52. BARRY SCHWARTZ: Stop Searching for the Best

Episode Transcript

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DWS052_040126_BARRY SCHWARTZ_FULL MIX

[00:00:00] Barry: And so all of a sudden everything becomes important and so you, you tell people, keep your eye on the important stuff, but from the point of view of the people making the choices, they’re all important.

[00:00:14] Michael: Hi, I am Michael Hyatt.

[00:00:15] Megan: And I’m Megan Hyatt Miller,

[00:00:16] Michael: and you’re listening to The Double Win Show.

[00:00:18] Megan: We are super excited today to share our recent conversation with Barry Schwartz.

[00:00:23] Michael: Okay. Lemme tell you a little bit about him. Barry spent more than 40 years asking a question. Most of us never think to ask, what if the things we assume make life better? Like more choices, better incentives, smarter metrics are actually making it worse. Wow. That all by itself is a revolutionary idea, but he’s a psychologist.

[00:00:46] He’s a professor emeritus at Swarthmore College, and his work sits at the intersection of psychology, economics, and moral philosophy. He’s written several books including The Paradox of Choice, which Megan and I read several years ago, why We Work and His Most Recent Choose Wisely, but across all his works, Swartz makes a single unified case.

[00:01:06] When we design our workplaces, our institutions, and our lives around optimization, guilty as charged. We don’t get diminishing returns. We erode the conditions that make work and life. Worth living in the first.

[00:01:19] Megan: This is such a great conversation. You guys are going to love this.

[00:01:22] Michael: We had a hard time stopping this could have been a two hour, three hour episode, but we made it an hour, so enjoy.

[00:01:32] Megan: Barry, welcome to the show.

[00:01:33] Barry: It’s a pleasure to be with you.

[00:01:35] Megan: We are so excited to talk to you. You book The Paradox of Choice, which I know is not your newest book, but is a book that I actually read a couple years ago, and Dad you’ve read I did, has been deeply meaningful to us and I think is the concept, this idea that we make the assumption.

[00:01:53] That more choice is always better as a solution to kind of the overwhelm that we experience, you know, and our, our community certainly experiences. You really disprove that idea in your work, and I’d love for you to just talk about that kind of at a high level for us as we get into this conversation.

[00:02:11] Barry: The key, uh, ideas, I think is this American society especially, but all western democratic societies think that freedom is sort of the most important thing in life, freedom and autonomy. And the way to give people freedom is to give them choice. It seems only sensible that you can’t have too much freedom.

[00:02:36] And so if you wanna enhance freedom, you just give people more choice. This is manifested in two different ways. One is that in parts of life where we’ve always had choice, like supermarket shopping, there are more options than there used to be. But in addition, there are aspects of life where we really didn’t have any choice.

[00:02:56] Where now we have real choice where to work, when to work, what job to take, what kind of romantic attachments to form, whether to have children and when to have children. All of these are up for grabs in a way that they weren’t 50 years ago. That isn’t to say that everybody did the same thing, but almost everybody did the same thing and most people didn’t give it a lot of thought.

[00:03:21] So you have an explosion of options within domains and an explosion of domains where there are now options. That all seems to be consistent with the view that freedom is good and more freedom is better, and what my work has suggested is that that view is not. Correct that adding freedom enhances wellbeing, but a point is reached where adding still more freedom actually turns the curve down and starts to decrease wellbeing.

[00:03:56] And if there’s enough quote, freedom of choice, it leads to paralysis. It leads to dissatisfaction even when people make good decisions and it can actually make people pretty miserable.

[00:04:09] Megan: Yeah.

[00:04:09] Barry: And so that’s the so-called paradox of choice. That choice is good, but more isn’t necessarily better.

[00:04:17] Megan: Yeah. Okay. I remember a story from the paradox of choice, which I, I don’t remember the details of, so I’d love for you to tell it briefly.

[00:04:24] For our audience, it’s the story of the grocery store and the jam, and you know, yes. That, that test. Will you tell that story? ’cause I think we can all relate to that. And it’s a good example of what you’re talking about.

[00:04:34] Barry: It is, and it was the first rigorous, empirical demonstration of what I was just talking to you about in the study.

[00:04:43] A fancy food grocery in Palo Alto, California, a very rich community. They had the custom, when they got a new product, they would put it on display and let their customer sample it. So the experimenters got them to cooperate in the study and they had this new product, expensive English jam, and one day they put out on this display table, 24 different flavors as the jam, and people could sample as many as they wanted.

[00:05:19] If they did come to the table and sample, they were given a coupon that would save them a dollar on any jam they bought. A few days later, they set up the same situation, except that instead of 24 jams, there were six. And once again, if people stopped by, they’d got a coupon to save ’em a buck. And the reason for the coupon is that you could actually count how many people who went to the display actually bought jam.

[00:05:48] And here’s what they found when there were 24 jams on display. More people came to the table, more people were interested, they tasted lots of jams. It was sexier than when there were only six jams on display, but one 10th as many people actually bought jam.

[00:06:11] Megan: Wow.

[00:06:12] Barry: So that, you know, it was great to see all this freedom of choice, but what it led to was paralysis, not liberation.

[00:06:22] Sheena Iyengar is the person who did that study. And that, as I say, is the first empirical evidence that even though choice is good, there can be too much of it.

[00:06:33] Megan: Yeah.

[00:06:34] Michael: You know, this is a really good word for people that create products and services because I think sometimes when you’re trying to sell a product or a service, you think, well, I’ve gotta have this, you know, in every flavor and, and what that leads to is probably.

[00:06:49] Less sales. I’m feeling with the rate of production now, because production has increased so exponentially, people are able to get products to market faster. There are more choices than ever, and the iterations are happening faster than ever. Just take like the software application space, you know, you’re working in a task management system and suddenly you hear about another task management system, and so you jump to that one because it, it promises an improvement of some sort.

[00:07:16] Yeah. But I want you to get to this idea of maximizer versus satisfier.

[00:07:22] Barry: So this was my and my colleagues’ contribution to this domain. There are two approaches you can take to any decision. One approach is only the best will do. This is the approach that we are encouraged to take when you’re putting money into your 401k.

[00:07:41] You wanna maximize your return on investment. When you choose a job, you wanna maximize your salary and maximize your opportunities for advancement and so on. The second approach is, instead of looking for the best, you’re looking for good enough.

[00:07:58] Michael: Hmm.

[00:07:59] Barry: Your standards may be low when it comes to some things, modest, when it comes to other things, and very high when it comes to still other things.

[00:08:07] But critically, as soon as you find something that meets your standards, whatever they are, you stop looking.

[00:08:14] Megan: Hmm.

[00:08:15] Barry: Now in a world where all you’ve got to choose between is Lee’s and Levi’s, there isn’t much difference between these two strategies, right? There are two brands and you’re gonna try ’em both on, and you’re gonna pick one.

[00:08:29] But in a world where there are 200 or 2000 or 20,000 options, these two strategies are dramatically different because if you are a maximizer, you have to look at every option. Otherwise, how do you know you found the best? When there are 2000 options, you’ll basically be walking around the streets naked before you pick a pair of jeans to wear.

[00:08:55] If you’re a satisfier, however, you don’t need to look at all the options. You look until you find one that meets your standards, and then you pick it and you stop looking and you’re not looking over your shoulder in case somehow you missed an opportunity for something even better. And what we find is indeed people differ in their orientations.

[00:09:18] Nobody’s a maximizer about everything, but some people are more inclined. To seek the best in many areas of life than other people are. And if you are a maximizer type, you find choice more problematic, more confusing, more paralyzing, and the results less satisfying.

[00:09:39] Megan: Hmm.

[00:09:40] Barry: And extreme maximizers are borderline clinically depressed.

