19: The Shallows by Nicholas Carr

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1. 00:00:00 I have coffee again this morning.
2. 00:00:02 Nice. Is it fancy coffee?
3. 00:00:04 I don't know.
4. 00:00:06 I...
5. 00:00:07 So it's caribou.
6. 00:00:09 Like a medium roast, which is kind of my staple.
7. 00:00:13 It's kind of my fancy coffee.
8. 00:00:15 Yeah. It's one of those that I enjoy it.
9. 00:00:18 'Cause I specifically do it through a French press.
10. 00:00:23 So I grind it myself, making sure that the grind
11. 00:00:26 is at the right level for a French press.
12. 00:00:29 And I do everything through the French press.
13. 00:00:31 And I love it through the French press.
14. 00:00:33 (laughs)
15. 00:00:34 I'm here. I like my French press.
16. 00:00:36 I guess so.
17. 00:00:38 But I've found that...
18. 00:00:40 If I grind it myself, I can get the bean grind
19. 00:00:43 to the right level, which means that
20. 00:00:45 I can get some of the...
21. 00:00:47 This is gonna be kind of nerdy here, but
22. 00:00:49 I can get kind of the oils extracted from it
23. 00:00:52 through that press process.
24. 00:00:54 Instead of getting a lot of the bitter that I typically get
25. 00:00:57 with a drip machine, sorry, drip machine advocates.
26. 00:01:01 I can't really do those anymore.
27. 00:01:04 I've ruined myself. You get that.
28. 00:01:06 You're in a new coffee bracket.
29. 00:01:08 I get it. I actually, last Saturday,
30. 00:01:11 I presented it at the suburban Chicago Apple users group.
31. 00:01:15 And afterwards, some of the very nice people who are in charge
32. 00:01:19 of that user group who I met at MaxStock last summer
33. 00:01:22 took Rachel and I 'cause Rachel came with me out to lunch
34. 00:01:25 and we spent a good portion of lunch talking about
35. 00:01:29 fancy coffee.
36. 00:01:31 Nice. Very nice.
37. 00:01:34 Yeah, I'm becoming...
38. 00:01:38 It seems like every time I talk to you or we have a conversation
39. 00:01:41 about coffee, the bracket and the level at which I am
40. 00:01:45 in the coffee realm continues to increase.
41. 00:01:48 Okay.
42. 00:01:49 You're ruined for the ordinary.
43. 00:01:51 Yes. And it doesn't help that I have,
44. 00:01:54 so on my list maker, on my gifts for myself list,
45. 00:01:59 I have towards the top of that list a...
46. 00:02:04 What do you call this? A prosumer espresso machine?
47. 00:02:07 So I want to get a rocket for the house,
48. 00:02:11 either that or a La Marzoko.
49. 00:02:14 Both of which are expensive.
50. 00:02:17 Yes. Both of which will also require a fancy coffee grinder
51. 00:02:22 and a plethora of accessories.
52. 00:02:26 It will be very easy to break four figures,
53. 00:02:29 maybe two or three times over.
54. 00:02:31 Yeah, that's why I've stayed away from espresso so far.
55. 00:02:35 See, when was this? Three, four years ago,
56. 00:02:38 I was given one of those super automatic espresso machines
57. 00:02:42 for Christmas, which was quite the extravagant gift at the time
58. 00:02:47 to me.
59. 00:02:48 And I loved that thing and used it a lot.
60. 00:02:53 So I got used to being able to make lattes
61. 00:02:56 and make aspressos at the house.
62. 00:02:58 They weren't super high quality because, you know,
63. 00:03:00 it's a super automatic.
64. 00:03:01 So it's going to do the whole grind and tamping and everything.
65. 00:03:05 It'll do all that for you, but you can't control it.
66. 00:03:07 You can't get some of the higher quality stuff out of them.
67. 00:03:10 Just my opinion, of course, but it kind of ruined me
68. 00:03:14 in the sense that I could have espresso in the house.
69. 00:03:17 And I have learned that I would love to have an espresso machine in the house.
70. 00:03:20 And now I have decommissioned that super automatic in the attempt to upgrade,
71. 00:03:25 but I don't have the dollars to upgrade.
72. 00:03:27 So here I set.
73. 00:03:29 Yeah, like I said, I've stayed away from espresso.
74. 00:03:33 It's worked so far, but I'm sure that at some point
75. 00:03:37 that's going to happen to me as well.
76. 00:03:39 Well, I'm going to get a machine here at some point.
77. 00:03:41 And when I do, I'm having you over and I will ruin you.
78. 00:03:44 This will be payback for you ruining me for coffee.
79. 00:03:47 All right, that's fair.
80. 00:03:48 Okay.
81. 00:03:49 Follow up.
82. 00:03:51 Can I just confess that I have again failed, Mike?
83. 00:03:56 Sure, that's fine.
84. 00:03:58 Because I failed also.
85. 00:03:59 Awesome.
86. 00:04:00 So we can fail, we'll revel in our failures together.
87. 00:04:05 The only one on my list here is to avoid my phone in the early morning.
88. 00:04:09 And I am kind of getting tired of seeing this thing on the list.
89. 00:04:13 And honestly, that is becoming a bit of an instigator to me
90. 00:04:18 that I continue to have this thing on here,
91. 00:04:21 that I continue to fail to succeed at.
92. 00:04:24 And I really want to succeed at this thing.
93. 00:04:27 But avoiding my phone in the early morning continues to stay on this list.
94. 00:04:32 I think I succeeded once since we talked last night.
95. 00:04:37 That's all right.
96. 00:04:38 As Zoolander says, what do we do when we fall off the horse?
97. 00:04:43 We get back on.
98. 00:04:45 Yeah.
99. 00:04:46 So just keep trying.
100. 00:04:47 Here's the thing, I have to be on the horse to begin with.
101. 00:04:50 Well, you did it once you said so, small wins.
102. 00:04:53 Ah, and so I got my foot in the stirrup.
103. 00:04:55 Okay, got it.
104. 00:04:56 It's Jerry Seinfeld says, just don't break the chain.
105. 00:04:59 That's what you do.
106. 00:05:00 You need to make big red X's on your calendar whenever you successfully avoid your phone in the early morning.
107. 00:05:04 All right, but after our book for today, I'm not so sure it should be a good one.
108. 00:05:07 I'm not so sure it should be a digital calendar.
109. 00:05:09 True.
110. 00:05:10 Yeah, we'll get to that.
111. 00:05:13 All right.
112. 00:05:14 Yeah, you can.
113. 00:05:15 My follow up items here, I had a stop doing list, which I put some initial thought into.
114. 00:05:21 And then didn't follow through on completely.
115. 00:05:25 So I still need to articulate what specifically I am going to stop doing.
116. 00:05:31 Okay.
117. 00:05:32 The rationale for not doing this is kind of ironic because I've been really busy.
118. 00:05:37 I've had too many things to do.
119. 00:05:39 So I should.
120. 00:05:40 You need to put stop procrastinating on your stop doing list.
121. 00:05:43 You need to put that on your stop.
122. 00:05:45 Well, really what I should do is I should stop treating the symptoms and look at the disease and actually stop doing some of these things.
123. 00:05:51 Okay.
124. 00:05:52 So yeah, we'll definitely follow up with that one next time.
125. 00:05:56 A chat productive interruptions.
126. 00:05:58 Okay.
127. 00:05:59 So this one, I hate getting the interruptions on my phone.
