Deep Questions with Cal Newport - Ep. 116: RE-READING: Shop Class as Soulcraft (with Brad Stulberg and Steve Magness)

Episode Date: July 26, 2021

In this episode, Brad Stulberg and Steve Magness join me to talk through Matt Crawford's classic 2009 book: "Shop Class as Soulcraft." We get into its impact on our own thinking, attempt to deconstruct its popularity, and seriously consider quitting our jobs to repair motorcycles. For more on Brad and Steve: https://wthegrowtheq.comThanks to Jay Kerstens for the intro music and Mark Miles for mastering. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

I'm Cal Newport, and this is Deep Questions. Episode 116. This episode is yet another collaborative deep dive, where I have some expert guest join me to go deep on a topic of interest. Now, with this episode, I'm trying a new format for the collaborative deep dive. I'll give you a little background here. I'm a big fan of Bill Simmons's, rewatchables podcast. This is where Simmons and various co-hosts go deep on various films that are

imminently rewatchable. Simmons and his co-hosts are huge pop culture movie buffs and they really want to show that off as they get into some of the movies that they really have loved. Well, I realize at some point listening to the rewatchables, I'm really in the nonfiction books. I read them all, especially pragmatic nonfiction. I know many of the authors. I have been writing them professionally since I was 20 years old. My entire life is infused with the art and industry of pragmatic nonfiction. So here was my thought.

It might be fun to try doing a rewatchable style format but aimed at a book instead of a movie. Well, I finally got around to giving that a try. In today's episode, we go deep on the classic book, Matt Crawford's shop class as Soul craft the book that was influential to me, a book that is cited in both deep work and digital minimalism. To join me in this deconstruction I had on longtime friend of the show, Brad Stolberg, along with his partner in crime, Steve Magnus. Brad and Steve are the co-authors of peak performance and the Passion Paradox. They run the Growth Equation HQ website and the Growth Equation podcast on which I have been a frequent guest. You should check out both of those.

These are two other authors who also really were influenced by Crawford and Shop Class of Soulcraft. So we get into it in this episode. We try to figure out a, not just what is this book about, why does it resonate, its impact on us, some insider baseball on the book's reception and what came afterwards and whether it'll be a classic or if it was just a one-time thing. We cover a lot of ground here. So if you're a fan of advice or pragmatic or philosophical nonfiction books, if you're interested in the publishing industry, I think you might

like this episode. Anyways, there's probably a lot of work to be done to get this format right. I'm not sure if I want to keep doing this or not, but I kind of enjoyed it. Your feedback is welcome at at calenewport.com. I'm interested in your thoughts, but for now, let's get started.

In my conversation on rereading shop class as Soulcraft with Bradstole and Steve Magnus. All right, we're rolling. I am here with friends of the show, Brad Stolberg and Steve Magnus. We are here to talk about a book that none of us wrote. All right, so the book is Shop Class as Soul Craft.

See if I got that right. That's Matt Crawford's book. I have cited this multiple times in various books I wrote, so it must be influential. Quick backstory on this. Matt wrote a essay for the New Atlantis. New Atlantis is like a, I don't know if it's peer reviewed. It's sort of a pseudo-academic tech and culture publication. He wrote an essay in 2006 that was called Shop Class as Soulcraft and it had a more mundane subtitle.

It was something like the case for the manual trades came out in book form in 2009 where the subtitle became more elevated. It became an inquiry into the value. of work. I remember reading this book. I was in grad school at the time. I was finishing up my dissertation. I brought it with me on a trip to San Francisco, sort of an influential trip for a lot of reasons we can get into. So I remember this book coming into my life and it being affecting at the time. But Brad, what about you? What was your encounter with Mr. Crawford and his shop? Yeah, I also read the book in grad school. So for me, that was in Ann Arbor, Michigan, shortly after the book came out. And I, at the time, was probably spending too much energy training for triathlons. And part of what I loved about that, even though I wasn't a great triathlet, was that it was real. And there was a clock, and it was very objective and measurable. And I'm sure we'll get into this, but that to me is really the core theme of Crawford's book and his work more broadly, which is that we tend to glorify knowledge work and very heady pursuits, but there's something very satisfying about real things in the world.

And what about you, Steve? Were you repairing motorcycles at the time? And it just resonated. You're like, yeah, he said what I was doing. Yeah, so I actually read this a couple years after it came out, and actually, I think, two or three years after grad school. And it was in my transition, I would say, from only reading things that were related to running and coaching, which was my primary job and endeavor at that time, and branching out into other areas and picked up shop class at Soulcraft. And it's funny, you know, looking back at my underlines and notes throughout this, throughout the book, there are so many instances where I just underline and then write coaching and then some note in there. So at this point, I'm tying it all towards running and then coaching runners,

which was real to me at that point. So real is coming up a lot. I mean, for people who don't know, the book is Matt Crawford story as a, political philosophy PhD from Chicago. And that is the school to get that PhD, right? So that's like being the math PhD from MIT, comes to DC, gets a think tank job, basically like a fake think tank.

It's one of these make-work DC jobs, which is sort of half of all the jobs in DC, and then just has this crisis at some point and says, I'm going to repair motorcycles and then writes lovingly about the difficulty of dealing with bolts that get rusted shut and the complexity of replacing gaskets.

Is this book, was this basically, is this eat, pray, love for the early mid-career sort of white knowledge worker? I mean, is that the right way to think about this? I don't know. I haven't read Eat, Pray, Love. So, tell me more about that book.

She gets lost. She gets, okay, so she's, you know, she's lost in life and she goes to Italy and, you know, has, she enjoys really good food and finds, I guess, some sort of spirituality and then eventually, you know, a boyfriend or a husband or something like this. And it was about learning, escaping the, whatever, the boredom and constraint of her life that was sort of falling apart and rediscovering something that was more real and a source of more authentic pleasure. And so it's great. You daydream like, yeah, I could be in Italy looking at the sea, at the Mediterranean, you know, eating this great food or something.

And it was a Julia Roberts movie, too. So there you go. And so he escaped, right? It was like, this job makes no sense. I don't even know what I do. I write reports. I'm not sure why. It seems to take up a lot of time.

And then, you know, he escapes, not the eating Italian food, but making motorcycles work that didn't work before. It's sort of like an escape to the exotic that is somehow more authentic and therefore finds himself. I mean, maybe that's, is that, maybe that's the log line. You know, eat, eat, pray love for dudes who. are tired of writing reports. You know, I've never read the book, but I saw the movie once with an ex-girlfriend, so I'm going to dive in here. I think you're spot on.

Because to me, this book reads, Crawford's work reads as almost this between time, once you're finished with school and grad school and you have this idealistic vision of what you're trained to do and what you're about to do, and then you get met with this, this reality and your expectations in reality don't match up. So you go on this kind of journey towards finding meaning and self, which I think is what Crawford does so brilliantly in it. Right. So the manual trades is like a metaphor here, right? I mean, this is the thing that catches me about this. I'm reading the review in the New York Times was a rave. Francis Fukuyama wrote it. And like I even have it here, but he calls it, what does you say here? A beautiful

beautiful little book about human excellence in the way it's undervaliant and contemporary America. There is no one who is sort of least connected to the manual trades or has less interest than being in the manual trades than, you know, Francis Fukuyama. And I don't know a single person who read this book who came away with the message of like, yeah, I'm going to quit my, like actually quit their job to Ben Conduit as an electrician or this or that. And yet it was incredibly resonant and had all these raves. So how do we understand that, right? I mean, the thing that he's doing, the thing that the whole book is built around, this sort of work with your hands can be incredibly complicated and fulfilling, and we undervalue manual.