[00:09:45] Wow. So this is not a trivial thing. It’s not just a nuisance. It actually can have profound effects on how you feel about the choices that you make and how you feel about your life in general. And you know, the thing is when people say, I only look for good enough, what people hear you say is You are settling.

[00:10:07] Michael: Yes.

[00:10:07] Barry: And settling is not a neutral description. When you say she’s settling, you’re implicitly criticizing what you’re saying is she’s just settling. Her standards should be higher, but she’s settling for the job, for the partner, for the restaurant, for the vacation, whatever. And so there’s enormous pressure on us to, uh, go through life with the idea that only the best will do.

[00:10:36] Michael: This may be a psychological condition on my part, but I wanna just confess for the sake of people listening if they experience this. So I love really nice backpacks. And when I say backpacks, I’m not talking about for hiking, but I mean, what, what I, what’s the word I’m looking for?

[00:10:53] Megan: Yeah, like for like, for, uh,

[00:10:54] Michael: computer.

[00:10:55] Megan: Computer bags.

[00:10:55] Michael: Yeah, computer bags. So recently, about two years ago, and, and I’m not proud of this, but I’m just confessing, um,

[00:11:01] Megan: this show, it turns into a confessional and or a therapist office on the regular. So, you know, welcome, welcome to our confessional booth in which you’re playing the part of the priest.

[00:11:12] Michael: So about two years ago, I ordered, and I’m not making this up, 14 different computer bags from Amazon. I figured I’d sort through ’em and I’d find the one I wanted. Well, I got it down to three and I thought, you know, I can’t really decide on these three, so I’m gonna keep these three and ship the rest back.

[00:11:27] Okay, fine. There’s one that I’ve been using consistently, and it’s good enough. In fact, it’s better than good enough. But I saw a Facebook ad three weeks ago. Simon Sinek was advertising.

[00:11:40] Megan: I saw the same Facebook ad, I

[00:11:41] Michael: know what you’re talking about. Bag the optimist bag. And I went, Ooh, that looks, you know, incrementally better than what I have,

[00:11:48] Megan: right?

[00:11:49] Michael: So I ordered it to which my wife said, this isn’t any better than what you’ve got. Just send it back. And I said, no, I wanna sit with it for a while, because I’m not sure it’s not better. So I still have that bag and I, I’m quickly approaching the window where I can’t return it to Amazon.

[00:12:05] Megan: Right?

[00:12:06] Michael: But how do I keep that from happening?

[00:12:07] I mean, it, it sounds like I just need to start with being self-aware of what’s happening.

[00:12:11] Barry: It helps a lot to be self-aware. And you know, I have various pieces of advice that I offer, but none of them are easy to adhere to, especially if you’re already in this sat maximizer mode. You have these three bags, which is already a problem.

[00:12:30] You have three instead. True fact. You know, and you say, well, this is gonna last me the rest of my professional life. I’ll just cycle through them. And then a new one comes along and you go, or your wife goes, you don’t really need that. And you go, but it might be better. And you use all of your strength to resist the temptation to buy it.

[00:12:55] But this nagging feeling that you’re passing up. A wonderful opportunity doesn’t just go away, so it’s gonna keep nagging at you and maybe eventually you’ll, your weakness of Will, will dominate and you’ll pull the trigger and get another bag you don’t need, or maybe you will, uh, resist temptation, but.

[00:13:15] That was a hard thing to do, and now comes another domain where,

[00:13:19] Michael: mm-hmm.

[00:13:20] Megan: Yeah,

[00:13:20] Barry: you could look, and again, it’s gonna feel unnatural and weird to stop looking before you’ve exhausted the possibilities. So what I tell people, you know, it’s sort of like working out in the weight room to become a better athlete, you have to understand that no pain, no gain.

[00:13:40] It’s going to be effortful, it’s going to be painful, and in the end you’ll be happier and you’ll suddenly discover there are an extra two hours in the day that you can use to do other things. And you what? What did I spend those two hours doing before? Oh, I know. I spent them on Amazon looking at computer bags.

[00:14:02] Megan: Yeah.

[00:14:02] Barry: Well now I don’t do that anymore, so. So that’s one thing you can do. I tell people. Choose when to choose. So sometimes if you need a new cell phone, instead of examining the possibilities, you can call a friend who recently got a new cell phone and say, you like it. And if your friend says yes, you just get it.

[00:14:24] Michael: Mm-hmm.

[00:14:25] Barry: And you don’t worry about whether it’s the best cell phone. So you sort of delegate the decision making to other people. Yeah. And they will sometimes consult you about your areas of experience and expertise. And so all of a sudden you’re still putting a lot of effort into choosing, but not with respect to every aspect of life.

[00:14:46] You’re delegating many of those choices to other people who you trust. Most important, I think, is to discipline yourself, to believe and act as if you believe that good enough is pretty much always good enough.

[00:15:00] Megan: Hmm.

[00:15:01] Michael: I got some work to do. I mean, because this

[00:15:03] Barry: honestly, well, most of us have some work to do.

[00:15:05] It turns out people who think that they have not been seduced by the market into seeking always the best, the best, the best. Discover that there are little parts of their lives where they want the best. So, you know what I’ve started doing, uh, when I go with a group of people to a restaurant, I don’t even look at the menu anymore.

[00:15:24] I listen to what my. Companions are ordering, and then I pick whichever one of those things sounds best. I

[00:15:31] Megan: love it.

[00:15:32] Barry: I love it. So I’ve reduced the set of options from however many the restaurant offers to basically however many people I’m with.

[00:15:39] Michael: I think for me, the issue is this, for me is a way of life. And in fact, even more poignantly, it’s become part of my identity.

[00:15:47] Mm-hmm. And identity’s a very difficult thing to shift. And being self-aware helps, but that’s really it. The, the, the route at which I need to take the X

[00:15:56] Megan: As you were talking, both of you, I kept thinking there’s such a cost associated with this that we are not aware of in terms of trade off. Not only do we have to manage all the stuff, you know, the, the three bags that now you don’t have, like you, you now have a net of four bags, one of which you may send back, one of which you may not

[00:16:16] Michael: two, you could bet I’m gonna send it back right after this.

[00:16:18] Megan: Yeah, right. Interview two. But if we hadn’t have done this interview, you would still have four bags, two of which you’re not using. I’m

[00:16:23] Barry: surprised that Amazon didn’t cancel your prime membership.

[00:16:26] Megan: Yeah, exactly. Right. Just, just punitively. But you know, there’s, there’s all the stuff that you have to manage that you’re not using, but you think maybe someday you will use, or you wanna just have options.

[00:16:36] You have three versions of the same thing in different colors or whatever. So there’s just the cognitive drain of that. Yeah. There’s the cognitive drain of even the simplest decisions like jam or jeans or your cell phone is. We have a finite amount of capacity in our brains. We know from, from brain science to make decisions which is being diminished all the time, and we’re, we’re spending it on this.

[00:17:04] Then you think about the fact, the time itself that it takes to make and curate these kinds of decisions. And you know what we hear all the time from those of you listening and feel ourselves is that there’s not enough time for all the things we need to do. Like the responsibilities that we have are too much.

[00:17:21] Lately we’ve been talking about just the kind of stress that we experience from the ambient noise that’s in the environment. You know, everything grounded, our feet shifting all the time, politically, economically, ai, all the things, right? Like it’s just a lot to process and I think this is a hidden.

[00:17:38] Driver of overwhelm in our lives. That’s actually voluntary, but we are, we’re totally unaware of it. And so consequently, we’re contributing to our overwhelm and it’s eating into the margin that we have to do things that would actually contribute to our own human flourishing, like being with real people in person and getting outside and walking or taking up a hobby or experiencing other rich in-person experiences because we’re literally sitting in front of our computers.

[00:18:07] Trying to decide which of the 20,000 options for denim we’re gonna choose for this year’s pair of jeans, when last year’s pair of jeans is just fine, you know?

