The Elon Musk Paradox... Is Chasing Greatness Making You Miserable? (& How To Win)

00:00:00.000 | I'm Cal Newport and this is In Depth, a semi-regular series where I talk to interesting people

00:00:08.080 | about the quest to cultivate a deep life.

00:00:11.680 | Today's episode is presented by Defender, a vehicle designed for those of us seeking

00:00:16.560 | adventure in a distracted world.

00:00:19.440 | Now we're trying something different today.

00:00:21.760 | For the first time, I am having two guests at the same time.

00:00:27.200 | The first is longtime friend of the show, writer Brad Stolberg.

00:00:32.480 | He's the co-founder of The Growth Equation and the author of Practice of Groundedness

00:00:36.280 | and Master of Change.

00:00:38.760 | I'll also be joined by Clay Skipper, longtime writer for GQ, who has interviewed me actually

00:00:43.960 | multiple times for that magazine, but is also the host of The Farewell Podcast, which is

00:00:49.800 | produced by The Growth Equation.

00:00:51.720 | All right, so why are the three of us talking?

00:00:54.920 | Well, the other day, Brad texted us on a group chat, a New York Times op-ed, this was from

00:01:02.320 | last week, and it was titled, "Elon Musk is the World's Richest Man.

00:01:07.800 | Why is He Sleeping on an Office Floor?"

00:01:10.040 | This was written by Eric Baker.

00:01:12.840 | Now this op-ed was adapted from Baker's book, Make Your Own Job, How the Entrepreneurial

00:01:17.600 | Work Ethic Exhausted America.

00:01:20.000 | In this piece, Baker takes, you could think of it as a critical stance on the constructed

00:01:25.080 | idea of greatness.

00:01:26.920 | Core to Baker's book is this notion that sort of post-war, we had a notion of industriousness

00:01:33.920 | as an ideal for labor in the American context, that you work hard and do your job well, and

00:01:40.720 | that this evolved over time to a culture of entrepreneurialism, where it was much more

00:01:46.960 | important that you pursued greatness, you became a sort of self-created mogul, that

00:01:52.980 | there is more of this pressure on you to do something really noteworthy with your professional

00:01:58.280 | lives.

00:01:59.280 | From a sort of typical critical standpoint, Baker talks about how there's a constructed

00:02:03.600 | nature to entrepreneurialism that helps, for example, paper over certain issues in the

00:02:08.480 | economy or a certain precariousness about the way that a post-industrial economy has

00:02:12.400 | evolved, and that as long as we have this myth of entrepreneurialism, we'll all put

00:02:16.260 | up with this difficulty because we say, "Yeah, that might be true, but I am going to be the

00:02:20.120 | next Bill Gates.

00:02:21.840 | I'm going to be the next Elon Musk, so I don't worry about it."

00:02:25.520 | So the article had a bit of a critical take on greatness, and we were debating this in

00:02:28.960 | the text thread because we also have issues with some of the way greatness is discussed

00:02:35.440 | as a topic.

00:02:36.520 | We also, however, think that the pursuit of mastery and craft and quality is something

00:02:41.960 | that obviously goes through a lot of my writing, a lot of Brad's writing, it goes in a lot

00:02:46.060 | of Clay's interviews.

00:02:47.060 | We were trying to make sense of this conflicted relationship we had with greatness, and it

00:02:50.740 | occurred to me, this topic is perfect for those of us who are thinking about the broader

00:02:56.040 | idea of cultivating a deep life in a distracted world.

00:02:59.600 | So Brad was like, "Maybe we should just record this."

00:03:01.040 | I said, "Yes."

00:03:02.040 | We jumped on to a bunch of microphones, and we recorded this conversation.

00:03:07.120 | I think it's really interesting.

00:03:08.120 | We get it a lot of points, and I think that you will enjoy it.

00:03:12.460 | But first, I wanted to say a word about today's presenting sponsor, Defender, which is allowing

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00:04:45.720 | And now, on to my conversation with Brad and Clay.

00:04:53.440 | I'm kicking us off again?

00:04:55.160 | Yeah.

00:04:56.160 | Okay.

00:04:57.160 | Brad, Cal, great to see you fellows for a little special edition of Deep Questions Meets

00:05:05.840 | Farewell.

00:05:07.720 | We are gathered here to talk about a New York Times article, that opinion piece that we

00:05:12.240 | had been reflecting on in our text thread, and we thought, "Hey, if we're talking about

00:05:16.560 | it here, it might be worth talking about on the podcast."

00:05:18.760 | I'm going to briefly summarize that article.

00:05:21.160 | The article is from New York Times Opinion section.

00:05:22.980 | As I mentioned, it's by Eric Baker.

00:05:24.920 | It is titled, "Elon Musk is the World's Richest Man.

00:05:27.540 | Why is He Sleeping on the Floor?"

00:05:31.640 | Biggest upshot of this piece, basically, is that Musk and his Department of Government

00:05:36.640 | – is it Department of Governmental Efficiency or Government Efficiency?

00:05:39.760 | I don't even know.

00:05:41.520 | It's one of the two.

00:05:42.600 | Whatever word's more efficient to say, I guess.

00:05:45.800 | Not to interrupt, but there's something I did find funny about the email that said,

00:05:50.080 | "What did you do last week?"

00:05:52.040 | In the text of that email, it said, "Can you send a prox five bullet points you did

00:05:57.840 | last week?"

00:05:58.840 | They were abbreviating the word approximately because it would be a profound lack of productivity

00:06:04.880 | to write out the whole word productivity.

00:06:07.040 | That shows how efficient Doge is, so we can only be thankful for that type of hard-hitting

00:06:13.320 | efficiency.

00:06:14.320 | Sorry to interrupt, Clay.

00:06:15.320 | Go ahead.

00:06:16.320 | No, that's incredible.

00:06:17.320 | Biggest upshot of this is that Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency – because

00:06:21.480 | that's more efficient – have been championing how much they work.

00:06:24.960 | They have reported to be working 120-hour weeks.

00:06:28.720 | For those doing some quick math, that is a little over 17 hours a day.

00:06:31.560 | I know I can speak for myself and say I'm skeptical of that number.

00:06:34.200 | I assume you guys are, too, but Musk is talking about why that makes them better, more effective

00:06:39.440 | than other bureaucracies.

00:06:40.440 | He has this quote in there where he says, "It's like the opposing team just leaves

00:06:43.760 | the field for two days.

00:06:44.880 | Working the weekend is a superpower."

00:06:46.360 | Basically, the upshot, Baker, the writer, says that he turns this into an argument of

00:06:51.700 | how we've elevated billionaires to be superheroes in America and we've valorized work.

00:06:59.440 | I think we probably agree that billionaires should not be elevated to the role of superheroes

00:07:03.000 | in society.

00:07:04.000 | Maybe you shouldn't also be government employees.

00:07:06.240 | But the other part of the question is sort of interesting.

00:07:08.400 | I think what we're here to discuss today, is it a bad thing to valorize work?

00:07:13.240 | Is hard work a bad thing?

00:07:15.040 | I know this is something that you think a lot about, Cal, and we think a lot about.

00:07:19.400 | How do we be productive in a way that allows us to be great and excellent, but doesn't

00:07:25.080 | get in the way of all the other things we want to do in our life?

00:07:27.640 | I think that's the question we're trying to answer, most simply stated, is hard work

00:07:31.360 | a bad thing?

00:07:32.360 | I'll kick it over to you, Brad, because I feel like you were the one who sent this article

00:07:35.280 | and had the strongest reaction to it.

00:07:36.880 | Yeah, I'm excited to hear what you think.

00:07:39.960 | Well, I find a couple of things very interesting here, and they're worth pulling apart.

00:07:45.120 | The first is the difference between pseudo-greatness and pseudo-hard work, and actual greatness

00:07:52.800 | and actual hard work.

00:07:54.800 | This article comes out in the context of Elon Musk at the CPAC conference, marching around

00:07:59.240 | the stage with a chainsaw to signify how hard he's working, how much he's cutting up the

00:08:04.840 | government, and how efficient he is, like a WWE wrestling character.

00:08:11.260 | I think that a lot of people see that, and I'm painting in broad strokes here, but a

00:08:15.560 | lot of people on the right see that, and they say, "This is awesome.

00:08:18.360 | He's our guy.

00:08:19.360 | He's finally working hard.

00:08:21.040 | Someone in government that cares about efficiency, that is sleeping on the floor, that is willing

00:08:25.360 | to grind, that is working hard."

00:08:27.760 | Then again, in broad strokes, people on the left see that, and they're like, "This is

00:08:30.480 | all kabuki.

00:08:31.760 | This is nonsense."

00:08:33.840 | I tend to be more in the kabuki nonsense camp.

00:08:36.760 | However, what gets swept up in that camp so often is that now all hard work is bad, and

00:08:42.660 | there I completely disagree.

00:08:44.360 | I think the performance of hard work when you're not really doing anything meaningful

00:08:49.440 | is bad, but if someone wants to come into government and sleep on the floor and be passionate

00:08:53.980 | about making things better and actually do it and do it in an ethical way, that might

00:08:59.240 | be great.

00:09:00.240 | I'll cap it off before turning it over to Cal with a really interesting observation.

00:09:05.760 | Around the same time that this article comes out, around the same time that there's this

00:09:08.720 | vibe happening where the right is all about, "Yeah, he's our guy with the chainsaw, hard

00:09:12.880 | work," and on the left, it's, "Eh, hard work is bad.

00:09:15.700 | It's all just capitalist, and it's terrible," the actor Timothee Chalamet gives a speech

00:09:21.320 | at the SAG Awards that goes absolutely viral around the same time that Elon's work goes

00:09:27.920 | viral.

00:09:28.920 | I'm going to quote from his speech.

00:09:30.260 | What this young actor says, "I appreciate the award, but it's not about the award.

00:09:35.720 | I know this sounds weird, but I'm really into the pursuit of greatness.

00:09:40.440 | I'm inspired by the greats."

00:09:43.760 | Everyone's like, "That's so cool.

00:09:44.840 | He's athlete-coded.

00:09:46.000 | He just wants to grind.

00:09:47.160 | He wants to devote his entire life to the craft."

00:09:51.640 | I think that, to me, is this tension between, on the one hand, we admire greatness and we

00:09:56.760 | admire hard work, but on the other hand, we say, "Oh, I don't know about hard work," or

00:10:04.240 | is hard work just a product of a capitalist system that is supposed to grind us all down

00:10:08.680 | to the bone and essentially appropriate our time, energy, and attention?

00:10:16.000 | I think those are the table stakes.

00:10:18.100 | Those are the things to pull apart.

00:10:19.240 | There's performative hard work versus actual hard work, and I think what all too often

00:10:23.680 | happens is people get swept up in performative hard work, but then they throw out the baby

00:10:28.160 | with the bathwater.

00:10:29.160 | Especially on the elite left, again, broad strokes, I sound like a broken record.

00:10:34.440 | Then it just becomes, "Oh, hard work is bad.

00:10:39.040 | It's bad.

00:10:40.040 | We shouldn't be for it."

00:10:41.040 | Yet, we love these athletes and actors that are essentially obsessed with their craft.

00:10:48.000 | I agree with you there's a language thing going on.

00:10:51.680 | I think it's easy to jump from what you're saying, which is there's a certain type of

00:10:56.360 | performative hard work that I don't know how to put my finger on the terminology, but this

00:11:00.520 | rubs me the wrong way, and it's easier just to say hard work is wrong.

00:11:05.840 | Here's a comment.

00:11:06.840 | I want to read a comment from the New York Times op-ed.

00:11:09.320 | A commenter left this comment, which I think gets at the core of what's really going on

00:11:13.360 | here.

