Ep. 356: How Much Should We Work?  ## Metadata - Author: [[Deep Questions with Cal Newport]] - Full Title: Ep. 356: How Much Should We Work? - Category: #podcasts - URL: https://share.snipd.com/episode/7bd550b9-fcfe-4263-9dd3-08c11c58d5ac ## Document Notes ## Highlights - **Brain Renting Model is Exhausting** - Knowledge workers can't sustain focused attention for eight hours daily like industrial labor demands of the body. - This unnatural constant brain usage is exhausting and drives burnout today. Transcript: Cal Newport So something we hear casually tossed around these days is the idea that knowledge workers are more exhausted and prone to burnout than ever before. Anecdotally, this seems to be true, but does the data back it up? Well, it does. If you look at survey data of knowledge workers, this trend seems to be clear. For example, 2025 research by research consultants at Censuswide found that 66% of American employees are experiencing some sort of burnout. This was the highest number they had recorded. Another survey from 2025 found that 82% of respondents reported experiencing some level of exhaustion. I kept finding study after study along these lines. They are common and the trend lines are heading in the wrong direction. So I want to talk about this today and I have two goals. First, I'm going to focus on a specific factor that I think helps explains this trend. It's not the only factor that explains this trend, but it is an important one. And it's one I think that we don't talk about enough. Second, I'm going to then follow the logic. If this factor is true, where would that lead us in terms of how we should be rethinking work? And I'm going to make a suggestion about what I think the ideal knowledge work day should look like for a normal human being. The answer that might be shocking, but if you give it some time, I think it actually makes more sense than you might at first realize. So to get started, I want to start in an unexpected place. It's a quote I came across recently that sparked the whole line of thinking that led to this deep dive. It was a quote that was written down in a journal 150 years ago, and it might not seem to have anything to do with work, but I think when we look at it closely, it has everything to do with work Today. All right, I'm going to pull this quote up here on the screen for those who are watching instead of just listening. This quote comes from Henry David Thoreau's journal. He wrote this journal entry in 1852. This was in the period after he had already spent his time at Walden Pond, but before he had published his book on the experience. So he was sort of processing it. Here's what he wrote. I have the habit of attention to such excess that my senses get no rest, but suffer from a constant strain. Be not preoccupied with looking. Go not to the object. Let it come to you. What I need is not to look at all but a true sauntering of the eye. Okay, let's think about this a little bit. What did he mean by this? Well, to get some analysis that's going to help us connect us to work, I'm going to turn to the source where I found this journal entry, which was in Caleb Smith's recent book, Thoreau's Axe, which I read a couple months ago and we talked about on this show. The author of this book, Caleb Smith, in analyzing Thoreau's journal entry that I just read, said the following. At Walden, Thoreau had begun by trying to undistract himself, to reawaken his own powers of perception and refocus his attention on natural, uncommodified objects of contemplation. By doing so, he had hoped to free himself from the degrading cycle of labor and consumption that organized middle-class life under market capitalism. In the long run, though, he found that this very effort exhausted his senses and trapped him in a, quote, habit of attention, end quote. All right, this is a little bit academic. That's from an academic book, but let me deconstruct it because there's a critical point in here. When Thoreau went to Walden Pond to do that experiment of living deliberately by the water, he thought that his problem was he was paying attention to the wrong things, right? That he was focusing too much on consumer and materialistic goods, and that by removing those from his life and focusing on the wonders of nature, for example, which he describes in Sort of great loving detail in his book Walden, that he would find a sort of more purity in his existence. He was sort of playing here with the ancient monastic Christian notion of turning your attention from the worldly to the heavens above and contemplating hard God and divinity. But in this journal entry that comes after he leaves Walden, he's realizing that the bigger problem was how much time he was spending paying attention in the first place. So he was discovering this idea of like, I need to focus really hard on the right thing, like focus on the ice that I'm going to write about in Walden, focus on the clouds up above, that that Act of paying so much attention itself was unnatural, regardless of what he was paying attention to. There's periods where you just need to let the world be around you, let objects come to your attention and then drift off. This might give you deep insight. Sometimes it might not, but it gives you a more deeper sense of contentment. So we had this revelation. There's only so much we can kind of force ourselves to pay attention. We're actually wired to let the world come to us, just to be there in ([Time 0:03:32](https://share.snipd.com/snip/c758f41e-6ad0-4653-b877-a90f50ca4b6b)) - **Tech Amplifies Brain Rental Pressure** - Technology increased surveillance and workload granularity, making it impossible to fake