[00:18:16] Barry: No, no, I think you’re exactly right. And you said something a second ago about, about having your identity wrapped up in this and with, with a former student.

[00:18:26] I’ve done some research that’s not in the paradox of choice. ’cause the research is newer, although I’m revising that book with him. Oh good. And it will be in the revision. And it’s all about choice and identity. And the argument we make, and we have evidence for it is this, when all there are are Lees and Levi’s, for the most part, the jeans you buy say nothing to the world about who you are because there just isn’t enough variety.

[00:18:57] So jeans are just jeans. However, when there are 20,000 options, now whether you like it or not. Your choice does say something about who you are, not just to the world, but also to yourself. I’m the kind of person who,

[00:19:15] Megan: yep,

[00:19:16] Barry: goes to this restaurant, buys this clothing, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, and what that does is it makes even trivial decisions into high stakes decisions.

[00:19:26] Michael: Yes.

[00:19:26] Barry: Because now it is a statement to the world about you and not just something to cover your behind when you go out. So what we’ve shown in lots of different areas involving decisions that are pretty trivial, is that when the set of options is large, people say that the choice they’re making is a reflection of their identity.

[00:19:49] Michael: Mm-hmm.

[00:19:50] Barry: And so all of a sudden everything becomes important. And so you, you tell people, keep your eye on the important stuff, but from the point of view of the people making the choices, they’re all important.

[00:20:10] Megan: Is there some kind of strategy here since that seems to just be like the human condition, especially among those of us who are affluent? And if you’re listening to the show, you fall into that category. You know, from a global perspective, certainly we have the means to make choices that quote unquote telegraph our identity to the world.

[00:20:31] Is there some way that we can narrow. Our sense of of, of what those things are so that we can sort of put a whole bunch of other ones in a basket labeled it doesn’t really matter, or something like how do we handle that?

[00:20:45] Barry: Well, I think what you said a few minutes ago is key, and that is the first step is self-awareness.

[00:20:51] You can’t solve a problem if you don’t appreciate that it’s a problem. Mm-hmm. And most people see the options we have, not as a problem, but as an opportunity. And of course it is an opportunity, but it’s an opportunity that has problems attached. So if you became self-aware. About this. That’s the first step toward making decisions about which parts of your life are worth devoting this kind of time and effort to.

[00:21:20] And which parts are just details. There are trade-offs that are inevitable unless people figure out a way to add two or three hours to our day. The time you spend buying jeans is time that you are not spending on, and you can list the things you’re not spending,

[00:21:37] Megan: yeah,

[00:21:37] Barry: time on and you’ll kick yourself afterwards.

[00:21:40] But then when the next shopping opportunity arises, you’ll do the same thing. Self-awareness, what really matters to me, what should really matter to me can help you separate the wheat from the chaff and not devote yourself to things that just don’t matter. I mean, we’re having some work done in our house, my wife and I, and that’s gonna require a little bit of repainting.

[00:22:05] So let me ask you. How many different shades of OFFWHITE do you think we need in society? How much time do you think we should spend on deciding which OFFWHITE is just the right offwhite for the bathroom ceiling? You know? Is this worth more than 10 seconds of your time? I don’t think so.

[00:22:28] Megan: No.

[00:22:29] Barry: But if the world has gone to the trouble to offer you a hundred different shades of offwhite, you should take advantage of that.

[00:22:36] Megan: Right? ‘

[00:22:37] Barry: cause one of them is gonna be perfect.

[00:22:39] Michael: Oh, it’s so true.

[00:22:40] Barry: And you know it. It is true. And the temptation is strong. And even if you don’t feel pulled, the advertisers are gonna push you as hard as they can to have that attitude. It seems un-American not to take advantage of all the options that the market has given us.

[00:22:57] So self-awareness is key. And then think of this as spending three hours twice a week in the weight room. Mm. Yes. You know, it’s not pleasant, but it’s incredibly beneficial. It will not be pleasant to limit your options, but it will be incredibly. Beneficial. In my most recent book, the one that just came out a few months ago, one of the arguments in this book, which is called Choose Wisely, is that economists have essentially instructed us that the right way to make decisions in life.

[00:23:35] Is to maximize. That’s the goal. Maximize utility, maximize return on investment. And if you don’t do that, you are not behaving rationally. And so they’ve attached an honorific to this. It isn’t just that you’re gonna end up with more money if you maximize return. In addition, you’re showing that you are a rational person and people who don’t pursue maximum return on investment are less rational than you are.

[00:24:06] So now it feels like it’s almost a moral obligation for you to maximize, because after all, you wanna show yourself in the world that you’re a rational person. This is not doing us a favor.

[00:24:18] Michael: It’s definitely not. And I was thinking about a friend of mine who’s a photographer, and when he told me this about 10 years ago, I thought it was odd.

[00:24:25] But now I’m beginning to see the wisdom of it. And that is, he said, I, I, I noticed that he always showed up in the same clothes. Ask him about that, and he said, yeah. He said, I literally only have one shirt that I wear in the summer. He said, I had several sets of it, but same thing with jeans. But he said, I don’t make any decisions about what to wear.

[00:24:43] I just grabbed the same shirt, the same jeans, and that’s what I wear. I think Steve Jobs was actually that way.

[00:24:49] Barry: You know the very well known writer of nonfiction books, Michael Lewis?

[00:24:54] Michael: Mm-hmm.

[00:24:55] Barry: He did an interview with Barack Obama when Obama was president. That appeared, I think, in Vanity Fair, and as they’re talking, Lewis asked him, you know, he said, you have this reputation that you kind of rotate through your suits.

[00:25:11] Monday for this suit, Tuesday for this one, Wednesday for this one, and so on. He says, how come Obama gives him this look and says, Michael, do you have any idea how many decisions I make in a day? You want me spending my time thinking about what suit to put on.

[00:25:32] Megan: Wow.

[00:25:33] Michael: Beautiful.

[00:25:33] Barry: So I, you know, that, that was my attitude.

[00:25:37] I would wear any color at all as long as it was blue. It just, it just made life easy, you know? It’s like Henry Ford. You can have the car any color you want, as long as it’s black. Well, I’m colorblind. So I basically had a whole set of clothing that was just carbon copies that my wife passed judgment on to convince me that no matter what I chose, there wouldn’t be a clash.

[00:26:01] I didn’t have to pay attention to whether this went with this because everything went with everything. ’cause everything was basically the same. And um, you know, it freed me up from some amount of time and worry about what kind of an idiot I looked like when I went out, went out into the world every day.

[00:26:20] Megan: That’s great.

[00:26:20] Barry: So I sympathize with your friend who just wears one kind of shirt and one kind of pants every day in the summertime.

[00:26:27] Michael: Yeah.

[00:26:27] Really

[00:26:28] Michael: makes sense.

[00:26:28] Megan: One of the things you and I have been talking about a lot, dad, is that in this season of our lives and our business, but also personally, that we’re optimizing for peace, you know, that the thing that we value most is having peace.

[00:26:43] You know, there’s a lot of ways to do life. There’s a lot of ways to do business, many of them successful by various criteria. And from our perspective, the thing we want more of in our life is peace. And I, I see this as being intention. With choice, you know that there’s some sort of tipping point with choice where.

[00:27:02] Too much choice and too many options, tips you into a land that is not peaceful because it stressful. It’s actually stressful, you know? Mm-hmm. Like when I walk into my closet and I see 40 different pairs of shoes that I have to choose from today, like, it creates a just little, like micro moments of stress and mm-hmm.

[00:27:21] And I think simplicity. I, I don’t know that I’ll ever be a, a minimalist, shall we say that Anyone that knows me would laugh at the idea of that. And certainly you, you know, neither of us will ever be accused of that. But I do think that part of the clarity that we need when we’re looking at these things is what are we optimizing for?