128. 00:06:04 I've decided because typically during the day when I am doing working hours, at least, I'm usually not on my phone.
129. 00:06:13 I'm on my Mac.
130. 00:06:14 And when I get a notification on my phone, it forces me to stop what I'm doing and answer that question.
131. 00:06:21 What am I doing right now?
132. 00:06:23 So I need to figure out a way to maybe launch a script every hour or something that just asks me what I'm doing when my Mac is open and on, which is most of the time.
133. 00:06:34 Yeah.
134. 00:06:35 But I can just type something quick and maybe automatically log it to day one, for example.
135. 00:06:39 I think that would be the way for this to really work, but I have not put in enough effort to figure out how to actually pull that off.
136. 00:06:50 So if you know anybody who's a good with Apple script, nudge, nudge, maybe they could help me out.
137. 00:06:58 Huh.
138. 00:06:59 Well, I know a guy who likes Apple scripts and continues to write them despite having zero methods of monetizing them.
139. 00:07:10 Yeah.
140. 00:07:11 Well, maybe we could throw this on and feel free to edit this out if you don't want to commit to this, but maybe we could create something and throw it up on the Bookworm website with a donate button for people who want to chip in and help out with this sort of thing.
141. 00:07:29 Okay.
142. 00:07:31 Just throwing it out there.
143. 00:07:32 All right. So if we do that, and I can leave this in, but if we do that, I'm, I'll have to figure out what, like what the number needs to be and just let it go until we hit that level.
144. 00:07:45 I just need to make sure it's completely possible to do that.
145. 00:07:48 Right.
146. 00:07:49 So let me figure out if it's completely possible.
147. 00:07:52 If yes, I'll figure out the dollar number on it, and I'll try to find some way that people can give us money to help go towards that.
148. 00:08:01 Is that fair?
149. 00:08:02 Yeah.
150. 00:08:03 So if you're listening to this and you want Joe to make us awesome Apple scripts, then please go donate on the website.
151. 00:08:10 All right.
152. 00:08:12 I don't know if I want to hit this number or not now.
153. 00:08:16 Regardless, even if it doesn't work out for you, I will have to figure out a way to do this. But yeah, the friction point here is that the notifications are on my phone.
154. 00:08:27 So I need to figure out a way to get those notifications on my Mac and just streamline this whole system in order for this to actually work.
155. 00:08:34 All right.
156. 00:08:35 I'm going to look into it.
157. 00:08:37 Sweet.
158. 00:08:38 Okay.
159. 00:08:39 All right.
160. 00:08:40 Now that we're done talking about interruptions.
161. 00:08:42 Let's jump into today's book, The Shallows by Nicholas Carr, which I think we'll probably talk about interruptions quite a bit here, along with a number of other things.
162. 00:08:54 But this book is one that it was my choice.
163. 00:08:58 And I believe I originally saw the name, this title in the productivity project, Chris Bailey, one that we did earlier. And it was also mentioned in brain chains.
164. 00:09:13 It's mentioned in a couple of different ones that we've possibly, yeah, we've definitely heard the title before.
165. 00:09:19 Yes.
166. 00:09:20 And I've read a couple of the excerpts from it prior to this. And after reading brain chains, I had this kind of mission, I guess, to try to find a book that helps explain how the Internet of in in facts effects, probably both.
167. 00:09:40 As I said, how the Internet affects our brains and what to do about it.
168. 00:09:46 And, you know, after going through brain chains, I was looking for something that was a little bit easier to recommend that because brain chains had some repetition that we didn't care for.
169. 00:09:58 It didn't rank as high as some of the other books that we've read.
170. 00:10:02 I can't say that it's one that I would recommend to people for that purpose.
171. 00:10:07 And my mission was to find something that I could recommend to people about that topic.
172. 00:10:12 And just initial reactions here, I think we found it, just my opinion here, of course, but I think we found one that I think we could recommend to say, you know, here, here's one that helps you understand how the Internet affects your brain.
173. 00:10:26 Is that fair?
174. 00:10:27 I believe so, but I have to confess that this book seemed to me like he was just a cranky old man. This sounded a lot like when I was a kid, I had to march uphill both ways through three feet of snow to school.
175. 00:10:43 And never really escaped that.
176. 00:10:47 The beginning of the book started off great. He's talking about his own personal experience.
177. 00:10:52 I was able to relate to that a lot. In fact, one of the things that I wrote down at the very beginning, he says, I now have almost totally lost the ability to read and absorb a longish article on the web or in print.
178. 00:11:03 And I put down that I've seen this myself. I don't even use Insta paper anymore because I don't have patience for the longer articles.
179. 00:11:09 So he got me right at the beginning, like I was engaged at the beginning.
180. 00:11:13 And then he launches into, first of all, how books have destroyed the ability to tell stories and then how digital stuff has destroyed books.
181. 00:11:24 And it just, it wore on me by page 200 or 200. I think it's like 220 pages long.
182. 00:11:31 I did not want to hear any more stories about the negative effects of technology because it was so focused on the negative effects of technology.
183. 00:11:43 And I think somewhere in the middle, which we'll get to in the outline, there's a very important distinction to be made or the technology itself is not the problem, but it's how you use the technology.
184. 00:11:55 And there are certain things that you can do to eliminate a lot of this stuff that the technology will do to your brain if you're not careful.
185. 00:12:03 I completely agree with the approach that you have to be careful with this stuff.
186. 00:12:08 And maybe it's just because I'm so steeped in the productivity space that I've been following and working for now, Asian efficiency for quite a few years, that I've heard about the dangers of some of this stuff and I've applied some safeguards in my own life.
187. 00:12:24 But it seemed very obvious to me that if you don't want to be interrupted all the time, if you don't want to be constantly jumping from thing to thing, then you could always just turn off your notifications.
188. 00:12:36 Yeah.
189. 00:12:37 But the thing he mentions at the very beginning and kind of the central theme throughout the book, which I think is really, really good, is the whole idea of the neuroplasticity.
190. 00:12:46 Because your brain actually changes, it creates new neural pathways based on what you do.
191. 00:12:54 And there's a quote on page seven that I really liked.
192. 00:12:58 This is once I was a scuba diver and a sea of words, now I zip along the surface like a guy on a jet ski.
193. 00:13:03 And that is because our brains have been changed.
194. 00:13:07 They've been formed in a certain way based on how we interact with our technology.
195. 00:13:12 And it's only going to get worse, but that really doesn't mean that we need to remove all this technology because it's doing all of this harmful things.
196. 00:13:21 It just means that we have to be careful how we use it.
197. 00:13:24 So for example, he mentions Generation Net, which are the kids who have grown up using the web.
198. 00:13:29 That wasn't me, but that is my kids.
199. 00:13:33 So the solution here is not to say, well, the internet is evil.
200. 00:13:37 It's changing your brain in a negative way.
201. 00:13:39 Don't use it, but showing them the correct way to use a technology like we've talked about before.
202. 00:13:47 I want to go back to your opinion on how I wrote this.
203. 00:13:51 Because I come at it a lot different.
204. 00:13:54 I think I'm one that if you're going to argue something that's against my opinions and what I believe,
205. 00:14:03 I want you to come with a fully thought out and a very detailed progression of how you get to that thought.
206. 00:14:09 I'm all for a conflict and a debate.
207. 00:14:13 I totally get whenever you have opposing views in order to understand each other.