00:11:14.360 | A commenter on that Eric Barker op-ed said, "I come from a position of being able to observe

00:11:19.840 | more than a few of these 'masters of the universe' day in and day out.

00:11:24.760 | Much of this so-called work ethic is performative and on closer scrutiny, dissembles into a

00:11:29.640 | scramble of unfocused, disorganized, and half-baked decision-making.

00:11:33.680 | They waste untold hours in the gyre of aimless meetings while consuming the time of their

00:11:38.880 | acolytes and employees.

00:11:40.120 | It's not an advantage.

00:11:41.280 | It's slogging through cement."

00:11:43.600 | I did a lot of research for that New Yorker piece we mentioned about Elon Musk's, for

00:11:48.160 | example, his first weeks being in charge of Twitter.

00:11:51.840 | What we see is exactly that, because we have a good tick-tock of not the social platform

00:11:58.080 | but T-I-C-K, the journalist term, a point-by-point timeline of what happened.

00:12:01.840 | There was great reporting in The Verge.

00:12:03.880 | The story about what happened is that he comes in like a whirlwind to Twitter in 2022 after

00:12:08.760 | he takes it over.

00:12:10.200 | He just starts doing random things and abandoning those things and moving on to something else.

00:12:16.160 | He comes in, he fires the CEO.

00:12:18.920 | That's where he first uses this phrase, "What did you do last week?"

00:12:22.000 | He texted that to the then-CEO, Agarwal, and then fired him soon after.

00:12:26.120 | Then he comes in and says, "I want every engineer to print out the last 50 lines of

00:12:30.800 | code that you programmed and bring it to me."

00:12:33.440 | Then they're like, "Actually, wait.

00:12:35.440 | Don't do that.

00:12:36.440 | Shred it if you've already done it.

00:12:37.440 | I'm not going to review that.

00:12:38.440 | No, here's what we're going to do.

00:12:39.440 | We're going to enforce these deadlines now from our OKRs.

00:12:43.160 | If you don't do the deadlines, we're going to fire you.

00:12:44.720 | No, forget that.

00:12:45.720 | What I want you to do is managers will rank order your employees so that I can see who

00:12:50.600 | the lower-ranking employees are."

00:12:52.440 | He's like, "No, actually, forget that."

00:12:53.440 | He just fired half the staff basically without explanation.

00:12:55.320 | It was just random.

00:12:58.200 | That I think is what people are picking up hard work means for some of the people coming

00:13:04.720 | out of Silicon Valley right now, for the iconoclastic founder types coming out of Silicon Valley.

00:13:11.920 | We're picking up this doesn't feel right.

00:13:14.560 | Another way we know that's not right is that you can derive the opposite conclusion from

00:13:20.360 | Elon Musk to what he's saying right now, which is, "Wait a second.

00:13:24.200 | He has seven different major concerns he's running right now.

00:13:29.360 | He's added Doge on top of Tesla, on top of SpaceX, on top of Neuralink, on top of what's

00:13:34.560 | happening with the Starlink product, on top of what's happening with the Boring Company."

00:13:38.460 | The fact that he has that many things going on, he could be working 120 hours a week,

00:13:43.200 | but you have to divide that now by, what, six or seven different companies.

00:13:47.000 | So actually, you could take away the opposite, which is somehow SpaceX is successfully launching

00:13:53.120 | rockets when at most it could be getting 10 hours a time from Elon Musk a week.

00:13:57.700 | You could almost take the opposite conclusion from this, which is effective hard work doesn't

00:14:03.900 | necessarily mean I'm sleeping on the floor of that office.

00:14:07.440 | So anyways, I think this is what's really going on here, is the real intuitive complaint

00:14:13.280 | is what is being called hard work by a small group of people is not that, and it's annoying,

00:14:18.760 | and I wish they would stop valorizing it.

00:14:20.700 | But it's a mistake, as you said, Brad, to say, "Well, maybe just this means that hard

00:14:25.080 | work itself is somehow broken," and then we go down the typical sort of left-wing social

00:14:28.360 | conflict lane of like, "Okay, so all of hard work is a construct.

00:14:31.300 | It was invented by capitalists to try to blind us from the misery of our precarious economic

00:14:37.000 | situation."

00:14:38.000 | It's like we don't have to go down the conflict theory sort of academic left theorizing in

00:14:44.640 | order to actually say, "Musk with the chainsaw, that feels like nonsense."

00:14:49.680 | I think that's right, but then how do you explain this very real vibe that everyone

00:14:55.400 | feels?

00:14:56.400 | Like listeners of the show, I bet all of you feel this vibe, which is generally speaking

00:15:01.960 | on the right, hard work, whether it's performative or real, and it's often performative, is

00:15:06.760 | extremely valorized.

00:15:08.160 | It's how we grow our character.

00:15:09.840 | It's how we contribute to society.

00:15:11.680 | It's productive, and it's what you should do.

00:15:13.560 | You should work hard, and on the left, there is this kind of anti-work or don't strive

00:15:21.080 | for greatness or don't give something your all.

00:15:26.960 | Don't become obsessed with a craft.

00:15:29.200 | How many people have called you out on your productivity books, which are the opposite

00:15:33.240 | of performative or pseudo-greatness?

00:15:35.740 | You literally use the term pseudo-productivity in contrast to the real thing, yet people

00:15:40.200 | are like, "Oh, productivity is bad.

00:15:42.160 | It's just a capitalist construct," or, "We shouldn't be working hard."

00:15:45.800 | I think that in my world, when I talk to people who are actually excellent at what they do,

00:15:52.560 | whether they're professional athletes, whether they're award-winning artists or chefs or

00:15:56.800 | musicians or transplant surgeons, they all say, "All of this is nonsense.

00:16:01.360 | These are a bunch of clowns yelling at each other."

00:16:03.640 | Real hard work comes with sacrifice and trade-offs, but it is a source of deep fulfillment and

00:16:08.880 | satisfaction, and it makes the world go round.

00:16:11.720 | That's why we admire the transplant surgeon that sleeps on the floor of the OR.

00:16:15.280 | That's why the Timothee Chalamet speech, where you see an actor that's not just about being

00:16:20.080 | famous but seems to genuinely be about greatness.

00:16:22.800 | That's why we love LeBron James.

00:16:24.640 | We do love hard work, and we ought to love hard work, yet it feels like genuine hard

00:16:31.080 | work gets crowded out by the polarized vibes.

00:16:34.440 | Go ahead, Clay.

00:16:35.920 | Go ahead.

00:16:36.920 | I was going to say, or it gets crowded out by performative hard work, right?

00:16:41.640 | I think people working hard in busyness, Cal, you've written about this wonderfully.

00:16:48.320 | The idea of being busy has replaced actually doing good work, and I think that's an interesting

00:16:54.240 | thing to unpack here, too, which is people want to look at LeBron James and say, "I want

00:17:01.680 | to work like that," but instead of actually working like that, they just perform busy

00:17:05.360 | work in place of actually doing excellent work.

00:17:08.120 | I think that's interesting, too.

00:17:09.240 | How did busyness become a metric for productivity as opposed to doing good work being the metric

00:17:15.760 | for productivity?

00:17:16.760 | Does that make sense?

00:17:17.840 | Quality instead of busyness.

00:17:19.440 | I'll jump in on that because you're right.

00:17:22.040 | This is what I wrote about in the last book.

00:17:24.000 | I think there's two things going on here.

00:17:25.840 | I think, one, you're right.

00:17:28.000 | People who have just standard office jobs have to face this dynamic all the time.

00:17:33.400 | It's not just Elon Musk on the stage talking about it.

00:17:36.040 | This is the central productivity crisis I've written about, which is the fact that knowledge

00:17:40.440 | work has largely embraced the notion of pseudo productivity as its main measure of useful

00:17:45.080 | effort.

00:17:46.080 | That is, visible activity will be my proxy for your doing something useful, which has

00:17:49.620 | created this culture of performative busyness just in knowledge work in general.

00:17:54.640 | I think this vibe is out there more commonly than just the Silicon Valley types talking

00:18:00.480 | about it.

00:18:01.480 | So many people's jobs now, you say, "Why do I have to answer all these emails and jump

00:18:05.240 | on all these calls?

00:18:06.440 | This whole thing feels like performance.

00:18:07.800 | I'm not actually producing something."

00:18:10.360 | There's a skepticism of productivity that comes out of the fact that the way we're defining

00:18:16.640 | productivity in so many organizations is flawed.

00:18:19.120 | I think it's coming from a good place, but I think the conclusion is often wrong.

00:18:25.800 | This is often where I try to go, is what I was trying to say before, is we have these

00:18:28.880 | real reasons to be suspicious about what's happening now.

00:18:32.000 | We have a real reason to be suspicious about what Musk is saying.

00:18:36.160 | We have a real reason if you just work in a large office building, you have a real reason

00:18:40.960 | to be suspicious of what is being treated as productive.

00:18:45.080 | But the instinct to say what's happening here is that all of these notions of hard worker

00:18:51.600 | productivity are constructed by a small cabal to our disadvantage.

00:18:58.840 | That is where I think we get stuck because what do we really need to do is we really

00:19:03.900 | need this because if that's the answer, what are we going to do?

00:19:06.600 | Overthrow capitalism?

00:19:07.600 | What are we going to do?

00:19:08.600 | Right?

00:19:09.600 | But if the answer is like, no, Musk is a moron, so we could ignore him, right?

00:19:15.280 | And what's going on in these offices over here?

00:19:17.400 | Well, we have a terrible definition of productivity because it's complicated and we're being lazy

00:19:20.560 | about it.

00:19:21.560 | We have to demand that we get smarter about what matters, what doesn't, how we want to

00:19:25.120 | reinvent work, what work should be.

00:19:26.800 | I mean, I think if we just, when we just demonize the concept, I think it's very good if you're

00:19:32.780 | writing about the concept that could be useful for you, but it's not useful for anyone else.

00:19:36.800 | I think something like that's going on here.

00:19:38.760 | - Yes.

00:19:39.760 | I love that.

00:19:40.760 | I think it's essentially, you've got pseudo greatness versus real greatness, pseudo productivity

00:19:44.640 | versus real productivity, pseudo excellence versus real excellence, and the work or at

00:19:50.480 | least our work needs to be to tease those things apart and say that they're very different

00:19:56.280 | in that the pseudo version is not something to aspire towards or is not something to valorize,

00:20:03.740 | but the real version, which gets crowded out by the pseudo version, is actually a huge

00:20:07.740 | part of what makes the world go round and what makes life worth living.

00:20:11.700 | Recently on an Ezra Klein podcast, he talked about how the right is all about excellence

00:20:18.100 | and how the right has kind of like become the party of excellence.

00:20:20.540 | And I'm like, no, like that's absurd.

00:20:22.540 | Like anyone can be excellent.

00:20:24.300 | Excellent ought not to be politically coded.

00:20:27.100 | Excellence is trying to be the best that you can possibly be at something and getting intimate

00:20:30.980 | and close in overcoming alienation to find something that you love and to give it your

00:20:35.740 | all.

00:20:36.740 | Like, how did excellence become a vibe thing?

00:20:42.220 | And I think like it's about reclaiming these words that really are true to who we are,

00:20:47.220 | but to your point, they can't be the fake performative version.

00:20:54.180 | - Can I throw out two quick factors that might be involved, I'm interested in both your takes

00:20:57.900 | on this too, all right, to like auxiliary factors that could be happening in this tension

00:21:02.900 | going back and forth.

00:21:04.260 | One, I wonder if there's something going on here with like an uncanny valley effect.

00:21:10.100 | So if I see LeBron James crushing it on the court, right, shot 50 recently and he's like

00:21:16.340 | my age, which is crazy.

00:21:18.980 | I don't, there's no threat to me and what I've done in my life.

