The Megyn Kelly Show - 20220324_taking-risks-time-management-and-leading-a-product
Aired: 2022-03-24
Duration: 01:44:04


=== Inbox Zero and Time Management (15:08) ===

[00:00:15]  Welcome to the Megan Kelly Show, your home for open, honest, and provocative conversations.
[00:00:27]  Hey, everyone, I'm Megan Kelly.
[00:00:28]  Welcome to the Megan Kelly Show.
[00:00:30]  Three words: 4,000 weeks.
[00:00:36]  If you are lucky, that's your average lifespan.
[00:00:40]  When we put it into those terms, life feels pretty short, pretty time-limited.
[00:00:46]  So, how are you spending those precious weeks?
[00:00:49]  Are you using your time wisely?
[00:00:53]  Journalist and author of 4,000 weeks: time management for mortals, Oliver Berkman joins us today to advise on how to make the most of our finite time on this planet.
[00:01:08]  Seems like a good use of our time right now.
[00:01:10]  Welcome, Oliver.
[00:01:11]  Good to have you.
[00:01:12]  Thanks so much for inviting me.
[00:01:14]  All right.
[00:01:14]  So, I have to tell you, in reading your book, I laughed because I thought my first thought was, This is a book for my assistant, Abby.
[00:01:22]  This is not a book for me because she and I are polar opposites when it comes to time management, planning ahead, getting to the airport.
[00:01:31]  You know, all the things that you talk about in your book, the way your family was, you know, three hours in advance of the airport and one hour in advance of the train station, and all that.
[00:01:38]  I never do any of that, never.
[00:01:41]  And it drives my poor assistant nuts.
[00:01:44]  But even if I were doing my own travel, planning it myself, and so on, I'm just not built that way.
[00:01:48]  So, I feel like this is an interview in part for her.
[00:01:52]  And that she's next to me going, Yes.
[00:01:56]  But then, in the latter part of the book, you get to some stuff that I found very useful for me, too.
[00:02:00]  So, we've got everybody covered, I think.
[00:02:02]  So, it's not as morbid as it sounds, the 4,000 weeks.
[00:02:05]  You're not trying to bum us out or depress us.
[00:02:08]  What are you trying to do by framing our life experience in those terms?
[00:02:13]  Yeah, no, I'm really not trying to be just sort of terrifying and depressing.
[00:02:18]  I don't think that would be commercially sensible anyway, right?
[00:02:22]  Writing a book.
[00:02:22]  But, no, I think that 4,000 weeks idea, putting it in those terms, it is really startling.
[00:02:31]  It is a little bit scary, and I plead guilty to wanting to startle people.
[00:02:36]  But I think that when you follow that through, it's actually really liberating.
[00:02:41]  It's really relaxing because I think in the long, hopefully I can unpack this a bit, but if you really think about what it means to be as finite as we are, one thing that you can see is that like huge amounts of the way we try to do everything and get our arms around everything and not miss out on any experience and answer every email, you know, we can just give that up because it's just not going to happen.
[00:03:06]  You know, there's always going to be too much to do, there's always going to be more things that matter than you have time for.
[00:03:13]  And I think, in the end, that's actually a really kind of liberating uh realization because it lets you stop trying to do something impossible and really get you know, get to grips with doing something meaningful with the time that you have.
[00:03:27]  What creates the me versus the Abby?
[00:03:30]  Because I can so easily, almost too easily, um, just ignore my inbox.
[00:03:36]  I just, I just didn't like I will always get the things done that must get done during the day, you know, to maintain my professional responsibilities, my duties as a mom and all that.
[00:03:47]  But I will never be like, I've got to get, I've got to respond.
[00:03:50]  Whereas she over there, she will, she will not go to bed until they are all she's doing her little emails right now.
[00:03:55]  I can see if you hear like click clacking.
[00:03:57]  I'm like, she's just, it's nonsense.
[00:03:59]  So what makes somebody more like, eh, like me, or more like, yes, I will get it done, like Abby.
[00:04:06]  Well, I'm, I'm really interested to learn this about you because I think it is rare for people to be, you know, successful and driven and accomplished and not develop this kind of fairly pathological approach to time, which you know, I think, I think a lot of people, a lot of people do.
[00:04:28]  I mean, I'm sure it has a million different origins in the way people are raised and all the rest of it.
[00:04:34]  But I do think, you know, there is this overwhelming pressure in the world that we live in, the technology that we have, the kind of economy that we try to thrive and flourish in that pushes us towards, you know, trying to become more efficient, more optimized, get more and more done.
[00:04:52]  And if it's always been the case for you since early in your career, that you haven't done it that way, I am super impressed and I want to learn from this.
[00:04:59]  No, I'm just, I'm just built this way because I think to myself, I've thought many times, maybe it's because I have Abby and she doesn't have an Abby.
[00:05:06]  But I was like this even before she came into my life.
[00:05:09]  I just, again, I would never miss an obligation.
[00:05:12]  You know, I know what's important.
[00:05:13]  I would never blow off an email from my boss back in the day or something that something about my kids that really needed to tending to.
[00:05:20]  But if you're not in that field, I really don't feel the need to get back to you right away.
[00:05:25]  And if you look at my email history, it's just flag, And within 30 days, I will go back and respond to all the flagged emails.
[00:05:33]  I will.
[00:05:34]  Like, I gave myself the time.
[00:05:35]  And I mean, the benefit of that is after 30 days, half of them are no longer even relevant.
[00:05:40]  Yeah, right.
[00:05:41]  Totally.
[00:05:42]  People email you to solve some problem and you don't reply.
[00:05:44]  They find some other way to solve that problem.
[00:05:48]  It's a big secret that you learn if you are bad at email, which I have been.
[00:05:53]  Not due to being a relaxed person.
[00:05:56]  Yes, but the texting is actually, it's more problematic because texting, like the message service on your iPhone does not have a star function.
[00:06:06]  So that bothers me.
[00:06:08]  If I could remove the messaging from my phone, the text messaging, I would.
[00:06:12]  Because that one's always lurking, judging me, like go faster.
[00:06:15]  People expect responses to the texts faster.
[00:06:18]  But your point of your book is that most people are putting that pressure on themselves.
[00:06:22]  They don't need the email box to be glowing or the iPhone to be beeping.
[00:06:27]  It's they're doing it to themselves.
[00:06:29]  Like, I've got to be more productive.
[00:06:30]  I've got to squeeze as much out of my abilities every day as possible.
[00:06:35]  Yeah.
[00:06:35]  I mean, look, I don't think it is without a huge amount of social pressure from the environment.
[00:06:40]  But what I do think is it just, it doesn't actually help to buy into that.
[00:06:44]  So even if you do feel a ton of pressure from outside to get through all your emails, it's not the best way to thrive at work.
[00:06:50]  It's not the best way to live a meaningful life to try to turn yourself into this person you can never be who answers every single email you could ever receive, who is ultra efficient.
[00:07:01]  Because apart from anything else, what happens when you get incredibly efficient at doing stuff is you get busier.
[00:07:07]  Like if you get really good at answering your emails really fast, one thing is guaranteed to happen.
[00:07:13]  And I've experienced this, and that is that you'll just get a lot more emails.
[00:07:17]  So like, like they say, the reward for good time management is more work.
[00:07:22]  It's not a sensible tactic.
[00:07:23]  Now, you do write about a woman in France who lived to be 122 years old.
[00:07:29]  And I wanted to know more about her.
[00:07:31]  Now, do we know whether this woman had some sort of crazy, she had more than the 4,000 weeks was the point of the book.
[00:07:38]  But I was curious to know how this woman did it.
[00:07:41]  Well, I don't know the details about Jean-Calmont in terms of her sort of health and the secret to her longevity.
[00:07:48]  I bring her up because to say that even if you break records like she did and live to be 122, you still get like 6,000 some weeks.
[00:07:58]  It like it really isn't a large amount.
[00:08:02]  But I mean, I will say this, it's almost a cliche, isn't it?
[00:08:06]  That when interviews are conducted with people who've lived to these incredible ages, they always credit kind of, you know, alcohol and smoking and various bad habits that we frown on today as having been critical.
[00:08:19]  It may just be that they are much more relaxed on some level about everything, about their health, but also about their time.
[00:08:27]  That bodes well.
[00:08:28]  Abby, you got to calm down.
[00:08:29]  You got to calm down immediately.
[00:08:32]  She says she doesn't have an inner.
[00:08:34]  Okay, so you decided to be self-reflective about this and take a look at how you were approaching your own productivity, your own life and so on.
[00:08:42]  And you write about something called Inbox Zero and saying that you've squandered countless hours, not to mention money and so on, thinking that if you could just find the right time management system, that you'd apply a sufficient amount of self-discipline, you might be able to win the struggle with time.
[00:08:59]  Like you could finally have this well-ordered life in which you accomplished all your goals.
[00:09:03]  And one of the things you tried was something called the 25 minute, or no, you call it the Pomodoro technique, which involves 25 minute blocks of productivity.
[00:09:11]  Can you tell us what that is?
[00:09:12]  Because you try different methods to figure out, is there one that works the best?
[00:09:17]  Yeah, and partly it was because I was writing this newspaper column, right, where I got to test them all out.
[00:09:22]  It was in some ways really bad because I had the opportunity every week, you know, to try some new self-help system and believe that finally now this was going to be the one that did it for me.
[00:09:34]  The Pomodoro technique, it's actually not a bad system, but I, but when I encountered it, I was, you know, I got totally tangled up because I thought I was going to find the perfect system.
[00:09:45]  And guess what?
[00:09:46]  Like all the other systems, it isn't the perfect system.
[00:09:49]  So what is it for eight hours a day?
[00:09:51]  You break it up into 25 minute blocks with little breaks?
[00:09:54]  If you want to get technical about this, it is you divide, you, you work for 25 minutes and take a five minute break and you do that four times in a row and then you take a longer break and you do as many of those whole things as you can get done in your working day, which is probably only like two or three when you actually think about it for a, for a, for a real working day or with a lunch break or whatever.
[00:10:17]  Again, you know, fine, sure, absolutely.
[00:10:20]  It's good to have these little systems for bringing a little bit of order to your workday if it doesn't have any order.
[00:10:25]  The problem, and I don't think this was just me, is in all sorts of different ways, people are always telling themselves that like they're almost there.
[00:10:34]  They're almost on top of things.
[00:10:36]  Like in a week or a few months, they're going to they're going to have things in working order, you know, that that feeling of like, I'm going to get to the place where it feels easy to go through the day.
[00:10:47]  And I'm not always on the back foot, always fighting against time.
[00:10:52]  And yeah, one of the things I'm trying to say in the book is that attitude of trying to win the fight against time, like that's a big part of the problem and actually just leads to more fighting and less.
[00:11:04]  Now, what about, okay, so I'm talking about this from the perspective of, you know, Megan Kelly.
[00:11:09]  And I do have responsibilities and I have, you know, a large amount of data that I need to manage in order to be good at my job.
[00:11:16]  But I'm not like a doctor where it's like, oh, no, you, you must read all those emails or someone could die.
[00:11:23]  You don't get the test result back in time.
[00:11:25]  You know, there are many jobs out there where you absolutely do have to read all your stuff.
[00:11:31]  And the vast majority of things that come into you must be responded to.
[00:11:34]  Your teacher can't blow off half the parents who write to you, not for very long, keep your job.
[00:11:40]  Right.
[00:11:40]  So how are those people supposed to apply this?
[00:11:44]  Know sort of being a little bit more relaxed about it to their own lives.
[00:11:49]  Yeah, it's a really good question and it and it does come up because people think like well okay, it's all very well saying that this is a ridiculous situation that we put ourselves in today, but hey, if you are in that situation um, you've got to respond.
[00:12:03]  Uh, like you say I.
[00:12:05]  I think that the thing to understand here is, i'm really trying to look at the ways in which we put impossible demands on ourselves and also our corporations, and our society makes these demands too.
[00:12:16]  But like, we expect something of ourselves that we literally cannot do, which is to uh, you know, in a world of sort of infinite potential emails, to be able to answer them all, in a world of infinite potential uses with our time, for our time to be able to get around to them all.
[00:12:33]  And and if the um demands being made of you are genuinely impossible, then it doesn't matter if you think you have to do them like they're impossible and the clue is in the word, and you're still going to have to triage, you're still going to have to make sacrifices here or there, so that teacher who's getting all those um emails from parents and has a hundred other lesson plans and you know to do, they still can't actually do an infinite amount.
[00:12:56]  They still have 24 hours in a day uh, you know which they can't use all of for work anyway.
[00:13:02]  So you still have to make tough choices when it comes to time in almost any walk of life, and part of what i'm trying to get at in the book is, I think we, we pursue all these ways of like avoiding that we don't want to feel what it feels like to have to make tough choices with our time.
[00:13:18]  We want to believe that soon and with the right systems or the right, you know, amount of self-discipline, that we're going to find somewhere um, that that we could avoid having to make tough choices.
[00:13:31]  And I think we all like it's, it's worth it for anybody, whatever their walk of life, to see that, like that's not gonna that's, that's not gonna work, like you do have take the time to create the time for yourself.
[00:13:45]  In other words if, if you're a teacher, maybe you you do an automatic notification of I during the day, I am busy teaching your children and therefore I will not be checking email, except for once at noon, you know, or something like whatever some way of managing it so that you can do the thing that is most important to you and you don't have to worry i'm blowing off important people or important things like, but that even just doing that would take time to figure out.
[00:14:09]  How do I manage the week and the amount of data and demands on me?
[00:14:14]  That system actually has worked well for me in my life too, like I. You know, if you can, if you can figure out who you can stiff arm early on in your week, it's brilliant.
[00:14:26]  Yeah, and like yeah and expectation management is so important because there's something in the way technology works and the way life modern life just is just getting faster and faster, that that leads us all to think that um, you know, everything has to be instantaneous, that you're failing if, if you don't reply to an email within an hour of receiving it or something.
[00:14:48]  Time and again, you see and I think you see this in the research studies, not just anecdotally people are fine with things moving a little bit more slowly, as long as they can depend on you and trust.
[00:14:59]  So if you're someone who always gets back to people, it's more important that you're someone who always gets back to people usually than that you always get back to them incredibly fast.
[00:15:10]  And it's way better that you get back to them in 24 hours than that you're occasionally someone who's responding in minutes and then other times you just like get no response for months on end.
[00:15:20]  So it's like there's a lot to be said for figuring out.