208. 00:14:17 I like to try to try keeping an open mind, and I want to understand where the other person comes from.
209. 00:14:23 And knowing that I'm a web developer primarily, and I work in IT, I am a fan of computers.
210. 00:14:32 And here I am reading this, which is kind of computer bashing to a point if you want to take it that way.
211. 00:14:39 But at the same time, I noticed that a lot of little places, and he would only drop in like one sentence here or there,
212. 00:14:47 which would be fairly easy to miss unless you're looking for it.
213. 00:14:51 But he would call out instances where he struggled with something and he still struggles with it.
214. 00:14:56 And yet he thinks that there's still a place for technology in our world today.
215. 00:15:02 And because of that, I felt like the entire progression of how he got to his thoughts and how he got to his points were very detailed and laid out, obviously.
216. 00:15:13 I mean, he goes through tons and tons of quotes and citations.
217. 00:15:16 I wasn't even about to be in to go through all that.
218. 00:15:19 But he has tons of backing for his views and how he got to them.
219. 00:15:25 And that's something that I could appreciate, that he's taken the time to do all of this research to lay out the progression of how he got to his conclusion.
220. 00:15:33 And, you know, towards the very end, he is saying, you know, you need to, you know, be very careful with the net and how you work with it and don't let it consume everything you do.
221. 00:15:43 I get that, but it, at least to me, it's helpful to see that progression.
222. 00:15:49 I may not necessarily apply it in the way that he applies it, but to me, it's helpful to at least understand that argument and how he got there.
223. 00:15:57 Yeah, I agree with that.
224. 00:15:59 But the first, let me see, after page 44, probably, when he's talking about the four different types of technologies, he launches into the history of basically every single technology that we've seen up until the Internet and how it has negatively impacted the one that was before it.
225. 00:16:18 Yeah, I could have done without that part.
226. 00:16:21 And then also, you mentioned he's got a lot of sources.
227. 00:16:23 I agree that that's the kind of thing that I'm looking for, too.
228. 00:16:26 But the way that he did it, I didn't really like, just because it seemed like there were a lot of, like, historical stories, which weren't exactly relevant to the point.
229. 00:16:39 Like, I don't really care how books impacted, how we tell stories because that has nothing to do with the Internet, and he's trying to connect all these things in a way that I think is a little bit of a stretch.
230. 00:16:50 And then also, there's a whole bunch of sources here, but a lot of the things, he'll just drop in, like, one sentence from this person.
231. 00:16:57 And I'm sure based off of all the research that he did, that supports his argument, but when you take it completely out of context like that, it's really hard to understand how all these things tie together.
232. 00:17:08 It's kind of like you're talking to that person, and they're just, like, dropping these facts to sound smart.
233. 00:17:16 You know, they'll just use this quote, "Oh, well, Socrates won't say it."
234. 00:17:19 And then they say that, and then you're like, "Well, great, but what does that have to do with what we're talking about?"
235. 00:17:24 Whereas, like, decisive, for example, they would cite a lot of things, they would tell a lot of stories, but they would tell pages worth of the story at a time, and it was a very clear connection to the point that they were making.
236. 00:17:35 This guy, Nicholas Carr, I believe, is the one who wrote this.
237. 00:17:39 He spent, I don't even know how many pages, but like the whole historical side up to the last half of the book really was just laying the groundwork for his argument that technology changes is really what I got out of it.
238. 00:17:55 And he even says later on, let me find the quote, he says, "I realize on page 115 that I've dragged you through a lot of space and time over the last few chapters, and I appreciate your four students sticking with me."
239. 00:18:10 At that point, I'm like, "Well, why did you do it then? Like, if you know this is going to be a drudgery to get through the first half of this book, like, why even put it in there?"
240. 00:18:20 My comment there was, "Flattery will get you nowhere."
241. 00:18:23 I thought it was interesting, because he makes a couple points in here where Google has this thing of scanning in a bunch of books. We'll probably get to this later, but he was concerned that they were going to piece it out and grab little bits and pieces of all these other books and compile it and just skim over the surface of what things actually mean without going through the linear thinking of reading an entire book and understanding it to its entirety.
242. 00:18:49 So he makes that argument, and yet the book that he's written, that's almost what it does is he goes through so many different resources and picks them apart and puts them together to create his own.
243. 00:19:02 That's interesting that you think that this is a negative thing to, you know, parcel out bits of other works, and yet that seems to be what you've done in this book.
244. 00:19:15 Interesting. I don't know, just something to think about. He has a lot of arguments in here about how our brains work and what you were saying earlier, the neuroplasticity, so how our minds change, how we can increase the physical size and the number of connections within our brain in one area and other areas can weaken.
245. 00:19:33 So the neuroplasticity, if you're not familiar with that term, but the listeners here, that's essentially that your brain can morph and grow and shrink and become better at some areas and weaker in others.
246. 00:19:44 So it's a way for your brain to physically change to get better at different areas.
247. 00:19:49 Is that a good way to explain that, Mike?
248. 00:19:52 Yep, I believe it is, but then also kind of related to that, you have the phantom limb and the phantom vibrations.
249. 00:19:59 Yeah, I thought that was interesting.
250. 00:20:01 Yeah, he cites this study by Michael Mersenich, I believe, who this guy sounds like a masochist.
251. 00:20:06 Basically, he was hurting monkeys just to see how their brains would recover, but he found that their brains actually were remapped to the right side.
252. 00:20:13 And actually were remapped after the nerve damage that he was doing to these monkeys was allowed to heal.
253. 00:20:18 And part of me when I read that was like, what?
254. 00:20:23 Yeah.
255. 00:20:24 But then I get the point that he's making there and it is kind of interesting.
256. 00:20:28 That's where the whole phantom limb idea comes from because after somebody has a part of their body amputated, for example,
257. 00:20:34 they still will have that sensation of like an itch in the leg that's been amputated, but that's because the brain has not been remapped yet.
258. 00:20:42 So it is interesting that your brain actually can remap itself and rebuild itself.
259. 00:20:48 My book talked about create new neural pathways based on your experiences, not just physically, but also with your tools,
260. 00:20:57 which I know is another thing that you wrote. There's a couple points here, so you can pick apart any one that you want here,
261. 00:21:02 but they're all kind of related.
262. 00:21:04 The tools that you use actually facilitate that change in your brain.
263. 00:21:09 So obviously you have to be careful how you use your tools.
264. 00:21:13 You can't just grab a computer with access to the internet and say, okay, great, I'm good to go,
265. 00:21:19 but the same could be said for just about anything.
266. 00:21:22 I can't give my nine-year-old the keys to the car because he doesn't know how to handle it yet.
267. 00:21:27 He has the potential and the ability to grow into the point where he can handle that.
268. 00:21:32 It'll probably come way too quickly, honestly.
269. 00:21:36 But it's the same thing with the internet.
270. 00:21:39 I mean, one of the things that I've done recently is I've kind of evaluated at home our internet connections and our devices,
271. 00:21:47 and I don't want my kids stumbling on stuff that's inappropriate.
272. 00:21:50 So what are the safeguards that I can put in place? Because if you think about it, you give your kid a device,
273. 00:21:54 I don't care how old they are, whether they're nine, twelve, sixteen, whatever, they have the keys to all of the information in the entire world.
274. 00:22:02 One of it is good, some of it is not good, especially for a young person.
275. 00:22:07 You can't just say, okay, here go nuts, have fun.
276. 00:22:11 Whatever you find, it's great because the internet is this awesome thing.