It's like this real big argument. And yet most of the residents that it had had nothing to do with manual trades. It wasn't convincing people to go in the manual trades. No other people that I know have quit their jobs and went there. None of the reviews come away with like, yeah, we need less knowledge workers. So what's going on here? It's like this weird, not a red herring, but is it a metaphor? Is it a stand-in?

Is it a stand-in for excellence? To me, it's like the most interesting feature of this book is that it is loved by people and it feels changing to people like us that had no thought coming away of like, yeah, I got to spend more time with engine gascans. So I have a hypothesis here. To answer your question directly, I do think, that the manual trades are just to stand in for doing real work that isn't bullshit with a result that you can trace back to yourself. And that could be the manual trades, but that could also

be gardening, running, weightlifting, sculpting, basically anything but middle corporate America reports that don't really mean much, which is what Crawford was doing. The second interesting thing is that probably my favorite book of all times, and in the art of motorcycle maintenance, very similar, right? Robert Persig goes off on this huge motorcycle journey. Some of the best parts of that book are when his motorcycle breaks down, he has to fix it. And that book did not become a cult classic amongst motorcycle riders.

It became a cult classic amongst people that were dissatisfied with their knowledge work jobs. Capital Q quality. Yeah, I remember that. Yeah, Capital Q quality, which Crawford defined as like caring deeply about what is in front of you. And I think that's why these books have so much resonance, because in order to fix a motorcycle really well, this is a case that both Crawford and Persig make, you have to care and you have to pay really close attention. And I think lots of people

in their first, second, third jobs, maybe in that 30 to 50 range that have kind of just climbed the ladder, done what's next. They don't really care about what their job is. It doesn't demand close attention. They're constantly multitasking. And this book is a reminder that says, hey, if you actually can take something that is at point X, or in the case of a motorcycle that is broken, get it to point Y, or in the case of a motorcycle, fix it, using your own skills and capabilities, that is extremely fulfilling. Now contrast that with the job of a management consultant or investment banker, and it is night and day. Yeah, the only thing I'd add there is that I think that, you know,

the manual work in terms of motorcycle maintenance and shop class can be replaced by almost anything that is like experiential and has a high degree of absorption. So as you're reading this, as I was reading this back then, and having no clue on anything, you know, motorcycle maintenance related or anything closely related to that, I'm relating all of these experiences to what I know, which is, oh, at that time, like running, which I'm sitting here like, oh, yeah, when I'm absorbed in this activity, it feels the same way. I understand and see this nuance. Oh, yeah, this differential and

knowledge that he talks about in terms of learning things versus doing and then learning from that experience. Oh yeah, that's that same battle I'm going on in my own coaching training life where I'm sitting there. Well, I learned this in grad school, but observing these athletes, like, that doesn't really apply and I need to like bank on this experience. So I think, you know, it's pretty simple. And that the, the, even though it's a book about motorcycles, like we all just replace that with whatever we kind of know an experience, and it just kind of hit on this almost universal experience for this time period where we have a lot of people who went from college into these jobs that don't value this type of experiential work and this type of absorption,

and we were seeking that flow or that absorption elsewhere. So why, so I completely agree with this. And this is the alchemy of this book, though, that I'm trying to understand is, like, let's bring in a comparison, Mike Roe. Okay. So, you know, Mike Roe, dirty jobs on Discovery Channel, as the Roe works foundation. On paper, Roe and Crawford are talking about the same thing, which is there is a real, like, value and dignity and satisfaction, not to mention, renumerative aspect to the skill. trades, right? That's, Mike Roe is all about that as well. And like Crawford is, is Mike Roe with a PhD, right? So it's, it's micro, but I have a fancier vocabulary. And I'm going to use words like

make my intentions manifest and et cetera, et cetera. But yet you don't, when someone like me encounters Mike Roe or someone watches dirty jobs, it's voyeuristic. It's like, oh, this is interesting to see what it's like to work in these jobs or this or that has no effect in terms of, oh, what's going on with my own life. Crawford's, on paper making the exact same point. And yet, it's like Steve is talking about, we immediately are substituting, yeah, well, obviously the motorcycle repair is metaphorical, and I'm thinking about the devalued nature of my own job and value and all these types.

By the way, sit me down a whole intellectual rabbit hole for years. It shows up in all my books. What is it? This is what I'm trying to figure out. I think it's the magic of this book is what was it about the way that he wrote it, that it had it have that effect? Because, okay, let's also compare it to Richard Sennett, the craftsman, which who blurbs Matt Crawford.

I think Sen, it's a Yale guy in academic who had a book about craft and the history of craft and I read it after I read Matt Crawford's book. And so it's very academic. It had no effect, no effect on me like that.

It was like kind of interesting in academic, but had no impact. I didn't make me very reflective about my life or this or that. So man, what is it? Crawford got something right.

And I don't know exactly what it was that allowed this to transcend, because we see Mike Rowe talking about this topic without the academic stuff. We see Richard Senate talking about this stuff with the peer academic stuff, and none of it's that affecting. But then Crawford hits something. I think what he hit is the middle of those two things. I think that he is academic enough where you can take the broader,

like you can take them narrow concept, excuse me, of motorcycle maintenance, and see it more broadly, because he's giving you an intellectual toolkit to do that, but he's not so academic that it reads like Dent's philosophy. I think the only other difference with Mike Roe in particular is his might, I'm unaware, but has Mike Roe written a book or has it always just been TV? I think he now has a book, but it's recent. Because I think a book in particular,

in what's so beautiful about a book, is a book is, to me, it's much more of a conversation with a reader than television. because a book, all you're getting is words and you're actually the one reading them. So the way that they sound and the tone and the flow is what you make of it. And whatever imagery comes up is in your own brain. Whereas TV, it's a lot more being kind of forced on you. Both the tone, the words that are stressed, the images. So I think some of it is just book versus television.

And what's so beautiful about books is it's much more of a conversation. with the reader. And then maybe he just got lucky. I mean, people don't like to talk of it. This is kind of inside baseball, but in our genre of these kind of, maybe the best thing to call him is highbrow personal growth or highbrow self-help books,

luck is a big factor. And sometimes you just hit the right book at the right time and the right handful of people come across it and then it spreads like wildfire. Do we call it a self-help? did he do his own thing or is this in the world of stuff we know? I mean, Steve, you read it most recently, so maybe you have the freshest thought. Where do you categorize this?

What are other authors you put on the same team here? Yeah, it's a good question. I mean, I think it is kind of self-helpy, but it's more of this like combination of philosophy and self-help. maybe along the lines of someone like Elaine DeBotten. Some, you know, where you're, there is like an underlying message of, you know, you can do this, this and this. But it's not expressively laid out in the way that a self-help kind of book would be in terms of, you know, giving structure or step by step. It's more of a guide that nudges you along the way but doesn't provide all of the answers, but gets you down that path towards hopefully helping yourself in some way. I had a hard time.

What's your, I had a, my memory, this was 12 years ago, is that it was denser than I expected it to be. And I had a harder time getting through it than I thought, but then it stuck with me really long. I don't know if you had a similar, either of you had a similar experience, but for whatever reason, that's my memory. I was like, oh, this is dense. You know, like it was, and maybe that's its magic. Maybe that's part of the magic. I'm not sure. Or maybe you guys are just smarter than I was.