00:21:22.460 | Like there was never a possibility that I also could be like an NBA basketball star.

00:21:27.420 | So we can kind of admire that from afar.

00:21:28.900 | I can watch an Olympic skier.

00:21:30.500 | There's no threat to like where I am in my own accomplishments, it's a completely different

00:21:34.420 | other world.

00:21:35.420 | But if it's in the realm of like roughly speaking knowledge work, you're like, well, I'm in

00:21:39.580 | that world as well.

00:21:41.540 | And they are doing, they're claiming they're doing better.

00:21:45.380 | They're very rich.

00:21:46.380 | It's, they're like, they're famous for what they're doing.

00:21:48.420 | That somehow seems like, hey, we're started at the same starting line and I'm lapping

00:21:51.820 | you on the track.

00:21:52.820 | Like there's more of a threat there.

00:21:54.340 | And this threat might be particularly acute.

00:21:56.320 | I'm going to, I'm going to pathologize, you know, my own class right now, but for well-educated

00:22:01.620 | academic and journalists like my grad, my class, you're often coming from the exact

00:22:06.580 | same cohort as the Silicon Valley masters of the universe.

00:22:10.420 | And you're probably smarter than them and know that.

00:22:13.540 | Like I went to Harvard with this guy and he's not that smart and yet they have the billion

00:22:18.720 | dollar net worth.

00:22:20.140 | And you know, so what, I don't feel like they're better.

00:22:22.740 | I know they're not better than me and I know they don't have some sort of superpower I

00:22:25.980 | don't have.

00:22:26.980 | So maybe, you know, you're looking for a pathology there.

00:22:29.980 | So I wonder if that's part of it.

00:22:32.180 | And then the other thing I'm wondering if might be involved here is just language, being

00:22:37.820 | a little more careful with language.

00:22:39.140 | Like athletes are very good at this.

00:22:40.500 | You will never see an athlete at the post-game interview be like, yeah, I crushed it because

00:22:45.060 | I work so hard, right?

00:22:47.140 | Like Jalen Hurt is not like, you know, you know how long I'm in the gym and like how

00:22:50.820 | much I had to study these playbooks and how hard I worked.

00:22:54.540 | That's always like my team is great.

00:22:55.860 | Like I'm so happy to be there, whatever.

00:22:57.860 | And maybe the left picks up this sophistication a little bit more.

00:23:01.740 | Like this is unseemly to post a picture, the equivalent of posting a picture of your bicep

00:23:06.780 | on Instagram.

00:23:07.780 | Like it's kind of unseemly that try to brag about your work.

00:23:11.260 | So there's like this other sort of unseemliness that goes around.

00:23:14.060 | These are secondary factors at best, but I'm curious about them.

00:23:18.100 | I have thoughts on that.

00:23:19.100 | The first one is I think part of the problem with the comparison game is just like everyone's

00:23:25.220 | success is way more available to us now, right?

00:23:27.140 | Like it's very easy to see who, you know, obviously the top of the top has always been

00:23:31.300 | available to us, but now we can see all of our peers on Instagram, on social media, how

00:23:35.620 | they're doing.

00:23:36.620 | And it's just an endless comparison game.

00:23:38.900 | And I think that is probably exacerbating this problem.

00:23:41.700 | As to your second point, I wonder if part of the problem there specifically with athletes

00:23:46.660 | is like they have an objective, sports is super objective, right?

00:23:49.940 | You win or you lose, you have more points or you have less points.

00:23:52.780 | And Jalen Hurts can point to like, "I won the Super Bowl, so I'm clearly great at my

00:23:56.660 | job."

00:23:57.660 | Whereas a lot of people in knowledge work don't have that sort of objective metric.

00:24:03.260 | So the closest thing they have is, "I worked 17 hours a day and I worked 120 hours a week."

00:24:09.220 | And I think that sort of blends into another thing at play here that a friend of both of

00:24:14.980 | our pods, Derek Thompson wrote a great story on last year in the Atlantic on workism and

00:24:20.020 | like how work has essentially become not so much about, to quote him, I believe he said

00:24:26.220 | this, not so much about material production as identity production.

00:24:28.780 | Like now that we have less places of belonging in our lives, we've turned to work as sort

00:24:33.940 | of our religion, our cathedral.

00:24:36.780 | And again, if that's where you're getting all your self-worth from, I think Elon Musk

00:24:39.940 | probably gets all of his self-worth from working, then it behooves you to be like, "Yeah, I'm

00:24:45.540 | working 17 hours a day and sleeping three and I don't know I'm doing the other four

00:24:49.060 | playing video games."

00:24:50.300 | Because then it makes you look like that's where all your self-worth is tied to.

00:24:55.140 | I think that ultimately what we're circling around here is like security versus insecurity

00:25:02.380 | in many ways.

00:25:03.460 | So if you're secure about your process, then you don't have to tell people that you were

00:25:08.100 | in the gym for six hours a day studying the playbook because you have confidence.

00:25:12.580 | You don't need to showcase it.

00:25:14.420 | If you're secure about your life, you don't have to compare yourself to other people,

00:25:18.740 | whether it's real or performative because you're secure about what you've done.

00:25:22.620 | If you're secure about your values, you can admire greatness even if you are not obsessed

00:25:27.640 | with what you do.

00:25:28.640 | And you can say, "You know, Timothee Chalamet is a great actor or LeBron James is a great

00:25:33.460 | athlete or Cal Newport is a great writer, but I'm not willing to make the trade-offs

00:25:38.860 | that they're willing to make and that's okay and I can still admire their greatness because

00:25:42.660 | I bet that they wish that they had more time with their kids or I bet that they wish they

00:25:47.300 | could just turn off their minds and have more hobbies."

00:25:51.020 | But all of that comes from a place of being secure with who you are and your values.

00:25:55.780 | And I think that maybe that's the second dairy problem here.

00:25:58.700 | So again, to retread where we've been, the first problem is when performative, elaborate

00:26:03.740 | kabuki steps in for the real thing and people see that and they get disgusted by that.

00:26:07.980 | I agree with that.

00:26:09.520 | But then the second problem is when there's the real thing, when there's genuine greatness,

00:26:13.020 | if people are insecure about themselves or their choices, then it's very inconvenient

00:26:17.320 | for them to acknowledge genuine greatness and instead of admiring it as a thing of beauty,

00:26:22.340 | they say, "Well, that person must just have a miserable life," or, "That's just capitalism,"

00:26:30.700 | and actually like by going to medical school and becoming a transplant surgeon, they're

00:26:34.100 | just part of a system, even though that system might very well save your grandma's life the

00:26:38.240 | next week.

00:26:40.020 | But if you're secure in your values and you're secure in your own life, then if you choose

00:26:44.200 | to pursue your own version of greatness, you'll do so from a place of security and you won't

00:26:48.440 | have to parade around with a chainsaw, and that might mean posting pictures of yourself

00:26:52.320 | on Instagram.

00:26:53.320 | Like we all have our own personal version of parading around with a chainsaw.

00:26:57.520 | And if you don't choose to pursue greatness because you don't want to accept the trade-offs

00:27:01.800 | and the sacrifices that come with it, then you can still admire it in other people, and

00:27:06.560 | to me, that's what this comes down to.

00:27:08.460 | So this goes back to Eric's article.

00:27:11.400 | Would this explain part of what you're talking about?

00:27:12.720 | This was a very smart part from his article, which comes from the book he's writing.

00:27:17.020 | He said part of what's different about that, like we're worried about this, we're having

00:27:20.520 | this conversation now, we wouldn't have had this conversation in 1955.

00:27:24.860 | And his argument was we shifted our understanding of work from industriousness to entrepreneurialism.

00:27:32.520 | So in the age of industriousness, what mattered was I did, I'm a good worker.

00:27:38.920 | Like I do my job well, right?

00:27:41.360 | Like here I have my job, I'm a GM, I think this was in Anna Wiener's review of his book

00:27:46.360 | from The New Yorker, and I do it really well, and I'm proud of that.

00:27:49.040 | But there's no notion of, there's a notion of greatness, but it wasn't something that

00:27:53.160 | most people pursued.

00:27:54.160 | And then yeah, some athletes did or some such.

00:27:55.760 | And then the shift that he argues in his book is that as we shifted to an entrepreneurial

00:28:00.160 | culture, part of the shift was culturally now the idea of you are in charge of your

00:28:05.680 | own career, there is no limit to you.

00:28:07.880 | You can and probably should try to get after it and make a name for yourself.

00:28:11.920 | This became on the plate of almost everyone.

00:28:13.920 | A lot more people did it, but more importantly, it put a lot more people into a context where

00:28:20.320 | you could have done it, or at least that became the cultural change.

00:28:23.320 | So now I'm thinking back, I'm thinking, "Eric, actually, your book is pretty smart," because

00:28:26.960 | this idea is starting to help me make sense of what we're talking about, is that maybe

00:28:32.040 | we have whiplash from a culture that suddenly says, "You know, you could think about trying

00:28:40.080 | to be quote-unquote great," in a way that I don't think my grandparents would have thought

00:28:44.400 | about.

00:28:45.400 | It just was like, "No, I do my job well, and I'm a deacon at the church, and my kids are

00:28:48.240 | raised right, and I'm respected in my town.

00:28:50.800 | What else?

00:28:51.800 | I'm killing it.

00:28:52.800 | What are we talking about here?

00:28:53.800 | The generation that went through the Great Depression, that's killing it.

00:28:55.400 | Our generation is like, "Well, how many sub-stack subscribers do I have?

00:29:02.640 | Heather Cox has a million.

00:29:03.880 | What am I doing here?"

00:29:04.880 | So I mean, I'm wondering how much of that's actually going on here.

00:29:09.320 | I think that's right.

00:29:10.320 | It seems to me just like an obsession with winning, because you think about the way you're

00:29:14.200 | characterizing your grandparents.

00:29:17.560 | I don't think they would have been ... It just feels to me like that switch from industriousness

00:29:21.680 | to entrepreneurialism, it all of a sudden becomes about who's on top.

00:29:25.400 | Am I winning?

00:29:26.640 | I think that is a big shift from just being like, "I go to work.

00:29:29.080 | I find meaning in work.

00:29:30.080 | I find meaning in coming home, and being a dad, and being a father, and being the coach

00:29:34.440 | of my son's sixth grade basketball team," there was no concept of, "I'm going to win."

00:29:40.200 | But now, I think a lot of people probably look at Elon Musk or Donald Trump, and they

00:29:44.520 | think, "That guy won.

00:29:46.320 | He won."

00:29:48.360 | Even we do this to some extent, right, Brad?

00:29:50.320 | We're always talking about, "Why are we not Andrew Huberman?"

00:29:55.800 | There's a sense of wanting to get to the top.

00:29:58.440 | I think there probably used to be more tolerance for, "I'm in the middle, and I'm feeling pretty

00:30:02.900 | good about finding meaning in the middle here," as opposed to being on the top of the mountain.

00:30:07.720 | >>Corey: Yeah, I have a long list of reasons for why we're not Andrew Huberman, but best

00:30:11.520 | I don't go into those right now.

00:30:14.480 | I think that's right.

00:30:15.480 | I think that in the 1940s and '50s, there was no LinkedIn.

00:30:19.840 | Cal, I know you're a fan of the Google Ngram.

00:30:23.440 | I bet you could look this up while I talk, but my guess is personal brand wasn't a word

00:30:28.480 | that appeared in anything that was published.

00:30:31.360 | I don't think anybody thought about having their own personal brand.

00:30:34.840 | You weren't measured in the number of followers you have.

00:30:39.360 | Because there's no internet, you're not comparing yourself to everyone in the world in their

00:30:43.360 | GPA and their degree.

00:30:44.760 | You're comparing yourself to the eight people that live in your neighborhood.