=== The Art of Tiny Steps (15:09) ===

[00:15:24]  the expectations that people have.
[00:15:26]  And then, yeah, if what you're doing, if there's something in your work that is the most important thing, if you're a teacher, it's teaching kids, whatever it might be, eventually you're just going to have to.
[00:15:37]  Sorry, go ahead.
[00:15:38]  Eventually, you're just going to have to make time for that thing and let the chips fall where they will with the other stuff, because otherwise, like, what's the point of doing that now?
[00:15:47]  Right.
[00:15:47]  What's the point?
[00:15:48]  And honestly, most people would be honest about that.
[00:15:50]  Like, I would rather have my teacher teaching my child than responding to my stupid emails that I should have probably not sent prior to 3 p.m. unless it's a true emergency.
[00:15:58]  Like, I've got to come get him early.
[00:16:00]  Please deliver him.
[00:16:02]  You write about how you had one of these epiphanies after you had your son, about how, you know, we don't, we don't tend to live in the moment.
[00:16:10]  We do tend to worry about what's coming at us down the pike.
[00:16:14]  It costs our enjoyment of what's happening in the moment.
[00:16:16]  And you can't always do it.
[00:16:18]  Of course, you know, when you're at work, you're managing, you're an important person.
[00:16:20]  You got to think about, okay, this is a worry.
[00:16:22]  I got to plan for it.
[00:16:24]  But it's hard.
[00:16:25]  I think the average person struggles to live in the moment.
[00:16:28]  So what was your realization after your son was born?
[00:16:31]  Oh, yeah.
[00:16:32]  I mean, I totally agree.
[00:16:33]  I think all the forces in us and outside us, they push us to this notion that what really matters when you're measuring how you used a day is like whether it helped get you somewhere in the future.
[00:16:44]  And you've got to do that if you want to make a living and do anything interesting in life.
[00:16:49]  But if it's the only thing you do, it really saps the meaning from life.
[00:16:55]  And that is so clear when you become, you know, you become a parent.
[00:16:58]  Suddenly, it's easily the biggest, well, for me anyway, you know, easily the biggest responsibility you've ever had.
[00:17:05]  You really want to get it right.
[00:17:07]  And if you buy all the self-help books about parenting, they will give you a million different pieces of advice that contradict each other about how to do it right.
[00:17:16]  But they're all focused implicitly or explicitly.
[00:17:20]  They're all focused on this idea.
[00:17:22]  What you're doing is trying to like build the most successful adult later on.
[00:17:27]  Build the most successful older kid when you're looking after a newborn.
[00:17:32]  And that's important.
[00:17:32]  Of course it's important.
[00:17:33]  Like, of course.
[00:17:35]  But if it's the only thing you're doing, then you just completely miss the actual childhood, right?
[00:17:41]  The actual relationship with your child in that moment.
[00:17:43]  So I found, because I was still when our son was born, I was still totally in this kind of productivity geek mindset.
[00:17:52]  I found myself transferring that mindset onto being a parent.
[00:17:55]  And it would be like, it wouldn't be like, am I, it wouldn't be just enjoying a moment with him as a newborn.
[00:18:02]  It would be like, is he meeting that developmental milestone?
[00:18:05]  Like, do I need to do something different?
[00:18:06]  Is this thing going to work?
[00:18:08]  Should we be changing the approach we have to sleep training?
[00:18:11]  And yeah, it's important, of course.
[00:18:13]  But if it's everything, you sort of miss the moment.
[00:18:15]  And then you're like, hang on, he's only going to be zero years old for one year.
[00:18:20]  He's only going to be one year old for one year.
[00:18:23]  This is true of all life, whether you're a parent or not, by the way, that every moment comes and then it's gone forever.
[00:18:28]  But it's so hard to ignore with a newborn that it really helped me see how much of my life to that point I had spent just assuming that the real point was next month or next year and never.
[00:18:44]  I love that idea.
[00:18:44]  You know, just he's got to get a more advanced extra saucer than this.
[00:18:47]  He can do better.
[00:18:48]  One of these stupid toys on this thing.
[00:18:50]  Could be ahead of the other zero plus six months year old.
[00:19:01]  You point out like it's hard to do and I see myself just with my kids and in my life, wanting time to be productive.
[00:19:09]  Okay so, like that I can relate to like wanting time to be productive, as opposed to just it.
[00:19:16]  It just is, you know, and you, you write about how, what if I just stared at my little boy's hand opening and closing, you know this, the miracle of this little baby figuring out his fingers and his thumb, and made that my moment, as opposed to like what if, why?
[00:19:32]  How about if I teach him patty cake and we could advance his motor skills?
[00:19:35]  You know like right right I, I can fall into that thinking too quickly as well, and it you do have to check yourself.
[00:19:41]  Like not everything has to be productive, or about advancing right exactly, or another way of saying the same thing I would say is, like, what does productivity even mean if there are never these moments of of, like it's for this, it's for here, it's for now um, so I, in a way, you could even say that those moments are totally productive right, I mean it's um, they're productive of what they produce, the value that they add, if we're going to use productive in its kind of, you know,
[00:20:11]  economic sense is the meaning that you get from letting yourself just be in that in that moment.
[00:20:18]  So there's something kind of unproductive about being totally fixated on future productivity because like, when does the value get produced?
[00:20:26]  Like you're just going to do it your whole life and then on your deathbed be like great, I won, and then yeah, fall over.
[00:20:32]  That's no good, that's, that's so true right, because if you were and as parents we kind of are responsible for programming a little human being you know that somebody just gave you, let's say, a three-year-old and said okay, you know, make it into a well-rounded human, you wouldn't just have it work work work work study study study, study.
[00:20:52]  Right, you know you would want time for whimsy, you would want the child to do the finger thing and to do some skipping and singing.
[00:21:00]  And yet when it comes to our adult selves, I think a lot, a lot of successful people really don't build that in.
[00:21:05]  It's all about, you know, forward motion.
[00:21:08]  It's not necessarily about like, the time management, but it's just about productivity, like doing something that's that has meaning and that will advance one.
[00:21:18]  Yeah totally, and I, and I think one of the one of the things about that is, we don't want to rest in the moment, right?
[00:21:26]  If you try to do it at first anyway, it feels kind of unpleasant to a lot of us.
[00:21:32]  I think you get sort of antsy and like it should be doing something else.
[00:21:35]  It doesn't feel good.
[00:21:36]  So we get all these messages about how important it is to be here now in the moment, and books on meditation that make it look like such a beautiful, delightful activity to undertake to just smell the roses.
[00:21:49]  Whatever you try it, I think what you need to understand is is to not expect it to feel that great at the beginning, because the flywheel is is racing if you try to stop that, which I Think we all should, we better expect it to feel kind of unpleasant at first because we are completely conditioned for the opposite way of being.
[00:22:12]  What about procrastination?
[00:22:14]  You've got feelings on this.
[00:22:16]  Is it good?
[00:22:17]  Is it bad?
[00:22:18]  Do we do more of it or less of it?
[00:22:20]  I think it can be good or bad.
[00:22:22]  But what I think is really important to see is that at least in some sense, we're always doing it anyway, somehow.
[00:22:28]  You're always procrastinating on something, right?
[00:22:30]  If you buy my basic idea here that because we're finite and the world is infinite, there's always going to be more things you could be advancing on, things that could matter, things that would matter to spend your time on today, you're always going to be neglecting almost all of them.
[00:22:48]  So, if procrastination is like neglecting something important, then yeah, better believe it.
[00:22:53]  You're neglecting something important every day, all the time.
[00:22:56]  And why this is an interesting way of thinking about it, I think, is because it makes you see that the challenge, the real challenge, is not how do I get to the end of the day and not feel like I neglected anything important, because that's crazy.
[00:23:11]  But what, but how do I wisely choose what to neglect?
[00:23:15]  And how do I let myself neglect almost everything that I could do today so that I can focus on something that I care about?
[00:23:24]  Now, I think procrastination does go bad, and people procrastinate because they don't want to bring things or relationships or projects into the world of reality because it's not going to be perfect like it is in their heads.
[00:23:36]  And so, there's a sort of strong perfectionistic reason to stay paralyzed, which I've definitely experienced in my life.
[00:23:46]  But some form of procrastination is going to happen.
[00:23:49]  So, I think it's kind of good to see that.
[00:23:51]  You get to relax and say, okay, I can only do one percent of the things today.
[00:23:56]  So, which one percent?
[00:23:57]  But you're right about figuring out why you're procrastinating this thing and then coming to terms with the negative feelings you're probably having about that thing.
[00:24:07]  And more accurately, your abilities to do that thing.
[00:24:11]  You don't generally procrastinate, think thing you're amazing at that you know you're going to nail, it's going to be a breeze.
[00:24:17]  So, talk about how that's like an it's an opportunity to learn a little something about yourself and actually relieve a pressure valve on you.
[00:24:25]  I totally think so.
[00:24:26]  Yeah, I mean, this is all about this idea, which I think runs through all the stuff I'm writing, talking about here.
[00:24:33]  We're limited in all these ways.
[00:24:35]  We don't want to feel the ways in which we're limited because that feels like a that feels like a defeat.
[00:24:39]  You know, we want to feel limitless.
[00:24:42]  The way to feel limitlessly talented about a project is never to start it.
[00:24:47]  The way to feel limitlessly confident about the way to cling to the idea that like married life has no problems in it is to never get to the point of actually getting married, right?
[00:25:05]  This reminds me of a line in the BBC version of Pride and Prejudice, you know, the one with Colin Firth and Jennifer El El, I'm not sure how to pronounce it.
[00:25:16]  Anyway, where the sort of very rich old stodgy aunt who's got the amazing estate is telling Lizzie how she should play the piano better and says to her, If I had ever learnt, I should have been a true proficient.
[00:25:33]  She's almost never played a key in her life, but she's got all sorts of thoughts on how to do better.
[00:25:39]  Yeah, no, exactly.
[00:25:40]  It's so lovely to just like wallow in how great it's going to be.
[00:25:44]  And the moment you bring anything into reality, by definition, right?
[00:25:49]  This isn't, this is not me the Brit being defeatist and a good American would be relentlessly optimistic about the topic.
[00:25:55]  It's like it's by definition.
[00:25:57]  The project is not going to live up to perfection, because the encounter with reality is going to mean that it isn't perfect.
[00:26:04]  Relationships are with real people who have their own problems and uh, creative work is something that brings you up against your edge and and just life's problems in general.
[00:26:17]  You can't do them perfectly and so it's always going to feel more comfortable to to procrastinate, for a certain personality type anyway.
[00:26:25]  And yeah, I think if you see that, if you see that it's inevitable that when you put this thing into the world it's, it's going to be, it's not going to measure up to the fantasy, that's hugely liberating because you then you get to realize, like it's not because you're no good or you didn't do it properly or something.
[00:26:43]  That's just how it is for humans.
[00:26:45]  And then it's like well okay, I might as well make the bold move, I might as well uh, embark on the relationship, I might as well write the novel, you know, insert all the examples here.
[00:26:55]  But the point is there's no reason.
[00:26:58]  If you're holding on to perfection, like that ship has sailed, so that's great.
[00:27:02]  That means you can just go do it and um, and I think that is really liberating for a lot of people.
[00:27:07]  That sort of like, don't let the uh, don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good or, in this case the, the so-so, yeah, exactly.
[00:27:15]  Or the good enough right exactly because um, otherwise you just won't do it at all.
[00:27:19]  And it's obviously it.
[00:27:21]  It has more value if it exists than if.
[00:27:24]  How do you get yourself past that?
[00:27:25]  You know you're in that place where you're procrastinating it for a reason.
[00:27:29]  You know it's weighing on you, it's daunting, there's so much work to be done.
[00:27:34]  Whatever the project is, you feel overwhelmed by it.
[00:27:37]  How do you get to that point where you're willing to move it right in front of you, onto the plate right, when there are so many other things you could devote your attention to and it feels so good to ignore that big bear?
[00:27:50]  I mean yeah, that's the question and uh, part of it, I hope, is just this perspective shift that we're talking about here.
[00:27:57]  I think if you can see that perfection is not possible in in reality, then that makes it easier.
[00:28:05]  The other thing that I think really helps is to get almost absurd in how um, incremental you're willing to be right, how tiny a step you're, you're willing to take.
[00:28:17]  There's something you can do on any project that that would make a difference and that you actually would do now.
[00:28:24]  And it might be nothing.
[00:28:26]  You know, it might be opening the file on your computer that is going to be the Great American Novel.
[00:28:31]  It might be uh, you know, arranging to have coffee with one friend to talk about how you're thinking about changing careers, like it's just there's something that you actually can do, that is, that gets just under that um, that bar of being too intimidating to do and, and if you can find that like that thing to do, that decision that you could make now and and do it um, the momentum effect is is bizarre, quite frankly, you know it.
[00:29:01]  It everything becomes progressively easier and easier and easier and, before you know it, you are actually making real progress.
[00:29:08]  Now you, you talk about though how, if you're going to go that route and I like that route, that seems doable, that seems manageable you know one tiny little teaspoon, you know you don't have to do the whole big quart of water.
[00:29:20]  Um, then the next day, let's say that's monday and I, I take the little teaspoon, i'm gonna do it.
[00:29:27]  Okay, I can do this amount.
[00:29:28]  But then tuesday, i'm like okay, i'll take, i'll do a teaspoon.
[00:29:31]  Then I get to wednesday, i'm like now, i'm now, i'm ready to go, i'm ready to drink the whole liter, and you're under this philosophy.
[00:29:37]  You say, don't do it, it's just teaspoons, it like just small amounts every day.
[00:29:42]  That's what incrementalism is.
[00:29:44]  That must be very hard, because if you get to the day when everything's unlocked, you want to like, let loose and do five hours on the project, you're saying, don't, It's a balance, but I, yeah, I think that impatience is actually, and we can talk about other ways in which impatience is a huge problem, but this is a form of impatience, right?
[00:30:03]  You get to that point, you're like, okay, now I'm going to binge it.
[00:30:06]  Now I'm going to race through to completion.
[00:30:08]  And what's going on there, actually, and this comes from various work that's been done on the psychology of writers and other creatives, people like that, is it's actually an unwillingness to let it take the time that it takes.
[00:30:21]  So I'm not necessarily saying you have to only do five minutes like every day for the rest of your life until the project is done, but you probably have to do less than you feel like you could do.