But it's denser than most. I'm trying to think of an equivalent that has that type of self-help type residence, but is that actually difficult to read? Yeah. Oh, go ahead, Steve. No, go forward, bro. I was just going to say, I didn't find it that dense, to be honest. I found his next book, The World Beyond Your Head, to be quite.

dense. But if I think back to that period where I read it, I had probably also read Kahneman's Thinking Fast and Slow, Talib's Anti-Fragile. Maybe I read Anti-Fragile a little bit later, but I was reading some pretty dense stuff. So my brain was probably just like very primed for the philosophical arguments interspersed with story and more down-to-earth on the ground writing. yeah i do think that maybe what makes it its own thing is that you do have to wrestle with the ideas in the book i think elaine i'm going to mispronounce his name elaine davidton who steve mentioned i think is a really good um analogous thing to compare this to yeah who i always call allan which is like the most american mispronunciation of it's what all french philosophers imagine

Americans think about it. Alan to bottom. You had a book about Proust. All right. So, yeah, I think I was probably just dumber. I don't know. I remember that.

I just remember being like, maybe I just had my expectation set differently. Maybe I was expecting something easier. I was up to my ears and like math stuff at that point too. Yeah, but I was just going to say, I'm going to growth equation you for a little. And like putting like a coaching head on, I mean, there are like performance in anything is so

multifactorial and complex. You might have had a flu when you read this book that you didn't remember. You might have been putting together the world's greatest computer science proof. You might have first had the idea for so good they can't ignore you, blah, blah, blah. So I wouldn't overthink why it was challenging. I was writing the high school superstar book at the time. I remember I had that manuscript with me in San Francisco. It was like before I had made the leap into more respectable. Here I was writing a book about college. admissions and reading philosophy. So yeah, maybe it was the mismatch. What about the argument that this has, I'm thinking about this on the fly, the manual trade piece is maybe a red herring. Like, the piece that

resonated was the takedown of knowledge work. That certainly is the piece I drew from a lot in my subsequent books is the incredibly incisive takedown. At this time, it had five years before you had, you know, from the movies, you had office space. You had sort of Mike Judges take down. And then here was sort of a more academic take down. But the way that he, the term he used, I always remembers, bewildering is how he described sort of the landscape of a knowledge work manager, like what it is.

And then he would cut over and say, compare that to this gasket is stuck. And it can take like a lot of skill and care and then eventually it's unstuck. And so maybe it's that dichotomy is, is what mattered. Not so much that I want to do gaskets, but like, man, you're really getting that, you're really cutting to the quick here about why I'm just generally

unhappy with, quote-unquote, work. Yeah. I mean, I'm going to quote Crawford, who talks about in knowledge, work, jobs, despite the proliferation of contrived metrics, most knowledge economy jobs suffer from a lack

of objective standards. The result of this, he writes, is that when you ask a knowledge economy worker, particularly an upper middle manager, what they do, they have to offer a chattering vindication of their work. Whereas if you ask an electrician, if the light works, he simply flips the switch. And to me, like, that is, that's the crux of the argument. I don't even think it's necessarily all knowledge work. I mean, what we do is knowledge work.

I think it's more the middle layers of bureaucracies where people have soul-crushing jobs. I think the book that sits next to you on my bookshelf. I'm neurotic, so I organize my books by theme, is David Graber's 2019 book, Bullshit Jobs, which to me is like the perfect compliment for this book. And Graber's really clear. Graber doesn't say that all-knowledge work is bullshit. He just justifies a bullshit job as like a job where the world wouldn't, be any different if you didn't do it, and where the person doing it kind of knows that it's

bullshit. Yeah, which is maybe most of knowledge work. Yeah, it might be. You know, the most popular story I've ever written for the internet was it Outside Magazine, and it's not my favorite story by any means, but I don't write the titles, right? Outside does, but it's called, why do rich people love endurance sports? And I built the whole argument off of Crawford's I quoted Crawford heavily in the piece that basically most rich people are in these white-collar jobs where there is a fair amount of bullshit and they go over to endurance sports, which is hugely objective. It's like the complete opposite. If you're a consultant at McKinsey, something that I have intimate experience with, whether or not you do a quote-unquote good job is based on the

mood of the client that day, the mood of the partner on the deal of that day, whatever's happening in the external environment, and whether or not the squares on your PowerPoint slide are in alignment. A lot of subjective stuff. You go race a marathon. If you went 305 and your goal is to go 303, well, if you go under 303, you did a good job. If you go over 303, you didn't. And there's something that is very satiating and fulfilling about that. Now, I think rich people also love endurance sports because they have the time to train for them. There's all kinds of cool gadgets. I mean, there's a million other reasons.

And I do think that a big part of it is endurance sports provide a sense of realness for people that are otherwise kind of in, like, subjectivity, political, wishy-washy land. That's interesting. Interesting. Concreteness. I mean, that's like what you're talking about, Steve, right? Like your connection to running the tangibility of it. Yeah, that, okay, so I like that theory.

I like that theory. The, the concreteness that we lack. There's the neurological cost. Also, manual trades are one thing at a time. You're doing one thing. You're doing that thing. You're not having to, there's this weird exhaust. So inhuman, the switching back and forth between 19 different open things, each of which you have to touch on with an email that you rushed and it's ambiguous and it's probably not what you need to send, that it's just kind of made things more complex and that's all, there is something maybe more human.

Whereas like, I'm doing this. I'm trying to make this thing. I'm trying to make this thing work. There's an inhumanity in the multitasking, multi-concurrent stream nature of knowledge work that. you don't really realize how you butted up against trying to make the lights turn on or something like that. Yeah, when I, you know, along those lines, you know, I remember when reading this book the first time, like, underlying it, I just kept referring and thinking to self-determination theory. Sure. And how, like, oh, what Crawford is essentially saying is like, you know, these jobs, this knowledge worker economy,

I mean, it doesn't fulfill these things, right? This objectiveness that allows us to see that we are getting better and competence. And if we don't have those in that area, then of course we're going to do what Brad just mentioned in that article, like venture out and try and find and fill that space elsewhere. And, you know, I think, you know, whether it's competency, autonomy, or relatedness, I think that underlies like almost the entire premise that Crawford is trying to get at. Yeah, I was going to say for those that may be unaware, self-determination theory, four decades of research all boils down to three qualities that lead to well-being, fulfillment,

and those qualities are autonomy or some control over how you spend your time and energy, mastery or a sense of tangible progress that can be traced back to yourself and then relatedness or belonging, which is a sense of connection to other people and craft a lineage. And you think about a motorcycle mechanic, they've got all those things. Autonomy, like the bikes come in the shop, they're on the rack, they're broken, you're there for however long you need to be there, you figure out how to use your time. Mastery, the carburetor engine's broken. I couldn't fix it a year ago, now I can fix it. In belonging, there's like this huge subculture. I think there's a whole chapter in gearheads of people who are in this small community. So you have those elements that are so

firmly in place, whereas you look at the like the worst of the worst soul crushing corporate job, you have no autonomy because your calendar is filled with meetings that you don't schedule. You have no mastery because you're writing reports about things that may or may not be necessary and the judgment of those reports is based on all those subjective factors I just earlier mentioned. And if your belonging is happy hour where you have to go get drunk to tolerate the people that you're with and the discussion that you're having about your work, that's a pretty low score on self-determination theory. Now, I'm being a little hyperbolic. I've gone to happy hours that I've really enjoyed. I've written reports that were meaningful.

and I've also been in the opposite situation where I'm like, oh my God, what am I doing in this bureaucracy? You don't drink before these podcasts like I do? I'm not the only one. That's how I get into. So here's the bombshell. Cal's starting to poke fun. This is a brief interlude.