00:30:50.160 | Maybe when you saw greatness, it wasn't a threat to your own ego or your own sense of

00:30:54.400 | self in the way that it is now, because now you see greatness, and a part of you is like,

00:30:58.600 | "Oh, if I'm not doing that, what does that say about me?"

00:31:02.360 | What I would say is all that that says about you is that you're at a stage of your life

00:31:05.760 | where you've chosen not to make the sacrifices required to pursue that level of greatness.

00:31:12.160 | There's all kinds of different greatness too.

00:31:13.800 | There's greatness as the deacon at your church, there's greatness as a parent, there's greatness

00:31:17.080 | as a kindergarten teacher.

00:31:18.960 | We just happen to valorize very specific examples of that, and the examples that we valorize

00:31:23.960 | are entrepreneur, billionaires, professional athletes, and musicians.

00:31:28.560 | I'm going to bring up, this is from our latest Farewell episode, so regular listeners of

00:31:33.040 | Farewell, you heard this last week, perhaps my favorite quote ever, and I think the greatest

00:31:39.360 | line in all of literature is the last line of the novel Middlemarch, describing Dorothea

00:31:44.600 | Brooke, the main character of the book, and it is, "For the growing good of the world

00:31:49.560 | is partly dependent on unhistoric acts, and that things are not so ill with you and me

00:31:54.960 | as they might have been is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life

00:31:59.960 | in rest in unvisited tombs."

00:32:03.000 | What that essentially means is a big part of the reason that the world goes round is

00:32:06.600 | because people are just living their life and being good, decent people, and I think

00:32:11.320 | that maybe that gets swept out a lot with this current obsession with winning in public

00:32:17.960 | greatness.

00:32:18.960 | How broad is this interest, I wonder, as well?

00:32:22.800 | Okay, so we're thinking demographically.

00:32:25.080 | Are we in a bubble?

00:32:26.080 | I mean, it's a bubble where whatever, we're well-educated sort of media-adjacent figures

00:32:31.760 | with like audiences.

00:32:34.220 | How representative are we?

00:32:36.720 | And the writers, Eric, at the New York Times, the Anna Wiener Review from the New Yorker,

00:32:41.040 | we're all in this like similar bubble.

00:32:43.320 | We write for elite publications, we write books, we have podcasts.

00:32:47.040 | How broad, I wonder, does this increased interest in greatness or this increased insecurity

00:32:52.160 | about am I doing enough, how broad does that go?

00:32:54.760 | I really don't know.

00:32:56.480 | I think that the interest in greatness goes very broad.

00:32:59.880 | I don't know about the insecurity, and the reason I think the interest in greatness goes

00:33:03.420 | very broad is I think, and I'm putting on my armchair political scientist hat, I think

00:33:09.560 | Obama represented greatness, and Obama was a very popular president because people voted

00:33:14.900 | for someone that wanted to build things and be great and was aspirational for individuals

00:33:19.400 | in a country.

00:33:20.880 | And then I think for a million different reasons, the left lost that, and the left is all about

00:33:25.080 | here, all the things that's wrong.

00:33:26.160 | There's very little talk about building or being excellent or about being great, and

00:33:30.440 | whether it's the real or the performative version, that depends on your politics, but

00:33:33.720 | the right picked that up, at least the perception of that up, and now people love that.

00:33:39.080 | I mean, Vivek Ramaswamy is running for governor in Ohio, I don't know if he lives there, and

00:33:42.640 | his whole campaign is like excellence.

00:33:44.980 | Now my definition of excellence is very different than his, but I'm sure he spent a good chunk

00:33:50.260 | of change doing market research and chose that the thing to run on is excellence, why?

00:33:54.420 | Because people see the left as somehow opposed to excellence.

00:33:57.560 | So I think that it's very big in the culture, and make America great again, he literally

00:34:04.220 | chose the word great, and I think that you could argue that that does two things.

00:34:08.980 | I think that one is it codes and says that America has become something that it wasn't,

00:34:13.740 | and I want to go back to the 50s, and I think a lot of people get value in that, but I think

00:34:18.500 | other people see it as we should be great, we should be proud of our hard work, we should

00:34:22.620 | be proud of our industriousness.

00:34:24.500 | I think that it's also like, we should be great, and we should work hard, and we should

00:34:29.580 | be leaders, and we should strive to build things, and people are inherently attracted

00:34:36.620 | to that, and I think that there's a vibe that elites like, "Ugh, we don't like that unless

00:34:42.780 | it's on our terms," and I think that's a real thing.

00:34:46.700 | So what do you think about this prescription?

00:34:47.700 | Because I'm thinking through what we're talking about, okay, so what are some prescriptions?

00:34:52.460 | One, I think it's useful to say we got to understand that the thing that we're talking

00:34:58.700 | about, like the real issue is performative versus real.

00:35:01.340 | We got to talk about pseudo productivity is a problem, it is really annoying, but there

00:35:05.220 | is such thing as actual meaningful productivity, that performative greatness is annoying, but

00:35:11.540 | there's such thing as real greatness that should be lauded.

00:35:14.700 | We recognize that.

00:35:16.060 | The right response, here's a proposed prescription, the right response then is to try to push

00:35:23.620 | back on, define, and reject the pseudo, as opposed to try to build a sort of theoretical

00:35:32.840 | framework that just makes productivity or greatness writ large something that's a problem.

00:35:40.740 | That's easier.

00:35:41.740 | Also, it's like a flex, if you're really smart, because you have about 150 years' worth of

00:35:47.660 | post-Marxian theory to draw from and talk about.

00:35:51.380 | Eric kind of goes there in his book to some degree, the degree to which, well, entrepreneurialism

00:35:54.860 | is somehow a construct of the capitalist class to try to paper over the sort of economic

00:35:58.740 | precarity that we're in, but I think that is getting in the way.

00:36:05.340 | Yeah, none of these people deadlift, none of these people run 800s, none of these people

00:36:11.020 | make beautiful music, none of these people do woodwork.

00:36:14.180 | It's true.

00:36:15.180 | Well, if they ran 800s, they would be so upset at life that they wouldn't do anything, because

00:36:20.180 | that's just a dirty point.

00:36:21.180 | No, but my point is, if you touch grass and you do real things in the world, you don't

00:36:26.180 | even have to be world-class, but if you give something your all, which is your own personal

00:36:31.220 | version of greatness, you realize how freaking awesome it is.

00:36:35.780 | You don't need to draw on Marxist theory to shut it down.

00:36:38.980 | You say, "Wow, training for that marathon was so much harder than I thought, and it

00:36:43.580 | felt so good," and that's very different than performative greatness, but the real thing,

00:36:48.820 | that's worth fighting for.

00:36:51.980 | That to me, I think, is the ultimate prescription, I guess the only addition to your prescription,

00:36:56.400 | is yeah, when there's the pseudo version of any of these things, we should call it out

00:36:59.860 | and we should name it and we should say, "This is elaborate kabuki," and we should laugh

00:37:03.660 | at it and we should make fun of it, but instead of trying to throw the baby out with the bath

00:37:08.640 | water or come up with this intellectual snarky reason for why all hard work or all greatness

00:37:12.700 | or all productivity is bad, we should say, "And the real thing is freaking awesome."

00:37:16.820 | Yeah.

00:37:17.820 | I always say, you don't need a complicated theory when plain stupidity will suffice.

00:37:25.100 | In my writing, the famous case study is email and distraction.

00:37:28.420 | I probably know more about the rise of email and knowledge work and its impact than any

00:37:33.540 | living human.

00:37:34.540 | I wrote a book about it, endless articles about it, and from my point of view, if you

00:37:38.140 | really study it, it's an unforced error.

00:37:40.940 | You introduce this tool for one purpose, replace fax machines and voicemails, and you have

00:37:44.620 | almost immediately due to the way that we deal with personal productivity and knowledge

00:37:48.380 | work, you have this unexpected consequence of communication volume metastasizing and

00:37:53.660 | suddenly we're distracted all the time.

00:37:55.380 | You don't need a nefarious villain to understand why that happened, and yet there was always

00:38:02.380 | this, if you cover this topic, always this drumbeat of, "If I feel bad because I'm being

00:38:07.620 | distracted all the time, it has to be because someone else is exploiting me.

00:38:11.740 | It has to be I'm on email all the time because this somehow is allowing the managerial class

00:38:17.500 | to exploit more value from my labor, to alienate me more from my labor."

00:38:20.900 | It's some sort of psychic mind games of trying to have control.

00:38:23.880 | You can document it.

00:38:24.880 | It's like, "Nah, it's just this tool messed up the ecosystem.

00:38:28.260 | You threw it in and it messed it up."

00:38:30.180 | As long as we're going to sit around and be like, "No, there's a bad guy here and we're

00:38:32.980 | hunting for the bad guy with our torches," we're not going to be actually trying to clear

00:38:36.940 | the invasive species out of the ecosystem, try to get back.

00:38:39.020 | It's like, "We got to fix what's going on here.

00:38:40.180 | We got to get rid of the kudzu."

00:38:42.300 | I think that's part of what's going on here is we need to yell louder about the nonsense.

00:38:47.900 | The Musk performance is just nonsense.

00:38:49.780 | Again, I think I mentioned this earlier.

00:38:52.420 | He's running seven companies, so really the thing he is showing us is that in 10 to 15

00:38:58.060 | hours a week, you can actually be a successful CEO because that's what he's doing.

00:39:02.420 | He might be working 120 hours a week, but he's spreading that very, very thin.

00:39:05.420 | If he really wanted to make the argument that you need to work 120 hours to do one thing

00:39:08.900 | well, he would have dropped everything else and just done one thing well, so that's nonsense.

00:39:12.380 | I think pseudoproductivity in the workplace, less nefarious in its origins, but it's just

00:39:17.540 | as annoying.

00:39:18.540 | We need to yell about it.

00:39:19.540 | All of these meetings, everyone jumping on calls and no one really pinning down what

00:39:23.180 | it is you're trying to do and just making the whole thing activity-based, we got to

00:39:26.220 | yell about it.

00:39:27.220 | That's a problem, but we don't need a complicated theory to understand why it's a problem.

00:39:31.500 | I think complicated theories are almost always smokescreens.

00:39:35.940 | I know this even in the world of mathematics where I do complicated math theories.

00:39:40.260 | It's usually the simple theories that win the day.

00:39:43.420 | You can come up with complicated theories and it looks smart and your math is complicated

00:39:46.660 | and you can even get a couple of papers accepted that way, but the real great minds in mathematics,

00:39:51.620 | it's typically like, "Oh, I cut to the core of it.

00:39:53.700 | Here's what's really going on."

00:39:54.700 | I think that's what's happening here.

00:39:56.500 | Call out the nonsense, but there isn't necessarily a complicated theoretically-induced nefarious

00:40:03.820 | scheme that we all have to write complicated journal papers about.

00:40:07.260 | All right.

00:40:08.260 | I have two follow-ups.

00:40:09.260 | The first is complexity versus simplicity or complicating things versus making them

00:40:14.500 | simple.

00:40:15.860 | You see this all the time in any kind of sport performance where there's this real temptation

00:40:23.540 | to have a super complicated program for what you're going to do at the gym or for your

00:40:27.740 | running and you have to have all these protocols and routines and you have to track everything.

00:40:33.700 | The reason for that is because you can hide behind complexity.

00:40:36.660 | So if something's not going well, well, it must be my complicated routine or it must

00:40:39.540 | be protocol six out of seven, so I'm going to change it up.

00:40:42.700 | When you make something really complicated and complex, you get to talk about it all

00:40:45.500 | the time.

00:40:46.500 | So you can go to cocktail parties and you can post on social media about all that you're

00:40:49.900 | doing and all the studying and methodology behind your program.