=== Settling for Less Like Buffett (12:21) ===

[00:30:33]  And if you call it off at that point and you actually can get up and walk away while there's still that sense that you haven't done all that you could have done, what you find is there's way more motivation to come back to it the next day and the next day.
[00:30:50]  And it doesn't become this incredibly large thing in your life, which then becomes intimidating or you resent it or you just can't be bothered with it.
[00:30:58]  If you binge instead, right, okay, maybe two or three days, you'll be incredibly productive, but then you'll be exhausted.
[00:31:06]  You'll start to hate the activity involved.
[00:31:09]  You'll fall off the wagon.
[00:31:11]  And then you'll just be like, well, if I didn't do it today, I might as well not do it at all.
[00:31:14]  And it'll be six months later before you get back to it.
[00:31:17]  So there's something, yeah, there's something really powerful about stopping, even when you kind of don't want to, because it goes against all the kind of drivenness that we have.
[00:31:28]  But it's good to push back against that.
[00:31:30]  That's cool.
[00:31:31]  Yeah, my husband, he's a writer, and he told me that he loves Ernest Hemingway.
[00:31:35]  And I guess Ernest Hemingway, when writing books, would always write the one next line, you know, of the, if he finished chapter two, he would write the first line of chapter three before he walked away.
[00:31:47]  So, you know, leaving even himself wanting a little more when he left the project.
[00:31:52]  And then, of course, the next time around, one would presume he got after it.
[00:31:56]  Easier said than done, but I like it as an approach.
[00:32:07]  You have a similar philosophy.
[00:32:09]  Well, you know, the name of my book was Settle for More.
[00:32:13]  And you have exactly the opposite philosophy when it comes to, for example, relationships.
[00:32:18]  And I thought this is fascinating.
[00:32:20]  You don't really mean it, but you kind of mean settle for less in that if settling for more in the relationship department means you sideline yourself from the market for 10 years because you just haven't met that perfect gal or guy, you're losing.
[00:32:35]  You are settling.
[00:32:36]  This isn't a winning approach to life.
[00:32:39]  Yeah, right.
[00:32:39]  Let me explain what I mean, partly because I'm always concerned that, you know, my wife is going to get the wrong idea and think I'm saying something hugely demeaning about her.
[00:32:49]  It's not that you should settle for less.
[00:32:51]  It's that there's a specific sense in which you are always settling in some way, whether you like it or not.
[00:32:57]  And it's a bit like the procrastination case, right?
[00:32:59]  You're always procrastinating in some way on something because you're finite.
[00:33:03]  There's an infinite number of things you could be doing.
[00:33:05]  So every decision you make with time, because we have such a little limited amount of it, is a decision to not do something else.
[00:33:14]  So we, or not to do a million other things.
[00:33:17]  And it's really obvious when we talk about settling as in entering a relationship with someone who like you could do better than, right?
[00:33:24]  Because then you're like, wow, that person's going to spend the next however many decades of their life not being in some notional other relationship for doing in favor of this one.
[00:33:35]  And we criticize them or judge them.
[00:33:37]  But like you say, if you instead you decide to spend 10 years refusing to settle and like looking for the absolutely perfect partner, then you are settling.
[00:33:47]  you're settling for spending that 10 years of your life, not getting the benefits of being in a committed relationship.
[00:33:54]  It might be the right decision for some people at some points in life.
[00:33:57]  I'm not saying it's the wrong way to settle.
[00:34:00]  I'm just saying, let's see that it is a kind of settling as well.
[00:34:05]  And so this idea that you should, that you can even keep your options open for a very long periods of time in relationships, in work, in anything else.
[00:34:16]  It's not really true, right?
[00:34:18]  Because one option that you're losing then is to use the time that you're keeping your options open to do something more satisfying or potentially more satisfying.
[00:34:27]  And the reason that that is useful, it's not just a sort of, you know, philosophical abstract point is, again, I think it frees people up to see, to see more clearly the choices that they face.
[00:34:38]  And sure, you might well not want to enter a certain relationship because that person is really no good.
[00:34:43]  But it might also take the edge off some kind of extreme perfectionism that was holding you back from a very fulfilling relationship because you are comparing that person to the perfect fantasy.
[00:34:57]  Or hold off from launching into a career because it isn't quite exactly what you fantasized about.
[00:35:04]  Because guess what?
[00:35:05]  Nothing in the real world can be exactly what you're doing.
[00:35:09]  Well, and what is perfect when it comes to a mate?
[00:35:12]  You know, that you're waiting for the perfect mate.
[00:35:14]  You don't even know.
[00:35:15]  You may think you know, but you don't know.
[00:35:17]  You know, you may think, well, I want someone who's incredibly smart.
[00:35:21]  Well, what if you got somebody who's only smart?
[00:35:25]  Not incredibly smart, but they also happen to be incredibly funny and dynamic and very social, whereas you're more shy and they get you out there into the world.
[00:35:34]  Like you, the hubris of presuming you know what, quote, perfect is in a mate without trying a lot of these mates on for size, right?
[00:35:46]  It's just you have to sort of check yourself on that.
[00:35:49]  No, totally.
[00:35:50]  Yeah, absolutely.
[00:35:51]  And another aspect that makes me think of it is like, of course, there are toxic relationships that people should get out of, but there are other kinds of difficulty that you encounter when you really try to have a deep relationship with a whole other human that you probably wouldn't ever have chosen those difficulties.
[00:36:10]  And yet they are absolutely crucial in the end, right?
[00:36:13]  They're part of maturing.
[00:36:14]  They're part of you grow as a result of that kind of challenge.
[00:36:20]  So it's not even that you right.
[00:36:22]  I mean, I think you do see relationships that flounder because one person just doesn't challenge the other person's sense of themselves in any way whatsoever.
[00:36:31]  And there's sort of no there there in those in those relationships.
[00:36:35]  So even some of the bad bits are good bits.
[00:36:37]  And we're just totally not set up psychologically to go in that direction, right?
[00:36:43]  To choose things, to choose difficulties that are good for us.
[00:36:47]  We don't like that at all.
[00:36:48]  So how does it relate to the 4,000 weeks, right?
[00:36:52]  Like how does that, the relationship advice relate to our limited, finite time here on earth?
[00:36:58]  I'm still a bit surprised to hear that I ever am giving relationship advice.
[00:37:02]  So it seems so strange, but that's the only bit of relationship advice.
[00:37:06]  That's true.
[00:37:06]  That is the only, but I thought it was interesting.
[00:37:11]  It relates to that because all of these things we're talking about only occur because we have a short amount of time, right?
[00:37:19]  If we had either thousands of years of life or, you know, hypothetically, infinite lives, you would never, that would be terrible in certain ways, I think, but you would never have to face these decisions.
[00:37:34]  You could like spend 100 years in one kind of relationship and another 100 in another kind and another 100, whatever.
[00:37:39]  You could pursue 12 different careers to a very, very high level.
[00:37:44]  So you wouldn't have to make the kind of choices that we have to make.
[00:37:48]  Those choices are imposed on us by being finite.
[00:37:52]  And I think we do all we can to sort of pretend that we don't have to, that we don't have to face them.
[00:37:57]  But so that's why it all links back to the to the 4,000 weeks.
[00:38:01]  If you weren't finite, then very finite.
[00:38:04]  Well, this is a another piece that you write about is understanding that, the finite nature of life, the importance of saying no.
[00:38:14]  You know, like Oprah says, no is a complete sentence.
[00:38:17]  Although I have to tell you, like your thoughts, you don't attack Oprah, but you do attack some of the healthy, like the lifestyle advice she gives in your other piece, your other book on happiness.
[00:38:27]  And I was like, I love this guy.
[00:38:28]  This is like, you're so right in what you have to say about happiness.
[00:38:31]  I want to get to that in a minute.
[00:38:32]  But anyway, one of the good things that Oprah did say was no is a complete sentence.
[00:38:37]  I love that.
[00:38:38]  You don't have to explain it.
[00:38:39]  You can just say no to it.
[00:38:40]  And you're one of the positions is if you want to live a well-managed life, right?
[00:38:45]  Not a life in which you're constantly worried about the amount of things that you've stuffed into your day and the amount of phone calls that you fail to return and so, but a well, a well-lived life.
[00:38:55]  You have to learn how to say no, not just to the things that you don't want to do, that you genuinely don't want to do.
[00:39:02]  Because a lot of people say yes to the stuff they don't want to do because they feel bad, but even to the things you do want to do.
[00:39:09]  Explain that.
[00:39:11]  Yeah.
[00:39:11]  And this, I mean, that's almost a quotation that I use verbatim from Elizabeth Gilbert in the book because she makes this point so well.
[00:39:22]  We hear all this stuff about having to say, about how important it is to say no.
[00:39:25]  And I think most people, in the back of their minds, what they mean by that is if I got really good at saying no, maybe I could get rid of almost all the tedious stuff that I wish there wasn't in my life.
[00:39:36]  And then I'd have time for all the stuff that counts.
[00:39:40]  But as Elizabeth Gilbert says, you know, it's actually a lot harder than that.
[00:39:43]  You also have to say no to a whole bunch of stuff that you do want to do.
[00:39:46]  And the reason is just, again, you know, there are far more things that would be worthy uses of your time, of my time, than we'll ever have the opportunity for in the short lives that we lead.
[00:40:00]  So there's just no reason why everything that feels like it matters to me will magically be able to fit into the time that I have.
[00:40:10]  So that necessarily, right, it's just math.
[00:40:12]  You're going to then have to be saying no to some things that would be perfectly good uses of your time.
[00:40:19]  Because if you don't, you'll be chopping up your time into such tiny bits between them that you just won't get any value out of any of them.
[00:40:28]  I mean, I find this really hard because I just, yeah, my upbringing is to really hate the idea that someone is mad at me or disappointed at me.
[00:40:37]  And if someone asks me to do something, I have an overwhelming, you know, impulse to just want to say yes so that they're happy.
[00:40:48]  And I've had to get better at doing the reverse because the truth is that you're always disappointing somebody.
[00:40:57]  Even when you say yes to that person, you're probably going to end up shortchanging somebody else as a result.
[00:41:02]  There's no option here, which involves meeting every expectation that you or other people can put on you.
[00:41:08]  It's just, again, it's off the table to begin with.
[00:41:11]  So it's all about setting priorities.
[00:41:13]  I mean, because you're going to have to figure out, all right, what am I going to say no to that I don't, that I don't want to do, but I normally would say yes to just because I owe that person one or I feel bad saying no to that.
[00:41:24]  And then to go a layer deeper of like, oh, no, I'd really love to do that.
[00:41:28]  And then you think, oh, but if I do that, I'm going to miss, you know, two more nights out of my house with my kids.
[00:41:34]  But like, so how do you figure that out?
[00:41:36]  You have your, your top three priorities and everything else falls by the wayside or, you know, what's the approach to figuring that out?
[00:41:44]  Yeah, for me, it remains very intuitive.
[00:41:48]  I can't really do it in a sort of algorithmic way.
[00:41:51]  I do have to just sort of think, hang on, is this really one of those things that if I don't do it, it'll just feel like something radically missing from my life.
[00:42:02]  But there are these kind of techniques.
[00:42:04]  There's one I mentioned in the book, which is attributed to Warren Buffett, but I'm pretty sure it didn't really come from Warren Buffett.
[00:42:10]  Big on no.
[00:42:11]  Sort of.
[00:42:13]  Yeah, and wise sayings just tend to get attributed to Warren Buffett.
[00:42:16]  That's how it works on the internet.
[00:42:18]  But this practice, which allegedly comes from him, is that you should list your top 25 goals in life and rank them from one to 25.
[00:42:33]  And then the top five of those, he says, those are the things you should focus all your time and energy on.
[00:42:40]  The next 20, the bottom 20 of this 25 long list, those are the ones you should avoid like the plague, because they're actually the middle priorities in life, the things that really do call to you a bit.