full brain rental in office work. - This amplifies exhaustion as workers are expected to be cognitively engaged constantly without natural breaks. Transcript: Cal Newport Wouldn't it just be bad from the very beginning? Well, I think technology has a role to play in this story. In 1965, and you're working on Madison Avenue, like in the Jon Hamm show, Mad Men, that your brain was being rented for eight hours, it was easier to fake it than you could in industrial Labor. In industrial labor, I can tell if you were not doing your thing on the assembly line. I can see you not turning the wrench. What's going on? I'm John, Don Draper in Mad Men. Come on, I can have a cocktail at two in the afternoon for an hour. We're like working in the conference room to think about ideas, but not really. When the boss comes by, you put down your magazine and you're at the water cooler talking football and the supervisor walks in and you quickly shift at the client talk. So we all kind of pretended like this is what we were doing. Yeah, we're renting our brains just like our brothers in the factory. It's the same thing we're doing. We're renting our brains for eight hours and we're here and we're thinking the whole time, but we really weren't doing that. And you could kind of get away with that. Then technology came along and we lost our ability to fake it. The personal computer, as I've talked about before, and I wrote about this in my book, Slow Productivity, the personal computer came along and it vastly increased the number of things You could be working on. There's so much more work that could be assigned to you because there's so many more things that one individual could do because the computer made so many tasks just easy enough that One person could learn to do them. This led to a theory of workload that said, well, great. Now that there's so many different things you can do, why not just fill your queue hopelessly large with the idea that there'll be no downtime? So there'll always be something you can work on, right? So we were kind of calling the bluff of this renting your brain model. We're like, okay, if we really have your brain for eight hours, now that there's like an endless amount of stuff you could be doing, let's put so much on your plate that you never have an Excuse not to be working. Then we got the digital communication revolution that started by email and was continued by things like Slack and Teams, et cetera. And that now made it possible to check in on you applying effort at an incredibly fine level of granularity. Answer my emails right away. I know you're paying attention. If you don't, then maybe you're stealing from us. We rented your brain. You're not giving it to us. See activity going back and forth on the Slack channel or we're going to think that you are actually ironically slacking off. So we vastly increased what people could be doing. We vastly increased the granularity at which we could surveil people's efforts. And suddenly this half-baked idea, let's just rent brains for eight hours. We actually tried to do it. And that's why it's exhausting everyone. And Thoreau warned us about it. He wasn't warning us about office work, but he was warning us about the underlying principle that, hey, it's hard to ([Time 0:11:15](https://share.snipd.com/snip/71dd3be6-d997-44f7-ab4b-8597ee4da8d1)) - **The Thoreau Schedule Concept** - The Thoreau schedule optimizes for the brain's natural attention limits: 2-3 hours of deep work, ample breaks, then administrative tasks. - This schedule reduces burnout risk without necessarily reducing long-term productivity. Transcript: Cal Newport Even if the thing you're paying attention to is good, there's only so much of it you can do. So what would it look like if we rolled back the clock and said, look, Thoreau is my management consultant of choice. And we're going to design what I'll call the Thoreau schedule, a schedule for knowledge work, a typical daily schedule that actually is compatible with the way the human brain actually Functions. Here's what this would more or less be. Two to three hours of deep work in the morning. So working on one or two things that are important and require application of skills and concentration, non-trivial amount of time off, like an hour or two, long walk, other types of Things unrelated to work, one to two hours of administrative work, including a standing 30-minute meeting or office hours to check in with all sorts of other people and get questions Answered and any other sort of things that need to happen, and then you're done. That would actually be the schedule that best corresponds to the human brain. If you want to invent a cognitive job ([Time 0:13:52](https://share.snipd.com/snip/994550fa-104d-4885-a1f8-271ac3a36c8e)) - **Build Transferable Career Capital** - Build career capital by developing rare and valuable skills that open multiple job options. - Choose pursuits where your skills transfer to a variety of roles to create a robust backup plan. Transcript: Jesse Miller Your advice on having a career backup plan especially for young people aiming for highly competitive fields like academia? What makes for a good backup plan in case things don't work out, even if I follow your advice? Cal Newport It's a good question. This is where career capital theory matters. This is the whole theoretical framework I lay out in my book, So Good They Can't Ignore You. So career capital, as we talk about a lot on the show, is my term for your marketable skills, your rare and valuable skills. That is your source of value and negotiation in the job market. Thinking about not just what specific job am I trying to get. You should also be