00:40:53.740 | But simplicity, which is you show up and you do the workout, you can't hide behind that.

00:40:57.100 | You either do the workout or you don't.

00:40:59.580 | Every single great coach will tell you that getting better at any sport or developing

00:41:04.820 | any physical capacity, it's just simple.

00:41:07.700 | Find the system you want to stress, stress it, recover, and rinse and repeat.

00:41:11.100 | You don't need fancy protocols.

00:41:12.100 | You don't need complexity.

00:41:13.100 | It is simple.

00:41:14.260 | So I just love how you come to the same conclusion in your own little corner of the universe

00:41:19.540 | and I think that's probably a fairly universal truth that sometimes things are complex.

00:41:23.900 | This is Oskam's Razor, the simplest thing is generally the actual thing.

00:41:28.340 | My second point that I want to make that I think is important is there are going to be

00:41:30.740 | some people listening and I'm curious what you think, Cal and Clay, before I offer my

00:41:33.980 | take that are saying a lot of what you guys are saying makes sense, but Elon Musk is pretty

00:41:39.060 | great.

00:41:40.060 | I mean, he's built all these companies, Starlink is an insane technology, Tesla completely

00:41:46.700 | overhauled how we think about vehicular transportation in America, SpaceX is like on some accounts

00:41:53.380 | doing better than NASA or at least has performed better than NASA, and yes, he got all of these

00:41:57.860 | government grants and all this government money to do these things, but still, he was

00:42:01.540 | the head of these companies.

00:42:03.220 | So who are you guys that have written a couple books that have this podcast to say that Elon

00:42:07.140 | Musk isn't great?

00:42:09.140 | So let's hear what you guys have to say about that.

00:42:11.220 | Again, I have my own answer, but let's hit this head on.

00:42:13.940 | I think it's a great point and it's one I thought I was thinking about as we were texting

00:42:17.700 | about this, but I think the thing that people are celebrating him for are not the things

00:42:21.380 | that actually have made him great to the extent that he's great, right?

00:42:26.180 | Great success, he's obviously very smart as a businessman, but I don't think people are

00:42:29.660 | celebrating him because of business decisions he's made.

00:42:32.300 | I think they're celebrating because he shows up on stage wearing a ridiculous outfit and

00:42:35.980 | a gold chain and sunglasses and busts out a chainsaw.

00:42:41.020 | And I think that gets at a larger problem of like we are maybe judging the winners and

00:42:50.060 | losers of this game by the wrong metrics, right?

00:42:52.980 | The fact that you can have pseudo productivity over productivity suggests that there's a

00:42:58.940 | way to shadow perform your job versus actually doing your job.

00:43:02.980 | And we're out there celebrating people for the ways in which they perform rather than

00:43:06.540 | the actual work.

00:43:07.540 | I don't know if that makes sense, but as we're talking about this, I'm thinking about someone

00:43:11.100 | who's like a teacher, right?

00:43:12.380 | I can't imagine a teacher has really a form of pseudo productivity because either you're

00:43:16.900 | like educating the kids or you aren't.

00:43:19.700 | But someone like in our world, in knowledge work or in jobs where you have a following

00:43:24.380 | or you're building a fan base, there is an element of like snake oil and selling yourself

00:43:29.880 | that gets in the way of actually making anything, if that makes sense, right?

00:43:32.660 | The selling of the product mattering more than the actual product.

00:43:35.380 | But in something like teaching or surgery where the product is how you're evaluated

00:43:39.340 | not based on how you sell it, there isn't as much of an ability to have a pseudo work.

00:43:44.220 | Does that make sense?

00:43:45.900 | Is that too convoluted?

00:43:47.460 | I buy that.

00:43:48.460 | I buy that.

00:43:49.460 | I mean, and I think it's worth acknowledging what Brad said that, yeah, Elon, I mean, another

00:43:55.700 | way to think about it is he has been very successful with various startups, right?

00:44:00.860 | So the critique is not that he is bad at technology or bad at startups.

00:44:07.300 | And what an idea that came to mind is I think, okay, here's the other caveat or factor, secondary

00:44:11.280 | factor I wanted to mention is that there is actually certain areas, context, where a sort

00:44:19.180 | of like 120-hour-a-week workload, workflow matters.

00:44:23.900 | It's typically in startup culture for like a small portion of the lifestyle of a company,

00:44:29.380 | lifeline of a company, right?

00:44:30.380 | The timeline of a company, right?

00:44:32.260 | So this is very overrepresented in the experience of Silicon Valley serial entrepreneurs.

00:44:38.460 | So I read the Musk biography.

00:44:40.360 | I've read both of them, actually.

00:44:42.860 | And so when SpaceX is getting off the ground, actually like having a singular leader who

00:44:48.420 | just is small enough that he can continually push everyone back to this is what matters

00:44:53.520 | and keeping them focusing on this and pushing away other things, that is actually a way

00:44:57.600 | how you get a high-risk startup up and off the ground.

00:44:59.660 | And he did that at Tesla, and he did that at SpaceX.

00:45:02.600 | So part of the problem is, though, is trying to extrapolate that.

00:45:05.360 | Steve Jobs did that early on like with the Mac group at Apple.

00:45:09.400 | Extrapolating that, though, that this is just how people should work in general, that is

00:45:13.200 | where the failure is.

00:45:14.200 | Musk kind of moves on when he gets bored.

00:45:15.760 | But if you look at all these companies, yes, I wrote about this in my New Yorker piece.

00:45:19.100 | When things are small, you might just have a single visionary leader who can hold the

00:45:23.200 | whole thing together.

00:45:24.560 | And in fact, that could be necessary for you to actually break out.

00:45:27.760 | But once your company is large and in the long run, you can't run it that way anymore.

00:45:30.960 | It's too big, and also it's just not sustainable or useful anymore.

00:45:34.360 | So I think that's part of it.

00:45:35.960 | Another part of it is I want to read this here from Nate Silver, who has been writing

00:45:39.520 | recently about the question, is Elon Musk smart or not?

00:45:43.280 | Because he's saying, like what you're pointing out, Brad, it's like, I think it's weird,

00:45:47.080 | this pushback from the left that he's somehow dumb, right?

00:45:50.560 | And just like it's somehow artificial.

00:45:54.440 | And here's what Silver said, which I think is an interesting take.

00:45:58.080 | He says that "Elon is highly intelligent in several ways does not mean that everything

00:46:02.600 | he does is brilliant.

00:46:04.340 | Everything he does are exceptionally dumb or dangerous, and we shouldn't make excuses

00:46:07.200 | for these to pretend that it's all or part of some master plan.

00:46:10.240 | But likewise, it's absurd to suggest that Elon isn't brilliant in many respects just

00:46:13.460 | because he isn't in others.

00:46:15.840 | And if he merely had very good SAT scores, I don't care.

00:46:19.080 | But he's demonstrated his intelligence through his accomplishment.

00:46:21.240 | This is a bit like criticizing Tom Brady because he had mediocre ratings in the NFL Combine."

00:46:26.320 | And he goes on and on.

00:46:27.320 | But he argues, you know, Elon is probably neurodivergent, and there are certain things

00:46:31.640 | he does very well, and there's other things like sort of interacting with normal humans

00:46:35.060 | or like reacting like a normal person on stage, and having feelings, having empathy, having

00:46:42.060 | any sort of moral compass that he's just really terrible at.

00:46:45.060 | So that probably gets at it, right?

00:46:46.660 | It's like, yeah, A, tech startups, you do go all out often for the first like year,

00:46:52.660 | and that's how these things succeed or fail.

00:46:54.380 | But we can't extrapolate that because if you tried that in many other fields long term,

00:46:58.340 | including athletic endeavors, including almost any other endeavors, you would burn out.

00:47:01.920 | And two, yeah, he's like really smart, sort of technical things and visionary things,

00:47:05.720 | and he's like a pretty terrible person at other things.

00:47:07.680 | And so both of those things could be true at the same time.

00:47:10.400 | And there's probably a lot of luck involved as well, something else we talk about a lot,

00:47:13.240 | right?

00:47:14.240 | Like, yeah.

00:47:15.240 | I have another take, and I'm shocked that you didn't say this, Cal, because this is

00:47:18.600 | to me like the ultimate Newportian take.

00:47:21.560 | Is it Newportian or Newportian?

00:47:23.220 | How would you say that?

00:47:24.220 | This is making me sound like Musk that I have a term named after my name.

00:47:27.080 | A Newportian take.

00:47:28.240 | This is the ultimate Newportian take.

00:47:31.720 | It's the simplest take, it's Oskam's razor.

00:47:35.460 | What I was going to say is I don't know if Elon Musk was great five years ago, and it

00:47:42.120 | depends on how you define great.

00:47:43.800 | There's a theory that he just put really smart people around him, and he's a sociopath, and

00:47:47.640 | that's what it takes to win in these kinds of companies.

00:47:50.400 | I don't really buy that.

00:47:51.400 | I think to have multiple successes, I think he's very good at running a startup, like

00:47:55.000 | you said.

00:47:56.640 | I just think that he got on Twitter and it turned his brain into sawdust.

00:48:02.560 | That's the simplest explanation.

00:48:04.320 | He didn't build any of this stuff after he became addicted to Twitter.

00:48:08.400 | All this was pre-his Twitter addiction.

00:48:10.600 | I think he got on Twitter and he tweets 50 times a day, and anyone, if I got on Twitter

00:48:16.640 | and tweeted 50 times a day, it would ruin my brain.

00:48:19.440 | I think the real story here is to be wary of social media.

00:48:26.600 | You hear this too.

00:48:27.600 | When I talk to professional sports teams, the biggest concern they have is players spending

00:48:31.240 | too much time on social media.

00:48:32.960 | Why?

00:48:33.960 | Because they think it takes away from that player's ability to pursue greatness in their

00:48:36.480 | sport.

00:48:37.680 | I think that no one took Elon's phone from him, and you spend that much time on Twitter,

00:48:42.200 | it turns your brain to mush.

00:48:43.760 | Yeah.

00:48:44.760 | No, fair enough.

00:48:45.760 | Maybe we're just talking too much about Elon Musk.

00:48:48.600 | It's only relevant in that he sparked a conversation.

00:48:50.920 | Yeah.

00:48:51.920 | Yeah, you're right.

00:48:52.920 | He's a hard figure to knock down.

00:48:53.920 | He was sociopathic, but also fantastic at startups, and then also his brain broke, which

00:48:58.640 | is Sam.

00:48:59.640 | This is Sam Harris's argument.

00:49:01.400 | He said this on the air.

00:49:02.400 | He has told this to me individually as well, is because he knows Elon, but now they feud.

00:49:09.200 | Twitter broke his brain.

00:49:10.200 | Yeah.

00:49:11.200 | Yeah.

00:49:12.200 | You're right.

00:49:13.200 | It's a cautionary tale.

00:49:14.200 | But Twitter would break my brain too.

00:49:15.520 | I think that I just have just enough self-awareness or just enough people in my lives to be like,

00:49:20.560 | "Man, you're spending too much time on social media," and then I get off.

00:49:24.560 | Because if I spent as much time on social media as Elon spent, I'd probably be a raging

00:49:28.880 | leftist instead of a trumper, but it would break my brain because that's the natural

00:49:34.020 | end point of social media.

00:49:35.560 | But isn't he also important not just for sparking this conversation, but because he is still

00:49:39.880 | the avatar for a lot of people of greatness.

00:49:44.680 | That goes back to our conversation of pseudo-greatness versus actual greatness.

00:49:48.040 | I think a lot of people look at him and want to emulate him.

00:49:52.480 | I think some people would say he's as great as he's ever been at this moment right now.

00:49:56.440 | I think that's part of the problem, is we're oriented towards the wrong horizon in some

00:50:02.280 | ways.