=== Tolerating Minor Discomfort (09:11) ===

[00:42:55]  They're not the things that it's easy to ignore because you hate them and don't want anything to do with them.
[00:42:59]  They're the ones that are important enough to you that they could eat into your time and that you could give them a lot of time, but not important enough to really justify using your limited time.
[00:43:11]  So I don't know whether the literally doing it that way is right for everyone, but the principle there seems really important.
[00:43:17]  It's like the problem here is not like certain acquaintances you've got that you never want to spend any time with because you just naturally never spend any time with them.
[00:43:26]  The problem is in the middle.
[00:43:28]  Friendships that, yeah, they sort of got into a groove and it's fine and you give them some time, but maybe neither person is getting much out of it.
[00:43:36]  Meanwhile, every hour you give to that is an hour you're not spending with your kids or your closest friends.
[00:43:42]  Same applies to work projects.
[00:43:44]  It's these things that are kind of like, yeah, somewhat interesting and somewhat meaningful, but are the dangerous ones.
[00:43:53]  I like that.
[00:43:54]  I'm just going to short form everything in my life.
[00:43:56]  Now, top five, Abby is a top five.
[00:43:58]  Never mind.
[00:43:58]  Don't even bring it to me.
[00:44:00]  It's not a bad approach.
[00:44:02]  One of the things, top five or not, I don't know.
[00:44:04]  You tell me, because we are on these things all the time.
[00:44:08]  All the time.
[00:44:10]  And they're distracting.
[00:44:12]  They enhance our lives and they ruin our lives, these iPhones and devices and so on.
[00:44:18]  I don't think I can step away from it.
[00:44:20]  I know that everybody says try that.
[00:44:21]  But like, you know, I'm in the information business and this is how I communicate with my team.
[00:44:25]  They're all over the country.
[00:44:26]  You know, it's like not going on email and not reading the news is not an option for me.
[00:44:32]  But the time suck and the forces working against us to make it a time suck are very, very powerful.
[00:44:40]  Yeah, no, absolutely.
[00:44:41]  And that's the distinction, right?
[00:44:43]  It's not that you should never give your attention to your smartphone or to various social media platforms or email, whatever.
[00:44:51]  It's that the business model, well, one of the things is that the business model for a lot of these devices and platforms is precisely to keep you there as long as they can and to monitor all your activity on them in such a way as to then, through algorithms, offer you more of the stuff that's going to keep you there longer.
[00:45:10]  And I think that's a real problem.
[00:45:12]  And I'm actually kind of, I'm fairly in support of certain kinds of, you know, regulatory things we probably should be doing with regard to Silicon Valley.
[00:45:22]  But the bit that we forget and that I try to emphasize in the book is like, we give into that distraction willingly.
[00:45:28]  I think we tell ourselves, or at least people who understand the attention economy and how it works, tend to tell ourselves, like, I'm powerless because my attention is being commandeered in this way.
[00:45:39]  And it is.
[00:45:40]  And that's a serious issue.
[00:45:42]  But when I get distracted from my work to go and like scroll through my phone and waste half an hour instead, it's not like I was unwillingly yanked away from the chapter I was trying to write.
[00:45:56]  It's that the chapter I was trying to write was making me feel uncomfortable because I don't know if I can do it and it's bringing me up against my limitations and all the rest of it.
[00:46:05]  And it's way more comfortable to just run away and just scroll and be distracted.
[00:46:13]  The other example I give in the book, right, is that like if you're if you're supposed to be having a kind of a serious conversation with your partner, say, and actually you're scrolling through your phone under the dinner table, we say what's happening there is you're being distracted by your phone.
[00:46:27]  That's not what's happening.
[00:46:28]  The phone is where you're going for a more comfortable experience than a difficult conversation that leaves you feeling emotionally vulnerable or something like that.
[00:46:38]  So I think it's really important to see that because then when you encounter that desire to distract yourself in the middle of something important, it's actually easier to resist that when you see like, oh yeah, this is that feeling that I know I get whenever I'm working on something I really care about.
[00:46:56]  It's the desire to go and do something much, much more comfortable and low stakes instead.
[00:47:02]  You know, it's not unlike the way they battle, they tell you to battle addiction, right?
[00:47:07]  They say like if you're, if anything's becoming too dominant in your life, you know, it could be desserts, it could be social media, it could be alcohol, could be whatever, it's pot.
[00:47:18]  They say you take that thing away, try it for like a week, take the thing out of your life.
[00:47:23]  And while you're jonesing for like the Twitter or the joint, whatever the person's preference is, you're supposed to be paying attention to how you feel.
[00:47:33]  Like what is it that's making you want it?
[00:47:36]  What are alternatives to having it?
[00:47:38]  How could you fill your life without it?
[00:47:41]  You know, in a way that would assuage whatever need you're feeling at the moment.
[00:47:45]  And I don't, I don't think we look at social media that way enough, you know, and even just talking to you right now, I'm like, well, what if I didn't do that?
[00:47:52]  Like I'm a news person.
[00:47:54]  I get the newspapers.
[00:47:55]  I get a bunch of them delivered to me every day.
[00:47:58]  What if I just read the newspaper?
[00:48:01]  Crazy.
[00:48:01]  Like that's crazy.
[00:48:03]  Just given the way we consume information and it's up to the minute now, you know, with Twitter and so on.
[00:48:09]  But that's not necessarily required for my job.
[00:48:12]  Maybe it's just, maybe I'm trying to avoid some sort of a problem by going on there all the time, just putting it all together.
[00:48:19]  Well, yeah.
[00:48:19]  And like, if we're going to talk about news journalism for a moment, I think there is going to be and already is, you know, some sort of real competitive edge to be found in one's ability to step back a little bit from that minute to minute to see the bigger picture and to see the patterns that are happening.
[00:48:39]  And you can really like get to a point in social media where you can't see the forest for the trees because of how that works.
[00:48:48]  And then yes, just to the addiction point, I mean, I don't want to speak to substance abuses when I say what I'm about to say because they can be serious in a different way.
[00:48:58]  But the discomfort that you feel when you're jonesing for your phone or, you know, whatever it might be, we respond to that like it's really unpleasant and unbearable.
[00:49:09]  And so we just have no option but to scuttle away back to the to the device or whatever.
[00:49:15]  It's not unbearable.
[00:49:17]  If you can show yourself a little bit of tough love and sort of and sort of bear it for five minutes, it doesn't kill you.
[00:49:25]  And you find very swiftly that it, that it gets, it, it, it dissipates, it attenuates, it gets easier to deal with by the minute.
[00:49:35]  So sometimes I think this is just a question of learning to tolerate kind of minor discomfort.
[00:49:40]  It's so useful in life if you can just like be okay with the fact that you feel a bit antsy or a bit anxious or a bit adrift.
[00:49:49]  Learning to tolerate minor discomfort.
[00:49:51]  Wait, I want to follow up on that.
[00:49:52]  But what you're saying right now, it's reminding me of when I was young in my career and I was going on the O'Reilly factor.
[00:49:59]  First it was once a week, then it was a couple of times a week.
[00:50:02]  And I used to spend a lot of time with Bill.
[00:50:04]  He was back then a mentor to me.
[00:50:06]  And he used to have the nation captivated.
[00:50:10]  Even the people who hated him loved to listen to his opening talking points, which I would still love to listen.
[00:50:18]  I mean, Bill, for all of his flaws, and there are many, the ability to deliver like a cogent synopsis of the news is not on the list of flaws.
[00:50:26]  He was great at that.
[00:50:27]  And I asked him one time, like, how do you do it?
[00:50:30]  Like, what are you, what are you reading during the day?
[00:50:32]  What do you do?
[00:50:32]  And he said, I read and I think, Kelly, I think, I don't have a blackberry.
[00:50:38]  I don't have a blueberry.
[00:50:40]  I sit there and I think.
[00:50:42]  And, you know, you could tell.
[00:50:44]  And as you were talking just now about how some of the people who are most reflective aren't like constantly jonesing for the next tweet or whatever, it made me think of Matt Taibbi, formerly of Rolling Stone.
[00:50:54]  Now he's got his own Substack and he's totally brilliant.
[00:50:56]  He's a great reporter.
[00:50:58]  He's not somebody, he's not like a prolific tweeter.
[00:51:00]  You know, you don't see a thought from him every two seconds on Twitter, but he sends out these headlines on Substack that always make me laugh or give me pause.
[00:51:09]  And the latest one that I was thinking of was his latest one is entitled, This is About What Happened in Canada with Trudeau.
[00:51:15]  When boring people turn dangerous.
[00:51:19]  Canada's insane power.
[00:51:22]  He's clear that way because he's reflective.
[00:51:25]  Yes.
[00:51:25]  Now, the problem with all of this is that it's siloing us, right?
[00:51:28]  And everyone is kind of going to their specific newsletters, their specific websites, and they're getting their analysis.
[00:51:35]  And it's totally different to like the other side's analysis.
[00:51:38]  But yeah, it has this great benefit that it isn't just, it isn't, it isn't just a sort of relentless sort of ever tinier facts and facts that five minutes later turn out not to be facts, you know, just like it's just, I think you, I think there's an argument to be made that you're better informed when you sort of try to impose a slightly slower time scale on yourself, especially with respect to the youth.

