Latest / Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps / PREMIUM: "The Fallacy of Productivity" with Oliver Burkeman

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PREMIUM: "The Fallacy of Productivity" with Oliver Burkeman · Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps

• 0:00
  Okay, humans, welcome to the safe space for dangerous ideas.
• 0:06
  Here's a dangerous idea for you.
• 0:09
  It will always be more to do.
• 0:12
  There is no productivity tip or life hack or AI calendar app or magic morning routine
• 0:21
  or brain supplement or project management practice that if you find it and implement it,
• 0:28
  you'll leave you feeling like you're actually on top of all your shit.
• 0:31
  You will never feel like you're on top of all your shit.
• 0:35
  It will always be more to do.
• 0:38
  If you're anything like me, that is both terrifying and also somewhat consoling because
• 0:43
  maybe you kind of like productivity hacks and feeling like you can get on top of staff
• 0:47
  and feeling like if you just deploy this method or that method, you'll find a way.
• 0:51
  You'll find a way to have a mind like water and to just walk through your days with
• 0:58
  a sense of effortless completion and purpose and validity in this crazy world.
• 1:04
  Sadly, for most of us, that is illusory unless you become like a Zen Buddhist monk.
• 1:11
  Instead, what we have to grapple with is the fact that we are finite.
• 1:16
  We have a finite amount of time.
• 1:18
  We have a finite amount of focus.
• 1:20
  We have a finite amount of things we can do.
• 1:23
  We are going to die and there is no productivity hack that will change that fact.
• 1:30
  That is a liberating idea, according to Oliver Berkman.
• 1:34
  Oliver had a column in the Guardian for almost 15 years.
• 1:39
  He's a journalist.
• 1:40
  He's reported from exotic locals such as London and Washington and New York City where
• 1:45
  he used to live while he worked for the Guardian and he has since decamped to the English
• 1:50
  countryside.
• 1:51
  He first came to my attention with a terrific book that I loved called The Antidote, Happiness
• 1:57
  for People who can't stand positive thinking.
• 1:59
  And then I had him on this show to discuss his subsequent book, Another Absolutely Groundbreaking
• 2:07
  Powerful Profound Work called 4,000 Weeks Time Management for Mortals, 4,000 Weeks Being
• 2:15
  Roughly the number of weeks that you get in your life to do with as you will.
• 2:21
  His follow-up book is called Meditations for Mortals, Four Weeks to Embrace Your Limitations
• 2:27
  and Make Time for What Counts.
• 2:29
  I always love talking to Oliver.
• 2:32
  He calls this latest book a four-week adventure in facing reality, embracing imperfection
• 2:38
  and finally getting around to what counts.
• 2:41
  We talk about ambition and anxiety and the hedonic treadmill, which if you're not familiar
• 2:46
  with the phrase, just means the fact that you always seem dissatisfied with the things
• 2:50
  that you are aiming for, that you thought we're going to make you happy before you got
• 2:54
  them and then you get them and they become the new normal and you want new things, the
• 2:58
  sort of phenomenon of trying to keep up with the Jones as I suppose, or taking for granted
• 3:02
  the good things that you've got.
• 3:04
  We talk about self-help and Elon Musk and Distractedness and boredom and snorkeling, especially
• 3:11
  in Yorkshire.
• 3:12
  There isn't much of it.
• 3:13
  Please enjoy it as much as I did.
• 3:15
  The one and only, Oliver Bertman.
• 3:17
  Do you think, do you hold any faith in artificial intelligence to be a solution to our quest
• 3:27
  for productivity solutions, in other words, that it might make the interface with productivity
• 3:34
  more seamless and intuitive?
• 3:36
  I think when it comes to specific, I mean, I have all sorts of feelings and thoughts
• 3:41
  and half-baked soapbox opinions about artificial intelligence more generally, but on the productivity
• 3:47
  front specifically, I mean, two things.