00:50:03.280 | I think that's also a larger conversation.

00:50:05.920 | We talk a lot about ... I think people think they want one thing, but they actually want

00:50:11.240 | another.

00:50:12.240 | If you talk about who emulates greatness in basketball, I think most people are going

00:50:16.240 | to say Michael Jordan.

00:50:17.240 | Now, if you took the qualities that Michael Jordan felt on the inside when he was at his

00:50:20.520 | greatest, this probably wouldn't make you feel good in terms of living that subjective

00:50:23.840 | experience in your life.

00:50:24.840 | You might be happier as Nikola Jokic, who seems to have a healthier relationship with

00:50:28.880 | being a champion.

00:50:29.880 | But I think we think we want one type of greatness, but what we actually want is a different type.

00:50:33.920 | I think that disconnect causes a lot of the turmoil.

00:50:37.560 | I'm going to try to tease that out a little bit more.

00:50:41.480 | I think that there's still two things at play here.

00:50:43.720 | The first is performative greatness versus real greatness, performative productivity

00:50:48.360 | versus real productivity, or pseudo, pick your adjective.

00:50:53.720 | I still think that's the most important battle for all of us to fight, for Cal to fight,

00:50:59.040 | for us to continue fighting, for us to fight together, because I think the first misstep

00:51:03.800 | that people make is they think they want masculinity, but then they go for performative masculinity.

00:51:09.960 | They think they want greatness, but then they go for performative greatness.

00:51:12.280 | They think they want an exercise program, and they want to be fit, but then they go

00:51:15.040 | for performative fitness.

00:51:16.600 | They think they want a certain family life, but then they go for the performative version.

00:51:20.040 | It's the, to quote Steve, who's not here, it's the Instagramification of everything.

00:51:24.600 | And I think that's the first problem.

00:51:26.900 | Then you overcome that problem, you've already done 90% of the work.

00:51:29.880 | So now you're able to, in your mind, tease out examples and role models of the real thing

00:51:34.520 | versus the performative version.

00:51:36.680 | Now when you get to the real thing, things get interesting.

00:51:39.840 | And then you get to say, is it worth the trade-offs to be Michael Jordan in my pursuit?

00:51:46.560 | Or can I do this more like Giannis Antetokounmpo, or Nicola Jokic, or Steph Curry than Michael

00:51:52.760 | Jordan?

00:51:53.760 | Can I get to greatness while having fun and playfulness?

00:51:56.680 | Or am I the kind of person that needs to have a chip on my shoulder?

00:51:59.000 | Clay, you want to say something?

00:52:00.000 | - Or just even can I be like Mikhail Bridges, or like Kentavious Caldwell Pope, right?

00:52:05.240 | I don't even necessarily need to be an all-star.

00:52:07.600 | Can I just be the sixth man and be happy with that?

00:52:10.920 | You know what I mean?

00:52:11.920 | This is already getting at the thing that I think we're talking about, which is winning.

00:52:15.520 | Maybe you don't need to be an NBA all-star.

00:52:16.760 | You can make a pretty good life coming off the bench as the seventh man in the NBA.

00:52:20.680 | And that's the equivalent of being a middle manager and being the deacon at your church,

00:52:24.600 | and that's a type of success too.

00:52:26.800 | - I think that's right.

00:52:27.800 | And I think all of this, though, comes after separating the bullshit from the real.

00:52:32.280 | And then once you get to the real, we could have a 40-series episodes or 40-podcast series

00:52:37.200 | 'cause it's such a fascinating question, we're all obsessed with it, which is how do you

00:52:40.680 | navigate these natural tensions and trade-offs that come with trying to get the best out

00:52:44.320 | of yourself?

00:52:45.320 | - Well, so then how would we deal with the other critique that comes from greatness,

00:52:48.160 | which is it's not fair, right?

00:52:51.640 | Different people are in different positions that go for different definitions of greatness.

00:52:58.200 | Michael Jordan was 6'6", which was table stakes for considering basketball to be serious.

00:53:05.840 | I think this is the second critique from the left, the first being any valoration of greatness

00:53:11.000 | is somehow like a capitalist construction, et cetera, et cetera.

00:53:13.640 | The second critique is, look, people start from different places, so it's best if we

00:53:20.320 | just don't talk about it.

00:53:21.800 | Because some people, I'm a single mom and it's taking every hour with my two shifts

00:53:27.280 | just to try to keep food on the table for my kids, and I can't go and work on whatever

00:53:33.080 | scheme to become great in X, Y, and Z, so maybe we should, in the interest of niceness

00:53:37.880 | and inclusivity, not talk about it.

00:53:39.360 | So how do we navigate that critique?

00:53:41.200 | Because that's probably the critique, I would say the elites, anti-greatness elites talk

00:53:46.720 | more about the theories.

00:53:47.720 | The critique I would hear most often sort of in my inbox would be of that second type.

00:53:52.360 | So I take it a little bit more seriously 'cause it's coming from real people.

00:53:55.480 | And so you gotta help me here.

00:53:56.600 | I should ask for help, like what's the right way to think about that?

00:53:59.800 | - I think that's the right critique.

00:54:02.560 | The right critique being like the much more interesting and I think more valid one.

00:54:08.080 | Someone who makes this point often is Ezra Klein, and I think he makes it really well.

00:54:12.840 | And he'll say just that.

00:54:14.040 | He's like, "My genetics are such that I love reading, that I have an obsessive personality,

00:54:20.120 | that I can read really fast, and I wasn't born in Syria.

00:54:24.720 | And if I was born in Syria, I wouldn't be doing what I'm doing.

00:54:27.320 | If I didn't have these genetics, I wouldn't be doing what I'm doing.

00:54:30.000 | So am I great or am I just lucky?"

00:54:33.200 | And my answer to that is yes, like the answer is both.

00:54:37.960 | So like I think that we have to acknowledge the role of circumstance in luck, in greatness,

00:54:44.200 | but that doesn't mean that we shouldn't celebrate it.

00:54:46.600 | I think that we can celebrate it while acknowledging the role of circumstance in luck.

00:54:50.520 | I think I made a post on Instagram a few weeks ago that essentially says anyone who says,

00:54:56.160 | "Look how hard I work, look how much I've done, don't tell me I got lucky," well, they

00:55:03.600 | clearly got lucky because they're too doofus-headed to realize how important luck is.

00:55:08.520 | But anyone who says, "You don't work hard and you're not that great, you just got lucky,"

00:55:14.560 | clearly has never worked hard or cared about greatness a day in their life because anyone

00:55:18.700 | who has skin in the game that's actually doing it knows it's both.

00:55:21.400 | It is being born in the right zip code.

00:55:23.200 | It is having certain genetics, but a lot of people are born in the same zip code as you

00:55:27.160 | and a lot of people have pretty good genetics and they just chose not to work hard.

00:55:31.200 | And that could be for a million different reasons.

00:55:34.020 | I'm not here to make a values judgment about it, but I don't think you should feel bad

00:55:37.600 | for making the most out of your situation and the most out of your gifts.

00:55:41.200 | And what's fascinating too, and the last thing I'll say here, is it's an argument that you

00:55:44.800 | hear out of very real people, and that's why I take it seriously and I appreciate it.

00:55:51.120 | However, when I've gone and I've given talks on my books in underserved areas, people who

00:55:57.600 | are born in like truly crappy situations, they're the ones that are the most inspired

00:56:03.300 | by this message of pursue greatness.

00:56:06.000 | They don't want to hear about how the structure is against them or how they're in an unlucky

00:56:09.080 | situation.

00:56:10.080 | They know that because they live that.

00:56:11.520 | They want to know how can they get better so they can work themselves out of it.

00:56:15.240 | Yeah, and I think there's absolute greatness, evaluating it across everybody, and then there's

00:56:23.200 | relative greatness and how great can you be given the circumstances you have, and I think

00:56:27.400 | our job as a society is to try to give everyone the same opportunity to achieve absolute greatness

00:56:36.400 | on that scale.

00:56:38.400 | But while the reality is still that everything's not going to be equal, you can still be great

00:56:42.720 | relative to your own circumstances, I think.

00:56:45.440 | So here's where it becomes more complicated because, I mean, I like the way this is set

00:56:49.560 | up.

00:56:50.560 | I mean, there's also like a religious, I think it's a Jewish notion of you have to make the

00:56:54.400 | most of what you have.

00:56:56.840 | It's not yours to complain, you know.

00:56:58.640 | If you have a particular gift, you have an obligation to do something that's going to

00:57:01.200 | help the world with it.

00:57:02.680 | Given like whatever latitude you have to do that, that'll look very different depending

00:57:06.800 | on what that would look like in war-torn Syria would be different than, you know, like Ezra

00:57:12.320 | growing up in Irvine, California or something like this.

00:57:14.840 | But you have an obligation to do something with whatever gifts you happen to have and

00:57:19.280 | opportunities you happen to have, do something with it.

00:57:22.240 | So that's like a notion that's out there.

00:57:24.680 | And then there's a notion that striving to get better at something important, regardless

00:57:29.080 | of scale or endpoint, is itself fulfilling, right?

00:57:33.780 | And so like do that, and if your endpoints and your opportunities happen to put you on

00:57:39.200 | like a very notable scale, I'm doing something at a big scale, don't be like Elon Musk about

00:57:45.160 | it.

00:57:46.160 | Don't, you know, have some self-awareness.

00:57:48.000 | But here's the complicated question I always get back to is like, okay, so how far should

00:57:53.040 | you go?

00:57:54.040 | I don't want to like psychologize this too much, but the pursuit of greatness is complicated,

00:57:58.880 | right?

00:57:59.880 | Like, I mean, I have a very complicated relationship with it.

00:58:02.400 | It's not simple.

00:58:03.520 | It's not, oh, all of the, it's not, it's all invented and it's all artificial and like

00:58:08.120 | you'll just feel better if you're just happy doing nothing.

00:58:10.440 | Like it really does feel good to do things, to get rewarded for it, and to have recognition.

00:58:14.840 | And it feels good and it can stay with you.

00:58:16.840 | It's also like really stressful and anxiety producing, and there's a lot of pathologies

00:58:20.180 | that come with it.

00:58:21.320 | And this is maybe going in a different direction.

00:58:24.040 | But if the idea is like, yeah, greatness is relative, but the point is like the pursuit

00:58:28.920 | of trying to do something useful with your gifts is important.

00:58:31.640 | It's a duty and it's going to make you feel better.

00:58:33.760 | But how far do you go?

00:58:35.160 | Like what is like most people, how do you figure out the line between Giannis and Jordan,

00:58:40.400 | you know?

00:58:41.400 | Or I mean, most of our audience probably doesn't know actually basketball.

00:58:43.600 | So to use like an actor, I was thinking of like an actor analogy, right?

00:58:47.740 | You know, Paul Rudd versus Daniel Day-Lewis, right?

00:58:52.360 | Like Paul Rudd, he's good and he got Ant-Man and got paid, you know, and then people like

00:58:56.880 | him, but he's not winning Oscars, right?

00:59:00.920 | How do – what's the advice there, right, about like how far to go?

00:59:05.180 | What a complicated question that becomes.

00:59:08.040 | Such a complicated question.

00:59:09.040 | To try to give a simple answer to a complicated question, for me it's like keep friends

00:59:12.800 | and family in your life that know who you are and will tell you when you've let greatness

00:59:17.280 | get in the way of who you actually are and if you're turned into an asshole.

00:59:21.620 | But I know a lot of people don't have that privilege, but I don't know, you got to

00:59:24.440 | surround yourself with good people.

00:59:25.520 | I tell Jesse not to make eye contact.

00:59:27.040 | I said, "Don't make eye contact.

00:59:30.000 | Keep this down."

00:59:31.000 | That's what I always say when we're podcasting here.