Listeners of the Deep Questions podcast, readers of Cal Newport's phenomenal books, time block journal officiados. Cal Newport was 15 minutes late for this podcast today. And lost. I was lost in a deep pursuit. Even better. He interrupted that deep pursuit to text message us. He took out his phone and texted in the middle of a deep pursuit and was late. So it just goes to show that everyone is a human. I was in a deep interview that was running long. And yes, I. And I, as as Brad pointed out, I cannot get through. I can't get through these conversations if I'm not drunk.

So I had to get through the bar card and you know how that goes. I have to set up my drinks. What does this mean? I don't know what it means, by the way, that I read this book in 2009, 2010, almost immediately start writing So Good, they can't ignore you. A lot of self-determination theory in that book, but don't mention Crawford. It's not till deep work, which comes out in 2016. Now suddenly I'm quoting Crawford all the time.

Maybe this was something that had to marinate. It was influencing me right away, but I didn't realize how it was influencing me until I let it marinate. So is there a solution? In other words, can work that is primarily knowledge, right? So there is no physical thing involved. Can it be Crawford-daized? What would that look like?

Yeah, I'll take a quick stab. So the first thing I'd say is that you can get closer to Crawfordotizing it. And I think that the way that you do it is, A, you make sure that it matters. So if someone's bike is broken or someone's toilet's not flushing, well, that's a problem. And you're there to fix that problem. So if you're doing work, then inherently you don't find meaningful or you don't think anyone's going to find meaningful and it doesn't matter, good luck. It's a non-starter. The second thing that I would say is pay close attention and care deeply about it. So even if you can more easily coast through writing a report, you shouldn't. You should treat

that report as if it's a broken bike and you're trying to figure it out. And then this is the hardest part in knowledge work, which is the concreteness or the objectivity of the result. Here I would say, if you can have a brain trust or a group of a few people whose opinions you really respect that you know will be reliable and give you good, honest approval or disapproval, obviously, your work and then you have the guts to only judge yourself based on what those people say, then yes, I think you get closer. And what I just described is how I approach writing. So I think that writing sits somewhere in between manual trade, Crawford-esque, being a sculptor, electrician, whatever, and more traditional white-collar office work. I think that you have a blank

page and you fill it. So there's something like really concrete about that. but the subjectivity of results of is it good or not is arguably open to significantly more wishy-washiness than knowledge work because you can't control what readers think or what reviewers think or when the book comes out or any of that stuff. So for me, it's really important that, hey, if you two read my book and like it and if Kelly McGonigal and blah, blah, blah, writers I respect like my book, then I can rest pretty well and be like, you know, if this book sells or not, like, it's a good book. Now, I'll say that

it still doesn't get all the way there, which is why I find it so important to personally have a practice that is super concrete. So the reason that I lift weights is not for my physical health. It's not to look a certain way. It's not because I'm competitive. It's because it provides me that really

concrete sense of mastery that I don't get from running. Excuse me, from running. I didn't get mastery from running because I never got better at running, but I don't get from writing. Well, an excuse also to send those videos of your weightlifting. Let's be honest. I'm glad you brought that up because I receive way too many videos. So I'm a little concerned that you're looking for external validation there from us, Brad.

Just for my respected peers, man, there is no Brad Stalberg on Instagram. I read digital minimalism. Steve was trying to convince me to have an Instagram account. This is all true, Cal. He's like it would be good for marketing. It would be good for the growth equation. And then I just sent him your book and said no Instagram account. And since then, I've been sending all my videos to Steve, looking, just dying for some approval from Steve of my deadlift. And he ignores them all. So I don't think you solved the problem.

You just made me your Instagram, which is, you know, going against things. But in all seriousness, kind of piggybacking on what you said there, Brad. I think it's important to understand that, like, well, certain kinds of college work can't get to maybe this idealized version that Crawford kind of outlines in his manual work. But we can shift where we are to a degree. And here I think it's important to recognize the value of the narrative or story we tell ourselves because we are in charge or in control to a higher degree than I think we are in terms of things like competency, meaning how are you just, judging whether you're getting better because so much of life, as this is an objective, is

pretty ill-defined. You know, you mentioned writing, like, whether we're successful or not can be defined by a number of different things. A lot of them kind of mushy and squishy that aren't objective. Same thing goes in with coaching, right? You can, you know, we'll step out of objective sports and just say a coaching that you or I do with executives or entrepreneurs. Are they getting better? Well, they can tell us they're getting better, but there's no real objectivity behind it. So we get to, you know, in a sense, define where those lines are a little bit. And I think too often is we're not intentional and deliberate on where we define that competency and what we value and, you know, all of those different things.

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And now I'm back to my conversation with Brad and Steve. Yeah, I like that. So much work now, it's very unclear what competent means. And it's interesting. Can we change that? Is it just some jobs that have it? Probably we can change it. But also, okay, let me throw out another theory, passion. So one of the other things that unifies the three of us is we've all three written books about passion.

This is something else that maybe helps explain some residents here is in knowledge work. We have this theory. We tell young people like, well, forget if it's your passion, you will like it. This is what matters. is matching the content of the work to this pre-existing passion. That goes out the window, like in the discussion of manual trades. I mean, like Mike Roe is known for this TEDx talk he gave where he was like, it was his whole thing.

No one has a passion to be a septic tank cleaner, but people have built great lives out of doing that, and you get this in Crawford, too. Nothing about his value structure is about, you know, if you're meant to be an electrician and you finally become electrician, then you find your value. It's a meaning system that's built out of a, qualities of the work, dealing with complex problems and solving them, doing things at a high level.

He has a whole section there about looking at the bent conduit of a master commercial electrician and just the sense of, said something like makes a grown man easy or something to see. Just what a beautiful thing I've done. So he's given a value structure for work that has nothing to do with this weird wishy-washy world that we grew up with, which is like, no, the work value comes from the job is your passion. And he's talking about a world. So that may be a satisfying, especially in 2009. You know, I don't know, maybe that is, is there a passion play here for understanding part of the residence? Or am I just trying to connect everything back to passion? No, I think you're kind of on to something to a degree

because, you know, he doesn't mention passion at all or this, you know, motivation driven by passion at all, which I think is something that, again, is something that you picked up on and something that Brad and I's work picked up on, on this like running counter to something that I think all of us were either kind of trained or told in the 90s through 2000s that connect this passion to your job and your work. And I think what Crawford, gets on or gets that really interestingly, is he almost in certain sections comes away with, hey, anything is interesting if you pay attention to it, like, see the nuance and get absorbed in it. Even these like things that are, you know, anyone else would see as frustrating or miserable can be interesting and valuable. And I think that gets at or runs counter to this idea that we were sold for so many years of like find the interest first and then you know that passion will drive you i think this is like a millennial i think this is the crux of the issue around millennials which i am of that generation so i think that there's nothing wrong with wanting to have a meaningful life and

wanting meaningful work anyone that says that something's wrong with that well that's on you and your generation because what's the point of being here if we can't create or derive some meaning out of it? I think the blind spot for millennials is too often this generation assumes that something will be meaningful right away or something has inherent meaning versus it's actually by doing the thing that it becomes meaningful to you. And that gets back to mastery and what Crawford is writing about. So it is this this total flipping of the paradigm that says, oh, hey, I'm going to do something because it's meaningful to I'm going to do something and get better at it and stick with it and forge community around it and struggle with it. And then it will be meaningful. And I think that that is another undercurrent through his book.