• 3:52
  To the extent that optimizing your life is useful, which is very limited extent, to the extent
• 3:57
  that getting more efficient in your systems and your workflow is a good thing, which it
• 4:03
  is, it's just not very important to save your life or your soul.
• 4:08
  I think there's every sign that AI will lead some improvements there.
• 4:14
  I don't use much in the way of LLM tools and things, but I do use a voice transcriber
• 4:23
  that makes heavy use of AI, at least in its sales pitch, and that seems to me to be radically
• 4:29
  better than any of the voice recognition software I've previously used.
• 4:34
  Oh, but then I think...
• 4:35
  Go on, give me the blurb.
• 4:36
  I need one.
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  It's called scribe.
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  I am not being paid by them.
• 4:40
  I need to keep this up.
• 4:43
  Yes.
• 4:44
  Right.
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  And, you know, this is only an intuitive judgment.
• 4:48
  I haven't done any sort of measurement of its superiority, but I have used or tried to
• 4:53
  use plenty of tools in the past where I would sort of, you know, be walking up a hill and
• 4:58
  have some thoughts for something I wanted to write, and let me just capture this here
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  and now.
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  And the work involved in correcting all the nonsense that came out of those voice recognition
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  tools would be, would make it not worth doing in the first place, just scribbling it down
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  on a piece of paper.
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  My one cry thinking that I'm multiple people.
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  So it keeps saying, speak a one and then speak a two.
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  I had a switch off.
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  That's very telling.
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  Yeah.
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  I think you should discuss that with a therapist, probably, yeah.
• 5:25
  Exactly.
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  And the only other thing that scribe does that I don't love so much is it gives automatically
• 5:32
  generated titles to the files that I create that are kind of terrifying and in how apps
• 5:39
  they are for described like they could often be the title of the article that I'm turning
• 5:46
  over in my mind or something.
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  What I was going to say, we're going to come back to that, but what I was going to say
• 5:49
  in my main point about productivity and AI is that I didn't see any reason why the sort
• 6:00
  of current generation or even any generation of AI tools that are advertised as saving
• 6:05
  your time, handling the scheduling of meetings and doing, being your admin assistant.
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  I don't see any reason why all of that is going to be an exception to this basic rule that
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  I've written about and called the efficiency trap whereby every bit of bandwidth that you
• 6:22
  free up by any means just becomes full of more inputs, right?
• 6:28
  Even if we managed to completely reduce our workloads so that we were only doing those
• 6:35
  things that a human being could truly really had to be the exclusive preserve of a human
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  being, all that would happen through our own ambitions, through the pressures of the economic
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  system and the rest of it is that the number of uniquely human things we were being asked
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  to do would increase and increase and increase until you were just as busy as before.
• 6:58
  Right.
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  But you might be being busier at things that give you greater fulfillment than the personal
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  admin tasks that the AI is now able to do.
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  Good news.
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  Yes.
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  I think there's definitely truth in that.
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  I think to some extent, that's always true of any kind of enhancement of your, like
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  it happens if you are very successful in your work and have more resources to outsource
• 7:25
  things, right?
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  This is all true.
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  It leads to a different kind of problem which is, you know, there's a different kind of
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  anguish involved in choosing between ways of spending your time that all feel great and
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  meaningful.
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  There's actually a strange sort of existential comfort sometimes in turning for half an hour
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  in a day to some tedious admin because it just has to be done.
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  And actually, you know, I'm sure you've had this experience in your work.
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  If you have any degree of success in it, what happens is that the things you're deciding
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  between become more painful to decide between because they're both things you want to do.
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  I think that's, you know, there's nothing that we necessarily need to avoid about that
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  kind of anguish life.
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  Maybe that's just what it is to be a human being with lots of interesting opportunities.
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  And if AI helps us get there, then I suppose I have to grudgingly accept that that's a
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  positive contribution from AI.
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  Yeah, I mean, these are good anguishers to have aren't they?
