The Peter Attia Drive - #265 - Time, productivity, and purpose： insights from Four Thousand Weeks ｜ Oliver Burkeman

00:00:00.000 Hey, everyone. Welcome to the drive podcast. I'm your host, Peter Atiyah. This podcast,

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00:00:53.260 of the subscription. If you want to learn more about the benefits of our premium membership,

00:00:58.080 head over to peteratiyahmd.com forward slash subscribe. My guest this week is Oliver Berkman.

00:01:07.180 Oliver is a journalist and author of three books, including the New York Times bestseller,

00:01:12.040 4,000 Weeks, Time Management for Mortals. If you've listened to this podcast, you've most likely heard

00:01:17.680 me talk about this book, as it's one of the four books that I consistently buy in bulk and give out

00:01:23.300 to friends. The other three being Stillness is the Key by Ryan Holiday, From Strength to Strength by

00:01:28.700 Arthur Brooks, and Die with Zero by Bill Perkins. I've been fortunate enough to have Ryan, Arthur,

00:01:33.500 and Bill on the podcast to speak about their books, and so I'm really excited to round that out by having

00:01:37.620 Oliver on as well. In this episode, we focus our conversation around Oliver's book, 4,000 Weeks,

00:01:42.700 and this idea that we want to try to master time, and whether or not that's an illusion or not. We

00:01:49.360 speak about the evolution of how people began to keep time and why that mattered, if productivity is

00:01:54.680 a distraction or a trap that can never be attained, and why it always feels like we're just about to

00:02:00.260 master our time, but then we never quite get there. We speak about the various techniques people try to

00:02:05.460 employ to control their time better and the role of productivity tools. We talk about our desire to

00:02:10.620 control the future, but how we only have a finite amount of time, and those two things seem in stark

00:02:16.720 contrast. Lastly, we talk about how all of this relates to the idea of sense of purpose. Of the

00:02:22.760 four books that I often gift to people, with this being one of them, in many ways, this is the one

00:02:29.120 that's the hardest for me to wrap my head around, and it's the one that I've read the most of each of

00:02:33.100 them. Actually, at the conclusion of my discussion with Oliver, I think it finally hit me why I struggle

00:02:39.840 so much to understand this concept. I won't let the cat out of the bag on what that is, but I sort of

00:02:44.800 have an epiphany at the end of this podcast where I explain to Oliver where my lack of comfort comes

00:02:50.980 with this subject matter. So I hope you find this enjoyable. I hope this resonates with those of you

00:02:55.720 who share much of the struggle I share, which is this desire to be the masters of our time, the desire

00:03:02.100 to be productive, and why letting go of some of this can probably lead to a much more fulfilling life.

00:03:08.140 So without further delay, please enjoy my conversation with Oliver Birkman.

00:03:17.520 Oliver, thank you so much for making time to speak in your evening. I've been looking forward

00:03:22.340 to this for quite a while. As I was saying earlier, when we spoke, your book is one of these four books

00:03:28.100 that kind of fits into, I don't know, call it like books about the quality of one's life that have

00:03:36.280 more to do with the way you live than some of the more physiological and biochemical things that I

00:03:42.780 tend to think of commonly. In addition to your book, people have not only heard me talk about

00:03:47.900 these books, but interview the authors, Ryan Holiday, with respect to his book, Stillness is

00:03:51.840 the Key, Bill Perkins, Die with Zero, and Arthur Brooks, From Strength to Strength. So to be able to sit

00:03:57.920 here and speak with you today is really exciting because it sort of puts a bow on these four books.

00:04:02.880 And it's a book I've enjoyed several times now, and I still am not convinced I fully understand it. So

00:04:09.440 I'm really looking forward to speaking.

00:04:11.900 Oh, thank you. I'm really, really happy to be here. I'm looking forward to getting into it. Absolutely.

00:04:15.960 When I read the book, there was a lot I could relate to because I'm definitely a productivity geek.

00:04:21.520 I probably have been as long as I can remember. I've always kept lists. I love pens and journals,

00:04:27.920 and I love to organize. And even at a young age and growing up, it was clear that there is almost

00:04:35.100 pathological consequences to this because if things were not done, there would be emotional

00:04:41.180 consequences. Tell me a little bit about your experience in this arena. It sounds like this is

00:04:46.140 something that came naturally to you as well. That sounds alarmingly similar to me. As a young

00:04:51.380 adult anyway, I don't know about as a kid, but certainly feeling very motivated, not realizing at

00:04:57.020 the time, obviously, that it wasn't just the normal way to try to get your homework done and get your

00:05:01.640 college assignments in on time. But this real sense that there must be a way of getting on top of my time

00:05:10.060 and structuring my time that would enable me to deal with everything that was thrown at me, not have to

00:05:17.660 make difficult decisions and fail to placate certain people who are making demands and not have to make

00:05:24.080 any choices about which direction I was going in because I would be so efficient that I would do it

00:05:29.720 all. And you get, well, in my experience anyway, I don't know about yours, you get to this place where

00:05:34.560 you often feel very nearly like you're there, right? You feel like it might only be a month or two of

00:05:41.360 really disciplined work before you're going to be at the sunlit uplands of effortless productivity,

00:05:48.300 but instead you end up sort of making fresh starts every, you know, introducing a new system,

00:05:54.160 downloading a new app, buying a new notebook every month or two. So yeah, that was definitely me.

00:05:59.440 And then I got into a position professionally where I could write about a lot of this stuff and continue

00:06:03.500 to sort of go deep into it. And I think this book is probably what came from exhausting that,

00:06:10.040 realizing that I'd got to the, I'd tried like a hundred different productivity systems and they

00:06:15.700 hadn't given me the emotional thing I was seeking. So maybe there was a problem with the question I

00:06:20.960 was asking rather than that. I just hadn't found the right solution.

00:06:25.200 Yeah. There's a line in there you throw away and I don't remember who it's attributed to,

00:06:29.160 but it's effectively, we teach what we most need to learn something to that effect.

00:06:33.880 Right. Richard Bach, I think, who wrote Jonathan Livingston Seagull. Not only that,

00:06:38.320 in terms of where the book came from, but even in terms of the book itself, it's a whole bunch of

00:06:43.300 advice that I needed to hear and still need to hear. So it's always a little bit funny to me or

00:06:49.780 awkward when I run into people who assume that the book describes the daily state of serenity in which

00:06:57.200 I actually live my life because I don't. And I certainly, you know, I totally still struggle

00:07:03.960 with all of this stuff, but that's what makes it interesting. I think to me, it's not interesting

00:07:09.020 to write about, to try to grapple with things that come easily to you. So this question of like

00:07:13.460 how you orient yourself inside time in a finite life, it's endlessly fascinating to me, but I'm

00:07:20.800 certainly don't feel like I've resolved it.

00:07:22.420 You said something a second ago that I think is very important, especially for someone who

00:07:27.380 hasn't read the book. I think for those of us who have read it, it makes a lot of sense. And it's,

00:07:32.660 I'm going to paraphrase you, but you basically said all of this productivity, all of these hacks

00:07:37.360 didn't give you what you were looking for emotionally. And again, to someone who didn't

00:07:42.340 read the book, that's a bit counterintuitive because the whole purpose of productivity is not

00:07:46.900 some emotional thing. It's to get more stuff done, to, you know, be more efficient. But I think

00:07:52.660 you're tying it back to something that is much deeper at our root as individuals that really comes

00:07:59.860 down to time and our view of time. And whether we consciously think about finitude or not,

00:08:08.880 subconsciously, we are all aware of it at all times. So let's talk a little bit about that and

00:08:14.220 maybe, well, we can do it in any way that you find it helpful. But I think that the way you

00:08:18.980 write about it through the lens of evolution is quite helpful and how we go from an era when we

00:08:25.860 didn't keep time through the industrial revolution, when all of a sudden timekeeping became essential.

00:08:31.920 Yeah, no, I think that historical lens is really illuminating. On some level, it's my working

00:08:38.180 hypothesis, my working thesis that everyone has always struggled with being finite. We are these

00:08:44.200 sort of unique creatures as humans who are both fully material animals and at the same time can

00:08:50.160 think about and know about the fact that we're going to die one day. So we're in this kind of

00:08:54.520 unique, anguished situation. But we haven't always had the kind of ideas about time that enable us to

00:09:03.180 then try to use time management or productivity or planning or scheduling to try to, you know, engage in

00:09:09.520 emotional avoidance of that scary issue of our finitude. All the way back through the record of

00:09:16.160 philosophy back to the ancient Greeks and Romans, there are people grappling with the fact that there

00:09:21.180 is death. But it's only in a widespread way with maybe not the industrial revolution, but running up

00:09:28.120 to that and certainly after it, that most people were thinking, I think, about time as a resource.

00:09:33.460 So it's not just the medium in which your life unfolds. It's almost like there's you and there's

00:09:38.660 time. And it's your job somehow to try to handle time in the right way. You feel like you have an

00:09:45.580 adversarial relationship with time, right? Most people feel either hounded by all the stuff they've

00:09:50.940 got to do in the time available, or some people might feel that there's not enough to fill their

00:09:56.100 time with. But all of these things kind of imply a relationship between you and your time, which is

00:10:03.780 actually quite an odd notion once you really start to think about it, the idea that it should be

00:10:09.180 something separate. So I guess that the root of my argument is, yeah, the idea that most of the stress

00:10:15.720 and the trouble and the anxiety and the lack of meaning and the things that we encounter in our

00:10:19.940 relationship with time come from sort of pathological versions of this idea that it's something for us

00:10:27.480 to try to use as well as we can or handle or manage or master. And most of our deepest experiences

00:10:35.840 as humans of truly meaningful and fulfilling moments seem to involve a kind of falling away

00:10:42.080 of those concepts and a falling back into just presence in this one moment that we have. Of course,

00:10:49.480 you need to think about time as a resource in order to do all sorts of things that we do in modern

00:10:53.620 society. But I think a lot of the problems arise from thinking that that is all time is, and that there

00:11:00.160 is some place in the future we can get to where we have finally nailed our relationship with it. Does

00:11:06.980 that make sense? Yeah, it really does. I mean, the idea that productivity is a trap is very

00:11:13.560 interesting. The idea that it's a distraction from something else is even more interesting. And the

00:11:19.220 idea that it can never be fully attained is anybody who's tried is sadly true. We're not born this way.

00:11:26.080 I mean, those of us that have kids clearly observe young children playing in a way that is untethered

00:11:33.360 from time as a separate entity. And yet somewhere along the way, we become inculcated with, and maybe

00:11:40.320 it's to varying degrees, you and I probably more than others, with this sense of time mastery being

00:11:46.480 important. How and when do you think that transition occurs?

00:11:49.760 My assumption is that it occurs in all different ways at different stages. And my son is six, but I

00:11:55.220 absolutely have seen some glimmers of his father's unhelpful attitudes to time. So maybe it's passed on

00:12:02.320 in the genes or in sort of subtle ways that I can't clearly control. So he sometimes gets into this place

00:12:08.220 of wanting to know exactly what's happening over the next 24, 48, 72 hours. I think here it's most

00:12:16.400 useful, though, just to look at the perspective that much kind of psychotherapy and depth psychology

00:12:23.020 would point to, which is that, you know, in various different ways, as we grow up and as we are raised,

00:12:30.580 even when we're raised by basically excellent parents, there are things that are missing from

00:12:37.080 our sense of things that give us less than a sort of completely comfortable, secure sense of

00:12:42.960 self-worth and of everything being absolutely fine in the world. There are people who have this much

00:12:48.940 more extremely than others, but there's something that you're trying to fill by the time you're a

00:12:53.780 young adult. There's something that isn't quite ideal there. And I think that we use all sorts of

00:12:58.920 things. And obviously, some people use substance abuse and all sorts of other things to try to

00:13:05.220 grapple with these things that feel like they're missing. And I think that productivity is especially,

00:13:12.400 you know, people who for one reason or another have ended up with the idea that their value as people,

00:13:17.160 that their right to exist on the planet or to feel that they are enough as human beings is somehow

00:13:23.140 dependent on their output and on attaining certain levels of accomplishment.