=== Why You Can't Hurry Life (08:19) ===

[00:52:07]  So back to your point about sitting in the discomfort, being okay with a little discomfort, getting ourselves used to that concept.
[00:52:14]  And by the way, it's reminding me of, I like intermittent fasting as a way of eating.
[00:52:19]  You know, I don't eat after 8 p.m. generally and before noon.
[00:52:22]  And I find that to be very helpful for my, for my well-being, for my body, for all this stuff.
[00:52:28]  But one of the things that helped me with it, because you do get hungry.
[00:52:30]  I mean, that 10 a.m. to noon period is kind of hangry.
[00:52:35]  One of the pieces of advice I read was learn to be okay with hunger.
[00:52:40]  Like we have been taught that that feeling of hunger, I mean, I'm talking about in the first world country where we have plenty of access to food.
[00:52:49]  It doesn't have to be a bad thing.
[00:52:51]  Like you can say, oh, there's a feeling.
[00:52:53]  It's hunger.
[00:52:54]  Anywho, you know, and you're kind of saying the same thing about discomfort, whatever, whatever's causing it.
[00:52:59]  And you came up in your book when you were talking, I think, about patience.
[00:53:02]  And there were a few things you need to keep in mind to have patience.
[00:53:07]  This section is for my husband, Doug.
[00:53:11]  And one of them was that, right?
[00:53:12]  Learning how to sit with that feeling.
[00:53:15]  Right.
[00:53:16]  Absolutely.
[00:53:16]  I think patience is a super interesting thing, even though it doesn't necessarily sound like it's going to be super interesting because I think impatience is one of the central ways in which we try to kind of win this battle with time, right?
[00:53:34]  We try to make everything go at the speed we think we need it to go in order to get to the end of the day and have done all the things we're supposed to have done.
[00:53:41]  And so that's why it's so sort of enraging to people, sometimes kind of homicidally enraging, you know, to be stuck in traffic or even things like, have you noticed how impatient it makes you to have to wait like six seconds for a website that's supposed to load in 0.5 seconds, you know, these kind of tiny little delays.
[00:54:05]  And it's apparently it's fine.
[00:54:07]  If you have to wait three days for something to come in the mail, that's fine.
[00:54:10]  But if you have to wait six seconds for it to load in a browser, that seems like really offensive somehow.
[00:54:17]  And I just think there are so many activities in life, enjoyable ones, but also sort of professionally important ones that just take the time they take, basically, and that you can't hurry beyond a certain point.
[00:54:31]  So certain parts of the creative process or creating strategies for business, lots and lots of reading.
[00:54:39]  You can speed up your reading a little bit before you completely lose the experience of reading a novel or a sort of deep book, but not a lot.
[00:54:50]  And you just have to be like, okay, it's actually kind of not up to me how long this takes.
[00:54:56]  It's sort of up to the book.
[00:54:58]  If I'm going to get the value from this thing, I have to sort of go with it.
[00:55:02]  And, you know, being in traffic, it's certainly very much not up to you how fast the traffic moves.
[00:55:10]  And there's something in the traffic case, it's just peace of mind, because then you don't live your whole life in a kind of frenetic, anxious rage.
[00:55:18]  But in the case of reading, thinking, all the sort of knowledge work that so many of us do in one way or another now, there's like real benefits to having the willingness to let things take the time they take.
[00:55:29]  You get better results, I say, anyway, than if you're always racing to get the thing done as fast as you can.
[00:55:37]  So again, yeah, it's not pleasant.
[00:55:40]  And, you know, if you sit down with a, if you're a driven person racing through life, millions of emails and you sit down with an hour to read a novel, even if you have that, feel that you have that hour, it won't feel nice at first.
[00:55:54]  It'll feel uncomfortable trying to do things at that speed.
[00:55:56]  It'll feel like, come on, can I listen to this at, you know, 2.5 speed and get through it quicker.
[00:56:04]  And maybe sometimes you just can't.
[00:56:06]  It's funny.
[00:56:06]  So my husband, Doug, doesn't have, like, he can easily sit down and read a novel and not feel the need to rush through, et cetera.
[00:56:12]  But when it comes to problem solving, you know, if we have an argument and he wants to make up, it has to happen right away.
[00:56:18]  I'm like, step back.
[00:56:20]  I need my time.
[00:56:21]  Or if he's waiting on something, let's say somebody leaves me a provocative voicemail, like, I've got something interesting.
[00:56:27]  He's like, call them back.
[00:56:29]  You know, I'm like, you know, me, I already explained how I am about the calling back and all.
[00:56:33]  I'm like, he's like, what do you mean?
[00:56:35]  Don't you want to know?
[00:56:36]  I'm like, you know, like this thing wasn't on my phone two minutes ago and I was just fine.
[00:56:42]  And I'm equally fine now that it's sitting on my phone.
[00:56:44]  I'm like, eventually I will get back.
[00:56:46]  So we are just built totally differently that way.
[00:56:50]  He would not be sitting in the in the discomfort well at all.
[00:56:53]  And for me, there's actually not even any discomfort.
[00:56:55]  It's just like, I just got my list of priorities straight.
[00:57:00]  Yeah.
[00:57:00]  So it's, I mean, you mentioned relationship tensions, but like parenting as well, I think is another place where this comes up.
[00:57:08]  If there is some, if I think something is amiss with how things are going in our family or how my son is being or something, the temptation to just like reach for some completely random solution and be like, okay, bedtime's going to be an hour earlier from now onwards.
[00:57:26]  Okay.
[00:57:28]  We're never going to have more than an hour screen time in the day from now onwards.
[00:57:31]  You know, these kind of radical solutions that are not solutions because they're just my desire to have this feeling of problem go away as fast as possible.
[00:57:43]  I don't want to like be in the problem.
[00:57:46]  They don't help.
[00:57:47]  I mean, actually what helps is being willing to sit in that and live in it for a while.
[00:57:51]  And then, you know, real solutions tend to make themselves felt.
[00:57:57]  Well, you write about how when you were expecting your child, I had the same experience.
[00:58:01]  You have two schools of people coming to you.
[00:58:04]  You know, the school that's like, you know, this book has got all the answers and it's about this rigid schedule that the baby has to stay on.
[00:58:10]  Otherwise, the child's going to be completely unhappy and, you know, too dependent on you and blah, blah, blah.
[00:58:15]  And then you get the other school that's coming to you with the, no, you have to do it the more natural way.
[00:58:20]  And, you know, like let the baby eat when he wants and let him sleep when he wants and blah, And everyone's, they think they've got it figured out.
[00:58:28]  You won't be surprised at this point in our relationships or in my relationship for me to reveal to you.
[00:58:33]  I was like, ah, it's going to work out.
[00:58:35]  I don't know.
[00:58:35]  I'm not going to read the books.
[00:58:38]  But I will say I had great advice because, you know, Steve Forbes, I was at a book event of his when I was very pregnant with my first child and his wife, they have, they have a lot of kids.
[00:58:48]  I think they had like six kids.
[00:58:49]  I can't remember how many.
[00:58:50]  But she came over to me and this is the mother of all these children.
[00:58:53]  And she comes over and she goes, I've got one piece of advice for you.
[00:58:56]  She goes, read nothing.
[00:58:58]  Go on, instinct.
[00:59:00]  I'm like, that was amazing.
[00:59:01]  That was the best piece of advice I got.
[00:59:04]  Yeah, I mean, makes sense.
[00:59:06]  It's like, yeah, everyone is convinced that they have the way to make your feeling of discomfort, which you say you didn't feel in this way.
[00:59:14]  So good for you.
[00:59:16]  But I think many people do, to make it go away.
[00:59:20]  And yeah, so they have to offer what seems like a clear solution to cling to.
[00:59:25]  What you find, I think, in parenting, but especially, but in lots of realms, if you really try to follow someone else's rules in that way, just to get away from the discomfort, yeah, it turns what you're doing from an experience you're having into an attempt you're making to conform to this framework that you've been taught.
[00:59:47]  And it's like, it's only really a problem that your child sleeps X number of hours one night and a smaller number the next.
[00:59:56]  Like it's only really a huge problem if you've read some chart in a book that says it's supposed to be two hours longer than that every single night, you know, and if you never read that chart, you might be fine with it.
[01:00:07]  It's so true.
[01:00:08]  Like so many times that when you look around, you think, I'm really enjoying this moment.
[01:00:12]  And then there's a voice in the back of your head saying, oh, but you should be getting the kids to bed or you should be making sure that they're reading or you should be making sure that it's like, but you know what?
[01:00:20]  I'm really just enjoying this stupid moment where we're not doing any of that.
[01:00:23]  We're just doing something totally mindless, but we're together.

=== The Grandiosity Trap (10:32) ===

[01:00:27]  And, you know, and so is that an American thing?
[01:00:30]  You know, like that, that voice in the back of the head that's always like, do it, do it, do it, or a British thing or just a flicker.
[01:00:36]  What is that?
[01:00:36]  I feel like a lot of countries aren't this way.
[01:00:40]  I mean, I think it's probably worse in the States where I lived for a long time and it's pretty bad here in the UK.
[01:00:46]  I definitely think it is a sort of, it's an Anglo-American thing.
[01:00:50]  It is everywhere on some level.
[01:00:52]  And it has to do with certain kind of economic, political factors.
[01:00:57]  But what it is at its root, I think, is this desire to feel that you're doing it right, that you're sort of, that you're measuring up, that you're justifying your existence, that you're guaranteeing the future somehow.
[01:01:13]  And yeah, there are definitely cultural differences there.
[01:01:16]  There are definitely cultures where it seems more like everyone's like you, basically, when it comes to time instead of like me.
[01:01:25]  Yeah.
[01:01:26]  Well, we're going to meet in the middle at some point.
[01:01:28]  I need to torque it up slightly and you need to torque it down slightly.
[01:01:33]  One of the main points that you raise in the book, which I think is so great, it's so great.
[01:01:39]  I mean, I personally refer to this as my own Paul Newman theory of life, but you call it cosmic insignificance therapy.
[01:01:46]  And I'll tell you, my Paul Newman theory of life is basically you can live your life perfectly, which I, I don't know, he, he seemed to.
[01:01:54]  Like, what do I know?
[01:01:55]  From the outside, he was gorgeous.
[01:01:56]  He married for love.
[01:01:58]  to another Hollywood movie star.
[01:01:59]  They had A-list careers.
[01:02:01]  They get to choose whatever movie they wanted to be in.
[01:02:03]  You know, that's what every actor dreams of.
[01:02:05]  They won awards.
[01:02:06]  They were beloved.
[01:02:07]  They weren't really that controversial.
[01:02:09]  They had a great family, children who loved them.
[01:02:12]  They made so much money.
[01:02:13]  They started a charity in which they donated more, hundreds of millions of dollars to charity.
[01:02:18]  And it goes on, you know, and died at an advanced age.
[01:02:22]  All of it.
[01:02:22]  I'm like, it's amazing.
[01:02:24]  You know what happened to Paul Newman?
[01:02:25]  He's still dead and buried in the ground.
[01:02:29]  You can live the quote perfect life.
[01:02:32]  It ends the same way for all of us.
[01:02:36]  Putting all these chips into the bank does not extend life.
[01:02:40]  It doesn't give you extra chips that the rest of us losers don't have.
[01:02:44]  You know, it's going to end the same for everyone, whether you live it perfectly or not perfectly or, you know, the most product, you're the most productive person or you're the least.
[01:02:54]  And that brings me calm.
[01:02:56]  That brings me serenity when I think about my life.
[01:02:59]  Like I don't have to, I'm not living a perfect life.
[01:03:02]  And even if I did, what would the reward be?
[01:03:06]  Well, I don't know.
[01:03:07]  Was he any happier with his Oscars than I am being with my kids?
[01:03:10]  No.
[01:03:11]  So it's like, what are you chasing?
[01:03:12]  Right.
[01:03:12]  You figure out what makes you happy.
[01:03:14]  You chase that and then you don't chase perfection.
[01:03:17]  You call it cosmic insignificance theory.
[01:03:19]  And for the reason I just stated, this resonated with me.
[01:03:22]  It's basically like, you don't really matter.
[01:03:26]  I'll let you explain it.
[01:03:29]  Yeah.
[01:03:29]  I know it doesn't sound like it's going to be therapeutic, does it, at the beginning?
[01:03:33]  But I mean, there's a number of different reasons why I think it's really useful.
[01:03:38]  But one of them is just like, I think that we stress ourselves out, a lot of us anyway, going through life with a real sense that like every decision we make matters as if the future of the universe hung on it.
[01:03:53]  You know, people hold back from doing things because they're terribly worried they might make the wrong decision about what to do with their, with their, with their time on the planet.
[01:04:06]  They set, they set a definition of a meaningful life that what would count as using their time well that is so extraordinary and so based on so much fame or wealth or something else that the probabilities are just sort of against them meeting that.
[01:04:21]  So you endlessly kind of stress yourself out and make it harder to live a meaningful life.
[01:04:27]  If you stop and realize, by contrast, you know, that 100 years from now, almost none of the decisions that you make on a day-to-day basis are going to matter at all.
[01:04:39]  I think that is not a recipe for despair.
[01:04:42]  I think that's a recipe for, you know, saying, okay, I might as well make bold decisions, might as well take some risks, might as well do the thing I've always been telling myself is what I want to do with my life, might as well see if that works out.
[01:04:57]  Because you get to like take away this crazy high stakes notion that basically the world's going to end if you get it wrong.
[01:05:05]  No, the world is going to continue just fine and long after you're after you're gone.
[01:05:12]  So I think that's one, we can talk about more, but I think that's one reason why it's just really useful to see we all sort of bring a certain kind of grandiosity, I think, even those of us who are not kind of megalomaniacs, you know, who are very sort of shy and retiring, there's still a kind of self-centeredness about it that adds to the stress.
[01:05:34]  You can sort of let go of that and say, it doesn't matter that much.
[01:05:37]  And so why not do something like exciting or cool or it's going to make a big difference?
[01:05:43]  Right.
[01:05:43]  I, I, I love this.
[01:05:46]  I, I go to Stanford Business School once a year and I speak to the students there about reputation management.
[01:05:53]  And these kids have spent, you know, an entire semester learning about this from, you know, corporate leaders and world leaders and how to manage reputation.
[01:06:02]  And they're going to be tomorrow's world leaders.
[01:06:04]  And I, I think the reason they want me to go there is because my message is, this is all bullshit.
[01:06:10]  You've just wasted a semester of your lives.
[01:06:14]  There's no such thing as reputation.
[01:06:16]  It's a mirage.
[01:06:17]  It's bullshit.
[01:06:18]  It counts for nothing.
[01:06:20]  It's this false creation, false idol, you know, false God that is totally and utterly meaningless.
[01:06:25]  And even if you get the nicest things written in the New York Times about you when you die, what does it matter if you didn't do the things you wanted to do while you were here?
[01:06:35]  Or as you said, take the risks you wanted to take, come what may after taking them.
[01:06:40]  Like, what, what does it matter if you led the perfect life, right, quote unquote, but didn't feel satisfied by it or have tons of regrets and looking back at your choices or weren't able to live in the moment and enjoy the hand opening and closing with the baby, as opposed to taking a selfie of it and then tweeting it out with a cute caption, you know?
[01:06:57]  What does it matter?
[01:06:58]  It's all a mirage.
[01:06:59]  Reputation is totally and utterly meaningless.
[01:07:01]  What matters is your experiences.
[01:07:04]  Yeah, totally.
[01:07:04]  And yeah, absolutely.
[01:07:06]  And that really puts a point on it as well that like you fall into this idea that you're working towards some moment of truth, right?
[01:07:14]  That the reason to manage your reputation, to use this example, which I think is really like resonates, right?
[01:07:23]  Why managing your reputation?
[01:07:27]  It's got to be because you want to get to the end of this life having thought, okay, I kept my reputation intact.
[01:07:32]  Or it's because you're storing it all up for some moment when you're going to cash that reputation out into some huge accomplishment.
[01:07:41]  And like these moments of truth, they basically never come.
[01:07:46]  And if you're constantly living for them, you find, yeah, you don't, you don't live.
[01:07:52]  You're deferring the meaning of life off to the future and off to the future.
[01:07:56]  And then eventually it's off to a future where you're not even alive anymore.
[01:08:01]  The future's there, but you're not.
[01:08:04]  So yeah, I just think it's so relaxing to just think, okay, I don't need to take myself as seriously as I take, as I tend to take myself.
[01:08:18]  And that, you know, basically, basically it doesn't matter what I do with my life.
[01:08:24]  And that is therefore a reason to do something exciting.
[01:08:28]  Yeah.
[01:08:29]  Swing for the fences, you know, or just whatever, whatever gravitational pull there is in your life of the thing that you really want to try, but you don't want to, or the thing you really want to say, but you don't dare.
[01:08:40]  It's so gratifying to be on the side of, you know, risk-taking and just living a big, bold life for whatever that means to you.
[01:08:50]  You know, it could be totally different things.
[01:08:52]  Well, I think that's another point worth making, right?
[01:08:55]  In a culture that is as dedicated to sort of fame and headline grabbing achievements and wealth as ours is, maybe the bold thing to do is to be willing to live a life below the radar.
[01:09:09]  Maybe it's to be focused on making your neighborhood incredibly beautiful or the community you live in incredibly vibrant.
[01:09:16]  You know, it could be very mundane things.
[01:09:18]  And that could actually be the bold choice, given that we live in this culture that's so dedicated to, you know, grand gestures and celebrity.
[01:09:28]  Oh, I mean, I talk to my stay-at-home mom friends about it all the time because they still, even in this day and age, beat themselves up about not being working moms outside of the house.
[01:09:37]  You know, like, I want my daughter to think I'm doing this.
[01:09:41]  I want them to picture me.
[01:09:43]  And it's like, why?
[01:09:44]  Why?
[01:09:46]  What kind of a value judgment is that?
[01:09:47]  You know, the society's put that on you.
[01:09:49]  You don't have to put that on yourself.
[01:09:50]  And you certainly don't have to teach it to your daughter that mom doesn't matter as much if she doesn't have some big, high-powered job.
[01:09:56]  You know, and the more you telegraph that to your child, the more that will be her imprint, you know, like, why, why lie about going to a meeting when you're really just going out to say, like, own it.
[01:10:06]  You should say, like, mom made these great choices.
[01:10:08]  And this is what I love about it.
[01:10:09]  And this is some things maybe I don't love about it, but like, these are all the great reasons I did it.
[01:10:13]  Instead, we allow society, strangers whose values we know nothing about to drive us to live our lives in a way we might not want to.
[01:10:23]  It's lunacy.
[01:10:25]  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[01:10:26]  And I think that approach telegraphs to your kid, if you do it right, that telegraphs to your kid that they can choose what they want to choose.
[01:10:33]  And that might be, you know, a big career.
[01:10:36]  Absolutely.
[01:10:37]  Right.
[01:10:37]  So it's to do with the freedom to go where your energy truly, truly is, I think.
[01:10:42]  And that means it takes boldness, but it doesn't necessarily result in what we tend to think of as the high status.
[01:10:55]  We've got to talk about happiness.
[01:10:57]  So you wrote a book on it.