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  And the anguish of being liberated from too much drudgery lies not only in the anguish
• 8:36
  of choosing between two things that you really want to do, but for me, at least, also lies
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  in the fact that when you're up to big things, the resistance to do them is much greater
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  than the resistance towards menial tasks.
• 8:50
  Right.
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  Much as I might grow up and moan about having to fill in a change of address form and
• 8:57
  send it off to my electric utility company, I'm much keener to do that than I would be
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  to sit my ass down and write a script that I've been procrastinating about, you know.
• 9:11
  Yeah, no, because the stakes are high, the stakes feel high.
• 9:13
  It feels like, you know, your worth or something rests more on the outcomes.
• 9:22
  This is a really interesting angle on the topic to me, actually, I haven't given it too
• 9:26
  much thought.
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  Obviously, we don't want to talk just like sort of monstrously privileged people who enjoy
• 9:34
  the sort of the vacation of tedious work when, you know, plenty of people have to sort
• 9:43
  of fill their days with that sort of tedious work.
• 9:45
  But it is a really interesting point about how we sort of navigate through our choices
• 9:52
  and the work we choose to do in the world and the work we choose to focus on.
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  But there is that kind of, there's something comforting about filling out the change
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  of a dress form, knowing that you can do it, finishing it and being done with it like
• 10:05
  absolutely.
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  Something is achieved that way.
• 10:08
  Yeah.
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  I mean, yes, you talk to people who work in certain kinds of mundane jobs and they
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  do get a certain satisfaction from it, some of them, you know, this comes in here and
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  then it goes over there and once all of those things have come in here and I've put them
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  all over there, then my day is done and I pop off and that was a successful day.
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  I didn't have to wrestle with my creative demons.
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  Yeah.
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  I could have done.
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  Right.
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  And sometimes I don't think that's necessarily even a, like, it's not even something to
• 10:37
  be secretly ashamed of, right?
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  There is just something, something good in that kind of, in that kind of work.
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  I have a very interesting experience when we lived, we lived in Brooklyn for a long time
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  and I was like all good liberal Brooklynites, a member of the Park Slope food co-op, celebrated
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  this institution, which, when they're not arguing about whether to stock humus from
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  Israel, have this, operate this structure where you do sort of four hours of things like
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  shelf stacking or working on a checkout each month and it turns out that if you only have
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  to do it for four hours a month, in my experience anyway, things like stacking shelves, things
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  like doing sort of some good, honest organization of a physical system in that way with some
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  other people who are doing it is not only tolerable, but sort of actively for me anyway, a real
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  addition to the quality of my life.
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  This is where you have to be very careful not to turn into some kind of, you know, tourist
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  of, of, of this kind of labor and point out that, you know, I would absolutely hate to
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  have to do it.
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  Yes.
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  You can, one can sound a little bit like Louis XIII, go with the commoners.
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  Exactly.
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  It's rather fun.
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  But there's something, and I think the crucial thing to realize there is that what's fun
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  about it is that I only had to do it for four hours.
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  I lived in Park Slope and I had to do it zero hours because I didn't want anything to
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  do with the Park Slope co-op.
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  Brilliant institution.
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  The food is fantastic and really good value.
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  But anyway, the terms, the marvelous, it's struck me that that made an interesting point
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  about whether we made a bit of a mistake with the specialization of labor, right?
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  Because actually, there is something kind of profound in the idea that what we should
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  each be doing in our lives is some sort of balance of using our brains and using our bodies
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  and doing things that are simple and complete and doing things that are open-ended and mysterious.
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  What's the same thing with, with chores?
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  I mean, I quite like doing the laundry for the same reason.
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  I'm happy to do the laundry and to do the dishes and stack the dishwasher and unload
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  the dishwasher and fold the clothes when they come out and dry.
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  It's like, there was a messy basket of clothes and now there are clean, folded piles.
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  That's much easier than doing a podcast.
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  If you do any work that is in any sense creative, as I think ever increasing proportions of
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  us do, there's a benefit also to that downtime in terms of ideas kind of noodling around
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  in the back of your mind.