00:13:28.660 The people David Brooks calls insecure overachievers, which is a great phrase and sums it 0.77

00:13:34.780 up well. I think they're the ones who are naturally drawn to this idea that they've really got to try

00:13:40.140 to double down on the technologies of time control to try to get as efficient as they can and process as

00:13:46.760 much as they can. There are, of course, other people, we know them, right, who for some reason are deeply

00:13:52.680 psychologically invested in not accomplishing things, in making themselves feel that they're

00:13:58.620 not part of that whole process of accomplishment, of becoming sort of a slacker in a very sort of

00:14:04.320 proactive and deliberate way. So I think in all sorts of different ways, we're just trying to kind

00:14:09.100 of plug in a lax. And the problems with that are going to manifest in different ways. The obvious

00:14:14.220 problem with productivity as a way to get to that kind of state of peace of mind is just that there's

00:14:20.620 a complete baked in mismatch between being a finite human being and existing in a world of

00:14:28.100 effectively infinite possibilities, right? Infinite emails you could answer, infinite ambitions you

00:14:33.740 could have, infinite places you could go. If your self-worth is staked on trying to get your arms

00:14:38.300 around all of that, but it's actually an infinite quantity, that's just going to be an unending

00:14:44.340 struggle. So what would you say to somebody who says, no, no, no, it's different. I can actually do

00:14:50.960 this. Like I can juggle these five projects and I can get my inbox to zero. I just need a little more

00:15:00.140 time. Like I'm right on the cusp of doing it. And if I just put my head down for the next six months,

00:15:06.020 it's going to be okay. How would you explain to them that that's kind of a fallacy?

00:15:11.060 I mean, there are two ways into that, aren't there? I feel like one is to say that one of

00:15:15.080 the greatest questions in terms of self-change and self-knowledge, which is just, how's that

00:15:20.460 working out for you so far? You know, to some extent, these are kind of revelations of the middle

00:15:25.300 of life because you have to have tried this out for quite a while. And you know, if you're 20,

00:15:32.680 telling yourself that the real part of life is still coming makes a certain amount of sense.

00:15:37.680 When you're in your forties and you're still telling yourself that the real part of life is

00:15:40.720 coming later, and this is still a dress rehearsal for that moment, it might begin to strike you as

00:15:46.240 no longer quite so credible. The other way of getting into that is just to say that there seems

00:15:52.740 to be this pretty much universal law that if all you do is become more efficient in any system,

00:16:00.280 is made just more efficient with nothing else being done in terms of how you select your

00:16:05.300 priorities. If all you're doing is trying to process more stuff, then all else being equal,

00:16:09.660 that will attract more and more stuff to do into your life. So getting better at processing email

00:16:17.700 at a faster tempo just basically attracts more email into your life for fairly straightforward

00:16:22.580 reasons. You reply to more people and they reply to your replies and you have to reply to those

00:16:27.040 replies and you get a reputation in your organization or wherever it is for being very

00:16:30.760 responsive on email. So more people email you. So there's this kind of unending aspect to it that

00:16:37.800 occurs in lots of other domains besides email. And so you're not going to get through an effectively

00:16:43.420 infinite supply of something by processing it more efficiently. In fact, the opposite is going to

00:16:49.180 happen. And so I think that's why it always feels like this moment of mastery is just over the horizon,

00:16:56.380 but it's never quite where you are. It is a very deceitful feeling for anyone who's

00:17:02.740 struggled with it. Maybe the word struggled is the right word because you really do feel at times

00:17:08.360 you're so close to just nailing it and then it will be different. Tell me about your journeys here.

00:17:15.760 I'm kind of one of these guys who tries to inbox to zero, never successfully. Is it called the

00:17:21.040 Pomodoro technique? You briefly touched on your dabbling in that. What's that technique? And what are

00:17:26.160 some of the other techniques that people are exploring as ways to defy the gravitational

00:17:31.900 inevitability of what we're talking about? Well, this is a really interesting point,

00:17:36.520 actually. I think it's one worth emphasizing. The Pomodoro technique, as many people will know,

00:17:41.800 I'm sure, is this approach where you divide up your work time into 25-minute periods interspersed

00:17:47.900 with five-minute breaks. And then after you've done four of those, you take a longer break.

00:17:51.160 And it's just a way of boxing up your time. Other approaches to the sort of classic approach

00:17:57.940 of time boxing that involves giving every segment of your calendar a specific job. And there are,

00:18:04.240 you know, a hundred other of these kinds of techniques. And many, many of them, including

00:18:08.080 the Pomodoro technique, are totally great. Like there's absolutely nothing intrinsically wrong,

00:18:12.560 I don't think, with using this or that protocol for...

00:18:18.020 When you say great, meaning they will increase an individual's productivity?

00:18:22.640 Well, they are fine as a way of structuring your day that might well help you make the right choices,

00:18:28.820 understand how much time you have available, and therefore decide that certain things are more

00:18:33.280 important uses of that time than not. And if you read the writing of the guy who invented the

00:18:38.580 Pomodoro technique, he's very on board with this idea that it's about turning time from being an

00:18:43.160 adversary to an ally by just sort of seeing that you're, in some sense, your time already is made

00:18:49.840 up of 25-minute periods, right? And you could look at it that way. So it's just a question of being

00:18:55.500 explicit about that and making choices about what you're going to put in those times and taking

00:18:59.660 appropriate rests. All of these techniques are, when I say great, I mean all of these techniques are like

00:19:04.820 fine, if they work as a way of lending order to the day. I think the real problem that you see

00:19:10.820 again and again, and I certainly have for a long time, is that people see them as, they throw

00:19:16.480 themselves on them as kind of paths to this salvation that I think we are talking about in some implicit

00:19:23.460 way, because it is a very sort of religious feeling in some ways. They think that they can ride this

00:19:30.160 approach to life to that point of finally feeling like they're doing enough, finally feeling like

00:19:35.120 they're the air traffic controller of their lives. That's the problem. I mentioned in the book, my

00:19:42.060 early experiments with David Allen's Getting Things Done, which kick-started the modern phase of

00:19:47.840 productivity writing. And there's so much great stuff in that book, some of which I still in some ways

00:19:53.440 practice today. But I completely, I was so fixated in this idea that I was somehow going to be able to

00:19:59.460 do everything, that I completely missed what he says very clearly early in that book, which is,

00:20:04.900 it's about having too much to do and staying calm in the middle of having too much to do.

00:20:10.040 And I totally took it as a way that was going to help me not have too much to do, because I would

00:20:13.860 have been managing to do everything. And we're just a certain kind of person anyway, I think, really

00:20:18.220 drawn to take anything and co-opt it into this psychological project of trying to feel like

00:20:24.620 we're fully in control of our lives in a way that we can't be. I'm fascinated to talk to you about

00:20:30.380 this because it seems you could easily see that a lot of the more physiological, physical, biological

00:20:35.200 stuff could easily be dragooned into a similar kind of project of feeling in total control of our

00:20:40.860 situation. I don't know if you see that happening. I do.

00:20:43.460 In yourself, maybe. I don't know.

00:20:45.060 No, absolutely. And I sort of write about this in the epilogue of my book, where I sort of say,

00:20:51.860 you know, I think when my obsession with this topic began about a decade ago, maybe 15 years ago in

00:20:59.420 one way, but really in earnest a decade ago, there's zero question in my mind with the benefit of the

00:21:05.460 retrospectoscope I have today, that it was 100% a, how do I run from death?

00:21:13.460 Basically, it was just, this is just a, I'm going to put my head in the sand and march my way towards

00:21:20.780 something that deep, deep, deep down I know is impossible, which is immortality, but I'm going

00:21:25.360 to focus so much on this thing that I'm not going to confront my fear of death, or I'm going to

00:21:30.240 confront my fear of death by shouting louder at that fear with this thing. And this thing is all the

00:21:37.220 things I'm going to do to live longer. I think a lot of people can relate to that,

00:21:41.320 and I think people have different reasons for it. I talk about what my reasons were for that,

00:21:46.100 but I can say now that I realized that completely, I have a slightly different take today, but like

00:21:53.260 you, I still struggle. Meaning I still watch people die and get very sad. Just recently, someone who I

00:22:03.520 actually had on the podcast died and he was in his early eighties. So by most people's standards,

00:22:09.380 hey, he lived to and maybe slightly beyond normal life expectancy, but I don't know. It always

00:22:15.460 bothers me when someone dies. It still does. And intellectually, I know that that's a very

00:22:20.700 bizarre way to feel that he had his 4,000 weeks. He did a lot with those 4,000 weeks. He had a

00:22:27.280 wonderful family. Like you have all of these things, like there's nothing to mourn other than the fact

00:22:31.680 that he's not here. And yet I still have a sense of sadness about that. And I understand that part of

00:22:38.380 that produces a distraction from what's happening today. Like if you dwell on that too much, you miss

00:22:44.660 out on the fact that, well, the best thing you can do to honor the legacy or the memory or whatever is

00:22:50.380 to do your thing today. But another thing you write about that I love is the challenge of trying too

00:22:55.900 hard to be present. This has equally become kind of cult-like, which is I am going to be the most

00:23:02.960 present person ever. And like, I'm going to will myself into that. Say a bit about that.

00:23:10.020 It feels like it's the natural reaction at first when you sort of begin to realize that you've been

00:23:16.340 running into the future for so long through these kinds of techniques and this approach.

00:23:21.960 It's like, surely what I have to do is the opposite of that. And that's like, be really, really present.

00:23:26.920 And then you read books on mindfulness that say, when you're washing the dishes, when you're loading

00:23:31.920 the dishwasher, just do that thing, be present in that moment. And then you find, right, there's

00:23:36.280 something sort of paradoxical about how the mind works in those contexts. As soon as you're

00:23:42.020 self-consciously trying to will yourself into the moment, then you're not doing it because what you're

00:23:46.560 actually doing is thinking about whether you're in the moment enough. And so, yeah, I tell this absurd

00:23:53.000 story in the book about getting to witness the Northern Lights when I was in Northern Canada and

00:23:59.440 having been sort of like getting excited about it for several days of my trip. And when it finally

00:24:04.120 happened and I was sort of dragged out of the place I was sleeping by some neighboring guests at sort of

00:24:10.500 two in the morning to see this, just finding myself thinking, firstly, trying really hard to be there and

00:24:16.740 being very much aware that as a result, I was not. And then just having stray thoughts like that. It looked

00:24:22.000 like an old PC screensaver and all these kind of like these terrible thoughts that just totally,

00:24:27.440 totally ruined the kind of sacredness of the moment because I had been so sort of cognitively

00:24:34.760 engaged with trying to be there. And by contrast, you know, we can all point, I think, to moments in

00:24:40.760 life that perfect afternoons and things like this that were not planned. They were not because we set

00:24:45.560 out to have a perfect day. So there's kind of a theme that runs through all this. I think it comes

00:24:52.460 up thinking about rest and recreation and leisure as well, that you do sort of to make there's a sense

00:25:00.220 it just sounds like a sort of annoying paradox. There's a sense in which you do have to be willing

00:25:04.580 to waste time to make the most of time. You do have to be willing to just sort of care a bit less

00:25:10.960 about whether a given afternoon, given weekend is spent in a deeply meaningful way in order to

00:25:18.020 maximize the chances of it sort of lucking out into one of those deeply meaningful times because

00:25:23.860 you need to not be fixated on trying to force the matter. And what do you think that means? I mean,

00:25:30.240 is that something that can only be appreciated in retrospect or is that something that will also

00:25:35.440 be appreciated in the moment? You mean the sense of meaning? Is that what you're talking about?

00:25:38.920 This experience that I think we're acknowledging we want, we're acknowledging that we want to feel

00:25:45.360 a certain way. And I think you're doing a pretty good job establishing, especially for anybody who's

00:25:51.680 tried, you're not going to achieve that sense of meaning by achieving. Getting more things done on

00:25:58.220 the to-do list is not going to be the path to make that happen. And so what is that thing that we're

00:26:05.360 trying to make happen? And do we know it when it's happening?

00:26:08.820 Huh. That's a really good question that I don't know that I really know what I think about.

00:26:14.620 Certainly just in my immediate direct experience, the best times in life are either best in recollection

00:26:21.020 in hindsight, or they are, you know, flow states in the moment, which, as we know from flow states,

00:26:26.060 right, it's like, it's, can you be aware that you're in them? I think in some bodily sense,

00:26:31.400 you can be aware that you're in them, but you're not in them once you're thinking too hard about them

00:26:34.960 in a verbal way. I don't know if it's quite the same point, but maybe it connects. I think that

00:26:40.520 one of the strangest parts of this is that, is that happiness feels like sort of the wrong

00:26:47.180 framing for what we're talking about here. I'm always really, really fascinated by those moments

00:26:52.860 in people's lives. And I've had a couple of them myself where somebody close to you is going

00:26:58.740 through some sort of immediate, serious crisis. There's nothing good about what's happening.

00:27:05.180 If you could have chosen for it not to be happening, it wouldn't be happening.