277. 00:22:15 You have to know how to use it correctly, and if you aren't able to use it correctly,
278. 00:22:20 you have to have those training wheels in place to make sure that you do.
279. 00:22:23 And even if you're a mature adult and you work for a remote company and you have to be on the internet every day,
280. 00:22:31 there's still things that you do, still support systems that you put in place to make sure that you stay on the rails.
281. 00:22:38 One of the things that I do is I have rescue time running in my menu bar.
282. 00:22:42 It tells me at the end of the day how productive I was today because it watches how I use my computer,
283. 00:22:48 and it gives me a report and it'll say, well, you played Civilization for three hours today, that was very unproductive.
284. 00:22:54 That actually hasn't happened in quite a while, but I do like Civilization.
285. 00:22:58 But it'll rank your internet activity and the apps that you're in as either very productive, somewhat productive, neutral, somewhat unproductive,
286. 00:23:05 or very unproductive, and it'll give you a percentage score at the end of the day.
287. 00:23:08 Same sort of concept. That's a tool that I use to make sure that I'm pointing myself in the right direction,
288. 00:23:14 but ultimately you could fall down that rabbit hole where you're just consuming all of this content all the time
289. 00:23:19 instead of using the technology to produce the content like we talked about when we did brainchains.
290. 00:23:25 There's a lot here, and I've got three points here that you've kind of touched on a number of them here,
291. 00:23:32 but the main reason I wrote down, so there's three for the listeners here.
292. 00:23:36 Nature versus nurture is one, the phantom limb and phantom vibrations piece, and then tools become a part of you.
293. 00:23:42 And the reason I've got all three of them down, and I think you're right, they do all kind of work together,
294. 00:23:47 is mostly that our brains tend to adjust to the tools and the scenarios and the culture that we're within.
295. 00:23:56 So essentially, the nature versus nurture piece, that's always a debate, especially among parents.
296. 00:24:02 I was like, "Where are you born this way or is this my fault? Like what? Why are my kids so different?"
297. 00:24:08 That's always a debate, and I think people are always trying to figure out, well, which is it?
298. 00:24:12 Personally, I think it's both. I think it's where a lot of people land on that, is that ultimately, if you come from the neuroscience of it,
299. 00:24:20 we're born with a certain set of pathways embedded in our brains, and over time, they tend to grow and weaken and strengthen and fall off the earth.
300. 00:24:31 Like they come and go, and we strengthen some and we deliberately let others fall.
301. 00:24:38 But in that process of teaching and training and creating habits and such, that's what morphs your brain and helps it to grow into the areas that you want it to.
302. 00:24:46 But we're all born with something slightly different as kind of a template at the very beginning.
303. 00:24:51 And if you think of your kids, you know, we've got three now, and of course, like everybody says, they're drastically different.
304. 00:24:58 They're all born with a different set of neuron connectors in their brain, and what may work out well for one, you know, our oldest, I could teach her to do something in a certain way, and she catches on right away.
305. 00:25:12 Well, her brain is programmed to catch onto those areas quite easily, whereas our second, I may do the exact same thing, and it just doesn't even register.
306. 00:25:20 It just goes right over her head, doesn't get anywhere with it, and it's just a difference in how they come at things.
307. 00:25:27 So that's one point I've got there is that your brain does morph and adjust, but whenever you have something that is removed, you know, the whole monkey thing was kind of weird.
308. 00:25:38 But whenever you get into this phantom limb piece, you know, you're having arm amputated.
309. 00:25:44 There was a period in some of the science that he showed that you could touch the person's cheekbone, and they would think that the missing arm was being touched.
310. 00:25:53 And effectively what was going on was inside their brain, it was trying to readjust to the missing sensory nerves that used to be in the arm.
311. 00:26:04 It was trying to recalibrate and decide what actually was where in your body, and over time, they would eventually get it figured out.
312. 00:26:12 This is the same thing. There was a guy that talked about strokes. He had a stroke patient that had a pretty massive stroke and lost basically all of the function in the left side of his body, and through the process of, I think it was what, six months?
313. 00:26:25 It was quite a while. He went through this process of learning to use that side of his body again, and eventually recovered like 95% of the use of that side of his body.
314. 00:26:35 That's crazy. I've always thought of, you know, if you have a stroke, it's just gone, like you're just done with that side of your body or whatever it is that you lose in the process, and there's nothing you can do about it.
315. 00:26:44 Well, this guy seems to think, and science seems to show, if you continue to use it, you can eventually get that back if you let your brain recalibrate.
316. 00:26:54 Same thing goes with tools. Like whenever you have physical tools, you just learn how to use them. It becomes a part of you.
317. 00:27:00 Okay, yep, done.
318. 00:27:01 No, totally agree, but that's the important thing is not just that the tools are in themselves. Bad. They are tools. They have no moral value. They're not moral or amoral. They're not good or bad. They are literally just tools, and then it's up to you how you use them.
319. 00:27:18 So, kind of going back to like the whole generation net thing where our kids are growing up with this always connected internet culture. I've seen that. You know, my boys even when they're like five or six years old, though, you know, someone will take a picture and be like, "Instagram that."
320. 00:27:36 Yeah.
321. 00:27:37 My nine-year-old is a great use case for the Amazon Echo. He uses it way more than I do.
322. 00:27:44 We'll be watching a sports game. It'll be, it'll go late and he'll go to bed and in the morning he'll, he'll say, "Yo Dingus, what was the score of the Bucks game last night?" He'll play music on it all the time where I never even think to use it a lot of times.
323. 00:28:01 Or I use it, but not as often as they do. It's just something that they do. They get it. I don't necessarily think that's bad, but we do need to make sure that they use those tools.
324. 00:28:13 Use those tools in the right context, in the right format. And that kind of leads into the next point you got here, the four different types of technology.
325. 00:28:23 So, there's, first type is one that extends our physical strength, dexterity or resilience.
326. 00:28:30 The second type of technology extends the range of the sensitivity of our senses.
327. 00:28:36 The third enables us to reshape nature to better serve our needs or desires. And the fourth intellectual technologies that extend our mental powers.
328. 00:28:46 And, I'm not really, let me give you a few examples of those four because, you know, if you just hear those, it may be kind of hard to under, what on earth is that?
329. 00:28:58 So, the first one that you mentioned there, technology is that extend our physical strength. He mentions things like the plow, needles, fighter jets, tractors, that type of thing.
330. 00:29:09 You know, it gives us more strength over our surroundings. The second one, things that extend range or sensitivity, that's like microscopes and amplifiers, sound amplifiers.
331. 00:29:19 So, it would fall into that category. The third, those that reshape nature, that's where like GMOs genetically modified organisms or birth control pills, those types of things that can affect how we interact with nature.
332. 00:29:33 And then the fourth is the intellectual technologies which would fall into books or the internet, that type of category.
333. 00:29:41 Right, there you go. So, none of these technology groups, I think, my interpretation anyway, he's not saying that one of these is something that we need to be aware of. This is just the four different buckets, basically, that something could land in.
334. 00:29:59 Correct?
335. 00:30:01 Yes, and I think it's interesting that he specifically calls out, and obviously, you know, this is a book about the internet. So, he specifically calls out the intellectual technologies and he spends the rest of the book talking about them.
336. 00:30:14 Right.
337. 00:30:15 And making arguments around how they impact the way that we think. You know, that's what they do.