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  Well, the problem is with listening to podcasts like this with people like you telling me
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  how I should have a clear mind.
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  Well, maybe that sparks some ideas or maybe you get so enraged by listening to me banging
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  out about this stuff again that you come up with a good idea in reaction to it.
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  This is an argument against something that you see quite a lot in kind of entrepreneur
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  Twitter, entrepreneur X and other social media spaces where people say what you should
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  do is put a value on your time and then refuse to do anything with your time that you could
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  pay someone less than that value in order to do.
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  I remember one from a couple of years ago where a guy was explaining that because he values
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  his time at sort of tens and tens and tens of thousands of dollars an hour, therefore
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  it was worth it to him to when a very crossing went wrong in the Bay Area somewhere to charter
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  to charter a private flight instead in order to get to meeting.
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  My response to that was I could might have been right in that instance, it depends on
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  what the meeting was, right?
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  I'm not saying that that is never right, but I cannot value my time in this sort of completely
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  standardized way because I can only do the things that I get the most monetary value from
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  in my work for a few hours a day and I need the downstripe.
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  That's right.
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  I need the breeders.
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  It's not like it's not infinitely expandable, just because you might get paid ten thousand
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  pounds to do a speaking, a special speaking thing for some corporation once a year, doesn't
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  mean that every hour of every day at 11 p.m. when you could be folding laundry, you could
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  otherwise be losing ten thousand dollars exactly in that time.
• 14:48
  It's interesting that you said that you hadn't quite thought about this aspect of the trap
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  because the imperfectionist is the name of your philosophy blog kind of thesis here and
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  perfectionism it strikes me is precisely what we're talking about here.
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  Perfectionism not as a desire to produce great work, but as a sense of paralysis because
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  the creative thing that I could be doing should be doing is never going to live up to being
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  as good as it is in my head.
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  Therefore, I'd rather fill out the change of address form that I need to fill out for the
• 15:30
  electric company, then sit down and bring into existence, instantiate this thing that
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  as long as I don't instantiate it remains perfect.
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  Yeah, I think that's absolutely right and I have thought about that sort of, it's the AI
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  part of it that I feel I'm still trying to sort of slot in there because there is that
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  sort of siren voice that says, well, maybe this is a solution to all of this, right?
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  Maybe enough time can be freed up through these new tools to make this less of an issue because
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  you only need to be able to muster the self-discipline in a smaller proportion of your available time.
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  Anyway, I think absolutely the preference that we have for unimportant stuff or easy stuff
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  because it's scary and intimidating to dive in to the stuff that really matters is,
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  apart from anything else, just an incredibly important influence on my personal life to date,
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  right? It's like the number of times looking back that that has happened and it's very often,
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  it's not always that you're just sort of intimidated by work or by important things.
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  Sometimes it's that you care about them so much that you tell yourself you really want to give them
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  high quality time when you have lots of energy and your attention is not being dragged away by
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  all these other little things on your plate and then you're into the terrible world of clearing
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  the decks and trying to get everything else, all the little stuff done before you move on
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  to the really important stuff and there's certainly a pay off to that which is not having
• 17:07
  to dive into the important stuff but you never get to that cleared deck place because there's
• 17:13
  an incident amount of stuff that can fill the decks. The question of whether the
• 17:17
  infinite amount of stuff, whether there are tiers of better and worse, incident amounts of stuff,
• 17:23
  is a relevant one with respect to AI in the sense that if you could have, like if in five years,
• 17:32
  we all basically have a good personal assistant and a good lawyer for basic stuff and a good
• 17:40
  accountant for basic stuff and a good doctor for basic stuff in our pocket that we can, I think
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  this is highly likely, right, that when you need to assign a rental contract or when you need to
• 17:54
  make an agreement with somebody or when you need to review whether or not the incomprehensible
• 17:58
  tax forms that the tax office has sent you are correct, that you'll be able to feed it into AI
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  and AI will be able to do essentially what a conveyance or I don't know what they call them in
• 18:11
  America but a low level solicitor who reviews contracts and paperwork could do and you multiply
• 18:19
  that by no longer needing a travel agent if anyone still does and no longer needing someone to
• 18:26
  schedule to squeeze your hair cut into your calendar in three weeks time. Then for that stuff is off
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  your plate, maybe I'm just being naive, now I'm sort of looking at myself with an olive
• 18:37
  of a Birkman eye and thinking this is probably naive but if all that stuff is off your plate then
• 18:41
  doesn't the stuff that that vacuum then sucks into your life, isn't it like clear to be more
• 18:50
  to be better? Like just because there's always too much to do, there are better and worse
• 18:57
  too much as or aren't there, is it the same psychological trap?