00:27:08.120 And then in the middle of this emergency, you, it's just obvious that you've got some,

00:27:12.380 your job is to like, I don't know, do their dry cleaning. It might not be being a shoulder to cry

00:27:16.260 on. It depends. You know, it might be your job is something very mundane to just make your

00:27:20.420 contribution to somebody weathering this crisis. And that sense of knowing that you're in exactly

00:27:26.800 the right place that there is no question. It makes you realize how I feel among my friends,

00:27:33.240 I have a good reputation of being quite good in a crisis, which feels very flattering until you

00:27:37.900 think about it. What it really means is you're just incredibly ambivalent and indecisive in all

00:27:42.780 other times, right? It's when you have a choice about what you should be doing. There is this great

00:27:47.340 sense of sort of second guessing and fretting and being indecisive. And yet I think we all have

00:27:52.480 these experiences when there isn't really a choice, when choice is taken away, when it's incredibly

00:27:56.060 obvious what you should be doing to help in that moment, which are in some sense deeply

00:28:00.880 fulfilling, even though they're not happy. And I think there's a clue there to what we're

00:28:07.100 looking for in other times of life. It is this sense that there's not really any option of

00:28:12.800 manipulating our experience, fitting a few more things in, worrying whether we're missing out

00:28:17.480 on something else. All that sort of goes away in those times. I don't know if it's the same

00:28:21.480 point, but it does seem really important to me. Can that exist without some interaction

00:28:26.000 with another person? Because the example you gave requires another person. In this case,

00:28:30.900 it requires that you are there to help another person. I want to talk much more about the use

00:28:38.200 of time as a good versus a shared good, but we'll come to that because I think that's one

00:28:43.620 of the most important points of the book. And there are many, but as I sort of rack my brain

00:28:48.980 to think about the most joyful moments, and I say this as a 10 out of 10 introvert, I mean,

00:28:58.460 I need endless amounts of time by myself to function. If I don't have that, I come off the rails.

00:29:05.880 But the truest joy I have, even as a 10 out of 10 introvert, is with others. And it makes me wonder,

00:29:15.300 is what we're talking about here so much about the relationship of not just time, but time with

00:29:24.140 others. I'll give you an example. I play this game with patients where I sort of say like,

00:29:29.340 if you could be in perfect health indefinitely, we're going to grant you eternal life.

00:29:34.860 But you have to do it on a desert island. Now it's a great desert island because you don't

00:29:40.020 have to find your own coconuts. Like everything you want is there. So we've somehow solved every

00:29:46.060 problem and away from the island, there are robots churning away, giving you everything you need. So

00:29:51.020 you've got your Netflix, you've got your food, you've got your, to your heart's content, you can

00:29:55.880 have anything. The only thing you can't have is another human being. Are you happy? And most people,

00:30:00.700 when they think about this for just a few minutes, come to the conclusion, no, it would be very

00:30:05.200 difficult to be happy. Whatever we define happiness is, that's such a sloppy word, but

00:30:09.080 fill in the blank, your positive valence, very difficult. I mean, what do you think of that?

00:30:14.320 And what does that tell us here? Super interesting. I think it's basically right. I think that

00:30:19.020 we're talking about things that can only happen in some form of relationship. I would say that

00:30:26.180 there probably can be such a thing as, you know, your relationship with parts of yourself,

00:30:32.580 you know, that I think when people are journaling, for example, they are maybe in a relation with

00:30:38.420 unconscious parts of themselves. I think you can be in relationship with the natural world in certain

00:30:43.920 ways, but by and large, I think you're right that the deepest ways in which we're in relationship are

00:30:48.620 with other people. And I mean, there's a million different angles to endorse that point. It's

00:30:56.440 stated like that. It doesn't sound super controversial. I think where it connects to

00:31:00.780 what I'm so interested in and I'm writing about in the book is that there's a sense in which other

00:31:06.220 people, other consciousnesses are kind of, in some way, they're sort of an affront to any idea that we

00:31:11.240 can use our intellect to control our world, right? Because as soon as you're in any kind of even

00:31:17.120 slightly intimate relationship, friendship with somebody else, it's like people have their own

00:31:21.060 agendas. You're brought into an encounter with your limits because you can't just make the rhythms

00:31:27.200 of family life go exactly as you want them to do. If you manage that, you find everyone else is very

00:31:32.700 miserable and that's not what you wanted. So we're sort of brought into this encounter with the fact

00:31:37.000 that we are these finite beings. And I think that's really important and edifying for us somehow,

00:31:44.680 because part of what is going wrong, at least for me in my personal experience with the whole

00:31:49.720 mastery of time approach, is it's some notion that I ought to be able to solve the problem of

00:31:56.920 life with my intellect, that I ought to be able to figure out the workflow and the scheme and the

00:32:03.180 goal setting system and like work life out. And other people are at once, you know, a constant

00:32:08.760 reminder that you can't use your own intellect to work out life because everyone else is living their

00:32:12.900 own lives and has their own agendas. And also that huge numbers of just very practical things that

00:32:18.020 mean anything to us just can't be done except in some form of relationship. So whether what you care

00:32:25.680 about is raising a family, making music, playing sports, pursuing a religious faith, or, you know,

00:32:33.740 building a business or being a political activist, like a million different kinds of things that

00:32:38.540 energize people, but they all have that in common, that need to collaborate. And that, that understanding

00:32:44.800 that like, you don't get to run life in the way that I think we often feel that we want to. And

00:32:51.340 actually, I give some examples in the book, right? Of people who sort of get into the position where they

00:32:54.520 do have an extraordinary amount of control over how time unfolds in their own lives, and then find

00:33:02.060 themselves kind of lonely and, and miserable. Let's talk about Mario. I mean, I don't know if

00:33:07.140 that's who you're referring to in the moment, but it's an interesting story. I hadn't heard of

00:33:10.340 this character. It's kind of bizarre. Yeah. And I feel like I shouldn't defame him. He may be,

00:33:16.380 I suppose, as I say in the book, he may be happy. All I'm saying is I know that I would not be happy

00:33:21.320 if I had designed. I think that's a fair point. Let's do it through the lens of, I agree with you. I would be

00:33:26.640 very unhappy in doing what he's doing, regardless of the luxury, the opulence, the wealth. Sounds

00:33:33.700 like you would share in that. Just tell folks briefly what the story is.

00:33:37.640 Yes. So there's this guy who is the subject of a New York Times short movie called The Happiest

00:33:42.900 Guy in the World, I think it's called, which is how he describes himself. And he's a fellow who

00:33:46.780 has constructed a life spent almost entirely living on board cruise ships as a sort of the ultimate

00:33:52.840 loyal customer of the cruise line that he frequents. And this movie is just a short,

00:33:57.700 really well-made movie. And you can tell from the title that the filmmaker also is skeptical of

00:34:02.600 his self-description as the happiest guy in the world. He has sort of total control in a sense of

00:34:08.860 what he does with his time. He is not bound to a location. He's not bound to a job. He's not bound

00:34:16.480 to chores because that's all handled for him. And there's just a sort of deep poignancy that comes

00:34:23.580 across in this short movie. Again, not sure he'd agree. This is my interpretation about what I would

00:34:29.940 feel of what I would say is loneliness, right? It's this sense that he is out of sync. He's not

00:34:36.140 synchronized with the rhythms of anybody else's lives. And as a result, there are these sort of

00:34:41.680 awkward moments in the film where he's greeting the staff of the cruise ship, referring to them

00:34:47.740 as his friends. And you have a kind of a sense coming off them that like, yeah, they're going

00:34:51.980 along with being his friends because they're the employees of the cruise line, right? They're not

00:34:55.060 going to be rude to him, but it's not a friendship. And I think that a lot of this has to do with the

00:34:59.580 idea that what I would say, if I was in that position, I would say that I had made a major mistake

00:35:04.960 in thinking that time is best understood as this thing that you should sort of hoard as much of as you

00:35:10.400 can for yourself, achieve a kind of total sovereignty over it if you can, as opposed to something that

00:35:17.720 gets its value as a kind of a network good, right? Gets its value from being shared. There's all sorts

00:35:24.360 of anecdotes from people who sort of become digital nomads, you know, and roam the world running their

00:35:28.780 businesses from their laptops. Lots of plus points to that. I think it's maybe often a wonderful thing

00:35:34.220 to do for a few years in your young adulthood, but they soon find, right, that they've sort of,

00:35:38.460 with all this freedom, they've kind of exiled themselves from the very normal routines that

00:35:45.460 actually we find deeply fulfilling of like, you know, several friends meeting up for a drink or,

00:35:50.380 you know, going for a bike ride or just very normal things that rely on our surrendering some

00:35:56.500 of our control, some of our individual control over time. And there are many other examples.

00:36:02.180 I think this point about regular goods versus network goods is important. Let's even continue to

00:36:07.620 expand on that, right? So classic regular good is money. All things equal, more of it is better than

00:36:13.360 less of it. So in other words, there's some, even though you could argue you could hoard all the money

00:36:17.760 in the world, it's not going to make you happy. But if you could choose between having more or less,

00:36:21.680 it's logical why you would choose more. But I think, you know, the great example of cell phones,

00:36:26.220 telephones.

00:36:26.620 Right. You don't want to have all the cell phones. You just need one and you want everyone else to have

00:36:30.700 one of them. So that's what makes the network work.

00:36:32.800 Such a great point. That's a network good. And to think of time as money is missing the

00:36:38.040 point a little bit. You need to think of time as cell phones. It's, you have to have time that

00:36:44.080 everyone else has. And to your point, let's, maybe this would be a great time to kind of talk about

00:36:48.540 the great Soviet experiment, about the asynchronicity of time. I thought that was so 0.97

00:36:53.340 fascinating. I never really considered that before.

00:36:56.520 So yeah, there was this extraordinary attempt in the early decades of the Soviet Union to kind of

00:37:02.060 leapfrog the state of economic development of the West by eliminating the seven day week,

00:37:10.540 five days of work, two days weekend, and replacing it with a five day system so that it would be five

00:37:15.660 days through the year, four days of work, one day of rest, four days of work, one day of rest.

00:37:19.680 And the sort of allegedly ingenious idea here was that it wouldn't be the same four days on,

00:37:26.160 one day off for everybody. Instead, that the population was divided into cohorts,

00:37:30.880 color-coded cohorts. And depending on which one you belonged to, your four days and one day would

00:37:35.760 be different. So they were all kind of staggered through the year. And the idea was that this would

00:37:39.240 enable the factory machines to run every single day of the year and never need to stop. This would

00:37:45.760 result in extraordinary economic gains. What it did very quickly, among other unintended

00:37:51.620 consequences, was to sort of desynchronize the whole population, right? Because if you had a friend

00:37:57.700 or even a spouse, and spouses were supposed to be assigned to the same cohorts, but it often didn't

00:38:03.020 happen, I think. If you had somebody you wanted to spend time with, and they were in a different

00:38:08.040 cohort, you never had the same weekend to spend time. It hugely disrupted, therefore, the family,

00:38:14.380 and it disrupted the church. And as others have pointed out, right, both of these were kind of

00:38:18.540 features rather than bugs from the point of view of the Soviet leadership, that you're sort of

00:38:22.840 undermining these other centers of power in the society. But you got this amazing letter to Pravda,

00:38:31.060 kind of amazing, that was written at all, but somebody complaining that a holiday isn't a holiday

00:38:35.380 at all if nobody else in your life is available to spend the holiday with, and you've just got to,

00:38:40.440 like, go to the cafe and drink a cup of coffee on your own. So it's a sort of extreme example of

00:38:46.980 how damaging it is to our quality of life to be put in a situation where our time is not

00:38:55.040 properly synchronized with other people's. But as various people, including the writer

00:39:00.180 Judith Shulovitz, who are quoting the book, has pointed out, like, we've kind of done something like

00:39:05.700 that to ourselves in the 21st century US and UK. Because although we do not have that kind of

00:39:12.360 deliberate, top-down government messing with our attempts to synchronize our time,

00:39:20.420 pretty much everybody, for one reason or another, both the kind of people who are sort of called in

00:39:25.940 to work irregular shifts in retail, but also the more privileged people who set their own hours

00:39:30.440 and work on their laptops or whatever, all of us are all on different schedules than everybody else.

00:39:37.280 And this helps explain this kind of notorious problem that everyone talks about, especially

00:39:41.240 in big cities, where it's just so difficult to find a time when, like, you and two friends

00:39:47.160 can meet up for a beer. It's not that you don't have any time. It might be that you feel very busy as

00:39:53.520 well. It's just that it's not the same time. And I think this is the real and sort of a growing

00:39:59.100 problem, the way we've sort of completely fallen out of sync with each other. Because almost

00:40:03.600 anything you do, and I write in the book about how much I've got out of singing in amateur choirs

00:40:08.800 over the years, you know, but anything like that, you all need to agree that it's going to be at the

00:40:13.000 same time of the day on the same day of the week. Otherwise, it's not happening. So I think there's a

00:40:18.180 kind of a deep point there that has quite a few sort of low-level practical ramifications as well.