338. 00:30:21 They're technologies about the way we think. And there, there's a lot of benefits that can come from pretty much any technology that impacts our mind.
339. 00:30:32 But there are also a lot of ramifications. He goes through the, the creation and adoption of clocks and keeping time.
340. 00:30:44 They had a huge impact on societies around the world. You know, we used to operate off of the sun and just how, how we felt versus when's it time for lunch? Well, it's when we're hungry at lunchtime, noon time, somewhere around there.
341. 00:30:57 And as opposed to being governed by an obeying the ticking of the second hand, as opposed to that.
342. 00:31:04 Same thing with whenever they came up with maps to, you know, cartography and where is everything and how do we find things.
343. 00:31:12 We used to have a much greater sense of spatial recognition.
344. 00:31:16 Which interesting fact with that, I've heard that in the past, the Air Force used to specifically look for pilots that came from rural settings as opposed to big cities.
345. 00:31:31 Which at first, that's kind of weird. Why would you, to me, that's a bit discrimination in that type of thing.
346. 00:31:37 Why would you do that? Well, their rationale was that folks that came from rural settings were used to seeing far distances.
347. 00:31:45 Whereas folks that came from cities usually just got blocked by the building right next to them and they never really saw that much.
348. 00:31:51 So anyway, little side tidbit there. But I think it's interesting that so many of these intellectual technologies like maps or clocks, they do impact this.
349. 00:32:00 For a lot of them, they have a lot of benefits even though they may cause part of our brain to shrink.
350. 00:32:06 When maps came out, our spatial recognition typically fell because we weren't relying on our sense of where we are and what directions things are.
351. 00:32:14 We tended to rely more on the piece of paper or in today's world, the screen that tells us where we're at and where we need to go.
352. 00:32:23 Yeah, and that's part of the thing that kind of bugged me about the book was the way that he framed every single one of these, at least the way that I heard it was.
353. 00:32:32 In the past, we were able to do this and now this technology came and that changed everything.
354. 00:32:38 Yeah.
355. 00:32:39 That's not necessarily a bad thing. It kind of goes back to the tools discussion. In page 47, he says, "Sometimes our tools do what we tell them to do other times we adapt ourselves to our tools requirements."
356. 00:32:49 I think probably both of those are true with just about any tool. There's a lot of negatives that can come from embracing a tool like the Internet and relying on that for specific things.
357. 00:33:03 That was one of my takeaways actually, was to evaluate my tools and ask myself, "Do I run this tool or does the tool run me?"
358. 00:33:10 Yeah.
359. 00:33:11 And figure out a better use case for things if it's the latter.
360. 00:33:17 But yeah, I really don't necessarily think that any of these inherent technologies are bad. They are what they are. Yes, things have changed.
361. 00:33:26 That is okay. We need to adapt with things and we need to make sure that we are still in control.
362. 00:33:33 And that kind of leads into the whole notifications thing.
363. 00:33:36 He's telling these stories and there's one in particular.
364. 00:33:42 He says, "A new email message announces its arrival as we're glancing over the latest headlines at a newspaper site."
365. 00:33:48 A few seconds later, our RSS reader tells us that one of our favorite bloggers has uploaded a new post.
366. 00:33:53 A moment after that, our mobile phone plays a ringtone that signals an incoming text message simultaneously, a Facebook or Twitter alert, blinks on screen.
367. 00:34:01 We've probably all been in that particular situation, but unplugging from the internet isn't the solution to this scenario.
368. 00:34:08 It's turning off the notifications.
369. 00:34:11 Yes.
370. 00:34:12 So...
371. 00:34:13 Yeah, I'm with you there because with all of, you know, go back to the maps and clocks thing and yeah, he does come across very negative to those and how they've impacted us and made our brains weaker in some areas.
372. 00:34:24 I think there's, he could have done a little better with explaining the strength that comes with those.
373. 00:34:30 A lot of this, there's a lot of strengths that come with it.
374. 00:34:34 You know, being able to make sure that we're getting more done in a day is one major benefit to having a clock.
375. 00:34:40 Like, there's just a lot to those particular technologies and a lot of benefits that come with them.
376. 00:34:45 And to me, a lot of those come with, like the negatives that he calls out.
377. 00:34:51 To me, a lot of those are minor negatives in comparison to the benefits that come from it.
378. 00:34:57 I think if he'd called out that distribution and the dissonance between those two a little bit better, I think it would have been a much better book in the long run.
379. 00:35:06 At the same time, I also have to say, I understand his viewpoint and I still enjoyed some of the negativity from him just because I sometimes like listening to him.
380. 00:35:14 And sometimes like listening to cranky old men complain about things just because I like seeing their viewpoint.
381. 00:35:18 So maybe there's a little bit of that in me coming out here.
382. 00:35:21 But it's something that I think understanding the negative side of it is important in knowing how to use it.
383. 00:35:30 Because if you don't understand both the benefits and the negatives of how you're using something, like when you're evaluating your tools,
384. 00:35:36 knowing the pros and cons of those can be extremely beneficial.
385. 00:35:42 If you go back to getting things done, because we're productivity nerds, with making lists, one of the bigger debates is paper versus digital.
386. 00:35:51 Most people seem to go digital anymore.
387. 00:35:53 But if you listen to David Allen himself, he creates all of his lists and he keeps his things on his list.
388. 00:36:00 He reviews them in the morning and then he doesn't look at them at all throughout the day,
389. 00:36:03 which is a complete opposite to how most people assume the system should work.
390. 00:36:09 A lot of people think of it as something that you need to pull up in the morning and you just work off of it all day long.
391. 00:36:14 That's not even how the author of that uses it.
392. 00:36:18 Right.
393. 00:36:19 I would argue though that David Allen, especially if you listen to the episode where he was on the MacPower users, he's another cranky old man.
394. 00:36:25 Yes, absolutely. Totally with you there.
395. 00:36:28 I feel like he mentions in this book that early writers had their words all run together, so there were no spaces between the words.
396. 00:36:36 Essentially, it was like reading a mind puzzle that you had to tease things apart and understand what the writer was actually saying.
397. 00:36:43 That's kind of how I view this whole book.
398. 00:36:45 There's definitely things in here where there's definitely some nuggets that are really, really good.
399. 00:36:52 There were definitely some things that made me question and that's okay. We want that sort of thing.
400. 00:36:57 We don't want to just read every single book that we get our hands on and say, "This is absolute truth and I need to apply every single thing to my life.
401. 00:37:07 We're evaluating what we're reading and we're making value judgments based off of that."
402. 00:37:11 I think it was definitely a good mental exercise, but one thing that he talked about was the memorization.
403. 00:37:16 I know this was something you have actually as an action item.
404. 00:37:18 I believe in the power of memorization, but he talks about at the beginning even, Socrates.
405. 00:37:23 He's got a story about writing being a recipe for a reminder and not for memory.
406. 00:37:28 That's when he's talking about the value of writing versus storytelling.
407. 00:37:34 He's basically saying that because we can write things down, we no longer have to remember all the details when we tell the stories.
408. 00:37:40 I'm not so sure that that's a bad thing.
409. 00:37:43 Going back to the David Allen, the GTD thing, one of the things that he says is that your brain is for having ideas, not holding them.
410. 00:37:49 While memorization, there's a lot of value there, I think it's great that we can choose what we want to memorize and what we want to focus on because we know that we can get this other information that we can't possibly keep all of this stuff in our brain, which functions more like RAM than a hard drive.