• 19:05
  No, I think there are better and worse too much as obviously this question is sort of framed in
• 19:16
  the on the basis that we're a putting aside what it's like to be one of those former conveyances
• 19:23
  or former travel agents but also that our work will somehow be immune from the same pressures which
• 19:29
  I think there's an argument that some work will be more than others but putting all that to one side
• 19:37
  yeah I think what I have always felt and I think argue when I've been writing about it is
• 19:43
  absolutely not that overwhelm is sort of equally bad for everybody, the person overwhelmed
• 19:52
  by having to work three menial jobs just to keep a roof over their heads versus the person
• 19:57
  overwhelmed by options for places they could go on luxury holidays or options for fascinating
• 20:06
  work projects they could take on but that there is a commonality underneath that very great
• 20:13
  difference and the commonality is the bit where we're grappling with our finitude, the commonality
• 20:17
  is the bit where it's also scary ultimately right so it's not that people's socio-economic
• 20:23
  circumstances aren't radically different and therefore that technological advances could really
• 20:29
  change that and change it for a lot of people and move lots of people perhaps from the
• 20:35
  from the the worst kinds of overwhelm to the better wow also maybe leaving other people with
• 20:40
  sort of insufficiently overwhelmed with with with no employment at all
• 20:48
  but I think that the thing that we really grapple with at the deepest level as humans and the
• 20:52
  thing that we then engage in procrastination or distraction or feeling miserable or pursuing
• 21:00
  the wrong activities and postponing the meaning of our lives into the future like that part of
• 21:04
  it is the bit that applies in all the cases right I mean can't you think of times I certainly can
• 21:12
  in my case where like you've had two or three wonderful options of meaningful high-stakes
• 21:19
  projects to move forward on with that day or that hour and as a result you've done none of them
• 21:24
  right you've done so you've chosen something that was literally today
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  so I think what that shows it does not show that your life or my life isn't better and and more
• 21:36
  fortunate than lots of other people's lives but it does show that the sort of existential
• 21:43
  struggle at the at the root of this is not a lesson by that sort of improvement in circumstances.
• 21:50
  You said grappling with finitude what does that mean exactly?