00:40:24.460 Well, and that's the interesting thing, right? Without time, you couldn't do these things. We

00:40:30.460 couldn't synchronize. And synchronization is so important for civilization. And yet, it's

00:40:38.220 potentially the thing that gets us back to this root problem, which is we now think we can master

00:40:43.620 this thing called time. And as I think we're learning, if you try to master time, time will master

00:40:49.920 you. We need time to have a civilization. We can't really synchronize it because of the

00:40:55.880 success of civilization. Ergo, we try to gain control over it by mastering it, some of us more

00:41:02.640 than others, and we end up feeling like we can't. And I love the way you point out the flaw in the

00:41:10.120 logic of the story about the rocks, the pebbles, and the sand, which I've always thought I lived by

00:41:16.940 that thing. I know my rocks. I know my pebbles. I know my sand. Maybe explain to folks what that is

00:41:23.400 and why that might be a fallacy. Right. If there's anyone on the planet who hasn't heard

00:41:27.200 the original story, which is, I think, probably reproduced in a thousand time management books,

00:41:33.220 it is this anecdote. It has different versions, but it's basically, in the one I know, a professor

00:41:39.380 arrives in a classroom one day with some large rocks, some pebbles, some sand, and a big glass jar.

00:41:46.740 And he challenges the students to fit all of this stuff into the jar. And the students who have to

00:41:53.420 be kind of dumb for the purposes of the story start putting in the sand first and then the pebbles, 0.98

00:41:59.240 but then the rocks don't fit. The pebbles first and the sand and the rocks don't fit. And then he 0.99

00:42:03.080 very smugly points out, no, no, look, if you put the big rocks in first, then the pebbles and the

00:42:08.160 sand nestle in the spaces in between. The moral of the story is, if you make time for your biggest

00:42:14.300 priorities, then you'll get them done and you'll have other time for other things. But if you don't,

00:42:19.540 first of all, make time for your biggest priorities, you won't find time for them because

00:42:24.060 all this other stuff will fill up the finite space. And it's actually just true so far as it goes.

00:42:29.360 There are kind of decisions to be made between things that really matter and things that don't

00:42:34.360 really matter. But I think much more importantly is that it's a scam, right? It's a rigged demonstration

00:42:39.480 because he has only brought into the classroom the number of big rocks that he knows can be made

00:42:45.960 to fit into this jar. And I argue in the book that a problem that we have as humans, but especially

00:42:52.260 as humans in the modern world, the real problem that we have is that there are just far too many

00:42:58.240 big rocks. There are far too many things that legitimately matter or could be said to matter.

00:43:04.200 So there are certainly marginal benefits to around the edges, you know, to kind of how you're arranging

00:43:09.800 your day and making sure that you're putting in the important stuff and not spending too much time

00:43:14.840 on stuff that doesn't matter. But the really big challenge, I think, is seeing that there will always

00:43:20.380 be more big rocks than we'll have time for. And having the courage, really, to neglect a whole lot of

00:43:27.680 them in order to focus on a few of them, being willing. Elizabeth Gilbert says this, right? She

00:43:33.260 has a great line about how we think that saying no is so important because if we say no to all the

00:43:37.400 stuff we don't want to do, we'll have time for the things that we do want to do. But actually,

00:43:41.940 the true art of saying no is saying no to things you do want to do in order to do some other things

00:43:46.640 that you do want to do. Because deep, deep, deep in our minds, there seems to be this assumption

00:43:51.780 of some sort of natural law that says, well, like we're only going to feel that the number of things

00:43:56.720 we're going to feel like they matter has ultimately got to match up to the time that we have. It just

00:44:02.580 isn't the case. We can feel that vastly more matters than we're going to have time for. And so I think

00:44:08.660 that really goes to the heart of this idea that figuring out what to neglect, being willing to let

00:44:13.740 things go, waving goodbye to possibilities, this sort of very dark kind of disappointment that's baked

00:44:20.600 in to any life. It's sort of handling that is the big challenge, I think.

00:44:25.120 Well, I love the story that you tell, whether it's apocryphal or not, about Warren Buffett speaking with his

00:44:31.100 pilot. I think you describe it as the allure of middling priorities. I think that actually captures the

00:44:37.560 essence of what you just said, which is a far more realistic version of the rock problem. Do you want to

00:44:44.360 share that parable story? Sure. And I think it's pretty established now that it wasn't Warren Buffett

00:44:49.080 or that Warren Buffett denies it. And I make this clear in the book. If people say wise stuff-

00:44:54.540 It's irrelevant who says it.

00:44:55.560 Yeah. And when people come up with like wise sayings, it's either Confucius or the Buddha or

00:45:00.460 Warren Buffett, basically, who gets them attributed to them. Right. He's allegedly asked, how should I

00:45:05.080 sort of set my priorities in life? And he replies that you should make a list of the 25 things that

00:45:10.920 matter to you most in your life, goals, priorities, rank them in order from one to 25. And the top

00:45:18.140 five are the ones that you should sort of pour your time and energy and attention into. But the next 20,

00:45:24.560 and this is where most of us might come to a different conclusion, right? Many people might

00:45:28.660 say, well, the next 20, those are kind of pretty important. So whenever you get a little corner of

00:45:33.660 time, do something on one of those. And he says, no, those 20 are the ones you should avoid at all

00:45:39.080 costs, because they're the ones that matter to you enough to lure you away from the top five,

00:45:46.160 but don't matter to you enough to be the top five. Even in this story, there is a little bit of not

00:45:53.620 quite facing the truth of the matter, I think, because it could simply be that there are many,

00:45:59.160 many things that all belong in the top five, more than five things. I mean, you're still implying that

00:46:03.900 you can do that ranking. But I think what's so important about it as a way of approaching life

00:46:09.940 is that it doesn't ask you to believe that everything you're going to decide to not do,

00:46:15.820 that all the things you're going to neglect, you have to convince yourself didn't really matter in

00:46:19.780 the first place. It's like, no, they did really matter. It would have been good to do those things.

00:46:25.060 But finitude, our state as humans, demands that we make some choices anyway. And actually,

00:46:31.820 I think it's very comforting in the end, right? Because if you feel that you want to not only

00:46:38.660 be great in your work and be a great parent and pursue a couple of leisure activities,

00:46:44.860 but also do these other 20 things, and you feel that there must be a way of doing it,

00:46:48.340 that's a very tormenting way to live. When you see that like, oh, right, there's just always going

00:46:53.980 to be more that I want to be doing than that I can be doing. I think that actually allows you to let

00:46:58.840 go of some of those other things to see that it's just our job as human beings to like pick a handful

00:47:06.640 of the things that really compel us and focus on them rather than to somehow make infinity fit into

00:47:15.720 a finite container.

00:47:17.620 What is it that you sort of realized circa 2014? You write about this sort of moment of clarity.

00:47:24.620 I think you were sitting on a bench somewhere in Brooklyn.

00:47:27.240 Oh, yeah. Prospect Park.

00:47:28.320 Yeah, yeah. How did this sort of coalesce for you then?

00:47:31.300 This was very much on the sort of productivity and work side of this whole thing. And it was a

00:47:36.720 kind of an intellectual epiphany. I don't know, you might resonate with this, right? You can sometimes

00:47:41.140 figure things out in an intellectual level. And then it takes kind of years to live into them in a

00:47:48.440 real way. So it wasn't like my life changed that moment. But it was a winter morning in the middle of

00:47:53.980 the week. I had like a huge, even more number of larger number of things I felt like I had to do

00:47:59.480 by the end of that week than normal. And I was on my way to my co-working space where I worked then

00:48:05.540 in Brooklyn, sitting on this bench, like trying to game it out, trying to figure out like what

00:48:11.220 combination of scheduling and what order I could do things in and how I could make it work to really

00:48:17.060 power through and actually get to the end of all these things that felt like obligations for that

00:48:22.780 week. And just suddenly being struck by the thought, the understanding that like, oh, it's

00:48:29.080 impossible. Oh, I see. I'm trying to do something impossible. And feeling that as a sort of like a

00:48:35.820 burden being lifted, right? In that moment, it's like, oh, right. I can't be expected to find a way

00:48:40.560 to do all this. I've taken on more things than I can do in the time that I felt I had to do them.

00:48:47.360 And maybe there are going to be some downsides to having to renegotiate things or fail to meet

00:48:52.760 some deadlines. But then I'm going to have to deal with those downsides because, you know, there's no

00:48:57.640 alternative. And I find this to be, I think it runs through a lot of what we're talking about here,

00:49:03.220 a lot of what I've written, maybe. This move where you sort of see that your problem is worse than you

00:49:09.520 thought it was. And that is incredibly liberating because you go from thinking that you face an

00:49:15.860 incredibly hard challenge to seeing that actually it's not really hard, it's impossible. And the

00:49:22.100 shift from really hard to impossible is actually quite important because you can stop beating

00:49:28.100 yourself up for not being able to do something impossible. And I'm thinking now just in terms of

00:49:34.080 what you were saying before about the initial motivations for your interest in the physical

00:49:39.280 stuff, I think there's a similar liberation to go through, right? In seeing like finding a way to

00:49:44.940 live forever, that's impossible. Then you drop through into the ground of, okay, we can work on,

00:49:50.800 there's certainly one can maximize one's chances of a longer life. You can certainly maximize the

00:49:55.040 quality of the life that you have, but you sort of drop away from that kind of me against the

00:50:01.420 universe thing that you can throw years of energy into, but you're never actually going to win.

00:50:07.960 And then there's something much more engaged with the world about being in the realm of the possible,

00:50:13.940 right? Because then you're like getting stuck in. I don't know if that, do people say getting stuck

00:50:17.700 in in America? I don't know. But in Britain, that's the idiom, right? It's like you're getting

00:50:21.420 actually into the activity of doing real things in the world.

00:50:27.020 You know, one of the things that I'm struck by in reading your book, and you and I were speaking

00:50:30.420 about this earlier, but your book is, as I said, kind of one of these four books that

00:50:35.100 I've read many times, but I've tried and failed many times to come up with a unifying theory of

00:50:42.140 them. And I set it as a goal to do this before I turned 50. So 18 months before I turned 50,

00:50:49.120 I had sort of set this goal of by my 50th birthday, I will come up with a unifying theory

00:50:55.300 on this aspect of life as it ties into what these four authors have said, what you've written,

00:51:03.660 what Bill Perkins has written, Arthur Brooks, Ryan Holiday. No doubt there are others out there who

00:51:09.320 are writing in this area as well. I wanted to limit myself to just these four things. I thought,

00:51:13.520 this can't be that hard. Well, that birthday came and went. There was just another thing I failed at.

00:51:18.340 And I'll tell you one area where I'm really struggling is sense of purpose. What is the

00:51:25.660 role of sense of purpose? Now, I have vacillated in my life on this. There have been times when

00:51:32.600 I had such a grandiose view of my role that I felt everyone should have a legacy. It was a bit of an

00:51:41.180 inside joke. So my wife and I who met in Baltimore, where you met your wife, when I was in residency,

00:51:46.740 which was a, you know, kind of a slog. This was, you know, you're working 110 to 120 hours a week

00:51:52.980 and talk about asynchronous time, right? My wife is working two jobs. I'm working one job that might 1.00

00:51:58.940 as well be three. I mean, we're virtually never together. And when we are, I was just working.

00:52:04.760 So I was either swimming or working on this surgical manual I wanted to write. I wanted to write like

00:52:12.580 the all singing, all dancing Bible for surgical residents. Wow. And she's sort of like, what the

00:52:18.600 hell are you doing? Why don't we just chill out? And I was like, no, no, no. Like this thing's going

00:52:24.000 to be my legacy. And she thought it was so funny that she got me a t-shirt that said, what's your

00:52:29.040 legacy? But it said like PA, it was my initials, colon quotes, what's your legacy? Like she's just

00:52:35.420 mocking me with this t-shirt. And then I think about where I am now, where I'm so far at the other end of

00:52:41.300 the spectrum that I also worry it's problematic, which is I don't think there's any such thing as

00:52:46.240 legacy. We're all going to die. None of it matters. If I died tomorrow, nothing changes. The earth will

00:52:52.580 continue to move on its axis with the exact same precision as if I live to a hundred, like nothing

00:52:58.780 will change. And if I live another 40 years, no matter what I do in those 40 years, it won't matter.