411. 00:38:07 It's not long-term storage. It's only got limited capacity.
412. 00:38:13 Let's fill that with the things that are really important.
413. 00:38:16 For example, one of the things that I try to do, we talk on this podcast quite a bit about our personal belief system.
414. 00:38:24 I have a Bible reading plan that I go through.
415. 00:38:28 Guess what? I have that stored digitally on my phone because I don't want to have to memorize that because I do the chronological one.
416. 00:38:36 I read it in the way that it was actually written not in the way that it is put together in the actual book form.
417. 00:38:44 There's no way I can remember that on this day I'm going to go from this book to this book, which is several hundred pages later, because those events that they're talking about actually happened at the same time.
418. 00:38:54 I'm going to use digital tools for that. I'm going to focus on memorizing those scriptures and not focus on memorizing the things that I read in this particular book or any of the books maybe that we learned.
419. 00:39:05 I'll take notes. I'll jot those down. I've got an app on my phone for that called Shelf.
420. 00:39:13 We have an outline here and equip with the outlining tool that we use so we can go through these things.
421. 00:39:20 If we were to try and do this based off of memory, it would not be a very interesting podcast.
422. 00:39:27 We'd be talking about, "Oh, I remember at the beginning of the book, he said something along these lines, and this is what I interpreted that to me, but I don't remember exactly what he said.
423. 00:39:36 There's no value in that to anybody. But being able to go back and reference that stuff, that's really valuable."
424. 00:39:44 Again, not necessarily a negative, yes, it's changed, but I think that there's a positive spin on how things are changed if you apply correctly.
425. 00:39:53 You're touching on a very important point here, I think, because there are a lot of instances where there's information on the Internet.
426. 00:40:01 Thanks to Google, we can find it easily. He's got a whole anti-Google thing in here.
427. 00:40:08 With that, we can find what we want very quickly, very easily.
428. 00:40:13 At the same time, there's also the argument that the more that we outsource from our brains, the less that we have to rely on for the things that we have.
429. 00:40:22 We are going to be looking at the most important things that we've been looking for.
430. 00:40:27 We're going to be looking at the most important things that we've been looking at.
431. 00:40:32 We're going to be looking at the most important things that we've been looking at.
432. 00:40:36 We're going to be looking at the most important things that we've been looking at.
433. 00:40:41 We're going to be looking at the most important things that we've been looking at.
434. 00:40:46 It makes sense to me. Here's the train of thought. Everything we do, unless we're following a checklist, I guess, everything we do is based off of memorization.
435. 00:40:56 You go tie your shoes, you put on your coat, you have memorized those tasks.
436. 00:41:02 They're very simple, they're very mundane, but you have memorized how to do those.
437. 00:41:08 Everything that we do is based on something that we've memorized.
438. 00:41:11 If you look at something like writing, better writers, if you use a historical context,
439. 00:41:19 the best writers are those that had memorized the most.
440. 00:41:23 There's a lot of arguments you could make against that, I think.
441. 00:41:26 At the same time, there's a pretty good point there in that if you take, for example,
442. 00:41:31 if you memorize hundreds of poems, which is absurd in today's world, it seems,
443. 00:41:36 but if you memorized hundreds of poems, and then you sat down to write a poem,
444. 00:41:42 there's a pretty good chance that you're going to be able to rely on the things that you've memorized
445. 00:41:48 and play off of them and be creative with the things that you've memorized.
446. 00:41:51 It's something to pull from, to use in creating something new.
447. 00:41:56 Everything that you've memorized becomes part of a bank of information that you can use in your mind to come up with something different.
448. 00:42:03 I think about, if you want to translate this to computer programming,
449. 00:42:07 if I'm learning, say, let's take Ruby and Rails, that's kind of my wheelhouse.
450. 00:42:11 Sorry for those who don't know this stuff, but in Ruby and Rails, you have methods,
451. 00:42:17 and those methods do certain actions.
452. 00:42:19 Well, if you don't know, if you're completely new to Ruby,
453. 00:42:23 and you don't know how some of the syntax works, like your method of writing it,
454. 00:42:27 if you don't know how that works, you're probably going to spend more time looking up how to write some of that syntax.
455. 00:42:35 But over time, if you've memorized a lot of the syntax,
456. 00:42:39 which I would recommend doing it by using it, not just sitting down, I'm memorizing it, so I know.
457. 00:42:45 After a while, after you've got a lot of those memorized, you get to a point which is where I believe I am
458. 00:42:51 in that you don't spend as much time trying to figure out how to do something.
459. 00:42:56 You look for creative ways to accomplish the task, as opposed to
460. 00:43:00 the mechanism to pull it off, if you get the difference there.
461. 00:43:04 So the main point I'm trying to make there is the more that you've got memorized,
462. 00:43:08 the more you have in your mind to pull from in order to come up with something new.
463. 00:43:13 So I think there's a lot of value in that with the memorization piece.
464. 00:43:17 This is why I've got memorizing as one of my action items, because I feel like I don't do this
465. 00:43:22 from an intentional standpoint. It tends to happen through osmosis in some areas,
466. 00:43:27 but not at the level I feel like I want it to.
467. 00:43:30 And I guess that's my point.
468. 00:43:33 I think memorizing has a very, there's a lot of value to it, even though we've kind of gotten away from it
469. 00:43:39 as a culture.
470. 00:43:41 And I don't know what I'm trying to say.
471. 00:43:43 As a whole, our culture doesn't memorize.
472. 00:43:45 We tend to focus more on searching for things, but I think if you figure out where the balance is
473. 00:43:49 of what to memorize and what to rely on searching for, that's where a lot of your power can come,
474. 00:43:54 because then you're not relying on one or the other.
475. 00:43:57 You can take advantage of the new technology of the internet without letting it overcome your ability
476. 00:44:02 to be creative and do the deep thinking.
477. 00:44:06 Yeah, I completely agree with that.
478. 00:44:09 The internet has the potential to just bombard you with more information than you can possibly process.
479. 00:44:17 And that's one of the things that he talks about is, he says on page 91,
480. 00:44:22 we don't see the forest when we search the web.
481. 00:44:24 We don't even see the trees.
482. 00:44:25 We see twigs and leaves, and we're constantly just jumping from one thing to the next.
483. 00:44:31 And he talks about how as internet usage has gone up, you would think that the technology that came
484. 00:44:37 before this, television viewing, that would go down, but it's actually either held steady or increased.
485. 00:44:44 And so what's ending up happening is we're just increasing the amount of information that we're
486. 00:44:50 exposed to.
487. 00:44:51 But again, this is not necessarily a problem with the technology.
488. 00:44:54 This is a problem with how you use the technology.
489. 00:44:57 And this is actually where that quote that he talks about, "New email message," or it announces its arrival.
490. 00:45:01 That's the section here where that happens.
491. 00:45:05 And so I agree that we need to be careful not to just take in all of these little details.
492. 00:45:13 We need to give our brain time and space to process what we are getting.
493. 00:45:21 But I guess I'm a little bit weird, maybe, in that I've kind of gone through some of that stuff
494. 00:45:26 already because of hit that tipping point and said, "This is enough.
495. 00:45:32 I've done that when it comes to email.
496. 00:45:34 I've done that when it comes to internet usage.
497. 00:45:36 And I totally get how you can just surf the internet for hours and click on hyperlinks and all of a sudden
498. 00:45:42 you're somewhere really, really far from where you started."