• 21:55
  I think that a lot of the problems that we confront when it comes to
• 22:07
  building meaningful lives and not being consumed by anxiety and all the rest of it can be
• 22:12
  traced to the fact that we are finite I guess I use this kind of language
• 22:18
  to distinguish it from talking about death where some people want to go when they talk about
• 22:25
  sort of limitations of life it is the fact that we're going to eventually die that that makes all
• 22:32
  the rest of it the way that it is but I think of finitude as just the state of being
• 22:38
  limited in all sorts of different ways right so it is the limitation in the amount of time in
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  a life limitation amount of time in a day limitation of your attention that you can only focus on
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  while arguably two things in some contexts at a time limited abilities to understand what's
• 22:54
  going on in the wider world or in even other people very close to us that whole sort of state of
• 23:02
  being limited I think it really limited I'll add one more you know in our ability to sort of protect
• 23:09
  ourselves from distressing emotions and and sort of deeply sort of traumatising experiences and all
• 23:16
  that and I think that a lot of what we're doing when we don't consider this or when we don't make
• 23:21
  it conscious in life is finding ways to sort of feel as though this is not the case to feel as though
• 23:29
  we're on the verge anyway of transcending these these limitations so I think you know if you take
• 23:35
  sort of most cliched and least reflective bits of productivity advice just to just stay with that
• 23:43
  topic what they do is they fuel without saying this is what they're doing they fuel this sort of
• 23:51
  unarticulated fantasy that if you follow those rules you'll get to the point where you don't have
• 23:56
  to choose between different projects where you don't have to say no to things that you really
• 24:03
  want to deeply say say yes to and so they keep you in this situation of like being on the cusp of
• 24:12
  finally dominating you know finally conquering finitude they never get you there because that's
• 24:20
  not possible so that's why whenever you talk to someone who's a complete sort of productivity
• 24:29
  geek or had you spoken to me in my 20s certainly in some of my 30s about this stuff you would never
• 24:38
  have found me feeling like I'd nailed it you would always found me like a couple of weeks away
• 24:43
  from nailing it once I'd put this new thing into place it's always just over the horizon
• 24:50
  what do you make of the the brand of kind of podcast bro who sells this at the moment I've
• 24:57
  noticed in the past five years or so arise in people who are some of whom are doing very good work
• 25:03
  in the sort of self-help space especially speaking to young males who seem disillusioned or
• 25:09
  ruthless and you know are presenting an alternative to the Andrew Tate vision of masculinity
• 25:15
  but a lot of it is wrapped up in a kind of aspirational life hacking you know take this supplement
• 25:23
  you know download this app to find these life hacks some of it even sounds a little bit
• 25:28
  all of the bookmanian all of the bookian in the sense of like you know it might be about
• 25:35
  like leaving your phone at home or leaving it outside at the bedroom or you know mastering your
• 25:40
  morning you have a go and you're at latest book in a very funny line about you know as someone
• 25:47
  in their early 20s who's on TikTok talking about the perfect morning and being that is content
• 25:53
  that's being consumed by people who run off their feet with children and you know real life
• 25:58
  things that someone in their early 20s on TikTok may not have um have you noticed that phenomenon
• 26:04
  it seems to be I don't know growing in appeal in my world yeah I guess there's a little bit of a
• 26:10
  selection bias for where I stand because I the people that I end up talking with and then also
• 26:14
  just consuming content because I'm into it is not going to be the kind that implies that
• 26:19
  you know one single technique is going to resolve everything once and for all but I do run
• 26:29
  into that stuff in my YouTube feed and elsewhere I think I don't know if it's growing or if it's
• 26:36
  just sort of changing the audience I mean I think certainly you know going back over decades
• 26:42
  um a lot of this kind of ways of managing sort of advice for managing your life has been
• 26:51
  either aimed very squarely at at women readers or has been aimed at sort of midlife middle
• 26:59
  management kind of you know how to how to run an office more effectively and and what you've
• 27:06
  got now is this very sort of yeah more male focused but also younger right it's this idea that
• 27:10
  you just to cope in the modern world and definitely if you want sort of gain a foothold and
• 27:15
  make a bunch of money you're going to need this whole sort of armory of of techniques
• 27:21
  listen my position on this is they fall into a couple of buckets really one is there are just
• 27:24