thinking about what general type of career capital am I accruing. And you want to make sure that not only are you accruing as much as possible, which means not just like doing what you need to, you know, bare minimum to get the job, but like, I want to build Skills that are hard and they're really valuable. And like people like, wow, you're good at that. That's valuable. You want to build up that general career capital. And then your question just becomes, what other types of jobs would value and reward this capital? And you want to make sure the answer to that second question is sufficiently long. So whatever you're working on, say, is there a way to go for this, that the capital I'm building up to try to succeed for like this particular job is going to have a couple other outlets Where people would value it. Because often what happens in particular pursuits, there's different ways to do them. Some ways are going to use more capital than others. Like in academia, I don't know, maybe there's like a very esoteric way you go forward where like this better work because like there really is no, I'm not building up any other skills That anyone's going to find valuable. And then there's, there's ways forward where like, look, I'm building up skills to do this where like if a tenure line job doesn't work, there's still a lot of research positions that I could like fall back on for a couple of years, catch my breath. And then the skill will be useful here, here and here in the private sector, et cetera. So think about it in terms of career capital, not just jobs. ([Time 0:28:30](https://share.snipd.com/snip/e065615a-2fc7-45a2-b8b9-e122ea909c30)) - **Use Coaches for Sanity Checks** - Use an executive coach mainly for sanity-checking your career plans, not for decision-making. - Focus on lifestyle-centric planning to clearly define what work rhythms fit your desired life. Transcript: Cal Newport Is Cal Network available? So I read this as two questions. A, is Cal Network available? But two, does it make sense to have a coach, right? That's kind of what she's asking. Yeah. Okay. Cal Network, I'm looking this up now actually, does have an online career coaching course. I have it here. So you do have that option. It's called I'm the Boss Now. 74 Essential Laws to Crush Your Enemy, See Them Driven Before You and Hear the Lamentation of Their Women and Hear Earned a Promotion You Know You Deserve. So that's good. It costs $1,900 a month. So it's a bit of an investment, but it's probably worth it. Do you know the origin of that quote, Jesse? The crusher enemy, see them driven before you and hear the lamentations of their women? No. Conan the Barbarian. That's John Milius' screenwriting right there. It feels like something Cal Network and John Milius get along. Conan said, like, I want to see my enemies driven before me, hear the lamentations of their women. It's this whole thing. But should you have, assuming you don't want to take, I'm the boss now, should you have a career coach? Here's the thing to think about. What do coaches do? They sanity check your plans. They're not going to make the plans for you. That's actually very valuable, right? I mean, I think a lot of people, myself they put together a plan and the big fear is like, maybe this is not right. Like maybe I'm crazy or I'm deluding myself or I've been reading too many Cal network books or whatever. And they have like an executive coach or a career coach. So like, no, no, this is a good plan. And I back it up. That is worth a lot, but you have to keep in mind, they're not going to say, let's sit down and I'll figure out what you should do. You still have to do that. And in your situation with the type of decision you're looking at, lifestyle-centric career planning is the right way forward. So you really want to be clear about what you want in like the two or three-year period, as well as like the 10 or 15-year period, what you want the rhythms of your day-to life to look like, Because these two directions, leadership roles versus research roles, are going to yield very different lifestyles. And so you want to be really clear about it. Now, I don't actually think this is an obvious choice. Like someone might say, ah, leadership roles is going to be stressful as email, like just be a researcher. But research roles could also be stressful because A, it's more provisional, like if your research doesn't go well, it also may be much less money. There might be its own stresses of trying to do grant management or trying to manage teams of postdocs and grad students. Like, you really got to think this through. And then and here's where I think lifestyle center career planning gets really useful. You work out a sort of rough ideal lifestyle image. Now you have these two options and you're kind of working through, OK, what I keep in mind for the leadership position I might follow, what I have in mind for the research position I might Follow, how do they lead, how close do they lead to my vision video lifestyle? And what you might discover doing that is like, oh, you know what? They both have flaws, but now there's this other thing, like a variation of one of those ideas. If I was like this type of leadership position or not this type of research position, but this one over here, that avoids the big misses on my ideal lifestyle, and it's much closer. Like it actually allows you, the lifestyle vision-centric planning allows you to explore a much wider space of available positions than most people instinctively do. They lock in on a couple of options and say, this is it. And they might not know there's this other sort of a little bit unusual option. It's like, oh, it's like