[00:27:39] Are we optimizing for self-expression? Are we optimizing for telegraphing our identity? Or are we optimizing for margin? Are we optimizing for peace? And if we are, then we’re gonna have some trade-offs around simplifying, because that’s what clears the path for margin and peace, which in our world. Are the most valuable things that we’re optimizing for.

[00:28:01] Barry: So I agree with you. Uh, I use slightly different terminology to capture what you’re talking about. The trade off I think we face is a trade off between wealth on the one hand and security on the other. Oh, and wealth is about not just material wealth, but wealth of experience. And to have a wealth of experience requires that there be lots of options.

[00:28:26] That’s what it means to have a wealth of experience. But in that kind of world, the price you pay is that everything see is less predictable and less controllable and less certain. And so you feel less secure. So what you are calling peace, I would call security.

[00:28:46] Megan: Huh?

[00:28:46] Barry: And so choice is a really good thing.

[00:28:49] As long as there are constraints, as long as we can put. Kind of a bubble around the choice set so that we are not always uncertain about what tomorrow’s going to bring. And we are not uncertain in every aspect of our lives. And I think people take security for granted in societies like ours. People take peace for granted in societies like ours until it’s disrupted, and then all of a sudden they wanna know why isn’t somebody keeping things safe and secure and peaceful?

[00:29:29] Why is it that every morning when I wake up and IO open the newspaper, I don’t know what I’m gonna see? So all of a sudden I’m willing to pay a price. To get more security.

[00:29:40] Megan: Yep, that’s a good,

[00:29:41] Barry: good word. Um, I just took it for granted and then it got blown up and I don’t take it for granted anymore. And I think that the choice problem is, one way of thinking about it is that we have unknowingly traded security for wealth and we’ve gone too far.

[00:29:58] And now we wanna backtrack. And the problem of course, is that some of us in a position to do this just as individuals, no matter what’s going on in the world, you can build your little secure fortress. But others of us are pretty much at the mercy of what society offers us and expects of us. We would like to be able to count on getting the healthcare we need, for example.

[00:30:24] But in a society where you’re essentially on your own when it comes to healthcare, you can’t count on getting the healthcare you need and you might be willing to settle for. Good enough healthcare that you could count on,

[00:30:39] Megan: right?

[00:30:39] Barry: But there isn’t something like that for you to settle on, so you’re kind of on your own.

[00:30:44] And so it’s, there’s a limit to how much we can do as individuals if society is not cooperating by offering us security and stability if that’s what we want.

[00:30:57] Megan: Mm-hmm. It’s fascinating.

[00:30:59] Michael: I’d like to shift the discussion a little bit to your book, why We Work and some of the issues you raised there. Yeah.

[00:31:04] Could you talk about the difference between jobs, careers, and a calling, and could you kind of tease that out a little bit? Help us to understand it, and especially what calling’s about.

[00:31:15] Barry: So in the literature, the research on, um, workplace satisfaction people have for, had for a long time made a distinction between work as a job and work as a career.

[00:31:27] And the essential difference between those two is that if you had a career. There was a trajectory. You were going somewhere, you weren’t gonna be doing the same thing day after day, month after month, year after year. Whereas if you have a job, that’s exactly what you’re gonna be doing.

[00:31:44] Megan: Mm-hmm.

[00:31:44] Barry: Same thing over and over again.

[00:31:46] And what we did in this research is we introduced a third category borrowed from sort of the language of religion, which is that work could be a calling in the way preachers are called to be religious leaders. Where it’s not that you’re going somewhere like with a career, it is that the work you do every day is meaningful and important to somebody.

[00:32:14] Megan: Hmm.

[00:32:14] Barry: And the, the wonderful example of this that we, um, focused on is, uh, hospital janitors. One of my co-authors did a research project on hospital janitors at a major medical center, academic medical center. And, you know, they have a long list of, uh, tasks that they have to accomplish in the course of their workday, 20 or 30 different things.

[00:32:39] And there isn’t a single item on the list that even mentions another human being.

[00:32:45] Megan: Hmm.

[00:32:46] Barry: It’s all about mopping and waxing floors, emptying trash cans, changing bedding, and so that, that kind of stuff, they could just as well be working in a mortuary as in a hospital. There are some janitors who, when you interview them, describe their workday and it is full of interactions with patients, interactions with patients’ families, interactions with nurses.

[00:33:12] You have a very heavy patient who needs to get turned so that they, the patient doesn’t get bed, sored, the janitor’s in the room and helps the nurse turn the patient because the nurse can’t do it on her own. So their job as they see it, is to promote the mission of the hospital, contribute to the mission of the hospital, which is to ease suffering and cure disease.

[00:33:34] And they do whatever is needed in a situation to promote that mission. Even it if, if it involves things that are not a part of their job description, and that’s the part of the job they get the most satisfaction from. The reason they’re able to do it is that they don’t have supervisors looking over their shoulders all the time and telling them, that’s not part of your job description.

[00:33:58] That’s not part of your job description. Mop the floor, empty the trash. So these are people who are called to ease suffering and assist in the mission of, uh, curing disease. And of course, they have a vital role to play given how many people go into the hospital sick and come out sicker because of all the germs that are floating around.

[00:34:23] Being antiseptic is really important to the mission of the hospital. And if the janitors aren’t taking their work seriously, the hospital will be a pit that you don’t wanna enter because you’re as likely to come out worse as you are to come out better. So it’s a very important part of the hospital’s functioning, and you have to take it seriously whether somebody’s watching you or not.

[00:34:45] So it turns out that many people wish their job was a calling. At best they think they have a career. It’s comforting, I suppose, to feel like you’re going somewhere and that your perks and your salary will go up and your title will become more prestigious. But if what you’re doing at a high level in the organization is just as meaningless as what you are doing at a lower level, then the, the, the perks and the salary are just sort of consolation prizes for spending hours and hours every day doing something that doesn’t make anybody better off and they wish their work could be a calling.

[00:35:25] Michael: Mm-hmm.

[00:35:26] Megan: We speak to a lot of leaders, some in the nonprofit space, some in the for-profit space. Some of those people are business owners. Some of those people are, you know, leading a couple of people on a team within a larger company. How do you create the conditions where the people who report to you feel as though their work is a calling rather than just a career or a job?

[00:35:47] Barry: Well, there are two answers to that. I think one of them is. That you hire for what? You don’t know how to train and then teach what you do, know how to train. Nobody that I’m aware of knows how to encourage people to treat the work they do as a calling. And so you hire people who already feel that way and then you teach them how to be janitors and how to be nurses and how to be software engineers.

[00:36:18] We know how to teach people those things. We don’t know how to teach them to really care about the work they do, and it’s the effects of that work on other people. So that’s one thing. Hire people who you think all are called and how do you tell that you can’t? Yeah, I mean, it, it’s, it’s full of error. I mean, how can you ever tell when you make a hiring decision that you’ve made a good decision?

[00:36:42] It’s a complicated business and you’re gonna get it wrong, but I’m pretty sure that if you’re not looking for that, you’re not gonna get it. Mm-hmm. Except by accident. Fair

[00:36:50] Michael: enough.

[00:36:51] Barry: And think about why, you know, you hire a coder who’s skilled and that person is producing from day one, right? It’s like a windup toy.

[00:37:01] Wind them up, sit ’em in of a desk, and he’s gonna be producing the code you need immediately. You hire somebody who is called but isn’t a great coder. You’re gonna have to teach that person a lot before that person actually makes a contribution to the organization. Are you willing to pay somebody for six months during which time that person’s contributing nothing and learning the skills much better just to hire somebody who can hit the ground running.

[00:37:31] So, you know, I think all the incentives in organizations are in the direction of hiring people who can do the task rather than hiring people who want. To be excellent at whatever task they have. And, uh, there’s enormous pressure on companies, particularly publicly traded companies, to have bottom line results that will keep the shareholders happy.