  techniques that are just stupid and useless and the idea that um by sort of following one specific
• 27:35
  morning routine you're going to uh make everything run uh run okay and perfectly is just
• 27:42
  completely unhelpful but there's another big proportion of these that I still feel drawn to
• 27:49
  and still experiment with sometimes but the problem here is not the techniques the problem here
• 27:54
  is not the idea that it's good to get some sunlight in the morning or that uh writing in a journal
• 27:59
  is a psychological beneficial or that setting goals in certain ways could be more effective in other
• 28:05
  the problem is always the notion that this is going to be your salvation right that some combination
• 28:14
  of these once you finally find them and find more self-discipline than you've ever shown in your
• 28:18
  life before but you were going to find it somehow and you put them into practice and you do it
• 28:23
  then sort of like the age of peace and plenty is going to is going to descend that it's not always
• 28:31
  even acclaimed made by the people promoting them it's fascinating if you go right back to
• 28:34
  David Allen's book getting things done which at the beginning of the 21st century as we kick started
• 28:39
  the modern era of um productivity advice I was just going to say it's like it's like we've shifted
• 28:46
  from the David Allen the when you were talking about middle-aged middle management we've shifted
• 28:50
  in David Allen to Chris Williamson as a model and I love and I know I love David I'm not
• 28:56
  shooting on either of them but it has different models of the aspirational right right and I think
• 29:00
  probably I think this is probably true of both of them as well certainly David Allen right if you
• 29:04
  go back to that original book he's not claiming that um you know following his methods will enable
• 29:13
  you to get everything done that possibly feels like it needs doing in fact very early on in that
• 29:22
  book he has the sentence about how it is possible to have an overwhelming number of things to do but
• 29:28
  still feel calm and peaceful in the midst of it or something like water baby mind like right which is
• 29:33
  a lovely aspiration but is not an aspiration of all getting everything done people still because
• 29:37
  we want to feel less vulnerable we want to not feel like the finite humans we are they still came
• 29:43
  to that book and internalized it as if it said on its first page you know follow the methods in
• 29:49
  this book and you will be able to do absolutely everything and be in complete control of your time
• 29:54
  your emotions and your and your life and I'm sure that uh Chris who I also have never had making
• 30:01
  any such claim like that I'm sure that some people come to someone who you know uh sort of
• 30:08
  talks early quickly about this stuff and and wisely I would say with that sort of hidden agenda
• 30:15
  ah this is the thing that's going to save me once and for all and of course what you really need
• 30:22
  as I have been learning sort of too late at life is to develop the kind of position of authority
• 30:28
  over yourself or within yourself that enables you to say that's a really interesting tool that I
• 30:34
  just heard about in the YouTube video I'm going to experiment with it maybe I will experiment with
• 30:39
  it right away maybe I'll leave it for a while until the time feels right and I'll see if it helps
• 30:44
  me and if it does I will use it when when relevant and if it doesn't I will move on to another one
• 30:52
  it's so much less than the problem glamorous to phrase it like that is not with the the experts the
• 30:57
  problem is with well not with these experts anyway the problem is with us in and there's a fundamental
• 31:04
  sort of keeping up with the Joneses going on where I mean I remember as a teenager I idolized
• 31:11
  Dave Letterman right I loved his TV show and I remember and I remember kind of implicitly thinking
• 31:18
  when I grow up and become a broadcaster if I can become successful like him then I'll have it
• 31:25
  made like I will be happy for the rest of my life and I read a profile and interview with him
• 31:31
  in which he was talking about how fucking miserable he is and how you know Jay Leno is number one
• 31:39
  in the ratings and he was he was at the time number three this is a funny anecdote actually he
• 31:46
  dropped from number two to number three behind the evening news behind the the late news on ABC
• 31:52
  and Jay Leno had put up in Times Square the tonight I would put up a huge billboard with Jay Leno's
• 31:58
  face saying number one in late night overtime square which is a bit of a shitty thing to do because
• 32:05
  Jay is in LA and Letterman is in New York who blocks out south north of Times Square right so Letterman
• 32:12
  buys the billboard directly opposite the Jay Leno one and they put his face up and it says number
• 32:18
  three in late night directly opposite them the one in late night Jay Leno side that's just an
• 32:23
  aside which I thought was a great a great thing for him to do and hilarious but for me to read like
• 32:28
  as a 15 year old that this guy is miserable and and that even he where there's only one person