00:53:06.440 Nothing will change in the universe. And you write about this idea of cosmic insignificance

00:53:12.640 therapy. Both of these seem problematic. The total lack of sense of purpose, which I'm not saying I

00:53:19.680 don't have a sense of purpose. I'm just saying I feel so insignificant. I flirt with the idea of being

00:53:25.040 so insignificant that I think it, there are days I struggle with doing things because I'm like, well,

00:53:30.320 I do them because I'm good at sort of doing things, but that's very different. Whereas Arthur Brooks in

00:53:36.820 From Strength to Strength would really talk about this important of sense of purpose, that the joy,

00:53:41.980 the fulfillment that comes from having a purpose that's larger than yourself. So I'm sure you've

00:53:47.800 thought through all of these things. How do you rectify that particular issue of, is what we're

00:53:52.960 talking about here too nihilistic?

00:53:54.720 It's so interesting. What we're circling around here, I don't think I'm going to solve the mystery

00:54:00.500 of the theory that unites the books. I think we're circling around this idea of finitude and

00:54:08.760 reconciling ourselves to what it means to be finite. Obviously that's my particular angle, so I'm doing it

00:54:15.740 from my perspective. But it's this way of thinking about meaning in life that doesn't accept this binary

00:54:23.480 of like, either we are gods, either we do things that echo down the centuries forever, or if we

00:54:31.060 can't, that must mean that we're nothing and there's no point in it all. There's something kind of very

00:54:36.220 seductive about it. I'm as bad as anyone at falling into this, but there's something sort of inhuman

00:54:41.200 about that because it doesn't kind of meet who we really are as humans, which is sort of extraordinary

00:54:47.760 and capable of extraordinary things and also very much not gods. So in the section of the book on

00:54:53.940 cosmic insignificance therapy, I'm sort of first of all explaining how I feel that it's very,

00:54:58.640 it can be very energizing and empowering to sort of drop the requirement, the inner requirement that

00:55:05.840 everything we do in our lives has to be sort of extraordinarily important on a grand scale.

00:55:11.780 Because obviously, if you zoom out far enough, you can make anybody's life completely unimportant.

00:55:16.480 And you can do that with like Mozart, if you zoom out far enough. I mean, some people might be

00:55:22.000 remembered for several thousand years, but just make it a million years instead. So there's nothing

00:55:26.240 we can do that matters in that sense. And I think that can be very liberating. It means that if you're

00:55:33.600 prone to indecision and spending time feeling like you've got to do things exactly right, then it's a good

00:55:40.220 reminder that it doesn't matter enough to worry about. But yes, then of course, the risk is that

00:55:46.160 you're sort of lifted out of that terrible kind of like, oh, no, am I doing things extraordinarily

00:55:51.100 enough with my life? Am I getting things right? Or am I going the wrong way? You're lifted out of

00:55:55.120 it so far that it becomes sort of lighter than air. And it's like, why am I even here? What's the point?

00:56:00.800 I've been really, really influenced here by the work of a philosopher called Ido Landau,

00:56:05.760 who wrote a book called Finding Meaning in an Imperfect World. One of the points I take him to be

00:56:11.460 making there is just like, it's quite strange that when it comes to thinking about what meaning

00:56:19.300 is, what purpose is, we insist on using these criteria that either no human or maybe in some

00:56:27.100 cases sort of a tiny number of humans in each generation could ever hope to meet. There's

00:56:32.740 something sort of cruel to ourselves in saying that meaning is only at this cosmic level. It's

00:56:41.360 slightly arbitrary. It probably is motivated by our fear of death and wanting to feel like we're

00:56:46.580 immortal and that our legacy will last forever. But you can sort of drop it to some extent. You can

00:56:53.180 say, well, if what I'm doing with my life, influencing a number of, you know, making life better for a number

00:57:00.300 of my contemporaries, or even just, you know, being a good parent, being a good member of my

00:57:05.560 neighborhood, if I'm using a standard of meaning that is defining that as pointless, well, maybe I

00:57:10.520 can just use a different standard rather than have to feel that what I'm doing is meaningless. And so

00:57:15.980 I think Landau would argue that the nihilist, the person who thinks like, there's no point in anything,

00:57:21.400 he thinks he's being really sort of facing the hard facts of life, right? He's saying like,

00:57:25.420 don't kid yourself. There's no point to any of this. But in fact, he's kind of still clinging

00:57:30.820 onto a fantasy, which is that like, that he should be able to, he's got very high standards for what

00:57:36.840 meaning should be. And then he finds that the nihilist, then he finds that life doesn't measure

00:57:41.120 up to the standards. So he's like, well, it's all pointless. But in fact, those standards, I feel like

00:57:46.140 we even know that those standards don't apply. Again, we're talking before about meaningful times when

00:57:50.720 you're helping a friend through a crisis or something like that. Like there's a feeling of

00:57:54.580 meaning in those times or a feeling perhaps of aliveness, some people might say, that is kind

00:57:59.480 of feels self-justifying. Sure, you can still point out that in any X number of thousands of

00:58:05.220 years, it wouldn't have mattered that you were there for that person, but it mattered then.

00:58:09.520 And Landau has this great line about, we're always doing this thing to ourselves where we're saying

00:58:12.800 like, well, it's not a meaningful human existence because something that we couldn't be expected to do

00:58:17.860 as humans is something that we're not doing that thing. If someone loves their dog, you don't kind

00:58:23.580 of correct them and tell them that actually their dog is no good because it can't drive.

00:58:28.620 If someone has a really nice chair in their house, that's real pleasure to sit on. You don't say,

00:58:33.380 well, no, it's a useless chair because it can't boil water for a cup of tea. We don't expect those

00:58:37.940 things of those things. So fine. And can we maybe not expect of ourselves as finite humans,

00:58:44.080 these kind of godlike acts of cosmic meaning, and still find that the meaning that is available

00:58:51.260 to us as finite humans is actually like really, really something serious and important. And that

00:58:57.280 becoming more and more wholeheartedly human is maybe a better goal in life than trying to sort

00:59:03.420 of escape the human condition and become a superhuman.

00:59:07.140 That makes a lot of sense. And that's the only place that I can reconcile it, Oliver,

00:59:10.580 is, yeah, in the big picture, I'm never going to bend the arc of the universe. I have no delusion

00:59:15.620 about that, but I'll matter to my kids and I'll matter to my wife and I'll matter to my friends.

00:59:22.960 And that's the focus, which then brings us back full circle to the trap of productivity,

00:59:29.580 because at least for me, this is maybe, I don't know if you struggle with it in this warped

00:59:34.820 way. I then say, well, gosh, I have this real sense of urgency. I'm back to now wanting to

00:59:42.180 control time, because I know the statistics. Once my kids are 18, I have virtually no time left with

00:59:50.040 them. They say on average, you have 19 years with your children. 18 of them occur in the first 18 years

00:59:57.040 of their life. One year of total time with them occurs once they go off to college. That's it.

01:00:04.160 Cumulative time. So I then think, oh my gosh, I have to master my time because I have such a,

01:00:11.240 it's not just the finitude of my life. It's an even greater finitude of the time I have with my kids.

01:00:17.920 Now I'm doubly whipping myself to make the most of my time. And my wife and I have this discussion

01:00:24.480 all the time, which is like, God, I wish I didn't have to do anything. Like I wish I could do nothing

01:00:29.240 until our kids were all gone. And I wish I could do a reverse retirement. I wish I could retire

01:00:34.820 for the next 15 years and then I'll work the remaining decades of my life when they're gone

01:00:41.080 anyway. All of these things are irrational thoughts, but this is the psychoses, neuroses that

01:00:46.040 kind of fuels it. It's funny, the format of conversation like this is such that you say that,

01:00:51.120 and then it's like, I feel like now I'm going to offer the solution, but I'm just like, yeah,

01:00:55.360 I totally get it. And I think that, and I totally feel it too. And I'm not sure that there is a

01:01:01.160 solution. But I think that a lot of what we're talking about is, I think there's a shift from

01:01:06.060 doing things unconsciously to doing things consciously that is really important. And that,

01:01:10.340 you know, knowing and seeing that there is this trade-off is in some ways the best that we can

01:01:16.880 hope for that trying to solve the problem through time mastery is not going to make things better

01:01:24.580 because that's going to be undertaken in the unconscious belief that there's a way of maximizing

01:01:30.700 your capacity so much that you can spend all the time that feels like it matters with your kids. And

01:01:36.240 you can spend all the time that feels like it matters on the work. And it's like, if the starting

01:01:41.060 point is that that isn't possible, then firstly, you make wiser decisions around the edges. Maybe

01:01:47.000 you do backpedal a little bit on certain work things in order to maximize a bit more time with

01:01:50.940 kids. Maybe you do organize your time in certain strategic ways to sort of make those gains around

01:01:57.480 the edges and free up capacity. But more fundamentally, I feel like you can just sort of see,

01:02:03.000 yeah, it's a sad truth about being who we are and being fortunate enough to have these different

01:02:10.680 domains of our lives that we value. If people who are parents and people who have work that

01:02:15.780 gives them meaning or whatever other things might be competing in their lives. And so this comes back

01:02:21.480 before, actually, I wanted to say in response to you talking about the person you were talking about

01:02:25.220 who died and the fact that one doesn't stop feeling sad about those things or struggling with

01:02:30.320 these things. The person who thinks they're going to find a way to master their time and make enough

01:02:34.920 time for everything is trapped in this kind of future oriented anxiety. The person who sort of sees the

01:02:40.440 truth about trade-offs and the truth about finitude doesn't suddenly become happy and

01:02:45.640 reconciled to it all. But it's a different kind of feeling. It's a kind of poignancy, right? There's

01:02:51.420 a sort of sad tinge to life that you don't get away from. But, you know, I'm sort of struggling to

01:02:58.920 articulate this, but it's part of living a meaningful life is to just sort of be consciously in that fact

01:03:05.300 that we don't get all the time we would wish to have. I don't know if that made sense.

01:03:12.400 It does. And I think going back to what we talked about earlier, I think that's why

01:03:16.180 I have yet to construct this unifying theory, because a unifying theory in some ways suggests

01:03:24.440 a solution. It's a series of equations. Unifying theories in physics are equations. I don't think

01:03:30.620 there's an equation here, even though my engineering background wants one, and there isn't. And, you

01:03:35.940 know, a lot of the physiologic stuff can be broken down into equations. We can talk about cardiac

01:03:41.180 output as a function of contractility and stroke volume and heart rate and systemic vascular resistance

01:03:48.780 and all these things. Like, we can really talk about physiologic stuff that way. Now, of course,

01:03:53.500 at the cellular level, we're still hosed. I mean, there's a lot we can't talk about in that regard,

01:03:57.840 but we still have biological mechanisms that we somewhat understand. This is much more difficult.

01:04:04.860 And if people are sitting here listening to this on a podcast that's about longevity and asking,

01:04:10.400 why are we talking about this? Well, I would argue if you're not talking about this, what the hell does

01:04:14.220 that other stuff matter?

01:04:15.580 Right. And I think you really put your finger on it with the idea that a unifying theory suggests a

01:04:20.060 solution. It's the acceptance of the fact that there isn't a solution that is such a powerful

01:04:25.640 psychological transition, I think. And it totally, yeah, it totally goes along with doing everything

01:04:31.160 you possibly can to sort of maximize both the quality of your experience and the amount of time

01:04:35.700 you can have the probability of having more time to have those experiences. But it steps away from

01:04:43.680 this idea that one day you're going to find the solution to the human condition. There are all these

01:04:49.360 great sayings and phrases and ways of putting it that come out of Zen Buddhism, where people are sort of

01:04:53.820 pointing to this notion that what drives us crazy is thinking that there has to be a solution to the

01:05:00.200 condition in which we find ourselves. So the quote I use at the beginning of the book from Jocko Beck,

01:05:06.300 the American Zen teacher, is she said, what makes it unbearable is your mistaken belief that it can be

01:05:12.680 cured, which is quite an interestingly sort of medical way of stating the problem. A friend of mine

01:05:19.960 years ago, who's a meditation person as well, said, from a certain point of view, everything is

01:05:24.500 palliative care because, you know, none of us is getting out of this alive. There are plenty of

01:05:28.420 sort of more cliched sayings that pinpoint this same problem. I don't think that's a recipe for

01:05:32.840 nihilism. I think that's a recipe for letting go of a quest that wasn't possible in order to really,

01:05:39.740 really get involved in the quest that is possible.

01:05:43.520 There's so much I learned from your book. And again, as I said, I think there are places where it

01:05:47.160 overlaps so much with others and it reinforces things that I've already seen the value in. And

01:05:51.800 one of the most important is what Ryan Holiday writes about as stillness and what you write about

01:05:57.680 as ethylic activities. My reading of this, because I take notes when I'm reading a book. So what I

01:06:03.900 wrote at the bottom of that page was, ethylic activity is the antidote. That was my note in red pen.