[00:37:59] The last thing you want is a shareholder strike, or a shareholder abandonment. And so all the pressure is on you to make hiring decisions and promotion decisions that will contribute to the bottom line immediately. Short-termism. If you don’t have a publicly traded company, you’ve got a lot more room to do what you think is right.

[00:38:23] Michael: Mm-hmm.

[00:38:24] Barry: And there are great examples of this, but the reason they stand out is that they’re so rare. The guy who started Patagonia, he did what he thought was right, and if you don’t like it, don’t buy my stuff. You know? And he took the millions and millions of dollars he made and devoted almost all of the, that fortune to what he cared most about, which is preserving the environment.

[00:38:48] He could do that. You know? There was nobody telling him what to do. Nobody threatening to pull the money out away. Right? Now there’s an interesting conflict. I don’t know how it’s gonna be resolved between Anthropic and um, yeah, open AI and chat. GPT, you know, anthropic, the guy said, we think AI should not be used to guide unsupervised.

[00:39:14] Weapons, drones unsupervised by humans, and we think it should not be used to violate the privacy of, uh, citizens. And if the Pentagon wants to use it for those things, we’re just won’t sell it to you. And this was a stand that I suspect, whether you agree with it or not, it’s a separate matter. But 10 years from now when Anthropic is a public company, I can’t imagine they’re gonna say that because now there are bound to be shareholders who say the nerve of you sacrificing my profit.

[00:39:54] For your holier than now stance about what should and shouldn’t be done with your product and chat. GPT seems much more willing to, um, cooperate with the Pentagon, which basically said, listen, you sell it to us and we’ll do whatever we want with it. And that, and it, they may end up winning the battle, at least for government contracts.

[00:40:17] And the independence that, that, uh, anthropic now has, it won’t have in 10 years or 15 years. So the more you give up control of the company, the less able you will be to create an environment in the company where people feel called to contribute. And you saw this happen in Google as Google has developed the workforce, despite the immense wealth that Google has, you know, they worry about profits and they worry about shareholder satisfaction and, uh.

[00:40:51] Their watch word when they started Don’t be evil now is just a laugh line at the company.

[00:40:57] Megan: Hmm.

[00:40:58] Barry: So, you know the things that you could do to encourage people to have callings. I think the folks who run companies are not willing for the most part to do.

[00:41:16] Michael: I agree with everything you’ve said, but I wanna add a nuance to this. I used to run a large public company for a number of years, CEO, of that company. And, uh, I took a lot of inspiration from Steve Jobs and I don’t wanna let leaders off so easily because I think oftentimes leaders of these companies, whether public or private, don’t do a good job in helping individual workers see the through line.

[00:41:41] From how their work matters to the larger mission of the company. Mm-hmm. And there’s this famous story where Steve Jobs, as he was trying to recruit John Scully, which turned out to be a huge mistake, but he is trying to recruit John Scully, who was the CEO of Pepsi to come to work at Apple. You may have remembered this back in the nine, I think it was back in the nineties, I

[00:41:57] Barry: do remember it.

[00:41:59] Michael: And he said, he finally said to John, he said, look, do you wanna spend the rest of your life selling sugar water or do you wanna come help change the world? And that’s the kind of thing I’m talking about. And he left a very prestigious job, John Scully, where he was making a ton of money to come to Apple with a lot more risk because apparently that resonated deep inside of him.

[00:42:18] And I think that as leaders, this is a skill that we can develop. And that is it’s, it has to do with our messaging, it has to do with our focus, and frankly. We’ve gotta feel the calling ourself. Yes. If I don’t feel called to the mission of full focus, I certainly can’t articulate it to our employees and enlist them in that mission.

[00:42:36] But I think that’s the exact No,

[00:42:37] Barry: that’s exactly right. We’re support. You can’t lie to people. You, yeah.

[00:42:40] Michael: Yeah.

[00:42:40] Barry: You may be wrong about whether the things you do are gonna change the world, but you have to believe that the things you’re gonna do are gonna change the world at least a lot more than selling sugar water, which as we know, is also changing the world, but not in a good way.

[00:42:57] But the Google people, their mission, the people who founded the company, was to provide all the world’s information to all the world’s people. What could be a more noble aspiration than that? And you could see why talented folks would just run. To join the company. Mm-hmm. You know, in this noble mission. I don’t think that’s their mission anymore.

[00:43:23] Yeah. Their mission now is to make sure that all of the world’s people see all of the world’s advertisements. That’s not quite the same thing.

[00:43:33] Megan: Yeah.

[00:43:34] Barry: It didn’t have to be that way.

[00:43:36] Megan: Yeah.

[00:43:36] Michael: It’d be interesting to see what happens to Elon Musk companies, and regardless of what you think about it, I mean, his, his whole mission in life seems to be he wants to make humans an interplanetary species, and he is recruited like amazing engineers and they’re doing amazing things because all of ’em want to participate in something.

[00:43:56] Megan: Mm-hmm.

[00:43:56] Michael: That will create really a, a legacy like no other.

[00:44:00] Barry: All of that is true, but I want your, I want your listeners to understand that you don’t have to be Steve Jobs or Elon Musk. Good point. Imagine that you work retail, you’re in a shop in the mall. People come into your shop, what is your job? Most people say, my job is to sell as much of the crap in this store as I can.

[00:44:29] That’s why I’m here. But here’s a slightly different perspective. Everyone who comes into my store has a problem, and my job is to help people solve their problem.

[00:44:40] Megan: Mm-hmm.

[00:44:41] Barry: And it isn’t gonna be a major problem that I’m gonna help them solve. It’s gonna be a minor problem, but if I can do that, they’re gonna walk out with a better life than they had when they came in.

[00:44:55] And I get to do that for 200 people every day.

[00:45:00] Megan: Wow.

[00:45:01] Barry: Now, not too many people who work retail have that. Attitude. It’s easy to imagine how different your experience as a shopper would be.

[00:45:13] Michael: Mm-hmm.

[00:45:14] Barry: If when you walked into the store, the people who tried to uh, help you were there because they wanted to help you and not because they wanted to sell you.

[00:45:24] And at the end of that day, the people who work in the store would probably walk out feeling a lot better about how they spent their day than they currently do. So it doesn’t have to be Steve Jobs, it can be hospital janitors, it can be people who do retail. As long as you, you know, see the work you do in a certain way and the people who supervise you let you do the work in that way.

[00:45:51] Great

[00:45:51] Megan: point. You know, that reminds me of, uh, there was a video that Chick-fil-A produced probably 10 or 15 years ago. It was probably 15 years ago now, and I think it was called something, I’ll try to link to it in the show notes. Something like, every Life has a Story or something. Yes. And it was basically a dramatization of people coming in and out of Chick-fil-A and they have these little word bubbles above the heads of the customers as well as the employees.

[00:46:15] And it was like this man’s wife was just diagnosed from ca with cancer and he just left hospice to come get lunch, you know, after sitting by her bedside or this person was just fired from their job, or this student just found out they were accepted to the college of their choice or you know, on a, this mother’s, you know, finally, you know, she was about to lose her mind with her toddlers at home.

[00:46:38] And so she, she wanted to get outta the house to get a break, you know, those kinds of things. And the point was that. They’re not just serving people chicken. They’re meeting people in the context of their real life and giving them this human connection of, I see you and I, I see that you’re a real person with a real story and I honor that.

[00:46:56] Mm-hmm. And we’re gonna have this maybe 32nd, one minute long connection, but it matters.

[00:47:02] Barry: It doesn’t, that’s the point. But it doesn’t only matter to the customer,

[00:47:06] Megan: right? No, it mattered to the employees as well.

[00:47:08] Barry: It matters to the employee too. Yeah. And fast food is actually a great example, you know? Yeah. A lot of people who eat fast food, they, the, the adults are working two jobs.

[00:47:18] Megan: Yeah.