=== Freedom to Follow Your Energy (02:40) ===

[01:10:59]  And it's the anti-opra book.
[01:11:01]  I'm sorry, but it is.
[01:11:03]  If you watch any Oprah, you are taught.
[01:11:06]  She loves that book, The Secret, which you take some shots at.
[01:11:10]  She's all about like the positive thinking and the gratitude journal and all this stuff.
[01:11:16]  And you're basically like, if you've been trying all that and it hasn't worked, there's a reason.
[01:11:21]  Yeah, I feel like I want to defend myself against having some being on some campaign against Oprah here.
[01:11:27]  I think the reason that it is I.
[01:11:29]  I am the one against Oprah.
[01:11:31]  The interesting thing about Oprah is I basically think she's, she goes into so many different areas and tries and is so open-minded and tries so many different things that you're going to get a whole lot of value.
[01:11:40]  Like, you know, work with Eckhart Tolle, I think is really interesting stuff about the power of the moment or stuff.
[01:11:47]  And then you're also going to get a whole lot of stuff that I, that makes me really angry and I think is stupid, like like the secret, the law of attraction.
[01:11:54]  Anyway, so you're going to get.
[01:11:55]  I've never read the secret, but it's basically what I gather is it's basically like, think about being successful, think about being powerful, think about being rich, and then you will be.
[01:12:04]  I'm going to get into so much trouble if I go off on this conversation into a rant about that specific book.
[01:12:10]  But yeah, you basically got there, you know.
[01:12:14]  And, you know, the kind of motivational seminar where you're supposed to, where you can like people walk barefoot across hot coals by just by thinking that they're not going to burn their feet.
[01:12:24]  And then sometimes they actually do burn their feet.
[01:12:27]  But anyway, the sort of main argument I'm trying to make in that book is that, yeah, positive thinking, which is the sort of ultimate American credo of focus on the good stuff, fill your mind with positive emotions, set incredibly ambitious goals, believe you can do anything, believe that failure isn't an option.
[01:12:52]  All of this is a really pretty disastrous way to try to actually bring happiness into your life and that and that being open to the negative, to uncertainty, to failure, to feelings of sadness, you know, instead of constantly trying to stamp them out and seeing them as a huge problem if they arise is a better way.
[01:13:15]  So yeah, this book led me to do things like I went to a motivational seminar in San Antonio, which is like the, I mean, British people just can't, you can barely exist in that.
[01:13:26]  It was like they go, I was going to make a crack about that, but I'm glad you did it instead.
[01:13:31]  I tried to leap out of my chair shouting, I'm so motivated, as we were instructed to do by the by the by the leaders of that.