01:06:10.940 The antidote, meaning what I was referring to, I think, was the aversion we have to being still.

01:06:18.860 The aversion we have to being alone with ourselves, you know, with our thoughts and things like that.

01:06:23.420 Say more about this. Why is, you know, you have so many great examples in the book. You could draw

01:06:27.940 from any of them, but just broadly speaking, why are you and Ryan coming at this same conclusion from

01:06:32.840 totally different, you know, Ryan is coming at it purely through a stoic philosophy lens.

01:06:37.480 You're coming at it, frankly, through the lens of observation and empiricism.

01:06:42.660 The idea of an ethylic activity, which is coined by a philosopher called Kieran Setia,

01:06:47.240 is this, the notion that of an activity that is done for itself alone, not to get somewhere,

01:06:54.980 not to get something else, that it's not the kind of thing that you will ever have done enough of.

01:07:00.380 And so the example I use in the book, just because it's something I enjoy a lot, is hiking.

01:07:04.180 You can't make hiking, in a meaningful sense, more efficient because you're just, I'm sure you can

01:07:11.580 walk in more efficient ways than others. But the point is simply that the reason that people are

01:07:15.700 drawn to an activity like that is for the experience itself. Sure, there are some ancillary health

01:07:21.340 benefits, absolutely, but you're not trying to get somewhere either in terms of training or in

01:07:28.360 terms of geographically trying to get somewhere. It's just, it's done for itself alone. A lot of kind of

01:07:33.220 activities around arts, music, dance can be pursued in a more sort of, in a way that culminates in

01:07:39.840 something, but they don't have to be. And a lot of the enjoyment people get is in itself alone.

01:07:45.900 And yeah, I think what Ryan means by stillness is also something that almost by definition can't be

01:07:54.760 an instrumental use of time. And so I think the unifying idea here is that there is something wrong

01:08:01.500 with pursuing a life in which time is considered in exclusively instrumentally, so that you're

01:08:07.300 always assessing the value of how you're using your time by where it's leading you and how well

01:08:14.040 it's getting you to that goal. Because of course, at some point, either this has to cash out in a

01:08:20.140 present moment of meaning, or you're always postponing. It has the effect of sort of always

01:08:24.680 postponing the moment of truth into the future. And there's a great quote that I use in the book

01:08:30.900 as well from John Maynard Keynes, The Economist, who I think gets at the point of why we do this,

01:08:37.900 why we want to live for future activities, even though it's a kind of anxious way to live,

01:08:42.840 even though we're never quite at the moment of fulfilment. It's because by projecting our interests

01:08:49.480 in what we're doing constantly into the future, you're sort of securing what Keynes calls a spurious

01:08:54.320 immortality for them. So he's got this quote where he says,

01:08:58.440 the purposive man does not love his cat, but only the cat's kittens, nor in truth the kittens,

01:09:04.240 but only the kitten's kittens, and so on forward forever to the end of catdom, as he puts it.

01:09:09.940 And it's kind of a terrible way to live because you never get to actually love your pet, or plug in

01:09:15.120 there, whatever the other benefit or value of an activity would be. But it has this great

01:09:20.480 advantage on a subconscious level, that it's all because of somewhere you're getting. And as long

01:09:26.520 as you're still getting somewhere, then you don't have to fully face the pain of the fact that this is

01:09:34.900 it, that it's not a dress rehearsal, that this is the time you have to use meaningfully if you're

01:09:41.700 going to have a meaningful life. And I fall into this trap all the time, you know, of sort of

01:09:46.520 catching myself seeing that I'm really thinking about two days' time, when this stuff's out of the

01:09:52.160 way, when this other stuff has been completed, when I've figured out how to do something, like then

01:09:57.540 I'll start living in a present way and really getting the value of life. But what we're really

01:10:05.340 doing, I think I agree with Keynes about this, is constantly projecting that moment forwards,

01:10:10.340 because it kind of feels like you don't have to die.

01:10:14.160 Yeah, and I think it's worth saying that again, Oliver, because it's so profound. I think this is

01:10:18.640 the jugular issue. I think it is this connection to our mortality and our finitude that is underpinning

01:10:25.740 all of this difficulty. Because on the one hand, it just shouldn't be this hard. I sometimes laugh at

01:10:32.560 my struggle with this, where I'll have a number of things over the next month that ostensibly all

01:10:40.940 are enjoyable. Oh, I'm doing this thing with my kids on this day, and we're going to go camping on

01:10:46.720 this day, and oh, I've got a day set aside to go racing my car on the track. I mean, these are all

01:10:52.000 things that are just pure bliss to me. And when I look back at the month after the fact, I realize

01:10:58.560 every time you're in one of those moments, you were thinking about the next one.

01:11:02.640 Right, right.

01:11:03.180 It's just, it's tragic. And I think this point of, am I doing that because subconsciously,

01:11:12.440 I need to do that to avoid confronting the finite nature of time? I don't know if that makes sense,

01:11:19.720 but that's kind of how I'm hearing and processing this.

01:11:22.780 Yeah, it makes total sense. And I think, you know, certainly in my experience, but I take solace

01:11:28.340 from the fact that in, I don't think the great philosophers of history found any alternative to

01:11:32.980 this. It's not that we need to aim to leave that mindset behind in favor of a kind of total perfect

01:11:43.260 reconciliation to mortality. It's just that you shift from this kind of avoidant stance, which

01:11:51.120 triggers so much kind of saps the meaning from life to a stance that kind of looks it in the face and 0.97

01:11:57.200 feels kind of sad about it. It's like, it's not that you don't want to get tripped up on the idea

01:12:02.340 that you're supposed to become, you know, totally Zen about this awful human fate. You can just kind

01:12:09.980 of integrate to some extent, only to some extent in my case, but you can sort of integrate that

01:12:16.240 poignancy into the experience. And then you do sort of land, you know, you do sort of fall back

01:12:23.040 into the moment that you're in. It's tricky because I think that those of us in this kind

01:12:29.620 of productivity mindset have spent a lot of time kind of beating ourselves up for not doing enough

01:12:34.780 yet or not getting to a certain point. And it's very easy to take that same stance towards the

01:12:40.940 challenge of reconciling yourself to it all. Right. And then feeling that you're somehow falling

01:12:46.880 short because you don't feel completely Zen about mortality. I don't think there's any reason to

01:12:52.280 believe anyone ever does. You know, I took some comfort in knowing there was at least one other

01:12:56.840 person who did the math, which I forget who it was you were referring to in your book. You're

01:13:01.840 referring to someone though, who had basically done the math on how improbable each of our existences

01:13:06.960 is. You know, anybody who I guess has thought through embryology can't help but think about

01:13:12.180 that, which is what's the probability that that sperm on that day hit that egg on that

01:13:17.720 month to result in me being here. And you only need to think about this through the lens of

01:13:23.160 siblings. Like you have siblings that are, you know, they're genetically similar, but they're

01:13:27.180 completely different people. And so therefore there's a sub trillion probability event that I even

01:13:34.300 exist. And one of the things you point out that can be, again, I'm sort of thinking about this

01:13:39.140 through the lens of partial antidotes. There's no solution to this problem. As you said, it's

01:13:43.080 palliative care, but what are some partial antidotes? Another one might be flipping the problem

01:13:49.200 statement from not, oh, I can't believe I only have 4,000 weeks. How am I going to make the most of

01:13:56.840 them? To, I can't believe I even get one week. It's just a miracle we're here.

01:14:04.620 Absolutely. A hundred percent. Going to that idea of getting to have the time is such a powerful

01:14:10.880 transition, partly because, and this is kind of Heidegger and all sorts of stuff I grappled with in

01:14:18.060 trying to write this book and don't recommend anyone else grapples with Heidegger, but partly because it

01:14:23.400 shifts the attention from the specific content of experience to the fact of there being experience.

01:14:33.080 And that is really helpful because it means that actually you don't need to spend quite so much

01:14:38.680 time worrying about whether you're doing the right things because you just get that sense that it's a

01:14:42.780 miracle that you're doing anything. It makes, potentially makes sitting in a traffic jam, at least,

01:14:47.400 if not pleasurable, then less enraging because experience is happening. Like, what are the

01:14:53.700 chances? And that's kind of amazing, even if you're doing something that we would normally

01:14:58.680 characterize as really frustrating. I mentioned somebody in the book who had this experience

01:15:02.480 after a friend of his died unexpectedly and young and finding himself in sort of, yeah,

01:15:10.440 traffic jams or supermarket queues or waiting on hold on phone lines, whatever. And, and having that

01:15:17.360 thought, like, what would my friend have given to be in this traffic jam now to be waiting in this queue

01:15:23.680 now? And there's a way of, yeah, just really dialing into an appreciation of the fact that there is

01:15:32.620 experience as opposed to exactly what it is you're experiencing.

01:15:36.960 One of my friends said something very similar, and I thought this was just such a great thought,

01:15:43.180 which is we all sort of lament getting older. Let's put aside the number, the birthday, but just

01:15:49.600 the changes that occur. It's not fun to experience more pain. It's not fun to have a little more ache.

01:15:56.220 It's not fun to have less pep in your step. And at some point we're all experiencing that. And she said

01:16:01.280 very wisely, well, consider the alternative, right? Being dead. Yeah, maybe it sucks to turn 65 and look

01:16:10.060 in the mirror and not see the face that you saw when you were 25. But isn't this better than having

01:16:16.460 died when you were 25? It's another way to sort of think about this problem. Let's go back to Martin

01:16:23.220 Heidegger, because I'm going to take your word for it, because after you read a little bit of his

01:16:28.360 writing, I realized I'm not going to be smart enough to interpret what he writes. It was way

01:16:34.020 too obtuse for me. I'm not sure it's a question of smarts. It's a very, very impenetrable and

01:16:39.260 endlessly debated question, what on earth he means. Yeah, but anyway. But let's talk about this idea of

01:16:44.720 having versus being time, because this comes up so much in the book, but I think you're always going

01:16:51.180 back to his work. Notwithstanding the disclaimer that he was a Nazi sympathizer, and that can color

01:16:57.320 maybe your view of him as a person, but his philosophy nevertheless is interesting.

01:17:01.620 No, absolutely. And slightly to my regret, after the book came out, I discovered very similar

01:17:07.780 outlook on this question in the work of one of the founders of Zen called Dogen, writing in I think the

01:17:15.200 12th, 13th century. And he wasn't a Nazi, so I should have... 0.65

01:17:18.740 And he was the original. I mean, he thought about it like centuries before.

01:17:21.680 Right. He came first, and he wasn't a Nazi. And it's much clearer. It's kind of puzzling,

01:17:26.340 but it's not aggressively impenetrable in the way that Heidegger often is. But this is just this

01:17:33.480 thought that, yeah, I think you're right. It comes up again and again in this material that maybe,

01:17:39.040 in some sense, being and time are the same thing. Heidegger's masterwork is called

01:17:44.520 Being and Time. One of Dogen's most famous works translates as Being Time with a hyphen as if

01:17:51.400 they're the same thing. And it's kind of strange to think about at first, but there's something very

01:17:56.960 true about it, this notion that maybe if the idea that we have time, if you can see the ways in which

01:18:05.640 that is flawed, you never really have time. You never really have more than a single present

01:18:12.880 moment. You don't get it to keep in the way that physical possessions say we have. You don't have

01:18:19.320 time in that sense. And if there are sort of all sorts of problems that come from treating time as

01:18:24.960 this resource that we need to maximize, and then it starts doing strange things like you try to

01:18:30.760 maximize it and you end up with more stuff to do and all these kind of perverse things because we're

01:18:34.680 treating it as something that it isn't. Well, maybe it makes a bit more sense to think of the idea

01:18:38.960 that you are time, that you are the moment, and that you are a kind of, in hindsight, your life will

01:18:47.320 have been a portion of the time that you were. This is not an idea necessarily that people working on

01:18:53.920 the physics of time would have much time for. But there's a really powerful shift here that

01:19:02.800 it's basically beyond words. So I'm just sort of pointing at it and hoping that some people

01:19:07.080 hearing this will be able to feel the shift that I'm talking about. It sort of returns you to your

01:19:13.780 life. It stops you engaging in this attempt to sort of, yeah, be the air traffic controller of your life

01:19:21.420 from above or sort of try to get out in front of your time and steer it. And it puts you back into

01:19:27.380 the position of just being a portion of time in a way that feels, to me, really liberating.