[00:47:19] Barry: They’re exhausted at the end of the day, twice a week that they take the family out for fast food is just a chance for the parents to catch their breath.

[00:47:28] Megan: Yep.

[00:47:29] Barry: And you who works there can make the difference between whether this is a relaxing and satisfying experience or one where you’re treated with contempt or complete lack of interest.

[00:47:43] It doesn’t take a lot of work from the salespeople.

[00:47:46] Megan: Yep.

[00:47:47] Barry: To make your experience a good one, but nobody. Takes that seriously as the mission of the job. The job is to sell burgers and fries. It is not to make people feel better at the end of the meal than they felt when it started.

[00:48:05] Megan: And that’s where Chick-fil-A has just done such a great job because they, they have seen that gap and they’ve said, we can do that better.

[00:48:11] That’s right. You know, and they,

[00:48:12] Barry: they were very effective ads. Yeah. I remember them. Yeah. Uh, and it’s interesting that the versions of that that you see from other fast food are so completely generic.

[00:48:22] Megan: Right.

[00:48:23] Barry: You know? Yeah. It’s not acknowledging the customers as individuals, it’s just that if you, um, get something at Taco Bell, the taste of the food is gonna put a smile on your face.

[00:48:33] Megan: Right.

[00:48:33] Barry: And that’s gonna happen to everybody who takes a bite out of one of Taco Bells. So it’s really not acknowledging the humanness of your customers at all.

[00:48:43] Michael: You know, one of the things my wife got in the habit of doing as she was an advocate for her brother who is in the process of getting a liver transplant, is she would begin to thank the providers at the hospital and the clinics and she would just say, thank you for choosing your profession.

[00:48:59] I mean, even though, you know, just the the attend,

[00:49:01] Megan: it could

[00:49:01] Michael: be

[00:49:01] Megan: the janitorial staff. Could

[00:49:02] Michael: be the janitorial staff. Thank you for choosing

[00:49:04] Megan: nurses. Yeah.

[00:49:05] Michael: Then she would add these words. She’d say, I want you to know it matters. It matters to us. Thank you.

[00:49:10] Megan: Yeah.

[00:49:11] Michael: And I think that just, you know, called for something in them.

[00:49:14] Right. But it was just, it took the conversation in the exchange to a different level that was

[00:49:18] Barry: I think it can, and so we have responsibilities as customers or patients or clients.

[00:49:24] Megan: Yeah.

[00:49:25] Barry: To let people know that this matters to us and then acknowledge when they do it well,

[00:49:31] Michael: yes.

[00:49:31] Barry: When they show concern for our welfare and not just our.

[00:49:36] Diseased organs, you know?

[00:49:39] Megan: That’s right.

[00:49:39] Barry: So yes, we can help, but again, you know, we can’t treat this in a vacuum and act as if everyone is free to create the kind of work environment they want. Yeah. There is pressure on people imposed from within the organization and from outside the organization. And I think it’s a simpler world if you think it’s all about maximizing profits and maximizing pay.

[00:50:05] ’cause then you can do anything as long as it leads to that objective when you’re trying somehow to balance that. With also enriching the lives of your customers and also your employees. Well, now you’re introducing complexities and trade-offs that the simpler model doesn’t acknowledge exist. So you need to complexify your life to acknowledge what work can be.

[00:50:33] And the interesting thing to me is that what research has been done pretty much shows in almost every area that enlightened employers have companies that are more profitable.

[00:50:47] Michael: Yes. Yes.

[00:50:48] Barry: Than the unenlightened ones. And so by being a command and control organization, you’re leaving money on the table.

[00:50:57] Megan: Yep,

[00:50:57] Michael: a hundred percent.

[00:50:58] Barry: So even if you didn’t care about the welfare of either your customers or your employees. And all you cared about was the bottom line. You would be an enlightened employer because that’s the way to enhance the bottom line.

[00:51:10] Megan: Yep.

[00:51:10] Barry: But there’s a kind of ideology that dominates so that people who should not be doing this are leaving money on the table as they run organizations.

[00:51:21] Megan: I wanna ask you about AI and wisdom.

[00:51:25] Barry: Yep.

[00:51:25] Megan: A lot of your work has been around wisdom and we are two people who are in many ways, enthusiasts around ai. We use it, we love it, like it helps us think better. It helps us come up with better solutions, et cetera. And we are, I’m speaking for myself, deeply concerned and skeptical about the downsides.

[00:51:48] You know, there are, there are incredible upsides and there are incredible downsides and how all that shakes out is, you know, yet to be seen. One of the things though, that I think is a threat as we go to AI more and more to problem solve. Is where, where does human judgment, where is human judgment needed and where does wisdom get exercised?

[00:52:10] What is the place of wisdom? And I’d love to just hear your thoughts on that. As ai, again, it just gets better and better. You know, we’re not getting a lot of stupid stuff out of AI anymore, if you know how to use it. Well, you’re not getting a lot of stupid stuff. So what is your thought on that?

[00:52:24] Barry: This is a very complicated question.

[00:52:27] As you just said. I, I don’t know how this is gonna shake out. It is potentially an extraordinary improvement on lives, and it is an incredible, potentially incredibly dangerous. But the one thing that’s clear now is that it does not replace judgment.

[00:52:48] Michael: Mm-hmm.

[00:52:48] Barry: It assists judgment.

[00:52:50] Megan: Mm.

[00:52:51] Barry: And if you think you can just push a button and then do whatever the, the application tells you to do, you are likely to get yourself and probably other people into trouble.

[00:53:03] Megan: Mm-hmm.

[00:53:04] Barry: So, so you need to be judicious and knowledgeable in asking the right questions of AI and in interpreting the answers that you get to extract the kernels and, uh, discard the, the husks. And so it, as is often the case, the, the more you know about a domain, the better AI is.

[00:53:30] Megan: Yeah.

[00:53:30] Barry: Because you can. Edit yourself.

[00:53:35] Mm-hmm. What it’s telling you, because you know a lot, you go to AI because you’re about to see the doctor about a potentially serious problem and you don’t know anything, and chances are pretty good that you’ll just torture the doctor with questions that are the wrong questions and values that are the wrong values because of how you’ve been led by the software, and you can’t filter out the main problem.

[00:54:00] I see. Yes, I wrote a whole book about wisdom with a colleague, but one of the points we make is that you can’t teach people to be wise in a classroom. The way you become wise, the way you develop judgment is by making decisions. Watching some of them fail and learning how to make better and better decisions, more and more context sensitive decisions as a result of correcting your previous errors.

[00:54:33] And so that means people need practice to become wise and the more people rely on ai, the less practice they’re gonna get.

[00:54:44] Michael: Hmm.

[00:54:45] Barry: So it is potentially the case that we will end up with people who know more and are less wise because of AI than the current set of people that we have because they have offloaded the kinds of trial and error experiences that make them wise to the software.

[00:55:07] Partners that they have. Hmm. I could be wrong. You know, these are, this is such a dynamic space and failures or shortcomings are probably correctable. So I’m optimistic that we will eventually figure out how to use it. Right. But my, my concern, and this is not a trivial one, is that the underlying profit structure of this field is almost certainly going to guarantee that companies are working not to maximize the quality of ai, but to maximize the return of their massive, massive investment.

[00:55:48] And so somebody’s going to have to say, we have to keep the main thing, the main thing, and the main thing isn’t profit. That doesn’t happen with tech companies. There’s only one tech enterprise I can think of that has managed. To remain true to its mission over many years of enormous influence and growth.

[00:56:14] And that is Wikipedia.

[00:56:17] Megan: Hmm.

[00:56:18] Barry: It’s not perfect. It was never perfect, but it is as, it’s better now than it was, and it’s still trying to do the same thing that it was trying to do before. It is not an accident that Wikipedia is a nonprofit organization.

[00:56:34] Megan: Mm.