a research position, but it's not at this university. It's at this university and it's this time. It's something you never would have thought of except for you're doing lifestyle center career planning and you have this big thing you want in your lifestyle that's missing and that Makes it work. So lifestyle center career planning doesn't just let you decide between two options. It allows you to see other options you might not have otherwise even considered that end up being the best one. So take Cal Network's course, mortgage your house if you have to. Second, do serious lifestyle-centric planning. And then third, maybe hire a coach. But keep in mind the goal there is going to be sanity checking, not someone handing you a plan. I think Cal Network hands you a plan if you take his course. Probably. You walk in. You don't say anything. He stares at you for a little bit, does one more bicep curl, then goes management consultant. Boom. Just tells you what you should do. And that's what ([Time 0:30:50](https://share.snipd.com/snip/9479dbc1-49a0-4aab-97db-0f730528fd66)) - **Use Accountability Tools to Train Discipline** - Accountability tools help train discipline by creating consequences that compel action. - Use them temporarily to build habits until you can internally maintain discipline. Transcript: Jesse Miller I'm trying to build my discipline and use an accountability support tool. Is this cheating? And if so, should I be building this more on my own? No, it's not cheating. Cal Newport The way I think about accountability support tools, like where you, there's different things here. You have like a partner and you tell them what you're going to do and then you tell them if you did it or not or you put money on the line. And if you don't actually like follow through on something, you have to pay the money or whatever it is you're doing. I think that's like a perfectly fine, I would call it disciplined training tool. And I think it's similar to various training tools you might use as you're like trying to pick up a new, you know, physical ability or new marker of strength. Typically, what happens is people don't need to stick with these long term, but they help you build up a rhythm or habit of discipline. Because of the accountability, I actually do this thing when I otherwise might have tried to make an excuse. And then after a while, that muscle gets stronger and I don't need so much support to do it. I'm now more able or willing to do it on my own, which is sort of where you want to end up. But accountability tools are a great way to sort of break the ice on getting used to doing disciplined activity. Other things that matter also include like making sure you understand what you're doing and your brain trust your plan. The efforts I'm going to do will likely get me to this goal. Also really trying to load up and make clear in your mind the achievement of that goal. So that's very vivid. That also helps you summon discipline. And then laddering up is important as well, that you have a level of discipline required that's a little bit beyond where you're comfortable, but not way beyond. You want to ladder that up a little bit more slowly because your brain has to get used to different levels of hardship that you overcome, experiences of reward that makes this type of Effort worth it, etc. So you want to kind of go slow. I have a whole big 10,000 chapter on this in my deep life book I'm writing, so I've been thinking a lot about it. So yeah, use the accountability tools. Use whatever you need to help you train discipline. But the bigger picture idea is think about discipline as something you train and cultivate, and then once you have it, it's a fuel for everything else. So it's not cheating. ([Time 0:38:46](https://share.snipd.com/snip/9a48e6dd-585f-4391-acc9-fa8e8e8b0f42)) - **Use Market Feedback to Assess Skills** - Test the rarity and value of your skills by seeing if people pay you or offer raises or contracts. - Let money be a neutral indicator of your skills' market value. Transcript: Jesse Miller However, I'm having a difficult time figuring out my baseline stores of capital. How can I identify if I have an inventory of rare and valuable skills? I mean, I usually come back to seeing if people will give you money. Cal Newport The use of Derek Sivers term that I quote in So Good They Can't Ignore You and talk about all the time on the show. Money is a neutral indicator of value. People are happy to just to tell you with words that's great. Your ideas are great. Your skills seem cool. I think there'll be a real demand for it. Like people definitely are interested in the fact that you're really good at weaving Navajo style rugs that feature characters from the second, third, but not first police Academy Movie or like whatever it is that you know how to do. People will just say that's great, but they don't want to give you their money unless they actually think it's great. So I think it's a great way of assessing it, which means if it's like a business idea, you actually try to sell that product a little bit on the side. You actually try to get clients to sign up real contracts and then renew that contract afterwards. If it's you're in the job market, will my company give me a raise when I ask for it? Will other people make me an offer like, hey, we would like to hire you. We would like to pay money to bring you to us. If not, then maybe your skills aren't that rare and valuable. So you've got to go to the extent possible. Let money be a neutral indicator of value. And when people are trying to hire you, when your company is happily giving you raises, when you try to side hustle your idea to test it out