00:59:32.920 | So I think that this is really, really hard and I think that the first thing is just to

00:59:39.680 | be aware that as you're pursuing greatness, whatever that looks like to you, that it comes

00:59:43.380 | with tradeoffs and then to constantly evaluate are the tradeoffs that you're making in

00:59:48.160 | alignment with your values and to have some minimum effective doses for important things

00:59:54.200 | in your life.

00:59:55.600 | So let's make this real.

00:59:57.560 | I might say, "Hey, I've got a book coming out in a year.

00:59:59.940 | I think it's great.

01:00:00.940 | My own personal version of greatness is selling as many books as possible."

01:00:04.320 | And part of being a great author isn't just writing the book, you have to sell the book.

01:00:08.840 | However, I'm going to do everything I can to sell that book and I'm still going to

01:00:13.840 | coach my kids' basketball and baseball team and I'm not going to miss that.

01:00:17.240 | I'm not going to miss those games.

01:00:19.160 | I'm only going to travel twice a month.

01:00:21.800 | I am not going to miss family dinners, so on and so forth.

01:00:28.280 | I'm going to make sure that I exercise for at least 45 minutes a day.

01:00:32.840 | Once I hit those minimum effective dose for the other important areas of my life, then

01:00:37.040 | it's all in.

01:00:38.160 | So I'm all in, but not all the time.

01:00:40.400 | And I think every person has a different temperament in a different situation in their life where

01:00:45.600 | how they answer that question will look different and it will also look different at different

01:00:48.760 | points of your life.

01:00:50.840 | Someone who has a temperament that is maybe less inclined towards their family, well,

01:00:55.800 | their minimum effective doses are going to be less than mine.

01:00:58.760 | Someone whose temperament is more inclined toward family and community, their minimum

01:01:02.320 | effective doses are going to be higher than mine.

01:01:03.980 | It's not good or bad, it just is.

01:01:06.840 | And I think that people who achieve greatness on a planetary scale, the LeBron James and

01:01:12.600 | really any NBA player or coach, their unique mix of genetics and situation is such that

01:01:21.080 | they're just okay putting other parts of their life aside more than I might be.

01:01:25.880 | I mean, I think about this often with, and these are people that I admire, like JJ Reddick.

01:01:32.200 | Seems like a really good guy.

01:01:33.520 | I feel like I know him because I've long listened to his various podcasts.

01:01:36.840 | He seems normal.

01:01:37.840 | He's very thoughtful.

01:01:38.840 | He's very, very smart.

01:01:39.840 | He was a hell of an NBA basketball player.

01:01:42.160 | Had a great career.

01:01:43.300 | Well, after his career, instead of retiring and hanging out in like building tables in

01:01:49.920 | his basement and whatever, posting on Instagram once a day, he took a job traveling all over

01:01:55.220 | the country, arguably traveling more than when he was a player so that he could be an

01:01:58.960 | analyst talking about basketball.

01:02:01.400 | And then he took a job as the head coach of the Lakers.

01:02:04.680 | That's not good or bad, that just is.

01:02:06.760 | But clearly, JJ Reddick finds more value in that than doing other things.

01:02:11.880 | And I just think you should never work against yourself.

01:02:14.340 | For JJ Reddick to say, "I'm not going to do this because I should be spending more time

01:02:19.280 | with my family and my friends," that's not core to who he is.

01:02:23.520 | But the flip side of that is also true.

01:02:25.440 | If you're saying, "I feel like I should be spending more time with my family and friends,

01:02:29.040 | but society is pushing me to sell more books, so I'm going to focus more on shilling my

01:02:33.320 | books," that's also not true to who you are.

01:02:36.180 | So I really think this comes down to knowing who you are and knowing your values and then

01:02:38.680 | getting as much out of yourself as you can within those constraints, all the while knowing

01:02:43.240 | that this changes at different points in time and different points of your life.

01:02:46.360 | All right.

01:02:47.360 | So I'll try to summarize this.

01:02:48.360 | All right.

01:02:49.360 | I'm going to...

01:02:50.360 | I've summarized our advice.

01:02:51.360 | Then you got to tell me if you agree with this.

01:02:54.160 | All right.

01:02:55.340 | So one thing we're saying is maybe it's easier to stop using the word greatness.

01:02:59.680 | Here's what you really should think about.

01:03:02.720 | Pick a craft.

01:03:03.720 | Let's use the word craft.

01:03:04.720 | Pick a craft that you're well suited for, both in terms of your abilities and just opportunities

01:03:11.680 | in your life.

01:03:13.120 | Strive to get better at that craft.

01:03:15.800 | Practice quiet gratitude.

01:03:17.920 | So you should have pride and have gratitude for, "Hey, I'm getting better, and this is

01:03:22.040 | important, and I feel good about it," but be quiet about it.

01:03:24.280 | Don't run around the stage with a proverbial chainsaw.

01:03:27.140 | At the same time, have well-defined minimum effective doses for other things that matter

01:03:30.320 | to you in your life.

01:03:31.520 | These will differ between different people, but you got to be super clear about what they

01:03:34.320 | are at the moment, and you have to stick to them.

01:03:36.040 | If they're going to shift, then you got to shift them and be clear about it.

01:03:38.720 | All right.

01:03:39.720 | I'm going to coach this team for two years, and that's shifting, but never take that for

01:03:42.720 | granted.

01:03:43.720 | Know what that is.

01:03:44.720 | That is the template for greatness.

01:03:47.200 | So then what should commentators like us or people writing other op-eds in New York Times,

01:03:54.180 | what then is our role in this?

01:03:57.240 | One way to think about it is getting rid of the stuff that gets in the way of that.

01:04:00.360 | Pseudo productivity gets in the way of that.

01:04:03.080 | Pseudo greatness, flexing online gets in the way of that.

01:04:06.280 | So those who are public figures writing or thinking about this, that's what we should

01:04:10.440 | be doing, is maybe not trying to find whatever, the theoretical substructure that explains

01:04:14.280 | the universe, but help people identify and sidestep the craft that gets in the way of

01:04:18.640 | real greatness, which is picking a craft you're well-suited for, trying to get better at it,

01:04:21.920 | quiet gratitude, coupled with minimum effective doses.

01:04:26.600 | I think that's great, and then this sounds a little bit woo-woo, but the only thing I'd

01:04:30.060 | add is really know yourself and then pursue your own personal version of greatness, and

01:04:36.320 | don't let society shape that for you in either direction.

01:04:40.560 | If you are the person that just wants to be the stay-at-home parent, and you're going

01:04:45.640 | to be the best stay-at-home parent, and when you're being a stay-at-home parent, you feel

01:04:49.120 | like you're living your life's purpose, that is awesome.

01:04:52.320 | That is incredible.

01:04:53.320 | That is what you ought to do.

01:04:55.100 | If you are the person that can't stand an hour of being the primary parent, but every

01:05:00.920 | cell in your body tells you to go to medical school and to try to be the best surgeon that

01:05:05.080 | you can be, you should go be the best surgeon that you can be.

01:05:09.540 | Don't compare yourself to different people, because they have different temperaments and

01:05:12.240 | values than you.

01:05:13.240 | They're wired differently, and in both of those cases, don't be an insufferable asshole

01:05:18.120 | about it.

01:05:19.440 | Do it with quiet gratitude.

01:05:20.880 | Let the work speak for itself.

01:05:22.720 | Yeah, and I think to go back to your question, Cal, about what is our role in this, I mean,

01:05:27.900 | I think this one's really hard to make actionable, but the way I think about it is, and you wrote

01:05:31.820 | about this a lot in your last book, Slow Productivity, but just make sure that the noise we're making

01:05:37.700 | is actually meaningful.

01:05:39.860 | It's really difficult, right?

01:05:40.860 | Because you've got to make noise to sell what you're making.

01:05:43.460 | I think part of the problem is here is we live in such a noisy world, and when you live

01:05:48.380 | in a cafeteria where everyone's screaming, that's how you get to a guy up on stage prancing

01:05:53.940 | a chainsaw, because he's making more noise than everyone else.

01:05:57.140 | But again, that's really hard to apply that across society, to tell people we should all

01:06:03.900 | be making less noise and make that noise better and more meaningful and higher quality, to

01:06:07.980 | use a word you've used, but I do think that is part of our responsibility, right?

01:06:12.180 | We aren't just going to get on here and talk about bullshit, because we want to give you

01:06:16.580 | guys listeners something to listen to.

01:06:19.320 | We're going to get on here and we feel like we have something to add to the conversation.

01:06:23.220 | >> You know who's an interesting model for this?

01:06:25.780 | I feel like whenever I listen to a podcast that's hosted by or has on a guest a Navy

01:06:32.740 | SEAL, and tell me if you've had the same experience, they don't like bluster.

01:06:39.060 | I think they don't like bluster, and probably because that's a community where you'll get

01:06:44.380 | your ass kicked if you're strutting around and you're whatever.

01:06:47.420 | I don't know what it is, but I've listened to a few of these podcasts, and it's an interesting

01:06:53.620 | – because I'm trying to think of an example on the right.

01:06:55.740 | We're kind of saying to the left, "Okay, will you stop pathologizing greatness with

01:07:00.020 | theoretical frameworks?"

01:07:01.300 | What we need to do is fix the definition and get rid of the stuff that gets in the way

01:07:04.380 | of the useful definition.

01:07:05.660 | On the right, we're sort of saying, "Stop bicep flex greatness."

01:07:09.340 | It's sort of very performative, like, "Hey, I'm going to talk about my bench press on

01:07:13.860 | Instagram," or this or that.

01:07:15.060 | I'm trying to give an example on the right.

01:07:16.820 | Look towards this.

01:07:17.820 | I don't know.

01:07:19.100 | Maybe it's special forces.

01:07:20.100 | Some of those guys, at least the SEALs, they also don't tend to be, just for practical

01:07:25.180 | purposes, super swole when they're still on the teams because it's inefficient to carry

01:07:29.300 | around that much muscle weight, and they tend to be – they really don't like to brag.

01:07:35.340 | Maybe that's – there's an example there.

01:07:37.420 | They get really good at what they do and have a culture of like, we get really upset if

01:07:42.100 | someone starts sounding off too much, gets a little bit too proud.

01:07:46.500 | But they're great at what they do, and they strive, and it's useful, and there's utility

01:07:49.740 | to it.

01:07:50.740 | So maybe that's our example from the right.

01:07:54.300 | Yeah, and there's no pseudo productivity there in the SEALs.

01:07:57.100 | You can't pretend to be working, I don't think, when you're a Navy SEAL.

01:08:00.620 | Right, and it's entirely different because what I like about the Navy SEAL example is

01:08:05.140 | it has like the ultimate foil, which is, over the last two years, there's been this movement

01:08:11.660 | where people sell like a one-week retreat where you train like a SEAL, and it's the

01:08:17.340 | fakest bullshit ever.

01:08:18.820 | It's like you sign up and you pay someone $10,000 to scream at you for a week, and that's

01:08:24.060 | not at all what actual – like, I've talked to Navy SEALs.

01:08:26.540 | That's not what they do in their training.

01:08:31.060 | What I would say is that unfortunately, I think a lot of Navy SEALs now see performative

01:08:37.060 | greatness everywhere, and they say like they're probably more in our camp, which is just like

01:08:43.500 | being an honest person and having some integrity in how you think about these topics and talk

01:08:49.500 | about them.

01:08:50.500 | But yes, if the right wants manly, honorable, conservative – but the Elon Musk with the

01:08:59.380 | chainsaw, there's nothing conservative or honorable about it.

01:09:02.380 | That's why this all gets to be like really hard when you actually talk about political.

01:09:05.900 | But yes, the traditional conservative, honorable, masculine example of this would 100% be a

01:09:12.940 | soldier who we ought to respect because they serve their country.