01:19:35.600 There's a very famous quote from a story by Jorge Luis Borges, the novelist. I'll really

01:19:42.660 mangle it, but it goes something like, time is a river which bears me along, but I am the river.

01:19:47.920 Time is a fire that consumes me, but I am the fire. Time is a tiger that attacks me,

01:19:53.700 but I am the tiger. And I think he's making the same transition, right? We're constantly trying

01:19:58.580 to sort of fight time, but actually we just are time. And yes, I think it's probable that this is

01:20:05.160 not just beyond words for me, but that it might be sort of in some definitive systematic sense beyond

01:20:11.320 words, which is possibly also why it's so hard to understand in the work of Heidegger. But I think

01:20:16.700 we're gesturing at something important here anyway.

01:20:18.980 How do you think about, or how should one think about almost doing what we're kind of suggesting

01:20:28.720 not to do, but for a different purpose? So I think what we're sort of saying is, look,

01:20:33.560 if you jump into the productivity hack space, it's a fallacy. You're going to chase your tail

01:20:39.520 and you're never going to be made whole. Just as, and you use this example, just as the alcoholic

01:20:47.200 can never quench their thirst fully, just as no amount of alcohol can numb the pain that is at the

01:20:55.600 root of that addiction, no amount of productivity can numb what is gnawing away at the need to achieve

01:21:04.820 and be productive. I know that for people out there who can't relate to extreme appetites for either

01:21:11.440 alcohol or productivity, they might not have a clue what the hell we're talking about, but they're going to

01:21:17.160 have to take it on a leap of faith. Those are very true statements. But nevertheless, I think as

01:21:23.100 humans, we work with tools. We work with protocols. We work with procedures. We work with tactics.

01:21:30.120 And we try to make the best of the situation. We try to palliate. You write about several of these.

01:21:36.900 I think we should talk about some of these things because I think they make a lot of sense.

01:21:40.340 So let's talk about these three principles of paying yourself first, limiting work in progress.

01:21:47.040 And of course, we already addressed, but it's worth revisiting, resisting the allure of middling

01:21:51.900 priorities. I like those three. Let's talk about how to operationalize them.

01:21:57.280 Sure. And I think you're right. We're getting at this question of like, what is the role of a

01:22:02.200 technique or a method or a productivity system? Once you have begun a little bit to go through

01:22:08.940 this process of kind of disenchantment with the lure of total productivity and infinite capacity.

01:22:15.840 And yeah, I think that's the moment at which to use these kinds of techniques. It's once you're sort of

01:22:21.000 no longer thinking that they're going to save your soul. They're just useful things to do. And specific

01:22:28.340 ones like the ones you mentioned are well attuned to the job of kind of embracing limitation and

01:22:33.420 finitude. They're not the kind of techniques that are going to lead you astray back onto that

01:22:37.980 treadmill. Paying yourself first, very well-known concept in personal finance that when you get

01:22:44.520 paid, you should take some money out of your paycheck and put it into savings and investments

01:22:47.640 right away. And then your regular expenses come out of what's left rather than spending what you

01:22:54.620 need to spend and hoping that there'll be some leftover at the end because there isn't because

01:22:59.040 we live up to our means. And the same thing is true of time. If you take the approach of like

01:23:05.260 clearing the decks and get through all the stuff that I need to get through so that I get to this

01:23:10.000 time when I can finally put real focused attention onto the things I care about, that's never going to

01:23:16.440 happen for some of the reasons we've discussed. The decks will never be clear. So paying yourself

01:23:21.780 first is just the act of taking that important thing and doing like at least a little bit on it

01:23:26.480 now, first thing in the morning, right away. In other words, not trying to clear the space for it,

01:23:33.260 but just claiming the time for it and learning to tolerate the anxiety of the fact that while you do

01:23:39.740 that, more emails will be coming in, more things will be filling up the decks, asking for your

01:23:45.240 attention. And this can be, you know, work-related, but it could be something else. Like if there's a

01:23:50.060 project you want to work on, a creative pursuit, a relationship you want to nurture, like it's just

01:23:56.020 the acceptance that at some point you're going to have to do that in a present moment. And it's not

01:24:00.840 going to feel like it's the right time. It's not going to feel like everything else is out of the

01:24:05.060 way because everything is never going to be out of the way. So you could operationalize that as,

01:24:09.540 you know, spending the first hour of the work day doing your most important priority, something

01:24:14.080 like that. There are lots and lots of different ways to make that concrete. Limiting your work in

01:24:19.060 progress, again, is one of these methods that just acknowledges upfront that your bandwidth is

01:24:25.000 incredibly limited, that your time is incredibly limited and says, well, okay, now what? And there

01:24:29.860 are, again, lots of ways to do this, but this is just the idea of setting an upper limit to the number

01:24:34.620 of tasks or projects that you're going to allow to sort of be on your plate at once. So I illustrate

01:24:41.340 this in the book using this idea of two to-do lists. This is an extremely simple way of doing this,

01:24:47.060 right? You could, in principle, have two to-do lists. One, an open list where you put absolutely

01:24:52.700 anything and everything that's on your plate. It could have like 400 items on it. The other is a

01:24:57.640 closed list. It might only have five slots on it. And the rule is that you feed tasks from the long

01:25:03.580 list to the short list until those five slots are full. And then you can't add any more until you've

01:25:08.860 freed up a slot by completing one of those tasks. So it's just a sort of artificial bottleneck that

01:25:16.060 you're placing on your workflow. And all that's happening here is you're taking a fact that is

01:25:21.840 already true for all of us, which is that we can only give our attention to a handful of things on a

01:25:28.760 given day and a given week. And you're just making it conscious and you're saying, okay, I'm going to,

01:25:34.680 I'm going to make all these other things wait outside the door until these things have been

01:25:39.240 done. There are lots of other ways of implementing this. Anyone who's familiar with Kanban methods of

01:25:43.960 project management will recognize the resonances here. It's just a way of articulating and making

01:25:50.500 conscious the limitations that we work with as humans. And the extraordinary thing is that when

01:25:56.120 you do this, you actually find you do get more productive. By being willing to make the other

01:26:00.380 things wait, you do end up processing more tasks, more projects than if you didn't.

01:26:06.180 And then yes, finally, the middling priorities idea was just that there are lots of things that

01:26:09.500 really feel like they matter. And those are the ones you have to be aware of if they are not the

01:26:14.280 ones that really matter the most, because the urge to try to find a way to make time for all of them

01:26:20.680 and end up not doing any of them well is really strong.

01:26:25.520 You made a point before, but I want to reiterate it because I think it's so important, which is

01:26:29.000 there's two types of saying no. There's saying no to things you don't actually want to do

01:26:34.500 that maybe on the surface might look like they're worth doing, but deep down you don't want to do

01:26:38.420 them. So you're kind of happy to say no. But then they're saying no to things that you do want to do,

01:26:43.240 but you know are not top five. And, you know, about three years ago, I really started to take that

01:26:50.200 seriously. So seriously, in fact, that that became the source of, or the substrate for my journaling

01:26:56.660 was I kept a no journal. All the things I said no to with an emphasis on things that I actually

01:27:04.660 wanted to do were all FOMO machines, but I have some strong FOMO genes. Boy, it was really difficult

01:27:14.360 to do that. And I created a system of accountability where I had a person that I would show up with to

01:27:20.320 discuss my no list. These are all the things I said no to that I actually wanted to do. So again,

01:27:27.260 I think those three things all fit together very well around that. I think, again, that's not a

01:27:33.440 solution. It's a bandaid. Right. And the discomfort that you feel, I think it's really important to sort

01:27:39.240 of zero in on that. The discomfort that we feel when we say no to something that we did want to do

01:27:44.900 is very different to the kind of talked up feeling that you get when you're racing through stuff to

01:27:52.900 try to not have to say no to anything. It's unpleasant, but it's an encounter with reality

01:27:58.320 and it's good in the end. We didn't talk much about it, but I think you part and parcel with this

01:28:04.900 because we've touched on it is this idleness aversion. And the flip side of that is the need

01:28:10.640 to be patient and how impatient we are. Tell the story of, I forget the name of the professor at

01:28:17.840 Harvard, but she has a class, an art class, and the students going through it have to do this

01:28:23.060 painful experience, which you yourself undertook. Yeah. Jennifer Roberts. She has her incoming art

01:28:31.020 history students at Harvard choose a painting or a sculpture in the area. There are many, many

01:28:37.640 venues to do that in the Harvard area and then go and look at it for three hours straight. And I did

01:28:44.740 this with a painting by Degas in the Harvard Art Museums. And the idea here, the motivation for her

01:28:51.820 came from seeing the students who were coming into her course and feeling that their whole lives were

01:28:57.280 so geared to speed, both just generally because of the way the technological culture works, but also

01:29:04.020 because of the pressures of highly competitive university, right? There's all these kinds of

01:29:08.580 incentives to get stuff done as fast as you can. That it was actually her job she felt to kind of try

01:29:14.020 to influence the tempo of what they were, of what they were doing to slow them down. And she did it

01:29:20.460 herself and I did it. And the really fascinating thing that you learn in this context, in the art case,

01:29:26.780 I'll explain why it's relevant beyond that. But in the art case is that like, if you can sit with the

01:29:32.580 intense discomfort that is involved in looking at a painting for such an obviously absurd amount of

01:29:38.720 time, right? She knows it's an outrageous length of time. That's the point. After the first sort of

01:29:44.160 hour or whenever it happens for you, when the discomfort begins to fall away a bit and you really

01:29:50.300 just sort of get into a different zone, you literally see things in the painting that you

01:29:56.520 hadn't noticed before. And I don't mean you come up with smart, fancy sounding new interpretations of

01:30:03.780 what you're seeing. I mean like literal objects in paintings that you apparently didn't see for

01:30:09.060 sort of 45 minutes of looking and looking at that painting. So the reward for kind of, you're giving

01:30:16.700 the experience the time that it takes instead of trying to dictate the time that it takes, which

01:30:21.820 is extremely tempting for us in all sorts of contexts. And so I'm sort of using that in the

01:30:27.340 book as one example of the benefits of sort of being willing to take experiences at the speed that

01:30:34.620 they need. Reading is another really classic example. You can sort of do a certain amount to

01:30:40.800 read faster and to train yourself to read more efficiently, but it's very small really before you start

01:30:45.700 losing the experience, especially with kind of creative writing fiction. And I think that a lot

01:30:51.720 of the time when people say that they don't have time to read or that they don't like reading anymore

01:30:55.880 or whatever, what they mean is that they really hate that it needs them to slow down, that a sort of

01:31:01.720 mind conditioned to speed and to going faster has to kind of surrender to the fact that reading,

01:31:10.340 especially if it's like a good novel or something, is just going to take a certain amount of

01:31:14.760 time that you just have to, to let it take. And it's really striking how uncomfortable

01:31:21.340 that feels, how deeply unpleasant it is to sort of give up control over the pace of something like

01:31:28.400 that. Cause like, it doesn't feel like it doesn't make any sense that it should be as painful as it

01:31:33.260 is, but it is. And then I think that on the other side of that, there are huge rewards.

01:31:36.500 What do you think problems that we encounter tell us about how to become more patient?

01:31:45.400 In other words, what is our relationship with a problem have to do with becoming more patient?

01:31:52.040 Wow. I could go in so many different directions. What's coming to mind is that there's a patience

01:31:58.480 that's involved in allowing a problem to be unresolved until a solution presents itself and

01:32:08.720 being willing to not hurry forward to resolutions just to get rid of the feeling of having a problem.

01:32:18.060 I've found this myself. I got it from this book, The Road Less Traveled by Scott Peck, but I found this

01:32:24.380 myself in really mundane context, but it's so interesting. It's such an education when something

01:32:31.100 sort of goes wrong in the house, like, you know, when there's some problem with the, I remember this

01:32:35.540 happening very vividly when there was a problem with the water supply to the dishwasher comes out

01:32:40.280 from, I don't know anything about plumbing, but like it comes out from, it's under the, it's in the

01:32:44.280 cupboard under the sink and then it connects to the dishwasher. And the urge that we have,

01:32:50.340 and Scott Peck writes about this in the context of fixing a car with no knowledge of

01:32:54.380 how to fix cars. The urge that we have in those contexts is so often to just sort of like

01:32:58.700 fiddle around in the hope that almost by chance you would like fix the problem and never works,

01:33:06.060 you know, because it takes expertise or some sort of understanding of what's going on anyway to be

01:33:10.480 able to fix the problem. And instead learning, and this, I do literally do this now with things that

01:33:16.360 involve appliances and things like that, to just be willing to look at the situation, to trace

01:33:23.520 where the pipes go and where they connect and what the joins are. And like, you don't learn how to be

01:33:29.800 a plumber in this process, but you just see the situation and the solution becomes clear, right?