499. 00:45:45 But my brain doesn't really work that way, I guess.
500. 00:45:50 I don't find myself going down those rabbit trails because I don't want to.
501. 00:45:56 Every time I start to, it feels like fingernails on the chalkboard for me.
502. 00:46:01 I guess if you were to go back to the very beginning, he talks about the Cistercians, I think, is how you say it.
503. 00:46:08 How they viewed any tardiness or other waste of time to be in a front to God.
504. 00:46:12 My response to that, the note that I took was, "I'm a Cistercian."
505. 00:46:16 So, I will be willing to accept that I'm just weird in this particular area.
506. 00:46:22 But some of the stuff that he was saying is like, "Well, that's not exactly how I see it happening for me."
507. 00:46:28 One of the other things, same topic he talks about, with the event of digital photographs and having a camera
508. 00:46:37 on your iPhone, for example, people take tons and tons of photographs and they don't actually ever go look at them.
509. 00:46:43 I've found the opposite to be true.
510. 00:46:45 In the past, I had a camera that I would bring with me.
511. 00:46:48 But now that I have a camera on my phone, occasionally I will snap a picture.
512. 00:46:53 But for the most part, what I've intentionally chosen to do is not try to be the photographer on the scene,
513. 00:47:00 the reporter who's trying to document this particular event,
514. 00:47:05 but just be a part of the event and enjoy it and create the experience.
515. 00:47:10 And the feeling is going to stay with me a lot longer than a photograph that I'll never look at.
516. 00:47:15 We need to talk about eBooks.
517. 00:47:18 It's necessary. So he has this thing, because I'm with you on the whole hyperlink and following the train of thought.
518. 00:47:25 Yes, that's kind of weird, but I also know that this was written 2009, 2010.
519. 00:47:31 And we have progressed quite a bit in our internet usage since then.
520. 00:47:36 Just my opinion, I mean, things move quick 2011 and 2010. That's what it was.
521. 00:47:41 It was right on that line.
522. 00:47:43 And he goes through a lot of that and how people tend to just go from link to link and go down this rabbit hole.
523. 00:47:51 Just my opinion, I know that there are some people who do that.
524. 00:47:55 I think that's becoming less common.
525. 00:47:59 I know that as Director of IT and I see people who work on their computers and I watch that quite a bit because I need to know how to help them,
526. 00:48:08 I tend to see that quite a bit where you're just going down a train of thought and you're just clicking and seeing how things interact with each other.
527. 00:48:17 And the next thing I know they've lost 10 minutes going down these rabbit trails.
528. 00:48:21 But I would say that a lot of those particular users who are doing that are not exactly, they're not web veterans.
529. 00:48:29 But there are a few web veterans in the group that I support and none of them do that.
530. 00:48:35 I mean, on occasion they'll get down a rabbit trail for about five minutes, but most of the time they're pretty focused on what they're doing.
531. 00:48:43 And I think you and I would fall into that category.
532. 00:48:45 I think some of that is trained.
533. 00:48:47 We tend to build our brains to do it that way.
534. 00:48:50 But if you go down, and this is why I bring up eBooks, most eBooks in today's world have links that go multiple places.
535. 00:48:58 And it's easy to follow.
536. 00:49:01 People tend to look at eBooks as they do a web page.
537. 00:49:04 That I think is barely solid and I don't know that that's, I mean, I'm sure there's some that don't.
538. 00:49:11 But to me it seems like that would be the common thing now.
539. 00:49:14 I'm saying that as someone who only reads paper books anymore.
540. 00:49:18 So I can't necessarily say that I'm solid on that.
541. 00:49:21 So you could probably shoot holes in me there.
542. 00:49:23 But personally, you know, let me ask this.
543. 00:49:27 Do you read eBooks or do you read all paper books?
544. 00:49:30 I read all paper books.
545. 00:49:32 And my experience with eBooks is a little bit different than what he's talking about.
546. 00:49:37 He talks about how we're on the advent of these eBooks actually becoming even more than books where they have multimedia.
547. 00:49:46 They have audio, they have video.
548. 00:49:48 I think the term he uses for that is books, like video books.
549. 00:49:51 Yeah.
550. 00:49:52 The only thing I have ever seen that falls into that category.
551. 00:49:55 And I'm sure there's other stuff out there.
552. 00:49:57 But the only thing that's even been appealing to me have been the David Sparks of video or the field guides, which are in iBooks format.
553. 00:50:06 But everything else I have resisted that wholeheartedly.
554. 00:50:11 In fact, it talks about how the Kindle is changing how people read.
555. 00:50:15 I put that I don't agree with that, but the iPad certainly has.
556. 00:50:18 Right.
557. 00:50:19 And my experience, I had an iPad and bought a Kindle because I didn't want to have all the other distractions and things that I could click on.
558. 00:50:27 Close my Kindle app and go open Twitter.
559. 00:50:31 I didn't want to have that ability on my device.
560. 00:50:34 So I've gone the other way.
561. 00:50:35 I started with all eBooks on the iPad when I got one and then I went to a Kindle and now I read completely paper books.
562. 00:50:42 So again, I'm willing to accept the fact that I'm weird.
563. 00:50:45 Well, at the same time, I think when he wrote this, Kindle was kind of a new thing.
564. 00:50:51 You know, it's crazy to think of that, but Kindle was fairly new at that point.
565. 00:50:55 And we've progressed quite a bit since then.
566. 00:50:59 I mean, eBooks costs the same as paper books for the most part, it seems.
567. 00:51:02 And to me, if I'm going to read a book, I want it in paper.
568. 00:51:08 And I think that has more to do with my wanting to mark it up.
569. 00:51:14 So I underline things and I create my own index in the back like I do all that stuff.
570. 00:51:18 And I like being able to look at a bookshelf and pull out the book I want.
571. 00:51:23 Like I like the physicality of it.
572. 00:51:25 To me, if I'm going to read any book and I've only read, I think, two or three books via a book.
573. 00:51:31 A book format.
574. 00:51:33 And they took me forever to read.
575. 00:51:35 Like it just took me a long time.
576. 00:51:37 And I think a lot of that came down to my inability to stay on the book and more of a, well, you know, I'm going to go look this up real quick because I'm not sure what that word means.
577. 00:51:49 And it's too easy to go do that with an ebook.
578. 00:51:54 Now, granted, I still do that with some words because I have no idea what they're talking about.
579. 00:52:00 But, you know, that's probably a bad example because if I'm on say an iPad and I'm reading it, there's a pretty good chance I may get distracted and go check Twitter or something or what's on Instagram.
580. 00:52:10 Like I may go do that with the iPad, whereas I wouldn't ever do that with a paper book.
581. 00:52:17 There's too much resistance to go pull it up and do that.
582. 00:52:20 Yeah.
583. 00:52:21 And again, my experience is a little bit weird here because I read physical paper books.
584. 00:52:29 And I take all of my notes for the books on my phone.
585. 00:52:33 So I have quite often literally the book in my left hand and my phone in my right hand as I'm taking notes.
586. 00:52:40 So the gateway is there.
587. 00:52:42 I could just go check Twitter or anything else.
588. 00:52:46 Email, although I don't have email on my phone anymore.
589. 00:52:49 So it's one action item I followed through on.
590. 00:52:53 But yeah, so it's there, but I don't feel the temptation to do that when I'm spending the majority of the time in the physical book.
591. 00:53:02 It's easy for me to just go into my app on my phone and jot the notes that I want to make on this particular section and then go back to my book.
