makes something totally new. And I know all this, but just tough. And figuring out how to navigate and but have that like to say what I just said, but in a really inspiring way, or unfortunately just lie. You got to lie.
Or just saying it is actually the best way.
Yeah, just act. You got to just act and pretend. Um, and be a politician a little bit. I find that to be incredibly challenging, but I think it's incredibly necessary.
Yes. Uh, you, you're, you're spot on. Um, you're spot on with that. You are spot on with, with what you just said.
Do you think you could do it?
Um, you know, the, I think the thing you said, so you, have you ever heard of Dunbar's number?
Yeah. What's it mean again?
So Dunbar's number is basically, it's, uh, 150. That's the number. And it's meant to represent the number of different, like how many people you can know. Like how many people do you are familiar? You, you like know their name, their face. How many people can one person know actually? Right? Like somebody who's like, I got 6,000 friends. Like, no, well, you don't really know 6,000 people. And so Dunbar's number was, was used to be 150. It's like in a tribe, you could know 150 up to, up to 150. You could know everybody in the tribe And then tools like social media and stuff came out that kind of like, it's like a tool for the human body to like do more. So like you might be able to know and keep up with more than 150 people now because Facebook makes it easy with the newsfeed and photos and their name is listed there and whatever, you get to see it all the time. I think what you're saying is like your version of Dunbar's number, which is 50, and it's like below this is dumb parts, dumb parts number, I'll call it below 50, below 50. The people who are there are like, you know, down for the cause. Like, yeah, the larger prior— obviously they care about themselves, but like a bigger— like one of the top factors, either number 1 or 2, can be like the cause.
And then like, or even just like, like, just like, you know, like that kid who said he wants to do hoodrat stuff with his friends, like that, that could be the cause. Like, I just want to— I just— it's just— there was a viral video like uh, years ago, and they interviewed this like 9-year-old who, um, stole his grandmother's car and crashed it. And the guy was like, why did you— why did you steal her car? That's— that was really bad of you. And he goes, he goes, I try to be good, but sometimes I just like doing hoodrat stuff with my friends, like smoking cigarettes and driving cars. Play the video, play the video, Ben. You got to play that really quick. Can you play it?
Along the way, he ran over 2 mailboxes, hit 2 parked cars in a Costco parking lot, and struck two moving cars near Walmart. I want to do it because it's fun. Fun to do bad things, to drive into a car. But did you know that you could perhaps kill somebody? Yes, but I wanted to do hood rat stuff with my friend.
First of all, that's how I feel about startups.
The YouTube feature for this podcast just took us to a whole new level already. First one is great. Second, we need to pull the clip of, yeah, just sometimes I want to do hood rat shit with my friends. That needs to be a sound clip, Ben, that you can just play when me and Sam are talking about something dumb that we're doing. Uh, so just, just go ahead and cut that one out.
That's the best part about— that's the best part about startups. Like, I don't care if it's ad tech, I don't care if I'm selling clothing, I don't care. Like, it feels like when you're— when you're like pulling shit off and you're like kind of fibbing to people and like, yeah, you know, we've been— we're, you know, we really care about our customers, our team is— it's like just 3 of you, and you know, there's like— you're just like trying to pretend that you're a big deal. Like, that's hoodrat shit, and I love doing that with my friends.
But I wanted to do hoodrat stuff with my friend. By the way, have you struggled to do that, uh, at now that you're at a big enterprise, you know, SaaS company that's like worth billions of dollars and hoodrat shit is now frowned upon and you're like, I just yanked it. I yanked it. Um, you can't, and they're like, you just yanked it, Sam. Why did you do that? We have a process for that. You know, like, because I definitely could think of like 2 or 3 examples where I was bragging about something I did that was like the startup scrappy thing on Twitch. Well, I would just be like, yeah, like, you know, I like, for example, there was like a competitor and I like went and met, I like talked to the founder and I was like, yeah, like, you know, I basically found out a bunch of their numbers and I was like, oh yeah, you know, they're growing this fast, this is how they're doing, blah, blah. And they're like, well, how do you know that? And I was like, well, I talked to him, I told him I was interested in blah, blah, blah. And they're like, ooh. Uh, I was like, what? And they're like, Well, you know, we just usually we don't, mm, we don't do hoodrat shit like that. So he basically was like, the, the reward I thought I was creating was like, well, we're gonna need to talk to legal and also Corp Dev is gonna have to, you know, we have a guy whose job is to have those conversations and we, we typically sign a letter of engagement before, you know, like whatever. It was like not the exact example, but like things that in the startup, when I was doing my startup, I would be so proud of my hack about like whatever, or like I I remember once I was negotiating a partnership deal and like basically I was just like really negotiating for like every, like every inch, which as a startup I used to love winning a deal, like doing it, getting a good deal for ourselves. And, um, and they were just like, you know, they're like, you know what, like we'd rather just use our standard deal and it's more favorable for him so he'll be happy. And, uh, we don't have to like, you know, let you like negotiate deal by deal on these things. And like, you know, in general we don't really want you negotiating directly with the person. We have like partnership just people who do that.
You're like the guy— yeah, but they were not negotiating. You're like the Big Lebowski guy. It's like, dude, you need a toe? I'll get you a toe. Uh, I can— I, I'll get you a toe if you need a toe.