01:33:36.720 It becomes obvious that, oh, I see, right. That should go there and it's come loose from there.

01:33:42.100 So I can just tighten that and now it'll work. And, you know, that's a really mundane example,

01:33:48.260 but I think the point there applies in all sorts of other kinds of problems that we hurry to

01:33:54.640 solutions because we want to feel like we're in control of the process, even if it leads to some

01:33:59.500 terrible outcome. And to sort of stay in that space of not knowing, John Keats, the poet, called

01:34:07.260 negative capability. Such an extraordinary phrase. The ability to stay in uncertainty and

01:34:13.680 not having a resolution and not always to be kind of like fidgety, restlessly trying to get things all

01:34:19.780 tied up with a bow. So yeah, that's what that makes me think about.

01:34:24.260 And let's think about incrementalism because I loved this idea, which is that, you know,

01:34:30.060 it's a bit of a tortoise and hare thing. You write about the professor who, or the study,

01:34:34.860 I think that looks at more productive versus less productive academics and just from a writing

01:34:39.760 perspective. And the amount of writing done by the more productive people on any given day is

01:34:46.240 rather unimpressive, right? I feel like this is something that you, I'm sure, can speak to in the

01:34:51.180 sort of physiological side of things, because it is something to do with like the nature of writing as

01:34:55.760 an athletic activity or something. But Robert Boyce, the professor you're talking about, found that

01:35:01.220 the most consistently productive writers were the ones who made their writing work only a modest,

01:35:08.440 moderate part of their days and their weeks. This meant that it didn't become something

01:35:15.000 intimidating. There weren't these sort of huge psychodramas with having your life dominated by

01:35:19.380 these tasks. They didn't start to resent it or to procrastinate on it for that reason. It was just

01:35:23.760 this kind of modest thing. And then the consistently applied over days and days and days and weeks,

01:35:29.180 the output really built up much more rapidly than the people who would sort of swing wildly back and

01:35:34.800 forth between putting in huge numbers of hours and exhausting themselves and then not being able to

01:35:38.940 do it for days after that because they were too tired. And where this has really made a difference

01:35:44.540 to me, just literally in my writing practice, is in the power of stopping, right? Because this is the

01:35:50.480 part of what he emphasised was that he actually advocated that if you find yourself on a roll,

01:35:55.900 right? If you say, well, I'm only going to write for an hour or two because I'm going to keep it this

01:35:59.100 modest thing in my life. If you find yourself on a roll at the end of that time, it's incredibly

01:36:03.640 tempting to just want to keep going and ride that wave of motivation. And he was a proponent

01:36:09.780 of stopping at that point, like making yourself stop being as important as making yourself

01:36:16.300 start. I don't know, you may have a better explanation of what's going on here, but I've

01:36:21.200 found it in all sorts of contexts, right? If you stop the thing that you're doing sooner than you want

01:36:26.860 to, it does something very helpful to motivation. Like it makes you want to come back to it the next

01:36:31.840 day in a way that is not the case if you let yourself get spent. And Boyce makes the point

01:36:38.260 that that's actually, you know, wanting to ride the wave of motivation is actually a kind of

01:36:42.520 impatience very often. It's a kind of belief that you've got to grab the inspiration while you've got

01:36:48.060 it now, grab the energy while you've got it now, because you might not get it again. And it's actually

01:36:52.180 a very act of great confidence to be able to say, no, I'm going to stop now. Like I said, I would.

01:36:57.360 And return to it tomorrow. I think it makes a ton of sense. And I would even say that physically

01:37:03.580 I've transitioned more to that type of a relationship with exercise in my older age,

01:37:10.940 call it. My philosophy used to be the exact opposite. Maybe there was a bunch of other

01:37:15.660 reasons for that, but it was clearly a sense of every day you had to burn every match. That was

01:37:21.840 really how I felt about it. And today, and I think it's a healthier approach. It's I will

01:37:28.400 always leave matches in the match box at the end of the workout. I'm never going to burn every single

01:37:33.820 match. Now there's an exception here and there, you know, some days you just really want to go for it

01:37:38.740 and really see what your limit truly is. But it is actually better, I think, from a longevity

01:37:44.380 standpoint. And I say that physiologically, but just as much psychologically, to leave the workout

01:37:50.300 with a little bit more, with a little bit of, I could do a little bit more and I can't wait to

01:37:54.520 get back and do it again. And I think part of that is just preserving the drive to be back in there.

01:37:58.960 Because I think if you're burning every match every day, it gets awfully hard to show up. And in reality,

01:38:04.620 you're probably not actually doing as much good physically.

01:38:09.200 Yeah, no, that makes a lot of sense.

01:38:10.700 Oliver, you closed the book with sort of 10 steps, 10, I think you call them tools or steps for

01:38:18.080 embracing our finitude. We won't go through them now because I want people to get the book if they

01:38:24.400 haven't already done so. I want them to read the book. I want them to kind of go through this in the way

01:38:28.540 that I've done it with a highlighter and tried to learn what can be done. But are there any of those

01:38:33.640 10 that you think we haven't at least somewhat peripherally touched on that you want to dive

01:38:38.180 into? I think we haven't spoken so much in general about the degree to which this desire for control

01:38:46.100 over time manifests as a desire for control over the future, for as an antidote to worry, as well as

01:38:55.200 being a sort of productivity geek and all the rest of it. I'm certainly a sort of inveterate worrier

01:39:00.460 about the future. And I write in the book about the ways in which a lot of worry and kind of obsessive

01:39:08.260 planning can be understood as an attempt to kind of, from the standpoint of the present, kind of

01:39:14.160 throw a straitjacket over the future, right? To feel like you've got it under your control,

01:39:19.840 you know what's coming. When in fact, another of the aspects of our being finite human beings is like

01:39:25.000 what's been called like our total vulnerability to events, right? Anything could happen at any

01:39:29.900 moment to anyone. That's just the way it is to be human. And so one of the things that I,

01:39:37.740 we haven't talked about it, it's one of those items in the appendix is this idea of a quite precise

01:39:44.220 idea about curiosity as a stance to take towards life. And in the context of that, I'm talking

01:39:49.720 about being a, I'm borrowing the advice of somebody else about being a researcher in relationships,

01:39:55.020 right? This stance where your attitude towards any kind of interpersonal relationship, although it

01:40:02.400 comes from how to sort of relate best to small children as a parent or caregiver, is this idea of

01:40:09.200 like, instead of trying to get things to go in a certain way, or hoping that they'll go in a certain

01:40:14.440 way, taking the stance of like wondering how they're going to go, taking the stance that of

01:40:20.320 trying to sort of find out what you can about another person, having that sort of open stance

01:40:27.200 that says like, I wonder what's going to happen. I wonder what this other person is like, rather than

01:40:33.720 that kind of attempt, that background attempt to kind of see if they're going to line up with what

01:40:39.100 you feel you need to happen or how you feel you need people to be. So I think that sort of idea of

01:40:46.500 being sort of curious, it's a bit of a cliche these days, right? You should be curious in life. But it's

01:40:50.940 specifically that kind of stance that is agnostic within limits about what happens next, or how a

01:41:02.700 relationship with somebody turns out to be. I think that's a really sort of resilient and helpful

01:41:07.480 attitude to have in life. It's probably one of the least specific of those 10 at the back of the

01:41:12.860 books, but it seemed like the one to mention here. You know, there's another one, Oliver, that's sort of

01:41:17.740 on this list that I think about a lot. It actually kind of overlaps with Bill Perkins' ethos in Die

01:41:24.700 With Zero. And it's the idea of being instantaneously generous and not sort of punting

01:41:30.820 generosity until another day. I think you'll enjoy reading Die With Zero. That was certainly one of the

01:41:38.560 three most important things I took away from that book is we have all these plans to do things

01:41:42.820 tomorrow. It's like, God, this person has been so great in my life and I can't wait to show them

01:41:47.980 in 10 years how great they've been. It's like, what the hell does that, how about you show them today

01:41:52.980 how much they've mattered to you? So tell me for you how this came on that list. What brought this

01:41:58.980 on the list for you? Well, I just came across this extraordinary line from the meditation teacher

01:42:05.040 Joseph Goldstein about how his personal practice is if a generous thought arises in his mind that

01:42:13.020 sort of implies some action, donating to a charity, sending a note to somebody to say you appreciate

01:42:17.900 them. His practice is to try to do that thing immediately rather than later. What really

01:42:23.420 resonated with me about this is I've always had a lot of difficulty with stuff, especially coming out

01:42:28.320 of mindfulness and Buddhism that says, that implies to me that we should be more generous or we should

01:42:34.580 be more grateful or kind. It's quite hard to will that kind of situation. But what this is, is a way of

01:42:41.840 saying, well, look, actually a lot of these urges in most decent people do arise all the time, right?

01:42:46.920 You already think that a certain friend you appreciate that they're in your life. You already

01:42:52.240 feel like, actually, it would be really good to make a donation to that particular philanthropic

01:42:56.320 course. The problem is that you just then like say, well, I'll do it later when I've got all these other

01:43:01.640 things out of the way. The problem is acting on it, not generating the warm feeling. It's hard to

01:43:07.260 generate the warm feeling originally. So I really took this on board from reading about it and try

01:43:13.640 to do it. But it's also, I think it goes beyond just this one example of generosity, although I

01:43:20.720 think it's really important to do it in that context. Time and again, you find yourself in

01:43:26.880 this situation, or I find myself in the situation of wanting to become the kind of person who does

01:43:31.860 things in a different way, who is always sends lots of generous notes to friends or who, I don't know,

01:43:36.220 it could be lots of other good habits in life. And the desire to become that kind of person

01:43:42.380 actually ends up as an obstacle to just doing that thing, because you tell yourself like,

01:43:50.460 okay, well, that's going to take a whole like reorganization of my schedule or like, you know,

01:43:54.080 just a bit busy today to start being that kind of person. I heard from somebody who said that like

01:43:58.720 he'd made a deal with himself that he was going to send like three appreciative notes a week or

01:44:03.340 something to people in his world, or maybe even it was a day and catching himself like as a result

01:44:09.980 of this plan, not just sending an appreciative note because like he was on track to becoming the

01:44:15.700 kind of person who did it all the time. It's one of the downsides of the otherwise, you know,

01:44:20.400 very laudable aim of trying to develop good habits is you can really let the kind of idea of

01:44:25.140 development of a habit stand in the way of doing the thing. It's daunting to consider that you might

01:44:32.800 spend 20 minutes a day from now on meditating every day. And that can get in the way of just like

01:44:38.600 doing it once now and then deal with tomorrow, tomorrow. The instantaneous part of that, I think,

01:44:45.220 is really important. It's like you'll find a way and a reason to postpone that thing. But it's really

01:44:50.980 powerful to try to make it your actual, make the explicit practice be, I will do that kind of thing

01:44:57.600 when the thought arises. Well, there are eight other great points there, which again, I just want to make

01:45:05.560 sure we're not overselling this. They're not the solution to this problem. You're not going to go and

01:45:10.900 adopt these 10 ideas or behaviors. And somehow, at least if you're me, presumably for you, be at complete

01:45:18.500 peace with the duration of your life. Never struggle again with trying to achieve something. Never again

01:45:27.840 struggle with trying to be productive. I mean, none of these things. But boy, if we can move the needle a little

01:45:34.140 bit and focus on these experiences and enjoy the experiences that do define those 4,000 weeks more than

01:45:41.380 the trying to grasp water, which is effectively what it's like when you're trying to master your productivity,

01:45:50.340 I think there's something there. And for me, I think just coming to grips with getting a little bit better

01:45:55.540 as opposed to being perfect is the best step I can take.

01:46:00.320 The only defense I make for the book not containing the solution to all of this is that no other book contains it

01:46:06.160 either, right? And that moving the needle, that's our job. That's the thing that we can do. That's the

01:46:12.880 thing that's available to us as finite humans.

01:46:16.300 Well, Oliver, thank you very much for not just making the time today, but obviously more importantly,

01:46:21.200 putting the years into this work here, which as I've said before, and as we've said now,

01:46:26.380 this is kind of one of those books that is a growing list of books for me that speaks to another

01:46:32.120 piece of a life well-lived, both in quantity, but more importantly, in quality.

01:46:39.260 Thank you so much. It's been such a privilege to have this conversation. I've really appreciated it. Thank you.

01:46:44.840 Thank you for listening to this week's episode of The Drive.

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The Peter Attia Drive - August 07, 2023

#265 - Time, productivity, and purpose： insights from Four Thousand Weeks ｜ Oliver Burkeman

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