Because on its face, right, like fixing motorists. doesn't pass the millennial sniff test for meaning. It's not solving climate change. It's not social justice. It's not feeding, starving kids. And all of these things I'm mentioning are really important. But often, people pursuing those things feel devoid of meaning in their life. Whereas, like, the Crawford or before him, the Robert Persig of Zen and the Air

Motorcycle Maintenance argument is like, forget all like the highbrow stuff. Like, just do something with your hands, do a good job at it and don't be an asshole. And the funny thing is if everyone did those three things, we wouldn't have these bigger problems in the world. Yeah. Well, and Persick also was that be, there's like a gratitude piece to it, like actually derive and appreciate meaning out of capital Q quality, which was like an idea that I picked up again in deep work. It worked its way into deep work as a bigger idea from this book, All Things Shining, which was Dreyfus and Kelly, I believe, were their name. So it was a Harvard and a Berkeley philosopher. And it was the book that, very influential for me as well, came out a little later. It opened with David Foster Wallace committing suicide.

And it got into the, there's this sort of liquid modernity idea that's been quoted a lot these days, that he was having to create his entire framework of meaning for himself. And that's very difficult, right? When it's all on you, things get existentially despairing. And then they went through the history of ideas and about how in prior times there were these external structures on which not just meaning, but they would talk about mystery and value. And there was like the Homeric Greeks literally felt like the gods were inhabiting them. And there was a sort of mysticism in the medieval era and et cetera. And when that all went away, you know, we were left with nothing except for what we could construct from scratch. It's very difficult each individually to construct it from scratch.

And they, at the end of that book, said, oh, we think this solution is craftsmanship. There's something about actually confronting, at least if you want a secular solution, which they did, it's craftsmanship. You're confronting physical objects. And there are immutable properties that you're not making up. Like, I got this thing to work or I didn't. This wood is good for bending into a wheel or it's not. There's value and properties in this whole world that exists that is cited outside of yourself, cited outside of your subjective framework of value, and that there's something saving about it.

So it was like this big think approach on partially what you guys were both just saying and what Persig was saying, and what you're pointing out in Crawford, that in mastery and skill and craftsmanship, what you get is a value system cited outside of yourself. And you need something to hang on or push on or to get outside of your own damn head a little bit, right? Right. Yeah, maybe he's touching, maybe he's touching on that.

And there's a spiritual, mystical element to it, too. This is like a big theme in my forthcoming book that, like, we, we tend to divide religion and secularism. And I think that there's like dogmatic religion, which gives you a set of values and properties for meaning based on what someone tells you. And that is common in the West. But in the East, if you look at the quote-unquote religions or spiritual traditions, there are actually. a lot closer to fixing motorcycles. They are built on mastery and craft, whether it's Taoism, Buddhism, Hinduism, contemplative practice, focusing on nothing but your breath,

learning about your breath, learning about the nature of your minds, paying close attention, that's like the core of those traditions. And in some schools of Buddhism, focusing on that motorcycle is just as good as focusing on your breath. It's like an object of your attention that you care deeply about, that you continuously focus on, learn more about, and eventually you lose yourself in doing it. I mean, that's like the Buddhist path to enlightenment, and that's Crawford fixing motorcycles. So I think that, like, you know, it is very, like, spiritual to be doing that. And I find this so fascinating. In Tibetan Buddhism, enlightenment is often represented by, like, orgasms.

in sex because it's like the complete losing yourself in an act. And anyone that's ever done deep work, been in a flow state, reach nirvana meditating, it's in the middle of sex. Like if you're thinking about yourself, you're doing it wrong. But once you lose yourself, you're enlightened. And that's so different than most Western religious traditions. Not all, but most are like listening to someone else versus losing yourself out in the world. So I think there's like a hugely spiritual, mystical element in Crawford's book. And maybe that's another reason it's so popular because it's probably popular amongst a lot of people that were raised in Judeo-Christianity, who went to synagogue or went to church, listened to a sermon, and thought that, like, spirituality

was, you know, not swearing. Yeah. Well, it has the word soul. The word souls in the titles. It was a clue. Yeah, there you go. No, I think it also gets to maybe why it was. popular during this time period too is because you also have this kind of search for meaning in that people are starting to evaluate, you know, Western religions and where they fall and how they like to see it in their world. And you had this bigger divide. At the same time as you had this increase of passive consumption as the internet grew into what we now know it is today. Because you think this came out at the very beginnings or fruitiones of this kind of social media boom as well before Twitter and all that in the midst of Facebook growing and all that stuff. So I think all these kind of factors come together to probably make it a book that came out at the right time where people were feeling some of this angst and lack of meaning and this search for things that, you know, they didn't have in their life.

Right. So this would, let's see, 2009, 2010, right? This is financial crisis had just happened. There's a lot of dislocation with that. So the world of work was upended in a similar way that it is right now sort of in the tail end of the pandemic where people are renegotiating what work means because there had been this disruption, something similar. That's right. It was a good context. I forgot about that. But we were in that same context back then, which was, I mean, that was a disruptive time that led to the emergence of a lot of meaning-making. I mean, if, like, if you go back, for example, and trace, I mean, if you look at the more sort of radical styles of the postmodern critical theories that have emerged now as like being at the core of social justice, that all emerged in that period. It actually came, the Occupy Wall Street movement was the pivot point that brought a lot of these ideas out of academia and into the activism class. And you, for the first time, started to hear these ideas that you would have known from

academic circles. So that's another example. of something that emerged at that time. So maybe we should keep in mind the disruptive nature of what was happening in the world. Because I look back, I was in grad school. It's just like my experience.

And I had been in grad school for a long time. And so it feels like a very homogenous time. But it was on the world stage or the national stage disruptive. So yeah, there's a timing element there. Well, one last, before we get to some insider baseball about the book and Crawford and et cetera,

one last sort of big question about it. Because I've had two minds about this point, so I want to pull you on this. In deep work, I pulled from Crawford and said, okay, this type of meaning through mastery, etc. The manual trades is just a way to get to that idea, but you can derive this out of any type of work. It doesn't matter if your hands are involved or not, and I talked about some like poetic conceptions of computer programming. By digital minimalism, the next book, I had read some more. There's a book by Gary Rogowski, which is a woodworker and a couple other books that were influential. And by then, I was like, well, there actually is something probably unique to the human experience to our hands.

And while there's ideas from Crawford that we can apply to knowledge work and make it much more meaningful, it's this complete agnosticism I had in deep work about, hey, whether it's in your mind or with your hands, does it matter? bigger points about clarity and craft or whatever, I kind of turned around a little bit and said, actually, a huge portion of our brain is dedicated to our hands, the tactile pieces, and actually seeing something made physically manifest in the world, we probably get a special satisfaction out that just because that's what work was until a minute ago. And so I've gone back and forth on that. So where are both of you? Like, Steve, where are you?

I mean, which is those is right? You know, I fall more in the lines. I mean, I think they're both right to a degree, but I fall more in the lines of doing stuff, whether it's with your hands or movement, plays a large role. And this could be, you know, out of the fact that I was just out of grad school,

whereas learning about the latest theories on motor control and movement and performance, which were all shifting towards like this kind of ecological psychology embodied cognition, meaning that perception is partially based on the movement that you're performing. We learn how we see the world is connected to the movements we're able to perform. The example I like to give that was widely cited at that point is our ability or our height, like, influences whether we think we can dunk or whether we think we can reach,

you know, a tall item on a shelf or whatever have you, and how, like, we predict whether that movement can be successful or not. So, like, our action capabilities influence our perceptions, which then influences our actions. So as I apply that to this kind of Crawford work, I'm sitting here thinking like, okay, like movement plays a large role in this because it influences how we see the world and what we're able to do. Oh, interesting. I don't know. I think that I've fallen between the two ends of the spectrum. So I don't think it's either or. I think it's a continuum. And I think, sure, maybe would work. or deadlifting or fixing motorcycles is pure craftsmanship and mastery.