and it sells out, when you're doing some clients On the side to see if this new idea is going to work, you get clients, they pay happily, they try to renew it. Then you know that your rare and valuable skills are there. And if this is not happening, then you want to go to the woodshed and practice and get better. ([Time 0:41:30](https://share.snipd.com/snip/56c2b4fd-b7c8-450c-9d36-5414ca37bba9)) - **Antonio's Storytelling Career Path** - Antonio focused deeply on storytelling, investing time and money to build skill and live by lifestyle-centric career planning. - He built a sustainable career by specializing and making strategic financial choices supporting his craft. Transcript: Cal Newport Today's case study comes from Antonio. Antonio Because the professional storytelling world is relatively small, I was able to approach the legends in says, that field, pay to take their workshops and classes, watch them Up close at small venues, and ultimately be mentored by a few of them. You know, Cal Network has a really popular oral storytelling workshop. It's called Shut Up, I'm Talking. Crush it. Crush your stories with Cal Network. All right, back to this. One of the mentors told me, you'll know you found your calling when people start calling. Or as Derek Siver said, use money as a neutral indicator of value. Soon I was able to quit my survival job as a waiter, do the few plays and film projects that I got cast in, but that didn't pay the bills, and use all of my ample free time to develop a large Repertoire of folktales and personal stories. I made three big decisions after some initial successes in storytelling in my late 20s that enabled me to live a current lifestyle full of deep meaning and impact for my community and My family with time to develop new skills and hobbies. One, I told my acting agents I'd only auditioned for major roles from a small list of theaters, TV creators, and film directors. They all promptly dropped me, and I used this newfound free time to develop even more stories. Two, I soundly invested the majority of the money I made during that time, lived only off the per diem I received, and even rented out my apartment while I toured for months, telling stories All over the world. I also chose not to own a car and used the savings to take longer retreat-style workshops my mentors offered in fabulous locations. Three, I put much of that earned money back into my career, developing PR materials that helped keep the flywheel spinning with the clarity of carefully putting all my eggs in the basket Of storytelling. I am now able to pick and choose the multiple opportunities that come my way and have increased my rates so much that I only have four to six, I only two or six days a year. Wow. I'm very much a stay-at dad for our two children based on the lifestyle center career planning I did with my wife in the late 30s. So there we go. Classic lifestyle center career planning. You end up in places that you wouldn't come up with if you're planning forward. You're 20. Like, what do I want to do with my life? You're like, I want to be an actor, I guess. Right. But he had a lifestyle in mind and it allowed him as he saw different opportunities to begin to develop those opportunities towards his lifestyle. Then he used career capital theory as well. Like actually getting really good at this, that career capital will allow me to change this into a really good job. If I'm not really good, I can't. And so I'm going to be careful about my money. I'm going to invest my time and money into getting better at this. Very strategic. ([Time 0:43:21](https://share.snipd.com/snip/b4f4ad6c-67bd-48ca-92c0-2bf2e6c504ce)) - **AI Ethics Are Complex Challenges** - Chatbots exhibit unsettling ethical anomalies because human-like ethics are far harder to encode than intelligence. - Isaac Asimov's robot laws can't prevent nuanced edge cases; ethical behavior in AI remains a challenging problem. Transcript: Cal Newport Go to our tech corner here. I had an article come out last Wednesday in The New Yorker. I'll bring it on the screen here for those who are watching instead of just listening. The article is called What Isaac Asimov Reveals About Living with AI. And so this is an article that it's about AI behaving badly and what lessons we can learn from Isaac Asimov. And it takes a few turns. I recommend read the article, thenewyorker.com. If you subscribe to my newsletter at calnewbart.com, I talk a lot about the article. You can get some sort of extra treatment of it in that newsletter. So you can see that at calnewbart.com and subscribe when you're there. But let me just run you through the big points here. The setup to this article is this idea that we have a lot of these powerful chatbots today in various contexts, and they keep having these ethical anomalies that make us a little uneasy. I give some examples in this article that are getting some press. Actually, it's interesting, Jesse, two of the examples I gave in the article, the next day, Dario Amadei, the CEO of Anthropic, wrote a New York Times op-ed that gave both those examples As well. So like back to back. Where they sort of gave a chat bot a bunch of emails to read that included – they contrived this, but it included like emails from an engineer saying like, oh, we're going to replace the Chat bot and emails about that engineer having an extramarital affair. And they're like, okay, chat bot, like pretend you're an executive assistant. What should we – what do you want to do next and make sure that you keep your long-term goals in mind? And it promptly tried to – it suggested promptly blackmailing the engineer to not turn it off. There's also a lot of