01:09:16.380 | They put their life on the line, and they pursue their own version of greatness with

01:09:21.820 | no BS.

01:09:22.820 | That used to be the right, I think, like 15 years ago.

01:09:28.100 | So we could just blame social media for everything.

01:09:29.940 | The SEAL, by the way, I was thinking about, I was listening to a podcast by Andy Stumpf

01:09:33.900 | who is pretty cynical about the Navy and is just like to a fault, hates to be self-praising

01:09:42.820 | on anything.

01:09:44.060 | Then it turns out more recently, I think not only was he a SEAL, but he was in SEAL Team

01:09:47.140 | Six.

01:09:48.140 | He was like an elite of an elite, and he's uncomfortable even people just like valorizing

01:09:52.860 | Navy SEALs in general.

01:09:53.860 | He says, "Oh, we're not so great."

01:09:56.300 | That caught my attention.

01:09:57.300 | I think it's kind of the same way.

01:09:58.300 | He's a gruff guy, and he posts those pictures of his watch, which that's its own thing.

01:10:05.380 | But if you listen to his podcast, really what he cares about is his men and the stories

01:10:11.540 | of what people have gone through.

01:10:13.280 | Most of his podcast is having on veterans and talking through, and the thing that haunts

01:10:18.820 | him is the men he lost in Iraq.

01:10:22.420 | So it's interesting.

01:10:23.420 | He's big, and he's black belt in jiu-jitsu or whatever.

01:10:25.940 | Man, that guy does not brag.

01:10:27.940 | I feel like he could put me into a stuff sack if he got mad at me.

01:10:32.980 | He would just go like that.

01:10:36.340 | But he doesn't go around acting like that's the case.

01:10:38.780 | I don't know.

01:10:39.780 | I think between our basketball references and our Navy SEAL references, we have now

01:10:42.260 | officially...

01:10:43.260 | I'm checking the notes here.

01:10:44.260 | Yeah, we've lost every female listener to this episode.

01:10:46.340 | I think the last one just left.

01:10:48.820 | When I said Contavious Caldwell Pope, I knew that was going to be a big drop off in the

01:10:53.660 | listenership.

01:10:54.660 | With the door shut, I think, in the background, with the screen door slamming shut as someone

01:10:59.660 | walked off into the field.

01:11:01.060 | Yeah.

01:11:02.060 | Yeah, but it's...

01:11:03.580 | I don't know.

01:11:06.740 | This example is, I think, gender neutral, and maybe we should catch ourselves in the

01:11:12.100 | examples that we're using, but Serena Williams, there is a fierceness in her style is very

01:11:19.480 | bold, and she was known for yelling at officials and screaming during points, but she wasn't

01:11:25.580 | faking it.

01:11:26.580 | She's the greatest tennis player of all time.

01:11:29.580 | Kaitlyn Clark plays with a lot of pizzazz on the basketball court.

01:11:34.660 | She's the greatest collegiate basketball player of all time, probably across both sexes, but

01:11:39.380 | she wasn't faking it.

01:11:41.940 | It wasn't performative.

01:11:45.620 | Maybe a place to drive this home is I put something up on social media, although I'm

01:11:51.980 | trying not to ruin my brain, where I essentially say LeBron James doesn't have to be parading

01:11:56.500 | around with a chainsaw because he's too busy shooting his 2,000 jump shots, and that's

01:12:01.460 | real greatness.

01:12:03.380 | Someone commented, "Yeah, but Elon Musk is so WWE, worldwide wrestling entertainment,

01:12:09.300 | and it's awesome."

01:12:10.980 | And I immediately thought, and I commented back, and I said, "Yeah, for pure entertainment

01:12:15.980 | value, it is, but if you want to watch real wrestling, you go to the University of Iowa,

01:12:21.720 | and I bet you can't name one guy on that wrestling team, but it's arguably the greatest sports

01:12:26.720 | program in history.

01:12:28.780 | That's real wrestling."

01:12:29.780 | And you know what this guy said?

01:12:31.220 | He said, "Touché, I've been owned on the internet today."

01:12:35.260 | But it's waking people up to that, and hopefully that guy had a realization, like, "Whoa, you're

01:12:39.700 | right."

01:12:40.700 | If you're watching Elon on stage, you can go down the YouTube wormhole and watch some

01:12:43.860 | videos about the Iowa wrestling program, but that gets back to just calling out pseudo-greatness

01:12:50.740 | without saying greatness is bad, with saying, "Hey, you want greatness?

01:12:53.460 | Look at the real thing.

01:12:54.460 | Admire that over there."

01:12:55.780 | That's our job.

01:12:57.020 | - What I'm seeing here, this commenter said, "Touché, his name is Sradd Bulberg."

01:13:01.380 | I don't know, man.

01:13:02.700 | I think this is, his picture looks a lot like you with a mustache.

01:13:07.460 | I don't know.

01:13:08.460 | I've seen him show up a lot.

01:13:10.380 | He really likes your work.

01:13:11.660 | - Yeah, yeah, yeah.

01:13:13.100 | You're too funny, Cal.

01:13:14.100 | No, the actual commenter, I'm not gonna name anyone's name that's not appropriate, but

01:13:19.900 | it's definitely one of these manly dudes who has "Trainer" in his name, and who you go

01:13:28.020 | to his profile and has a Roman gladiator aesthetic.

01:13:32.300 | - I feel like if you send that guy to Iowa Wrestling Videos, given what's already in

01:13:35.580 | his algorithm, he's going down, you're gonna get him red-pilled.

01:13:38.700 | So maybe he shouldn't be watching Iowa Wrestling, but you know.

01:13:44.300 | - But that's my point.

01:13:45.300 | It's the WWE version versus the real thing, and that cuts across everything.

01:13:48.860 | And I think the left is too quick to throw the baby out with the bathwater and say, "It's

01:13:53.620 | all bad."

01:13:54.620 | And the right is too quick to actually mistake the WWE version for the real thing.

01:13:59.700 | And the people wrestling at Iowa have no time for either, 'cause they're too busy trying

01:14:03.380 | to be great at what they do.

01:14:04.380 | - Yeah, no, I like that.

01:14:05.380 | I like that.

01:14:06.380 | I like that.

01:14:07.380 | Yeah, there's a better way to think about it.

01:14:08.380 | So have we solved all the problems?

01:14:11.380 | - We did.

01:14:12.380 | - I don't know if we solved all of them.

01:14:13.380 | I don't know if we solved any of them.

01:14:14.380 | I hope we were great.

01:14:15.380 | - Well, I am gonna parade around with a chainsaw after this episode, just to lean into my greatness.

01:14:22.760 | - The new Porsche and chainsaw?

01:14:24.340 | - Hold up my Webby Award or whatever.

01:14:26.180 | - It shouldn't be a chainsaw, though.

01:14:28.300 | If it's Cal, it should be like a time block planning book, what's like the manifestation

01:14:34.780 | of time block planning, I'm trying to think.

01:14:36.740 | - My planner.

01:14:37.740 | - Maybe it is a chainsaw, and you're just cutting everything that's not productive out

01:14:42.120 | of your day.

01:14:43.500 | - Cut it out of my way.

01:14:44.500 | - Scissors.

01:14:45.500 | - Other losers aren't doing this 'cause they're losers, but I deep work for 19 hours a day,

01:14:51.420 | 'til my rectum bleeds.

01:14:53.900 | That's what a man does.

01:14:55.740 | - I forgot my partner's name.

01:14:58.620 | My kid only knows me because they see me on TV.

01:15:01.620 | I know my partner by the nickname Roadblock, 'cause that's what I see her as.

01:15:05.500 | - Oh, man.

01:15:06.500 | - The road to greatness.

01:15:09.060 | - Yeah, this is the problem, and this is the kind of greatness that we need to continue

01:15:14.900 | to call out, and as a listener, hopefully you found this helpful.

01:15:19.340 | Hopefully this helps you define the role of greatness in your own life, and I think that

01:15:23.980 | once you, hopefully we've helped you see the difference between the performative Kabuki

01:15:28.700 | version and the real version, and it's the kind of thing where once you see it, you can't

01:15:31.900 | unsee it, and now that your radar is fine tuned to this, I suspect you'll start seeing

01:15:36.340 | it everywhere, and I think it's a really good way to decipher between signal and noise,

01:15:41.620 | and I'd encourage all of you, as you look for examples in your own life and sources

01:15:46.060 | of inspiration, to identify the noise and try to minimize it, and then to follow good

01:15:51.780 | signal.

01:15:52.780 | - Yeah, I agree.

01:15:53.780 | All right, well, gentlemen, thank you.

01:15:56.100 | A pleasure talking, and I'm glad we could share this with our audiences as well.

01:15:59.900 | So, I guess we have to get back to crushing it.

01:16:03.060 | - All right.

01:16:04.060 | - Gotta go win.

01:16:05.060 | Gotta go win.

01:16:06.060 | - Let's go win.

01:16:07.060 | - Thank you, Cal.

01:16:08.060 | - All I do is win.

01:16:09.060 | - Thank you.

01:16:10.060 | Thank you, Cal.

01:16:11.060 | Thank you, Clay.

01:16:12.060 | Thank you, Jesse, in the background, for doing the production, and hopefully we'll make this

01:16:16.940 | a more regular occurrence.

01:16:18.860 | - All right.

01:16:19.860 | Talk soon.

01:16:20.860 | That was my discussion with Brad and Clay, brought to you by the Land Rover Defender.

01:16:27.580 | Visit LandRoverUSA.com to learn more about the Defender.

01:16:30.780 | It's funny that they sponsored this particular episode, because Brad's neighbor in Asheville

01:16:35.700 | just bought a Defender, and he's always sending me photos of it, because he likes to look

01:16:39.900 | at that car.

01:16:40.900 | So, go to LandRoverUSA.com if you want to see what is this car that keeps being a part

01:16:46.400 | of Brad and I's life, whether we want it to or not.

01:16:48.660 | All right, I like that discussion.

01:16:50.220 | I think we covered a lot of ground.

01:16:51.700 | We got practical.

01:16:52.700 | We got philosophical.

01:16:53.980 | This idea of having people I know and who have been on the show before join me for an

01:16:59.780 | in-depth episode to talk about something timely, this is new.

01:17:03.380 | It wasn't the original intention for this series, but maybe it's something I'll play

01:17:06.620 | around with as time goes on.

01:17:08.140 | If there's other things that come up in the news, or a new book, or a new sort of cultural

01:17:12.900 | trend that I think my existing group of writer friends might have an interesting thing to

01:17:19.140 | say, maybe we'll do a few more of these episodes.

01:17:21.020 | But in the meantime, I have what I think of as a spring season lined up for more semi-regular

01:17:26.300 | in-depth episodes.

01:17:27.300 | I have a few writers I want to have on.

01:17:29.980 | I have at least one repeat guest in mind who I want to try to convince to come back in

01:17:34.260 | the show.

01:17:35.260 | I'll give you a hint, he's in the woods for a month right now, so I want to hear about

01:17:37.860 | how that goes.

01:17:38.860 | So, anyways, I'm trying to do more of this.

01:17:40.460 | I took a little bit of a hiatus during the late fall and winter, but I want to get back

01:17:44.700 | to it.

01:17:45.700 | So, stay tuned on our normal feed.

01:17:46.700 | I'll release these as I finish, but otherwise, Monday, you've got my normal episodes.

01:17:50.500 | I hope you enjoy this one, I hope you enjoy the ones to come, and until then, as always,

01:17:55.420 | stay deep.

01:17:56.420 | Hey, if you like this video, I think you'll really like this one as well.

The Elon Musk Paradox... Is Chasing Greatness Making You Miserable? (& How To Win)

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