And then I think that you can work toward that if you are doing something that is more brain focused. One thing that I think makes a huge difference. It's something that I do with all my coaching clients and like unambiguously, I don't think I've ever had anyone that went back or didn't like this, is we start taking all of our notes in a physical notebook with a physical pen. So you don't have to write your next great novel or your executive report or do your PowerPoint deck with your hands, but you do need to capture creative ideas and think with your hands. And I had never thought of it until now, but I'm sure a part of

why people like that, why they report being more creative, feeling more like integrated with their work, if it is knowledge work, is because it's making it real in the world. It's not just existing in a cloud. So I think that maybe one takeaway for individuals that are not fixing things in the world or professional athletes, which is all of us, is that, yeah, autonomy, mastery, belonging, care deeply, single task, pay close attention, try to have a brain trust of people that really care about you and your work that you can evaluate your work and trust. And then also think about what can you do to make your work more real? And if it's using a notebook and writing with your hand, great.

If it is going from using BS words like leverage and hierarchies and blah, blah, blah, like try to speak more clearly and simply. Like get closer to reality and perhaps you'll find more fulfillment. Yeah, I think I, here's here's my, summary then. Here's where I think I fall is that I think it was congruent with what both of you just said. We're wired to understand and get satisfaction out of a very physical traditional craft because this was something humans did. We could conceive of things and then make those conceptions manifest. Okay. Now I built this thing and it matches the thing I was thinking about in my head. You know, the bells go off in our head. You feel good because we're wired for it. And a lot of what we're, you could summarize a lot of lot of this advice for knowledge work is basically, yeah, you're hijacking that system to try to get more sort of meaning and success at your knowledge work. You're basically hijacking a system that was meant for cavemen to build tools in order to get more meaning and satisfaction out of being a novelist or something like this. And that's good. Like you want to, this is the, the closest system we have that's most relevant to work is this. So how do we hijack that? In other words, how do we make what we do on a computer, screen be as congruent as possible to what we do in a motorcycle shop.

But then you probably also, and this is the argument from digital minimalism, probably should have at least a hobby that actually directly touches that system. Because you don't want to neglect it. So you're better off trying to hijack the craft brain system for your knowledge work job. It's going to make it better. But it's not going to make that job necessarily the same as being a wheelwright. So you might also want to have a hobby somewhere where you're doing that more directly. because we're wired for it.

That's the thing that I got convinced of sort of post-Soul shop class and sort of pre-digital minimalism is like, ah, there's something there. And so it's a way to think about it, right? We're just hijacking. We're hijacking this system. And the way we typically work today is terribly mismatched with this system. And so we all feel on we, and we all like this book.

Let's do some insider baseball, just some book publishing stuff. It's a little redundant to say that I'm stealing an idea here from Bill Simmons because this whole podcast is stealing an idea from Bill Simmons. But let's get even more specific in our theft. When you first, let's start with you, Brad, when you first encountered this book in 2000, whatever it was, were you buying Matt Crawford stock? Are you thinking, okay, this is someone who's going to kind of dominate the world of ideas for a while? I would say back then I wasn't even thinking about dominating the world of ideas I was just like oh like this dude's on to something right I was at grad school I had just finished two years of McKinsey I was very much living some of the things that he was giving me a new language for so I was much more like a I want to meet this dude be when my then girlfriend now white says like you're spending too much time training on your bike i could just be like oh yeah read this book you're spending too much time dealing with law school so that's where i was at yeah which you loved

i'm sure hearing yeah steve would you if you were in penguin in 2009 would you be saying after this book came out and hit that cord would you be like okay let's lock this guy up in a three book deal yeah i mean i i i was moved enough by this book to think like oh this is a thinker and i remember um You know, it was several years later when his next book came out, if I remember correctly, but I remember buying it just because it was Matt Crawford. And I was like, oh, like, this guy, like, whatever he writes about at this point, I'm sold on it because, like, you know, he, he hit on some concepts and then balanced this idea of, oh, here's some research, plus here's some philosophy, plus here's some experience, which really resonated with me at the time. And I think

set him a little bit of a part because we're used to, you know, saying, hey, here's some research. I'm going to go read this academic book, but no practical experience. Or here's my thoughts based on practice, but no philosophy, academic, et cetera, behind it. So that really sold me on that integration of that, that he was a good thinker. Yeah. But he never got, well, I guess he didn't get it. How do we think about what happened to him? next. Let me put it that way. What's the right way to understand the literary career? And let me, by the way, preface this. I am a massive Matt Crawford fan. He blurbed deep work. And it's all part of my scheme that I'm still working on that hasn't been, I haven't quite brought the fruition yet of

finding a way to hang out with him because I just think he's like one of the more influential thinkers I've encountered. But he wrote two books after this, The World Beyond Your Head, and then more recently why we drive. How do we under from just a strictly professional standpoint, how do we evaluate what happened? I mean, is it fair to say, obviously, those books were not culture shifting nearly in the same way? Yes, I was going to say, I would say that Matt Crawford is probably in the eyes of his publishers, maybe like a little bit of a flop after this book. That said, he set a very high bar for what a flop means. And most important, I don't think Matt Crawford gives a shit because I genuinely believe he was fixing motorcycles

and he couldn't even tell you which of his book sold the most copies. So by that metric, he's enormously successful. And a reminder that particularly in this tradition of human potential or mastery, lots of thinkers are not in their time wildly popular and then become more popular. So like Eric Fromm was mildly read. George Leonard mildly read. And sometimes it takes a generation or two. And I think the more that we turn into automaton's in a huge consumeristic flywheel, the more relevance this book might have. Or while just forget, about Crawford, but yeah, I don't think he's a smashing success by conventional standards, but I think he's a smashing success by his own standards because, like I said, I just can't imagine

Matt Crawford, Karen. Well, we should point out, he still has Shaco Motor, his repair shop. He's also a fellow at UVA and they're like Institute for Cultural Studies. So he really is figuring this out. My understanding is he goes to campus a couple days a week, maybe. It's like a fellowship. He writes smart things and mainly is working on his motorcycles. He doesn't repair motorcycles anymore, though. He does custom builds.

So I don't know what he take away that. I think I'm holding on to my Crawford stock too. I think, Brad, you're absolutely right that this is going to be, I hope he keeps writing. It's going to be one of these thinkers that 30 years from now we look back on and say, oh, this guy had his finger on a lot of things. And I think you're right that he could not care less about, you know, what are the what's my Amazon rank in you know week three uh I also think a world outside our head

it was the idea piece of of shop class without the grounding piece right I mean it went pure academic he's a smart guy I mean he's got a special brain right and then his new book I'm why we drive it's back I don't know I think it's back more to vintage Crawford because it's more he's grounding again. It's a meditation on human freedom, etc. But he's completely grounding it in something that involves, you know, grease under your, under your nails. Yeah, so I'm, okay, so I'm holding on, I'm holding on to my,

I'm holding on to my Crawford stock, even if that the splashy metaphorical, or hypothetical, I should say, three book deal in 2010, got the, would have got the editor in trouble with their publisher. Yeah, okay. I'm holding on my Crawford stock. He's doing something unique, for sure. And I think it's coming back to one other thing we mentioned earlier, which is timing. Because, you know, having read why we drive recently, which is, I think you're right, it's back to vintage Crawford's shop classes, sold craft, integrating these different practices and philosophy. But it's interesting, because I wonder if why we drive is a little too early, right?

because I don't know if everyone's feeling the central premise of that book is, you know, well, doing, driving, like gives us these things that we don't recognize versus this automated world we're kind of going towards. I just wonder if the timing versus shop class kind of came out at the right time and why we drive might gain in popularity as we go into this more, you know, people face this more, you know, passive life of automation or things being done for them or, you know, even driving being taken away.