=== Embracing Uncertainty and Failure (15:24) ===

[01:13:39]  And I did my best.
[01:13:44]  Did they really have you do that?
[01:13:48]  They did.
[01:13:48]  They did really have us do that.
[01:13:49]  And I just about did it.
[01:13:52]  I think I got up from my chair, but just like.
[01:13:54]  Oh my God.
[01:13:54]  And as the kids say today, Oliver, that's awkward AF.
[01:13:59]  So, okay.
[01:13:59]  So instead, what are we supposed to be doing?
[01:14:01]  Thinking negative thoughts?
[01:14:03]  I can't do it.
[01:14:04]  I'm not going to be successful.
[01:14:06]  That's not really exactly what you're posing.
[01:14:08]  Right.
[01:14:09]  No, exactly.
[01:14:09]  That was one of the misinterpretations here, especially when people realize I'm British, if they're American, is like, oh, you just think we should think that mediocrity is all we're entitled to, that we should just be sort of miserable as befits the population of a nation where it rains almost every day.
[01:14:30]  But no, I think the point is, the point is to be, it's really to be capable of experiencing those negative things when they come, not being sort of, not adopting a philosophy of happiness that is sort of inherently allergic to all that, that side of life and to seeing that it's just an inevitable side of life.
[01:14:52]  So, you know, an obvious example of this, which is a little, which is pretty widespread now, I think, is the idea that failure is something that like you certainly can't rule out from life.
[01:15:07]  And in fact, you're going to be more exposed to the more you are trying to do things that count and that bring you up against your edge.
[01:15:15]  And that if you really want to try to eliminate the possibility of failure from life, you're going to become very sort of small in your goals and in your outlook.
[01:15:27]  Though there's a whole chunk in that book about the philosophy of stoicism, which asks us to think about the ways in which actually lots of negative events that happen to us, we don't need to think of them as catastrophic.
[01:15:44]  We can think of them as like negative.
[01:15:45]  Sure, yes.
[01:15:46]  And actually, if you're a positive thinker, if you can't handle a negative event, you're much more likely to sort of fall off the wagon, jump off the deep end, whatever, and go into catastrophizing mode when you can no longer keep your veneer of positivity.
[01:16:03]  So it's actually just a much more resilient way to be, I think, to be sort of open to this side of life and not to be always insistent, but like a negative emotion is a problem somehow, just because the very fact that it arises is some kind of symptom that you're doing it wrong.
[01:16:24]  I like, I love stoicism, and that's very in vogue right now, but I had on Ryan Holiday and I think I am a natural stoic.
[01:16:32]  I don't know how much Marcus and Aurelius and I would have had in common, but I like reading his stuff.
[01:16:36]  Ryan sent me a book with his daily meditations and I love them all.
[01:16:40]  It's reminding me of this is like the hour of my personal stories, but my husband and I, when we first got together, first got married, we didn't have kids yet.
[01:16:48]  We had two little dogs and we woke up in the middle of the night and he said, oh my God, I said, what?
[01:16:54]  And he said, the one dog crapped in the, in our, they were both in our bedroom in the in the like the dog bed and the other one had completely covered herself in it.
[01:17:04]  And I look at him, it's like two in the morning and I remember saying, I wish that weren't the news.
[01:17:13]  It's a great line.
[01:17:14]  use it to each other all the time now, whenever something bad comes into our lives.
[01:17:17]  You don't have to wallow in its badness.
[01:17:20]  You also don't have to make it positive.
[01:17:22]  In no world is this a positive.
[01:17:24]  It's just, gee, I wish that weren't the news.
[01:17:26]  And then onward.
[01:17:29]  Yeah, no, absolutely.
[01:17:30]  And I think that's that difference between whether something is your preference, which clearly an event like that is certainly not your preferred course of events.
[01:17:43]  versus whether it's like a huge problem that reality did not unfold that night according to your preference is a really useful distinction.
[01:17:50]  It makes you so much more sort of resilient to the ordinary, the ordinary setbacks that you're doing.
[01:17:55]  Well, haven't you seen that during the pandemic?
[01:17:57]  I know you've written about, you know, your other book and with respect to the pandemic, but I think this book we're talking about, this is called The Antidote from 2012.
[01:18:06]  The subtitle is happiness for people who can't stand positive thinking.
[01:18:11]  But that's, it's had some bearing over the past two years.
[01:18:14]  Part of getting through this pandemic, let's put aside for now, personal loss.
[01:18:19]  I mean, that's something there's no shiny thinking on it.
[01:18:23]  But, you know, just dealing with the shutdowns and the change of life and the restrictions that we've had, some of it has required a change in attitude.
[01:18:32]  Like, how are you going to approach it?
[01:18:34]  Are you going to lean into fear?
[01:18:35]  Are you going to lean into sadness?
[01:18:37]  Or are you going to try to lean into some of the good things that you're recognizing with these changes around us?
[01:18:42]  I know you've written about that too.
[01:18:45]  Yeah, no, I mean, I think there are these kind of strange, ironic upsides that have come that have come out of the experience.
[01:18:54]  And also just this, you know, just this reminder that it's very easy to think that we're living through extremely uncertain times at the moment.
[01:19:05]  But I think when people have sort of had the chance to reflect on that during the pandemic, that's kind of not the point.
[01:19:11]  I think the truth is the future is always completely uncertain.
[01:19:14]  You never know what is going to happen next day, next week, next month in your life.
[01:19:19]  But an event like the pandemic brings us, it makes it impossible to ignore.
[01:19:24]  And there's something very edifying about that.
[01:19:27]  Absolutely.
[01:19:28]  Agree with you.
[01:19:28]  This is not something I would find easy to say to someone who had, you know, lost close relatives.
[01:19:34]  But there is something beneficial about seeing, firstly, that life is always completely uncertain.
[01:19:41]  This isn't actually an unusually uncertain time because the future is always 100% uncertain.
[01:19:46]  It's the future.
[01:19:48]  And secondly, that by and large, we're a lot better at weathering that uncertainty than we think.
[01:19:57]  We think we want to make plans and have life go our way.
[01:20:01]  And then it turns out that we can basically cope and in fact, often be very creative and resourceful when it doesn't go our way.
[01:20:08]  And the sort of flip side of that is if you look back at your own life, at all the things you really love about your life, people you met, job opportunities you had, almost never do they emerge from the plans that you made.
[01:20:21]  They emerge from coincidences and people you met you weren't expecting to meet and, you know, random encounters, random opportunities that arose and that you were able to capitalize on.
[01:20:32]  So in both these directions, right?
[01:20:36]  I think it enables us to sort of reconcile ourselves to how uncertain life is and to thrive more in uncertain conditions, which as I say, I think are what conditions always are anyway.
[01:20:50]  And that leads me back full circle to why Abby should not try to send me to the airport three hours in advance.
[01:20:57]  She should not try to put me at the train station an hour in advance.
[01:21:01]  There is no reason to be doing this.
[01:21:04]  And I'll tell you, Oliver, I'm up to it because my husband, Doug, is her co-conspirator.
[01:21:08]  They have the same approach.
[01:21:10]  They're like, we're having a family trip and Abby plans it for us, you know, like I got to be at the airport at seven.
[01:21:15]  I'm like, okay, what do we have?
[01:21:16]  Like an 8.30 flight?
[01:21:17]  She's like, no, your flight's at 11.
[01:21:19]  I'm like, you're fired.
[01:21:24]  And she's like, Doug, maybe do it.
[01:21:26]  Right.
[01:21:26]  But you, you were raised in a family like this.
[01:21:28]  And I know half of my listening audience right now is like, yes, I agree with MK.
[01:21:32]  And the other half is like, team Abby.
[01:21:35]  So you were raised in a family that made you do that.
[01:21:38]  And why do people do that?
[01:21:40]  Because they do have a belief they can control the future.
[01:21:45]  Yes, exactly.
[01:21:45]  There's an onion headline, which is dad suggests arriving at airport 14 hours early or something like that.
[01:21:53]  I'm not getting it exactly right.
[01:21:55]  And that belief sort of resonates.
[01:21:57]  Right.
[01:21:57]  That resonates with me.
[01:21:59]  Yeah.
[01:21:59]  I think what people are doing when they engage in compulsive planning.
[01:22:02]  And as I say, I think I know whereof I speak when it comes to this approach.
[01:22:08]  Me too, by the way.
[01:22:10]  I mean, you know, I tease my parents, both in the book and in life about it, but it's in me as well, probably thanks to them, but whatever.
[01:22:18]  Yeah.
[01:22:20]  I think we think of that kind of planning as a way to guarantee that things are going to go the way we need them to go.
[01:22:28]  So you make these plans.
[01:22:30]  You're trying to nail down what's going to happen next week, next week, months, months ahead, so that you can relax and be like, okay, things are going to go the way I need them to go.
[01:22:39]  But you never ever get to that state of knowing that things are going to go the way you need them to go because it's built in to the nature of the future, right?
[01:22:47]  That you can't know about it in the present.
[01:22:51]  Sounds obvious, but easy to forget.
[01:22:55]  So the truth is that no matter how many hours early you arrive, how many hours you build in for your trip to the airport, you can't actually be certain that something won't get in the way.
[01:23:07]  If you plan the next like six months of your life in incredible detail, you don't get to relax because then you suddenly realize there's another six months after that that you should probably be planning.
[01:23:17]  So we're always trying to get this kind of reassurance from the future and the future never gives it to us.
[01:23:24]  And the people who have a healthier attitude towards time, such as apparently you and me now to some extent, you know, now that I've been through this, been through this process is, yeah, is.
[01:23:36]  I wanted to go.
[01:23:37]  Yeah, right.
[01:23:38]  She said, I don't like all of it.
[01:23:41]  Keep going.
[01:23:44]  You come to see that like all you're ever doing is just sort of surfing the moment after moment after moment, right?
[01:23:50]  You can tell yourself that you're being super, super dutiful about making sure there's lots of slack in the schedule, but it won't stop something going wrong with the with the plan.
[01:24:02]  So you, it's actually all sort of by and large, just wasted anxiety.
[01:24:07]  She's arguing over here that you, but you reduce, you reduce the chances of something bad happening.
[01:24:13]  You do reduce it.
[01:24:14]  She's saying, tell them you missed a flight.
[01:24:16]  Literally, I've been working with her for 12 years.
[01:24:18]  Every time I get to the airport with my lungs burning, that's what I consider a win.
[01:24:22]  I sit down on the plane with lungs burning.
[01:24:24]  That's, I've done it right.
[01:24:25]  In all the thousands of flights she's planned for me.
[01:24:28]  One time I missed it.
[01:24:29]  That's a win.
[01:24:30]  My system is working.
[01:24:32]  Think of all the hours I have saved myself not sitting in that seat.
[01:24:36]  Go ahead, Oliver.
[01:24:38]  You do reduce the probability of something going wrong with that specific thing.
[01:24:40]  But as you point out, it's funny arguing with someone I can't see, by the way.
[01:24:47]  Sorry, the other side of this equation.
[01:24:53]  The sacrifice you make is all the things you could have done with that time.
[01:24:58]  And you will never actually reach this perfect state of being totally relaxed that it is going to go fine because you will never know.
[01:25:06]  You never know that you get to the airport on time until you've already got to the airport.
[01:25:09]  And then it's too late.
[01:25:10]  Who cares about how many hours you left?
[01:25:13]  So it's kind of a, it's a way of seeking reassurance.
[01:25:16]  I think all worry is like this, right?
[01:25:18]  It's a way of somehow trying to feel like we've got a handle on what's coming.
[01:25:24]  And you can get a certain amount of predictive handle on the future, but you can never get that real security that we compulsive planners crave.
[01:25:37]  Well, I know you write about how your parents into life.
[01:25:40]  Your parents want you and your wife to commit to your holiday plans, your Christmas holiday plans in June.
[01:25:45]  They're coming to you in June.
[01:25:47]  That like, I broke out in a rash just reading that.
[01:25:50]  Like, I can't stand making plans.
[01:25:53]  You have to do it.
[01:25:54]  I've learned by age 51, you have to do it if you want to have any sort of a social life.
[01:25:58]  But I hate it.
[01:25:59]  If I could just be the person who's like, yeah, Friday night, let's do something.
[01:26:04]  You know, I would love it.
[01:26:05]  But now you can't because everybody else around you is a planner.
[01:26:08]  They're all social calendars filled up.
[01:26:11]  You know, I realized you have to do some committing.
[01:26:14]  But there's the other extreme of it's June and your parents want you to commit to what days are you coming over the Christmas break?
[01:26:21]  Yeah, now my, my, I think my dad is, my dad disputes the details of this claim, but I say I can, I've got the emails to prove it.
[01:26:29]  Yeah, right.
[01:26:30]  There is this level of coordination that is required to just sort of make life work.
[01:26:36]  And it'd be nice if it wasn't, but it is, it is required.
[01:26:40]  The problem with trying to get all that, all your ducks in a row, as they say, you know, months in advance, is that it doesn't get you to the place of peace with respect to time.
[01:26:49]  Cause then there's like, well, why not?
[01:26:51]  Why not?
[01:26:51]  What's going to happen the week after that?
[01:26:52]  The week after that, the week after that?
[01:26:55]  Yeah, you need to be able to just, on some level, just relax into where you are right now, instead of always trying to like grasp the next bit of time to yourself, which you can't do because it's, yeah, it's in the future.
[01:27:11]  Yeah.
[01:27:11]  And but I will say, of course, I have learned that there are, you do have to, my side has to come over a little bit more to the middle if you want to have any sort of a life.
[01:27:20]  Otherwise.
[01:27:21]  You're stuck alone on Saturday night.
[01:27:23]  You got to make some advanced plans or like vacation.
[01:27:25]  You know, that's another, like you got to, if you don't book enough in advance, you're going to be paying an arm and a leg.
[01:27:30]  Like certain things you have to force yourself to do.
[01:27:38]  So you've got, you've got tips in the book for embracing your finitude.
[01:27:44]  And that takes us back to the 4,000 hours.
[01:27:46]  You know, we have a finite time on this earth.
[01:27:49]  It should be embraced.
[01:27:50]  It shouldn't be rejected.
[01:27:51]  It shouldn't be, we don't have to deny it in order to live a happy life.
[01:27:55]  Nor do we have to deny our pessimism or our cynicism.
[01:27:58]  We can still be happy.
[01:27:59]  In fact, it's key to embrace those things.
[01:28:03]  And let's just go through a couple of them because I don't totally understand them all.
[01:28:06]  One is adopt a fixed volume approach to productivity.
[01:28:11]  What does that mean?
[01:28:12]  This is just a general idea when it comes to sort of managing your workday.
[01:28:16]  And obviously people have radically different amounts of control over how much they can organize their workday, but thinking first in terms of portions of time and second about tasks instead of the other way around.
[01:28:28]  So I'll explain what I mean by that.
[01:28:34]  If you decide that, say, you've got nine hours available for work, or maybe you've got four hours when you really think you're going to be able to do serious, focused thinking work, say, and that's sort of a little box on your calendar, time boxing is one of the techniques that embodies this principle.
[01:28:53]  Then once you see that amount of time, you can make some decisions about like, okay, given that I can't do most things today, what are the three or four things that are most important to put into that box?

=== Prioritizing with a Done List (03:26) ===

[01:29:04]  Then maybe the box ends at 5.30 p.m., 6 p.m., whatever, and you get up and walk away and you're on to the next stage of your life.
[01:29:10]  If you put tasks first, in other words, you get up in the morning and think, these are the 12 things that must be done, regardless of the time I have.
[01:29:19]  They just have to be done.
[01:29:20]  You find that you don't get through more than two or three of them.
[01:29:23]  The list gets longer.
[01:29:24]  It's 20 items long by the end of the day.
[01:29:26]  You're still at your desk at 11.30 at night trying to cross them off.
[01:29:32]  And over the long haul, you actually get less done.
[01:29:34]  So the idea of a fixed volume approach is of saying like, okay, this is how much time I'm going to dedicate to this kind of activity, given that, which things are most important to put into that box.
[01:29:46]  So it's just a way of prioritizing that respects the fact that you are, that there are so many hours in the day and that there are probably to most people two, three, four roles that they want to dedicate time for instead of this endless commitment to fantasy that I'm somehow going to, first of all, answer 500 emails and spend several hours on this project.
[01:30:08]  And then apparently I'm also going to have enough time to do this, like 10 more things on my list.
[01:30:11]  Well, I like that because, you know, you, in my case, I want to be a good mom.
[01:30:16]  I want to be present with my kids and my husband at the end of the day, but there's always more work I could be doing.
[01:30:21]  And so unless I put a cap on it, it will never be capped.
[01:30:25]  It was actually one of the things I hated about practicing law because they say the law is a jealous mistress and it really is.
[01:30:31]  It's constantly there needing you, wanting to be with you, wanting to interrupt your time with your spouse.
[01:30:39]  The mistress is annoying.
[01:30:40]  And news is a little bit like that, not as much.
[01:30:43]  So I like that.
[01:30:44]  Like, sorry, but it's over between us at 5.30.
[01:30:47]  That's it.
[01:30:48]  Yeah.
[01:30:48]  It's like how, exactly.
[01:30:50]  That idea of like, there'll always be more to do.
[01:30:53]  So how long today am I going to spend dipping into this infinite pool of tasks, right?
[01:30:59]  Yeah.
[01:30:59]  I'm just, I'm out of time.
[01:31:00]  Yeah.
[01:31:01]  Clearing the, clearing the infinite pool is not, that's not going to happen.
[01:31:04]  Yeah.
[01:31:05]  Yeah.
[01:31:05]  Now that this also relates to another one of the tips.
[01:31:07]  And I like this, which is I do have to-do lists like most people, you know, because otherwise I'll just forget stuff.
[01:31:13]  I got to take care of my kids, my job.
[01:31:15]  And you're explain how it's, you say it's supposed to work.
[01:31:19]  It's supposed to be like you've got your to-do list, but then you also have your done list.
[01:31:24]  And the two must relate and interact in a useful way.
[01:31:29]  Yeah, two different points about to-do lists in the book.
[01:31:32]  I'll focus.
[01:31:32]  Yeah, the done list is this idea that you should not only keep a list of all the things you think you need to do that you haven't yet done, but also keep a list that gets longer during the day of the things you have done so that it's clearly displayed somewhere in your on your desk, in your organizer planner, on your computer, whatever.
[01:31:51]  This like list of things that is getting longer during the day.
[01:31:54]  I think so many of us kind of get up in the morning feeling like we're sort of in productivity debt, right?
[01:32:00]  That you've got to, you've got to pay off this debt during the day by getting a certain amount of things done.
[01:32:06]  Otherwise, you don't really deserve to, you know, your place on the planet or whatever.
[01:32:13]  And you can reverse that a bit with a done list because it helps you sort of see, look, you could have done nothing any day.
[01:32:21]  You could have stayed in bed, right?
[01:32:22]  And instead, you did this, you did this, you did this.
[01:32:25]  So it slightly sort of reframes that idea that you're always on the back foot.

