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Back to Work

Episode 185: David Foster Wallace Morning

Back to Work

5by5

Business, Society & Culture, Barriers, Dan Benjamin, Careers, Communication, Merlin Mann, Creativity, Work, Productivity, Constraints, Technology

4.72.3K Ratings

🗓️ 2 September 2014

⏱️ 90 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

TOPIC: The Durable Impossibility of Email.

This week, Dan and Merlin return to an evergreen topic: the impossibility of email.

Chaotic, paradoxical, debilitating, frustrating, buoyant, and occasionally capable of causing short-term madness, email is still the medium that we'll never get right.

But, quixotically, it never stops us from trying.

Links for this episode:

This episode was sponsored by our friends at lynda.com (Start learning something new by visiting lynda.com/backtowork and get a free 7-day trial where you can access all of their 2,400+ courses), and Varonis DatAnywhere (Try turning your own network shares into a private cloud free for 30 days with an unlimited amount of users and if you visit varonis.com/backtowork you get 5 users free forever).

Transcript

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0:00.0

Lie on your way like an ego

0:06.4

Hello, oh hi, Merlin. Good morning. How are you? How's everything going?

0:13.6

Very well. How are you good house? How's school?

0:16.5

School is

0:18.7

Good good school is good. We're just starting our third week of school. You're starting your second week of school second week of school

0:27.2

Yeah, and he lost the tooth yesterday

0:30.0

All front tooth. Oh, she just lost her front tooth a couple weeks ago. It's so funny. They look so weird. She looks a hideous freak

0:38.0

They look they look a little too homeless for my tastes

0:41.4

When you get those little gum nubs hanging down. Yeah, what is the gum nub gum nubs

0:48.0

Hi, you enjoy jelly babies. It's so weird. Try gum nubs. Hi

0:54.0

Lost the tooth can't chew. Not a problem. Hi

0:57.9

Yeah, I was surprised with the gum nub and

1:01.7

And my wife's like, oh, yeah, that's normal. That's fine

1:04.7

How what which number tooth is this for cash for losing?

1:11.6

Three maybe three that same for us. We lost the two bottom front ones and the one

1:17.8

When one she's got a little snaggle now makes the other one look really big and weird

1:21.8

Cleetus the slack job. Yokel. Well, what was the weirder part for me was that before he I don't know why

1:29.6

But I don't know if it's a courage thing

1:32.5

but he was not ready to

1:35.6

Really work it so it would come out so he was very gentle with it

1:40.2

And I said, listen, you know if you want this and come out all you got to do is just kind of twist it around a little bit

1:44.8

like not so it bleeds, but just keep twisting it, you know like move it and

...

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