And it gains value when that time, you know, comes. Yeah. Well, partially what made that time interesting, it was in the pandemic. I mean, it was June 2020. He did some really interesting interviews, by the way. It's not really the main point of the book necessarily,

but he was doing some really interesting pandemic. heart of the pandemic interviews about why we drive, where the point, this really stuck with me. He was talking about, like, look, the guys in the shops where I work

have a different relationship with coronavirus than the knowledge workers, I know. And it's, they're not as worried about it. They aren't really obsessing as much about it. Like, they'll put on masks if required to do this and that.

It's just not something. And he's like, and I think it all comes down to a different relationship with risk. This type of work has these dangers. Like the things fall, you lose fingers, things get chopped off in the saw. The car comes off of the stands. And so they're very, and he was also talking about they race cars, some of these guys,

which is risky. He's like, oh, so they're very comfortable with doing risk analysis and very comfortable with like very precisely gauging risk. You know, like, okay, yeah, this could happen. Probably won't. I'm comfortable with that risk. This is too much risk. And so his contention was the guys around me in the

shop, we're very easily able to take at the time in like the summer. And it's very easily kind of able to take it in. Like, how risky is this thing? How likely am I to get it? How bad would it be for me compared to these other risks I have? And you're like, okay, like, yeah, it's a higher risk. There's other elevator risk in my life, whatever. And that the rest of us have no relationship to risk beyond just basically no risk, which we're just not comfortable with it. So it just fried our circuit. Like, wait, something bad could really happen here. Hand me the welding torch because I'm trying to get this doorframe, you know, welded. I'm trying to get this doorframe welded shut, and the Uber each driver can catapult the food

to me through the chimney because, you know, so I don't know if that's either here nor there. It probably didn't help him sell the book to be doing that type of interviews on sort of rich white people type stations, but I thought that was really interesting. And it's not the point of the book. And I don't know why I'm bringing up other than, for some reason, I just really remember that, that, yeah, you do stuff with risk, you get comfortable with risk. and when new risks come along, and the other group,

and now I'm completely on a digression here, the other group that had a very similar reaction to COVID was the Navy SEALs who have podcasts, who I know or I follow, and Crawford helped me understand why. It's like, oh, their whole life is like calculated risks. Like, everything they do,

they're jumping out of planes and blowing things up and going on missions. And so, like, they're just very used to, like, risks at different levels. And like, yeah, that's above here, here, I'll be a little bit more cautious, whatever.

I'm going to take a nap. And so there we go. I mean, that probably didn't help the book, but it was an interesting, timely application of his ideas. Yeah, I remember when those interviews were happening, and I think that Crawford spoke to this

with more nuance. What bothered me in lots of those discussions was the conversation was on risk avoidance, not on value, and if the cost is just wearing a mask or not being able to go watch football at B-dubs,

that's a pretty low cost to avoid like a long-tail risk. So I don't know. I think it's easy to see the, I think a risk of writing a book like this is you start to see the world like through your idea. And I do remember listening to Crawford being like, I am, I am, know my bias is probably some, someone that is very risk-averse, that is a knowledge worker that has a young kid.

And I kept thinking, like, but come on, man, like, they're asking you to wear a mask. Now, the extent of closing things down and what things were closed down, I actually think, and now we're going on a real segue, that those decisions were made with non-perfect information, and I think that people in good faith generally tried to do a good job. I think the media hysteria about all this has just been terrible since day one, but it's like, if it bleeds, it leads. So, of course, it's constantly going to bleed. But back to Crawford and Wye Drive, I thought that was really good.

I was really glad because I had never heard of Shoshana Zubov until I read that book. And she wrote Surveillance Capitalism that Crawford quotes a few times and really draws from. And that book, you know, if you've made it this front of this podcast, you're probably a reader into this kind of book. I could not more highly recommend surveillance capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff. It's dense. It will take you time to get into. But it is just a completely mind-blowing book on the, I guess what she would call the instrumentization of all of our behaviors to serve the ability to sell us stuff. and I say that I change my mind often, but I'm like a human, it's still hard to. And reading that book gave me a total 180 on the Google self-driving car. Now I think it's a terrible idea because I read that book,

and I used to think it was a great idea. Yeah, everyone has to read that book. I love those books, by the way, where it's not replicatable because it's like I've spent my whole life studying this, and you don't really know enough about this. I'm going to bring you into this world, and it blows up your head. Now, you can't write a book like that unless, like, you actually spend a good portion of your life,

like, mastering a tough man. But that I underlined that. I read that book. Why did I read that book? Because we were interviewing Professor Candidates at Georgetown. And we were interviewing someone who works in that field of, like, trying to basically using it. They try to counter some of these surveillance capitalist things that are going on. And he just sat down and walked me through all the ways we're being.

tracked. And he's like, hold on, let me pull up calnewport.com. He's like, okay, you have multiple things on here that you didn't know that are tracking people who come to your website. You don't even know they're there, figuring out who they are based on fingerprinting, and then selling that information on an auction market so that we can better target an ad because this is someone who is just at calnewport.com, so we know what to sell them. And it was your widget for signing up for your newsletter. Yeah, you know what they put in there? code to track people and sell their information on. And then he got into, oh, do you realize what happens with your app, your, like your fire stick or your

Roku? You realize it's selling all the information about what you're watching and when you're watching and it's being integrated with, yeah. So that got me onto that book and it's scary. So I'm with you. We're all being surveilled. And, you know, except for Crawford, who's probably, you know, in his disconnected garage, tuning up his motorcycle. I'm doing a search now that I'm nervous about. I am searching for Matthew Crawford and social media, and I am hoping there is not a bunch of weightlifting videos here. All right, let's see here.

That by the way... If you want to take the algorithms for a trip, I actually do this weekly, and it's probably a waste of my time, but it makes me feel good like I'm beating the system. I'll like Google poisonous iguanas, Black Widow spiders. So I was on like a small animal phase.

And then sometimes I Google like different kinds of trees or like water treatment products. And it definitely messes up the algorithm all the way through Spotify. Like I'll spend time Googling like reptiles and suddenly my Spotify song recommendations are totally different. So keep the algorithm guessing. So the algorithm's watching our video right now and they're going to start sending me a lot of James Clear links. right, Brad, because you look exactly like him. The algorithm is learning. By the, okay, here's irony, guys.

I just looked up, Matt Crawford. Oh, it's a different person. Oh, thank God. Okay. I just looked up. I was like, oh, here's Matt Crawford's Twitter page, and it's a bunch of tweets about him having COVID. It would be some, like, deep irony in it,

but this is a different Matt Carford. So, okay. Saved by the, saved by the bell there. I don't know why this matters. have I have this hope that he is not someone who is spending a lot of time on social media. I'm sure he's not on social media at all. I'd be shocked if you could find Matt Crawford. I can't find him.

I'd be shocked if you could find Matt Crawford in Charlottesville. So I think he lives near to D.C. His shop, anyways, this is all part of my plan to go hang out with Matt Crawford, which has been a long-term plan of mine that hasn't yet come to fruition. He's in sort of suburban Virginia and then drives down the Charlotte. Is this weird that I know this stuff? Is this going to come across as creepy? All right. I can't find him on social media.