[00:56:35] Barry: It’s the only one I can think of, of any size and influence.

[00:56:40] So how do we instill the commitment to mission that a Wikipedia seems to have in, uh, anthropic and in, um, other law soon to be massive ai. Generating companies or somehow bring it back and Google, you know, Facebook, I have different feelings about, I don’t think Facebook ever had particularly lofty aspirations.

[00:57:06] In fact, it started about as low as you can get and it’s just proceeded.

[00:57:11] Megan: Yeah.

[00:57:12] Barry: I’m not a big Facebook fan fan anyway, so I wish I could answer your question, but that real concern raised by you, tying it to wisdom is the more we rely on it, the less practice we’ll have in developing our own judgment and wisdom.

[00:57:27] Yeah. And that may be a problem.

[00:57:29] Megan: It’s the net to crack.

[00:57:30] Michael: There’s so much to say about this and I feel like we could do a whole show on AI and wisdom,

[00:57:34] Barry: but you wouldn’t want me on it.

[00:57:37] Michael: We might.

[00:57:37] Megan: We might.

[00:57:38] Michael: But at any rate, thank you so much for your time. You’ve been very generous with us and I’ve loved this conversation.

[00:57:43] Me too. It feels like it’s gone by in a blink of an eye. If people wanna start digging into your work. Where could we send them?

[00:57:50] Barry: All my books are on Amazon. I’m an old man. I don’t have a website I, I don’t use. Uh,

[00:57:57] Michael: kinda

[00:57:57] Barry: love

[00:57:57] Michael: that.

[00:57:58] Megan: Yeah, I love that too.

[00:57:59] Barry: There are a bunch of books. If you type my name into Google, you’ll see them.

[00:58:04] If you type my name in on Amazon, you’ll see them. And you should just read everything I’ve ever written.

[00:58:11] Megan: done

[00:58:12] Barry: Challenge accepted. What can I say?

[00:58:15] Michael: We’ll put links in the show notes to all of Barry’s books so you can read ’em. But Barry, thank you. Thank you so much for your time.

[00:58:21] Barry: My pleasure. And thanks for being interested.

[00:58:32] Megan: Okay, so yet another trip to the confessional booth slash therapy room, known as the Double Wind Show.

[00:58:41] Michael: So true. I mean, I, I think part of what makes this enjoyable for me. As opposed to the older format of what we did, where it was just us talking, is I’m getting so many insights in real time. Yeah. And so much input and it’s challenging my life and my assumptions and how I live.

[00:58:57] And that was certainly the case in this interview with Barry.

[00:59:00] Megan: Yeah. He’s so wise and also just fun. I mean, if you weren’t, didn’t watch the video, you may have missed this, but he’s just like so animated and he just brought so much energy, energy to the conversation. But let’s start with the conversation around choices and the maximizers, the cost of being a maximizer.

[00:59:20] What’d you take away from that?

[00:59:21] Michael: Well, this is my entire life. You know, I think I, I don’t have maximizer, you know, in the strengths finder sense is one of my top strengths. But I, I do think it’s part of the operational software that I bring to my life.

[00:59:36] Barry: Mm-hmm.

[00:59:37] Michael: You know, I’m trying to maximize everything and I, and I don’t differentiate between the things that, you know, where good enough is just good enough.

[00:59:44] I’m always seeking the optimal solution. So I, I told you that, you know, I’ve been into EI AI deeply and I got into vibe coding recently. And so I’ve learned to build applications, which I could have never done before Vibe coding, but now you just can describe it and it does take some work. But I come up against a app that I don’t like, that it has got some annoyances with it.

[01:00:05] And I just think to myself, well, I could create something better than that. And I have. And so it’s like, where does it stop? ’cause those things consume an enormous amount of time. Yeah. And I, I read a thing yesterday, Megan, that I’ve gotta send to you. It was a Harvard business study about how AI is not actually saving us time.

[01:00:24] Megan: Of course it’s not.

[01:00:25] Michael: Because what we’re doing is now we’re finding more things to do with this. Enhanced capability that we have through

[01:00:31] Megan: ai. Yeah. Our standards are, are increasing and so we wanna do more. I mean, this is, I think this is the trend that we’ve seen historically with every major technological innovation that was meant to save time.

[01:00:43] Yes. It, it never does. It never does because we always figure out how to do more with it. You know, we’re not satisfied. We’re always optimizing.

[01:00:51] Michael: I was saying like four months ago that, you know, man, AI has saved me probably 10 to 15 hours a week. Well, yes, if you compare it to the things that I’m no longer doing, that I was doing

[01:01:03] Megan: right.

[01:01:04] Michael: But now I’m doing 20 hours a week of more stuff that’s higher level stuff that’s more interesting. Right. That I think makes a bigger contribution. But to say that it’s saving me ti my time is not entirely honest.

[01:01:16] Megan: Well, first of all, thank you for being honest.

[01:01:19] Michael: Well,

[01:01:19] Megan: thank you for sharing. Um, no, seriously, I think that’s really helpful.

[01:01:25] You know, one of the things that I notice in myself is. Optimizing or maximizing things like perusing choices has a compulsive quality to it, I find.

[01:01:38] Michael: Are you confessing here?

[01:01:39] Megan: Yeah. Okay, so now we’re back in the confessional booth. You’re the priest this time. Okay. So we switched, we switched seats. But when I am tired, you know what, what do they say in recovery?

[01:01:48] Lonely, angry. It an acronym. Angry, lonely, tired. That’s halt. That’s

[01:01:52] Michael: it.

[01:01:52] Megan: Any of those. I am more likely to start surfing for choices because it’s like my brain thinks the discomfort I feel now will be solved by some new novel solution that’s better than what I already have. Except inevitably it takes more time, it adds more complexity, it costs more money.

[01:02:13] Um,

[01:02:14] Michael: switching costs.

[01:02:15] Megan: Switching costs, all that stuff. It, it, it’s always fool’s gold. It’s always a false promise.

[01:02:20] Michael: We’ve all had these conversations probably in the last few weeks where somebody says, you know, Hey, I’m using chat pt, and then somebody says, well, I’m using Claude. And so you go like. Well, maybe I need to check on that.

[01:02:30] Megan: Yeah.

[01:02:30] Michael: And then so you go down a rabbit hole of trying to compare ’em. And I literally had this happen this morning.

[01:02:36] Megan: Yeah.

[01:02:36] Michael: You know, so I was looking at different vibe coding tools, and I happened to use one called Rept, but I had a good friend that’s using one called Base 44. And I thought, well, maybe I’m missing something here.

[01:02:45] That’s the feeling. Maybe I’m missing something here. Maybe

[01:02:47] Megan: I’m missing something here.

[01:02:48] Michael: And so I, I had perplexity, which I haven’t used for a while, but it’s actually very good research. I said, I want you to do a comparison between the four major vibe coding platforms so that I make sure that I’m on the right one.

[01:02:59] Well, first of all, if I quote AM on the right one, how long is that advantage gonna last

[01:03:03] Megan: and how much does it matter?

[01:03:05] Michael: And how much does it matter?

[01:03:06] Megan: Like how much, like, like what is the gain between the, almost the best and the very best?

[01:03:10] Michael: Well, and I’m using 10% of the capabilities of Rept right now, so,

[01:03:14] Megan: right.

[01:03:14] It doesn’t even matter, but it just becomes, I, I think it becomes this psychological. Sav for some kind of discomfort that we tell ourselves. If I, I, there’s something missing. And if I can just solve the thing that’s missing with the thing that I think is the plugging of the hole, the thing that’s missing, then everything will be okay, except it never works and there’s no end to it and it continues on and on.

[01:03:37] And I think in so much about like what is really creating overwhelm in our lives, and it’s not just that we have too much work to do, I think we used to think that here, like at full focus, we used to think 10 years ago that the primary thing that was creating overwhelm and a lack of winning at work and succeeding life was that you just had too much work to do and you weren’t prioritizing the rest of your life.

