Do Hard Things (Featuring: Jerry Seinfeld)

So I just listened to the most recent episode of the Acquired podcast. It focused on the business of Seinfeld. Now I found the the whole thing really fascinating, but there was one story in particular from this episode that really caught my attention. Here, let me play you a clip now. The HBR interviewer says, so you cut off the show when it was so successful really as a result of the fact that you were burned out. Why didn't you try to come up with a more efficient, more sustainable way to make the show? What would McKinsey have said if they'd come in and said, there's a better way to do this? And Jerry says, who's McKinsey? The interviewer says, well, McKinsey is a big consulting firm. Jerry says, are they funny? The interviewer says, no. Jerry says, then I don't need them. The interviewer says, no interest in efficiency. Or... And Jerry says, no. No. If you're efficient, you're doing it the wrong way. The right way is the hard way. Now the reason why this caught my attention is that I couldn't shake the thought that this story about comedy writing in the nineteen nineties actually has a lot to tell us about AI and the world of work today. Now I know that's a bit of an unlikely connection, but I really couldn't shake it. So I thought I would jump on the mic and record a quick episode explaining what I mean. So let's get into it. Alright. So how am I gonna connect Seinfeld from the nineteen nineties to AI and work today in 2026? To do so, I have to start by introducing a key idea that is central to my thinking and writing about the role of technology in the workplace. And that idea is this. Technologies are not just tools that you deploy as needed to help with various things that you do in your job. Technologies can actually shape the way you think about your job. They can actually change our implicit understanding of what it means to work. Now I documented this effect, for example, in my 2021 book here, I'll hold it up here, A World Without Email, which looked deeply at the history of email and how this particular humble tool changed the definition of work. Here's the one minute version of the story. When email first began its spread through the office, it had a very simple pitch behind it. It was just supposed to replace two existing technologies with a better one, in particular fax machines and voice mail. So in the late nineteen eighties, right before email began its emergence, look, if you worked in an office, the way you sent information to other offices quickly is you you fed sheets of paper into a machine that then sent it over a phone line. And on the other end, another machine printed it back out again, and these were really annoying to …