So I'm happy. Him and I are the last two. Okay. No radio is more exciting than people Googling things. All right. Well, good. So I think we've figured this out. would this final question, could he sell this book today if he was just starting?

Or would they say, where's your Instagram account? Like, where's your podcast? Or 2021, this portfolio of books signing up that profit? If you all are listening to this podcast and you want to read this book, let's tell know. And I'd be really curious to see, like, A, is that? this conversation even resonant now or does it just the three of us navel gazing and you know intellectually just having fun um or is there is there still an appetite for it i i think it's a super important book

i think it was also a groundbreaker it's kind of like mj and then you get you know Kobe and i don't know devon booker maybe like the wing guard i love basketball so like you get deep work and you get um Oh, it's totally alluding. Oh, the shallows, Nicholas Carr. You get these other books that are very similar. Am I MJ or Devin Booker in this analogy? No, no, no. Matt Crawford is MJ. I see. All right. So then I'm Kobe. No, but you, like, no, I guess what I'm saying is that talk about like belonging in lineage is I think like Crawford is somewhere in a lineage. and then, you know, in coaching and performance coaching, and particularly in sports, Steve will know more about this than me. You have like these coaching trees.

And you have like this old-timer master coach and then all these disciples and they emerge and they emerge and they emerge. And I feel like Crawford is kind of higher up in that tree perhaps. And maybe Persig. You'd have to ask Crawford like who he sees or from. But I think that he is like a firm branch on the tree that says, hey, these are age-old ideas about math. and paying attention and caring, here's modernity, and here's my first take on, like, taking back our time and energy for what matters, concreteness, mastery, and then that is going to spur in other books, like the books that we write. So that's how I think of him.

One thing that I think is interesting that I think Cal was alluding to is, I think this book would have a harder time getting published, though, maybe published in a popular press like Penguin because he has no social media, right? No following to a degree. He's a professor, right? Or, you know, works at UVA and some other stuff. I think if it

just came out at this point and Crawford wasn't known, it might have a harder time taking off, which I think is kind of sad in a disservice. Yeah. I think he had like a big New York Times magazine p like excerpt i think that's what launched it it's my memory is like they they basically

kind of re-ran this might be wrong i think they kind of reran his new atlantis essay or something like this but yeah i think that's sad man i think you might be right though right uh they might they might say um you have no platform you know though though right now would be a great time for this book to come out like i hope this pops to sales i mean everyone's doing the same thing now they were doing in 2010 after the crash. Like, what does work mean? What do I want to do with my life? I mean, this would be a perfect time.

I guess it would be a perfect time. Somebody's got a book coming out in September. That's, okay. We should, we should say Brad does have a book coming out in September. It is a coffee table book full of photos of him weightlifting. So I think we should all look forward. It says, it's called Like Me. and it's style like Instagram pages.

I don't know. Now, Brad has a book. Oh, you're killing me. Grounded. Brad's book is perfectly timed. And I can't even give you too much credit because you didn't, you couldn't have predicted this timing. I remember when you were first working on this.

No, but it's a, and we'll talk more about it later, hopefully. But like, it's a timeless book. And it's kind of like this book. And it's not rocket science, but it's like a call to focus on what matters, define what matters. try to craft a life around those things that matter. I mean, you call it the deep life.

I call it groundedness. Which is the moment. This is the moment. Everyone's like, how do I do that? Like, people suddenly care. Yeah. So last time around, we had Crawford. What I'm interested in too, and now we're getting way off,

is like maybe we're sometimes I think, like, I'd like to see our writing go, all of us individually, the things we talk about together. And, Cal, I think you're kind of doing this a little bit, at least in your popular press writing and with a world without email is the individual like our work has predominantly been bottom up and maybe you'd say a world without email change that where we're helping individuals work in a system that has lots that is wrong with it to be better, feel better, and change the system. And I think that at some point it'd be nice to start switching to some of the issues with the system. Like something that's on my mind a ton and in my

brain relates completely to Crawford's work is like universal basic income. Like if technology truly gets so good that all the actual things that matter or most of them can be done by robots and algorithms, then should we really make people get bullshit jobs just to keep them busy? Or should we tax the owners of the remarkable technology at a very high rate, give people $60,000, $70,000 a year to live on? And then there'd be more art, more creative work, more motorcycle mechanics. I don't know the answer, but I do think that we're eventually going to get to a point where technology gets really good and many of the jobs left are just there to keep people busy. And I don't think that is a recipe for thriving society.

Well, okay, just brings us to the last question then, perfectly, which is if you could decide what Matt wrote next, what would it be? And I would. I would. would, what you're saying here just catches my attention, you know, at Shop class laid out an issue, laid out a philosophical framework. I would love a follow-up of how could we reconceive

the world of work, given what he uncovered in Shot Club. It'd be great. Just sort of like a world without email follows up the deep work. Like, how would you rethink work now that we understand the value of deep work or whatever? Just like Geron Lanier, after You Are Not a Gadget, wrote the

book about like rebuilding the internet. But his idea turned out to be crazy. But I love that. I love that one-two pair. If you have a book that lays out a new value system and elucidates it, you're like, oh, wow, this thing is really valuable. We're missing it right now. And then here's how we rebuild.

Here's how we could dramatically rebuild things. I love the dramatic rebuild book. I don't think we have enough of those. I think people worry too much about people saying, well, that's a bad idea. And I think that kind of ignores the point, which is take the big swing and then let people add their own caveat. So that's my answer to spare final question. Steve, what's your answer? What book would you convince Matt the right next? Yeah, I'm just going to steal your answer because I love it. I actually think it ties in well with why we drive, which just kind of gets on this. Oh, what does the

future look like in terms of when we have automation and aren't driving cars? I want that bigger, grander, like, to expand out to what does the future look like when almost all of our jobs are automated and we have time for doing, but we have all of this system, this internet, social media, etc., that pulls us away from active doing into passive consumption. Like, how do we take that back and go towards active doing in a world where, you know, everything's automated? So like a pitch. Are you going to zag or what's your answer?

I'd love Crawford to write a book on universal basic income. I think like it gets to his political philosophy. And I have no idea. I could feel like he's totally for it or he thinks it's a terrible idea. But I would love for him to wrestle with that idea. I think it'd be really interesting because I'd imagine if I'm seeing the thread, then he's probably thought about it a lot more. between jobs that don't really matter just to keep people busy

and letting people take more shots at the arts and creativity and manual work. Yeah. I mean, in my own, like, worldview, Crawford's made me, like, what I call, like, a progressive libertarian, like, super progressive on so many things, but also, like, generally, like, big bureaucracies are full of BS. so people will make good, for the most part, make decent decisions if you set them up to. But I think, like, yeah, I'd be really curious to hear what Crawford thinks about universal basic income. Yeah, okay, I love it. Or just more generally, Crawford, let's get that brilliant, somewhat crumudgeonly, non-Twitter-affected brain, taking some swings at policy or taking some swings at some big ideas about how to live.

All right, Penguin, you've heard it. Get on the phone. I assume it's a phone you would have to use it. He picks up off the wall in his motorcycle repair shop and has the long cable and he brings it in. Get on the old-fashioned phone with Matt and get him writing another book. Steve Brad, thank you for joining this first sort of rewatchables ripoff. I enjoyed it. And everyone else out there listening, put down your phone and go try to repair motorcycle.

All right. Thanks, everyone. All right, that was fun. We'll be back next week with our normal Q&A formats, but it was nice to have a little change of pace for the July holiday. So we will see you next week with those answers. And until then, as always, stay deep.