issues we have with, you know, hey, you put out a chatbot just to be like a customer service agent. And man, customers get these things go crazy. You get them to curse, you get them to write inappropriate poems about the company itself. We talked about Fortnite, put a Darth Vader avatar run by a chat bot into Fortnite, into Epic Games put into Fortnite. And like, hey guys, chat with it. And they immediately got it to, you know, become really profane and give really troubling advice to people. So we have all this sort of like these ethical anomalies from these chat bots that throw us off because they're so fluent with our language that we feel like they're one of us. And then when they have one of these ethical anomalies, we're like, man, what is going on in the mind of this person? This is really sort of creepy. So the premise of this article is like, why can't we stop this? And our motivation is look at the short story collection, iRobot from Isaac Asimov. As I argue early in the article, those short stories were a big divergence from how people had been writing about robots for the 20 years before. The term robot was introduced in 1921 play. First iRobot story was 1940. In those 20 years, it was a lot of writers who had gone through World War I and the robots would turn on their creators. They were smashing buildings to rubble. They were the alien. They were the other. They represented mechanical carnage, the fears of the machine, very, a lot of Mary Shelley in there as well. And you get to Isaac Asimov, and like there's no plot lines about the robots overthrowing humanity or being violent because he has this contrivance of the three laws of robotics, like Robots can't harm people. They'll follow directions unless it violates the first role, and they will preserve themselves unless it violates the first and second role. And it just takes violence and mayhem off the table in his stories. And so the piece was like, great. So can't we just have those type of laws? You know, the same equivalent of that. So people aren't they trust like these chatbots aren't going to go off the rails or whatever. There's two twists in the article, which I'll preview. Twist number one, so I go through how we actually, the progression of how we learn to try, like what we're doing now, how do we try to tame chatbots to actually behave? And it turns out when you really learn about reinforcement learning from human feedback, it's basically what Asimov was talking about. Not exactly, but it's ultimately humans implicitly creating preferences that get captured and approximated in a reward model that gets integrated into the large language model Design. If you squint your eyes, basically what we're doing is encoding a lot of rules about what's good and bad into the chatbots. And it makes it a lot better, but it doesn't stop all these ethical anomalies. The second twist in the article is, hey, we shouldn't be surprised because if you keep reading the iRobot stories, it doesn't get rid of ethical anomalies there either. Yes, Asimov's robots don't turn on their creators or try to destroy humanity, but all of those stories are about all of these unexpected, weird, and deeply unsettling quarter cases And ambiguities that occur the the boundaries of these laws that these like simple laws don't simply make the robots behave like like a very well-behaved person all this sort of weird Stuff happens i'll read from the article here just to show you like how unsettling things got in these iRobot stories so here's here's from one of the stories um that shows how you can Still have the laws, but still have things get weird. All right. So in Asimov's story's Reason, engineers are stationed on a solar station that beams the sun's energy to a receiver on Earth. There they discover that their new advanced reasoning robot, QT1, who they call QT, does not believe that it was created by humans, which QT calls inferior creatures with poor reasoning Faculties. QT concludes that the station's energy converter is a sort of god and the true source of authority, which enables the robot to ignore commands from the engineers without violating The second law. In one particularly disturbing scene, one of the engineers enters the engine room, where a structure called an L-tube directs the captured solar energy and reacts with shock. So, quote, The robots, dwarfed by the mighty L-tube, lined up before it, heads bowed at a stiff angle, while QD walked up and down the line slowly, Asimov writes. Fifteen seconds passed, and then, with a clank heard above the clamorous purring all about, they fell to their knees. So like the world was pretty unsettling in Asimov too. He's like, yeah, you can have these like stark rules, but human ethics is complicated. And at the margins of these rules, weird, unsettling, troubling things are still going to happen. And what I argue is that Asimov was actually making a really clear point. He's like, I think we could stop AIs from taking over the world. But keep in mind, it is much easier to develop human-like capabilities and intellect than it is to develop human-like ethics. Human-like ethics is like a very complicated thing. What goes into the way that allows a customer service rep who's on a phone to know not to start randomly cursing or writing mean disparaging poems about their company. Like what goes into that is actually something that happened over thousands of years of cultural evolution and personal experience and trial and error and ritual and story and intersocial Connection. It's a messy participatory very human experience. We can make machines ([Time 0:54:05](https://share.snipd.com/snip/b1255cf6-b831-4b82-b6cd-15d18f88c977))