=== Making Phones Less Addictive (02:23) ===

[01:32:30]  And it helps you sort of see and give some appreciation to the things you did do.
[01:32:37]  And then, you know, you can get rid of that feeling where you get to the end of the day and you have no idea what it was you did.
[01:32:43]  Now, maybe sometimes your done list will reveal that you spent it on the wrong things and you can factor that into future behavior.
[01:32:51]  But it's really great to just, you can really surprise yourself in a positive way that is, I think, just, you know, encouraging in a world of overwhelm.
[01:33:02]  It's really good to be able to see uh, how much you actually do manage to do on on on many a day.
[01:33:09]  And you also talk about how you you need to embrace boring and single purpose technology.
[01:33:14]  And this takes me back to the Iphone.
[01:33:17]  I like this.
[01:33:18]  You can make your Iphone less attractive, less appealing, less addictive uh, in a in a couple of actually pretty simple ways.
[01:33:25]  What are they uh?
[01:33:27]  Well, the way I really like is is, this is the Um function that allows you to turn it black and white so that it's all grayscale.
[01:33:36]  And so there's no colors on your phone at all.
[01:33:39]  You have to go into, well, this is technical stuff.
[01:33:42]  You have to find it in changes based on operating systems, but on an iPhone, you have to find the accessibility shortcuts in settings because it's an accessibility feature.
[01:33:53]  But you can do this.
[01:33:55]  You can exercise.
[01:33:57]  All right.
[01:33:59]  Differentiate without color.
[01:34:02]  Maybe that's the one.
[01:34:03]  I don't know.
[01:34:04]  Color filters off.
[01:34:06]  Oh, I don't know what this is.
[01:34:07]  I'm not sure.
[01:34:08]  I have no idea, but I'll play around if you want me to get rid of it.
[01:34:10]  It's a slightly old iPhone, so it's probably not going to be useful.
[01:34:12]  Well, it's not like I have Mark Zuckerberg here.
[01:34:14]  I mean, he probably could tell me, but your point is figure it out and get rid of the colour.
[01:34:18]  It's easy.
[01:34:18]  Yeah, you'll find it online for your model of phone a way to turn it black and white.
[01:34:23]  And you can toggle this, right?
[01:34:24]  It can be on a button so that you can still take color photos when you want to make when you want to do that.
[01:34:29]  But the rest of the time, instantly, it's quite bizarre how much less appealing it becomes to just pick up the phone and scroll through.
[01:34:38]  It's kind of embarrassing because it just shows that on some level, we're all just excited by bright colors.
[01:34:46]  It's not a very intellectual way of dealing with life, but it works.

=== Single Purpose Technology Tips (02:26) ===

[01:34:53]  Yeah.
[01:34:53]  And then, you know, I think the other part of that is just there is really no need to have a lot of social media and other stuff on your phone, even if you're an active user of those things.
[01:35:07]  You can make a big sort of environmental intervention in how much you use those if you make yourself use them on a on a laptop or a desktop.
[01:35:16]  Even I have a very good friend whose name everyone would know, who's very big on Twitter, who told me what he now does, because he has the problem that so many of us have, is he just dictates a couple of tweets to his staff to post for him because that way he can make his thoughts known, but he doesn't get sucked into this wasteland of time spent during the day.
[01:35:40]  Yep, that's great if you've got the team to do that.
[01:35:43]  I think like, absolutely.
[01:35:45]  That's another way to sort of buffer yourself from those dynamics.
[01:35:50]  And the thing about single purpose technology or boring technology, any kind of device that does a thing and that doesn't allow you to just scoot off to some other thing as soon as you are feeling uncomfortable is really, I think, is great.
[01:36:08]  So I've got a Kindle e-reader.
[01:36:11]  I've got a tablet called a remarkable.
[01:36:13]  They're sort of less well-known, but both of these are tablets for reading.
[01:36:18]  And in the case of the remarkable for writing, you kind of can't do anything else with them.
[01:36:23]  There is a web browser on the Kindle.
[01:36:24]  It's difficult to use as long as you don't have one of the fancy Kindles that's got a really good web browser.
[01:36:29]  And that's great because it means when you're reading a book and you get that little sort of impatient feeling that now it would be time to just sort of distract yourself with something meaningless, you can't do it and you don't do it.
[01:36:42]  So you keep reading.
[01:36:44]  And so I'm a big fan of devices that only do one thing and there are all too few of them around.
[01:36:51]  Yeah.
[01:36:51]  I mean, this reminds me of a discussion I had with a technology expert who was telling us, Don't let your kids start using message services that are embedded in one of the social media apps like TikTok or Snapchat, because then it goes from being just a pure message exchange to all the demons of the social media where they try to lure them over to bad places or keep them on forever.

=== Slowing Down as We Age (02:44) ===

[01:37:20]  You know, I was like, that's actually a very good tip that I don't think a lot of parents know.
[01:37:23]  Okay, here's the last one I want to mention with you.
[01:37:26]  Seek out novelty in the mundane.
[01:37:30]  I love that.
[01:37:31]  Can you explain?
[01:37:33]  Yeah, I mean, the context for this in the book is that one of the many ways, one of the sort of acutely awful ways in which our finite time makes itself felt to us is that like, as soon as you're older than about 25, the older, you become aware that time is speeding up the older that you get.
[01:37:54]  Like a month seems to pass quicker when you're in your 40s and when you're in your 20s and when you're in your 50s and when you're in your 30s, so on.
[01:38:03]  This is kind of really awful because not only do we not have very much time on the planet, but we seem to lose it faster the older that we get.
[01:38:13]  And, you know, if you talk to people in their sort of 70s, 80s about this, they will talk about whole years apparently just like flashing by.
[01:38:22]  And there's a whole theory for why this happens.
[01:38:25]  And it has to do with how routinized our lives tend to get after childhood and young adulthood.
[01:38:31]  And so people are often advised that one way to sort of push back against this is to fill your life with novel experiences, go to exotic places all the time, do things you've never done before.
[01:38:42]  I think that's true, but it's also pretty difficult for anyone who's a parent or got a job or in a relation.
[01:38:47]  You know, all these things require a certain amount of routine and sameness to be done well.
[01:38:54]  So there's a meditation teacher called Shinzen Young who makes this brilliant point that the other way to sort of slow down time and feel like your life is not like speeding by, instead of filling your life with exotic experiences, is to sort of discover a new level of exoticness in the things that you're already doing, to find ways to like pay more attention to where you are.
[01:39:21]  Firstly, because it's just more fulfilling in the moment, but secondly, because it will have this effect of making your life feel kind of like more expansive and like it's not like it's not sort of dribbling away faster and faster and faster.
[01:39:35]  So, you know, this could be anything from taking a different route to work.
[01:39:41]  Meditation is good for it.
[01:39:43]  Journaling is good for it.
[01:39:44]  But lots of hobbies like photography, spending time with kids almost in some way obliges you to do it because you sort of have to try to see the world through a fresh set of eyes.
[01:39:57]  There are so many different ways of doing this, but the governing idea is just, you know, look closer at what you're already doing.

=== Finding Beauty in the Mundane (03:59) ===

[01:40:04]  And in some ways, that will often prove just as interesting and meaningful as doing something like radically strange or weird with your with your day.
[01:40:17]  It's so true.
[01:40:18]  I love what you said about the kids.
[01:40:19]  It's just having my kids, it's made me appreciate the mailbox more.
[01:40:24]  It's like my kids, especially when they were little, it was like, what do you mean?
[01:40:27]  You put up the little flag and then somebody comes and they deliver it to any place in the world for just cents?
[01:40:33]  Like it is amazing now that you think about it.
[01:40:35]  And like, they're talking to me about how the telephone works.
[01:40:37]  How does the telephone work?
[01:40:38]  I'm like, I have no idea.
[01:40:41]  It is a miracle.
[01:40:43]  How do our voices go?
[01:40:44]  I'm like, I don't get it, but they help you appreciate the wonder in things.
[01:40:49]  And I'll give you one other example.
[01:40:51]  Now, there's a guy on Twitter.
[01:40:54]  He's one of the forces for good on Twitter.
[01:40:57]  And his name is Joseph Massey, and he's a poet.
[01:41:01]  And I started following him because he does exactly what you're talking about.
[01:41:05]  He tweets out pictures of leaves floating in a puddle or the shadows that a building is casting on a city sidewalk or the sun hitting a post in a field just so.
[01:41:19]  And he's a poet too.
[01:41:20]  So his tweets accompanying these images are always pithy and beautiful and conjure up the simplicity of a thing that you probably walk by yourself that day without thinking about it much.
[01:41:33]  So I love this guy.
[01:41:34]  And he sent me a note when he saw that I followed him thanking me and saying he was a fan.
[01:41:39]  He listens to the podcast and I love that.
[01:41:41]  And because, you know, I'm so lame in responding.
[01:41:45]  It took me a long time to respond, Oliver.
[01:41:48]  He sent me a note in July, July 13th.
[01:41:51]  I responded August 5th.
[01:41:52]  I thought that's pretty good.
[01:41:53]  This is August 5th.
[01:41:54]  I mean, I didn't know him.
[01:41:56]  So I respond to Joseph Massey and I write as follows.
[01:41:59]  Keep in mind his name is Joseph Massey.
[01:42:01]  Paul.
[01:42:07]  I am bad at checking DMs, but a belated thank you for this and for putting beauty into my days.
[01:42:13]  You may be the most thoughtful person on Twitter, which I realize is a low bar, but still.
[01:42:18]  And then he writes back.
[01:42:20]  You're going to love this.
[01:42:21]  He writes back.
[01:42:23]  Megan, your note made my night.
[01:42:26]  Thank you.
[01:42:26]  Your work is fearless and an inspiration and always great company.
[01:42:30]  I like the name Paul.
[01:42:32]  You can call me Paul.
[01:42:34]  You can call me Paul if you want.
[01:42:37]  Normally, I go by Joseph.
[01:42:39]  It's all very Catholic either way.
[01:42:45]  Love this guy.
[01:42:47]  If you want to follow him, by the way, it's J Massey, M-A-S-S-E-Y Poet.
[01:42:51]  That's at J Massey Poet.
[01:42:53]  But to your point of appreciating the novelty in the mundane, the beauty in the mundane, both my experience of this guy on Twitter and my exchanges with him as well allowed me to appreciate that very thing.
[01:43:07]  Yeah, that's a lovely story.
[01:43:08]  Yeah.
[01:43:09]  All right, Oliver.
[01:43:10]  Well, one of these days, I'm going to see you in person and you and Abby are going to hash it out.
[01:43:14]  It's going to be fun.
[01:43:15]  Yeah, right.
[01:43:16]  Yeah, we'll resolve this matter.
[01:43:18]  That's right.
[01:43:19]  The next time.
[01:43:20]  It's been an absolute pleasure.
[01:43:22]  Thank you so much for all of your insights and expertise.
[01:43:25]  Same here.
[01:43:25]  Thank you so much for inviting me.
[01:43:27]  Take care.
[01:43:28]  Go ahead and download the Megan Kelly show on Apple, Pandora, Spotify, and Stitcher.
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[01:43:36]  If you wouldn't mind giving me five stars, that helps us out.
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[01:43:40]  And go to youtube.com slash MeganKelly and subscribe to the show.
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[01:43:56]  Thanks for listening.
[01:43:56]  See you tomorrow.
[01:43:59]  Thanks for listening to The Megan Kelly Show.
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