• 32:35
  above him in that industry is is looking towards that guy and is miserable because he's not that guy
• 32:41
  made me realize well it's fruitless I'm not I'm that was my first glimmer of like obviously your
• 32:48
  external circumstances are fundamentally irrelevant when it comes to your sense of self worth as
• 32:53
  a human being and for the person who's looking towards David Allen or Chris Williamson it's not
• 32:59
  that David or Chris are doing anything wrong it's that that person is presumably looking at them
• 33:05
  and thinking if I had that much money and that much fame and if I had a mind like water or if I had
• 33:10
  sighs like Chris's I'd be happy yeah yeah no I think it's it's so interesting because also there's
• 33:18
  a really interesting sort of pressure that this place is on the person who is issuing the advice
• 33:28
  I think Chris handles this really well and I've sort of grapple with it on my own sort of
• 33:33
  you know less sort of no profile and less good looking I haven't seen your car as well of
• 33:44
  context for myself but which is that you have to you you also need to be careful not to just sort
• 33:50
  of be completely self-deprecating and say I don't know anything right because there is a real job
• 33:54
  a useful job being done in giving people guidance for the next step they might take being a step
• 34:02
  ahead of them in terms of what you've read and people you've talked to and the things you've
• 34:05
  experimented with and then helping them do that and then there is a temptation that in certainly
• 34:12
  more sort of spiritual circles than productivity circles probably this that people sort of find
• 34:16
  themselves giving into to just yeah to to turn it into a cult and it's just like whatever whatever I
• 34:23
  think the moment I wake up in the morning is is the sort of truth given from God and everyone's
• 34:29
  got to follow it but it's not the case that there's something totally wrong either about suggesting
• 34:36
  to people but if they follow your advice or philosophy their lives may improve I think it's
• 34:43
  that absolutist sense that we bring to it of like this is what's going to lead to this sort of
• 34:49
  binary shift from I am dissatisfied and I'm happy to everything is absolutely wonderful of course
• 34:56
  the complicating factor here is that presumably that dissatisfied part of David Letterman's personality
• 35:05
  is also integral to you know that what he has been able to do and the joy he has been able to
• 35:13
  spread to so many people and the value of whatever value it is that he brings to life comes from that
• 35:19
  yeah and of course I feel like in the back of this whole conversation is is Elon Musk as well
• 35:28
  right there's this there's fascinating phenomenon of how obvious it seems to me that even putting
• 35:34
  aside like my vast political differences and I was just like leaving all that aside just looking at
• 35:42
  people who are ascended to the absolute pinnacle of the of the wealth mounted and the power mounted
• 35:48
  like that they don't give the impression of being happy people and in fact I think that a lot of
• 35:58
  the things that they do and say and the behavior they engage in can probably be best understood as
• 36:05
  you know some kind of attempt to feel more alive which is on some level or any of us is doing
• 36:13
  in more or less functional ways because clearly having billions and billions and billions of dollars
• 36:20
  does not simply lead to a complete absence of dissatisfaction
• 36:28
  that's true although I wouldn't take I mean I would agree with the soft version of that claim but
• 36:33
  not necessarily with the hard one if the hard version was something like you need to be an
• 36:40
  unfulfilled asshole in order to be successful no I don't think that some people say right I don't
• 36:46
  think I would I don't think I would agree with the hard version either I mean I don't want to make
• 36:50
  everything about politics but it does strike me that we live in a moment where we are being ruled
• 36:55
  by some of the least contemplative people that I can remember in my life being in the public eye
• 37:02
  in terms of having a groundedness or a grace you know you might whether you'd like to dislike
• 37:09
  the politics of someone like Barack Obama I think it was obvious that he was a he was an
• 37:16
  upstanding guy and like had a moral center and had the capacity for thoughtfulness in fact even his
• 37:23
  critics sort of found him too professorial and thinking about everything and now we've got these
• 37:29
  people standing astride culture and politics who are entirely reactive and very fast-paced and
• 37:37
  very twitchy and very even their supporters would say that that's one of the good things about
• 37:42
  them that they're unpredictable they're fast and tough dancers they're you know they're not
• 37:46
  beholden to ponderous speech of following um so you yeah what do I do you make of this cultural
• 37:54
  moment is this because of social media is it just an accident what's happened to hear the rest
• 37:59
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• 38:12
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