[01:03:58] You know, that was kind of our hypothesis, and I don’t think that’s. So much wrong as it is incomplete. I think now what we know is, like I said in the interview, there are all these sort of ambient forces in our lives that we can’t control. Like, you know, what’s happening politically, economically, technologically, all these things that impact our lives very personally.

[01:04:18] So we can’t say it actually doesn’t matter to me. So I, you know, don’t ever wanna pay attention to it. It does matter to me and I have no control over it. So that’s one thing. But then it’s these like real sneaky things, like our affluence enables us to spend vast amounts of time curating our consumption in ways that are literally stealing our lives from us.

[01:04:40] And we don’t even know. We’re like, here’s my hands put on the, you know, the, um, what is it? The shackles, you know, the, yeah, the handcuffs on. And like, we gotta reckon with that. Our consumption is creating overwhelm. ’cause then, then what happens is you go to your closet and you go, oh my gosh, I gotta get rid of some stuff.

[01:04:58] And then we spend our weekends getting rid of the stuff. That we bought on the front end, and now our lives become a lot of managing stuff.

[01:05:06] Michael: Well, and part of it is we get rid of this stuff so we can fill it with more stuff.

[01:05:10] Megan: Right.

[01:05:10] Michael: It’s not like we’re content to just like my friend who had uh, you know, four different outfits, all the exact same shirt, right?

[01:05:16] All the same different pants. No. If I had that, if I did that, if I whittled it down to that, I guarantee within three months it would be an overflowing closet once again.

[01:05:26] Megan: And I think that’s a metaphor for lots of parts of our life. We spend a lot of energy managing the stuff of our life if we’re affluent in any way.

[01:05:36] And I, and that doesn’t mean people who have more money than you. That means you compared to anybody else in the world. We are all affluent if we’re listening to this show in some way. Right. It is a burden. It is a burden.

[01:05:48] Michael: I was just connecting the work in my mind as you were talking with Ian Crohn’s work.

[01:05:54] And what was the last title of his last book?

[01:05:56] Megan: The Fix.

[01:05:57] Michael: The Fix.

[01:05:57] Megan: Yeah.

[01:05:58] Michael: And he talks about all of us have inside this deep,

[01:06:01] Megan: the ache,

[01:06:02] Michael: this the

[01:06:02] Megan: big ache. Maybe

[01:06:03] Michael: the big ache. Yeah. You know, where we’re, there’s just, we, we just want more, there’s something that calls us to search because we don’t feel satisfied.

[01:06:11] And it’s a deep psychological, and I would argue, and I think Ian would argue too, a deep spiritual

[01:06:15] Megan: Yeah.

[01:06:16] Michael: Kind of crisis that characterizes our time.

[01:06:19] Megan: It’s like we’re, it’s like we’re made for eternity and our hearts know it and they’re restless. That’s right. We’re restless for that. But we, we try to fill that hole with consumption.

[01:06:29] And I mean that more broadly than just buying things. Yeah. But like this kind of, there’s always something else out there better. And it’s like, that doesn’t fit the shape of the whole, that is the problem.

[01:06:39] Michael: Well, and for the first time in history, we can actually fulfill a lot of those desires.

[01:06:43] Megan: Right.

[01:06:44] Michael: And that’s what makes it so addictive.

[01:06:45] Megan: Yeah.

[01:06:46] Michael: And particularly when you’re getting. Dopamine hits.

[01:06:49] Megan: Yeah.

[01:06:50] Michael: From those things, whether it’s, you know, buying that, that new shirt that you really like and Right. It feels great the first time you wear it. You know, it’s like we’re this relentless quest for more dopamine.

[01:07:00] Megan: Yes.

[01:07:00] Michael: And we become sort of slaves to our own hijacked psychology.

[01:07:05] I guess the only thing, I mean, I, I wish I had an answer to this, but I think the only thing is just, you know, increased self-awareness and being in community with people that have the same values.

[01:07:15] Megan: Yes.

[01:07:15] Michael: And are willing to not hold us accountable in a Shay kind of way, but just call us to something greater than that.

[01:07:22] Megan: Well, I think increased disconnection is the other thing that we’ve got to have. Yeah. We have got to take the umbilical cord that we’ve got plugged into these places, like social media, you know, where we’re seeing ads and things like that. We’ve gotta unplug from those things because like biology wins every time.

[01:07:38] Like we are no match for the, I mean for the dopamine engineers. You know, I’ve said

[01:07:42] Michael: it on the show show before, the Amish are not all. Yeah. I’m not in danger of becoming Amish, but I’m telling you, there’s some wisdom in just saying, okay, what are the limits?

[01:07:54] Megan: Right.

[01:07:55] Michael: You know, with technology or something else that I’m just, I’m just content to be okay where I’m at.

[01:07:59] Right. I don’t have to have the latest iPhone, the latest, greatest Mac, whatever it is. And it’s not settling to say that as Barry made clear

[01:08:07] Megan: it’s wisdom.

[01:08:08] Michael: That’s right. Here’s what I’m willing to commit to publicly before you and all the people. Wow. Still listening to us.

[01:08:13] Megan: It just got real.

[01:08:14] Michael: I’m gonna go home and get rid of that computer bag that is sitting there still in box.

[01:08:19] Megan: Sorry, Simon Sinek. ’cause he won’t be on our podcast anytime soon.

[01:08:21] Michael: Yeah. First of all, it’s an incredible bag, but don’t go check it out because I recommended it.

[01:08:26] Megan: We’ll not post it in the show links and get rid of the other two. So you don’t feel the stress of, should I be using those? I wish I hadn’t bought ’em.

[01:08:34] I probably need to use them. But are they the best? Like that’s just an open loop, right?

[01:08:37] Michael: It’s so true.

[01:08:38] Megan: Just one bag.

[01:08:39] Michael: And if you really feel the need in the future, like I, like I bought. My quest for the best bag. I said, well, I need a bag for my laptop, but I’m just kind of out in the way and I don’t really wanna carry my, so I’ve got a few of those bags,

[01:08:49] Megan: right?

[01:08:49] Michael: And they just take up space. And then if you get rid of ’em, you say, well, I might need it someday. Well, how about if someday you really feel the need for it, you can order one again.

[01:08:57] Megan: Maybe introduce like a waiting period like they make you do for guns. You know, like you gotta wait 48 hours or get a background check or something.

[01:09:03] Michael: Well, your mom keeps saying to me, she says, look, when you go to Amazon, put it on the wishlist. At least that creates a buffer.

[01:09:09] Megan: Yeah, smart.

[01:09:09] Michael: Just don’t buy it. Put it on the wishlist. And I guarantee you probably if I did that, which I don’t, but if I did that, I’ll bitch you in two days. I’d forget about that thing and never get back to it

[01:09:18] Megan: 100%.

[01:09:19] How often do you forget that you ordered something on Amazon? It shows up and you’re like, I don’t even remember ordering that.

[01:09:24] Michael: Oh my gosh.

[01:09:25] Megan: That’s embarrassing. Anyway, clearly we need more therapy and we’re gonna need to bring Barry back.

[01:09:31] Michael: Well, guys, I hope you’ve enjoyed this episode, and I know that we often ask you for a review, but I’m not gonna ask you for that.

[01:09:36] I’m just gonna ask you if this episode has meant something to you. If you’ve gotten value of it, I just encourage you to text a link to a friend, just share it with them.

[01:09:46] Megan: Mm-hmm.

[01:09:46] Michael: I guarantee you I’m gonna be not only doing that with this episode, but I’m gonna be re-listening to it because I’ve got some work to do.

[01:09:52] Yeah,

[01:09:53] Megan: same.

[01:09:54] Michael: Thanks for being with guys. We’ll see you next week.

[01:09:56] Megan: See you next time.