Welcome to this episode of the award-winning Best of the Left podcast, although today we're sharing a sample of this week's episode of our other show, solved.

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the Best of Left YouTube channel and catching every episode of Solved there. And now here's a few

minutes for free to wet your appetite, but just like Best of the Left,

the real benefits kick in when you hear the whole show, which is greater than the sum of

its parts.

Today, we'll be looking at some of the debates happening in society right now, and rather

than try to solve those individual debates, we're going to tell people to shut up and realize that we're having the wrong debates altogether because our collective frustration should be aimed higher.

And in fact, having many of the debates that we are is actually acting as not only a distraction, but also a sort of pressure release valve that prevents our collective

problems from being addressed in better ways. So we're going to start briefly on the topic

that inspired this episode. I was talking with a longtime family friend recently about their

experience managing an office that is holding the ongoing debates, as many offices are, about returning to work post-COVID.

And they're not even talking about fully coming back to work. They're just trying to up it from

one day a week to two. And it's causing a huge problem. And so there are lots of nuanced arguments

on both sides about the benefits

of people being in the office versus the benefits of staff having more flexibility in their

schedules, thanks to working from home, et cetera, et cetera. But we're not getting into those weeds.

And I just want to pull on one of the threads, which is the relationship between working from home and child care.

Because this one really stuck out as an example of having the wrong discussion.

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