Cal Newport

I mean you talked about you have a somewhat idiosyncratic interest in extinctions from times way in the past, but that that helped give you a different mindset about how should we think about –

the privilege and joys and awesomeness of what life is today.

Maybe you can walk us through that reframing of having a busy schedule with control over parts of it, how this is not some terrible burden, but kind of makes us some of the luckiest people who ever lived.

How do you think about that?

You get to add up to a lot of cool things that you got to do and you got to choose.

And a lot of it's done in air conditioning.

It made me think about a friend of mine.

They bought a new house that they just moved into.

And this house has all of these crazy features on it, right?

It's not a huge yard, but there's a pool and a giant pool house.

And there's a Chinese pagoda that has a hot tub in it.

And there was this full bar in the basement.

All these, there's art installations.

And it's this exuberant collection of...

stuff and projects and it's all kind of fun.

And I was asking him about it and he's like, yeah, the original owners who did all of this, it was Holocaust survivors.

And you just get this sense that they were like,

Life is for the living now.

Yeah, let's build a Chinese pergola and put a hot tub in it.

Let's build a giant pool house.