592. 00:53:10 I don't know why.
593. 00:53:11 Maybe again, I'm just wired weird.
594. 00:53:14 But one thing that he says about the books section is he talks about how the book has survived the photograph as it had the newspaper listening didn't replace reading.
595. 00:53:25 I put until audible and podcasts.
596. 00:53:28 I think that this maybe is changing.
597. 00:53:31 Not for me.
598. 00:53:32 I still prefer the paper books, but it's surprising to me a number of people that I know say, "Oh yeah, I've read that book.
599. 00:53:40 I have it on audible."
600. 00:53:41 I'm like, "Well, you didn't actually read it then. You listened to it."
601. 00:53:44 And you probably skipped over some stuff because you don't control the speed at which you comprehend these things.
602. 00:53:50 You just have the narrator who's telling these things to you and you can skip right over it, which is another reason why a lot of the Bible apps that you can get to read your Bible plans and stuff like that, they have built in audio Bible so you can just listen to it.
603. 00:54:06 I did that for a little while and I didn't like it because same thing, you would just skip over these things.
604. 00:54:12 There'd be something that jumped out at you and before you can even think about it, there are three verses down the page and you've completely passed over that.
605. 00:54:22 So I think that this is a little bit interesting.
606. 00:54:26 This is potentially a tipping point.
607. 00:54:29 But again, I'm wired weird and not my preference, but I will say that it kind of depends on the type of book.
608. 00:54:35 So for example, I'm listening to right now on audible when I go to the gym and things like that, I'll listen to creativity ink.
609. 00:54:42 It's not the type of book where I want to jot down the individual items, like the type of books that we typically cover here on Bookworm.
610. 00:54:48 I'm not writing down action items. It's telling me a story about the history of Pixar.
611. 00:54:53 And so that situation, fiction books would be another great example.
612. 00:54:58 I think that that format is great.
613. 00:55:00 Podcasts in particular are generally entertainment.
614. 00:55:04 So I'm not going to listen to podcasts when I want to be fully attentive and write every single thing down that the hosts are talking about.
615. 00:55:13 Once in a while, I'll jot down the things that jump out to me, but I'm not trying to glean everything from every single podcast that I listen to.
616. 00:55:20 There's no action items when I listen to the accidental tech podcast most of the time, but I enjoy doing it.
617. 00:55:25 So I'll put that on when I'm doing chores or when I'm not listening to an audible book at the gym.
618. 00:55:31 I'll listen to podcasts at the gym and stuff like that.
619. 00:55:34 But that's the difference there for me.
620. 00:55:37 It's always bugged me when people say that they've read a book and they listen to the audiobook.
621. 00:55:42 It's always bothered me. It's like, no, you didn't read it, you listened to it.
622. 00:55:45 Like, use a different verb there. Like, that's not correct. You're technically wrong in what you just said.
623. 00:55:50 I probably just made a whole bunch of people mad. Sorry about that.
624. 00:55:54 But that's just my view. Like, I have this thing for you.
625. 00:55:57 If you're going to say that you've read a book, read the book.
626. 00:56:01 Read it. Don't listen to it. To me, that's drastically different because if I'm, you know, take a podcast, for example,
627. 00:56:09 I try not to listen to podcasts whenever I'm doing something else, which is completely counter to what most people do.
628. 00:56:17 So if I'm going to listen to a podcast, it's going to be when I'm doing something that I don't have to think about.
629. 00:56:22 So I'm mowing the lawn or I've got a big batch of boards that I'm cutting in the exact same way in the woodshop.
630. 00:56:28 Like, something like that that I'm not really thinking about because then I can focus on the podcast and not just have it as background noise.
631. 00:56:36 Whereas it seems like most people are able, like, I've talked to some folks that listen to podcasts while they're working.
632. 00:56:42 Like, how on earth do you do that? If I tried to listen to podcasts while I was writing code, I would not hear any of that podcast ever.
633. 00:56:49 Like, even even songs with words to them don't work. I'll never hear it, which is fine, but it serves as somewhat of a distraction.
634. 00:56:57 Okay. Now everybody knows Joe's weird, but that's, I try to listen to, if I'm in the listening to anything at all,
635. 00:57:04 it tends to be like white noise-ish, which typically means like classical piano or something like that,
636. 00:57:10 that I'll listen to whenever I'm doing my work. So, okay, now I'm done with my rabbit trail.
637. 00:57:16 Okay, let's get off the book thing. So, next one on our list here, neuroplasticity and the internet.
638. 00:57:22 I wrote this down because I'm not real sure what the answer is here because he goes through this whole thing on how the internet is forming our brain
639. 00:57:30 and it's teaching us to have shallow thinking. That's where his title comes from.
640. 00:57:35 And it's forming our brain to jump from bit to bit very quickly.
641. 00:57:40 And it's very easy to fall into the cranky old man thing with him in that, I think.
642. 00:57:46 But the part that struck me was if I think about it in the sense that, what do I do about this and how do I keep myself from just bouncing from one distraction to another?
643. 00:57:56 It started to form, at least for me, this balance that I needed to create that I needed to create.
644. 00:58:03 So, this is maybe an action item, but I don't really know what to do with it.
645. 00:58:06 So, I didn't put it as an action item, but something to just be aware of.
646. 00:58:10 So, maybe I just didn't put it as an action because I don't want to do anything about it.
647. 00:58:14 Okay, maybe that's it. I don't know.
648. 00:58:16 But the difference here is that you need to be willing to use the internet and it can form the way your brain works.
649. 00:58:24 That's fine. But you need the opposite as well. You need to learn how to develop the attention and focus that it takes to read an entire book.
650. 00:58:32 And it's linear form, not skimming it, not bouncing from thing to thing, but sitting and forming that strength.
651. 00:58:38 Same thing with going out into nature. I don't want to really go into all of that, but he shows a lot of benefits to getting outside and doing the balance of being in nature itself.
652. 00:58:49 But finding the balance between the distractedness of the internet and focus, which you're going to get me onto an ADD rant if we're not careful.
653. 00:58:59 You can see how that easily develops habits and forms your brain.
654. 00:59:04 It may physically be something that's in your brain that's been created, but it's due to your choices and how you do things.
655. 00:59:11 Not necessarily something you're predisposed to.
656. 00:59:17 You may be born with a tendency towards that, but you over time can work against that.
657. 00:59:24 Okay, I'm going to get off my rant there before it gets too far down the road.
658. 00:59:29 The big takeaway in this particular section is in my mind to recognize what the internet has the ability to do in terms of neuroplasticity.
659. 00:59:39 He mentions on page 121, they did some research with people who had never used the internet before.
660. 00:59:46 After only five hours, their brains were being rewired.
661. 00:59:51 A big part of that comes from the Airping Zoo research on hyperlinks, where it shows that increased links lead to decreased comprehension.
662. 01:00:03 This is taken to the next level with the whole idea of hypermedia, which are hyperlinks plus multimedia.
663. 01:00:10 But again, I'm a little bit weird because when I see a hyperlink on a page that I'm reading, I don't feel the urge to just click on it and see where it goes.
664. 01:00:21 In fact, I get a little bit nervous, like, "Should I click on this thing? I don't want to leave this page.
665. 01:00:26 I want to finish this article that I'm reading."
666. 01:00:28 Often, even if I'm interested in the link, maybe they're citing a research study and I want to see what that study says,
667. 01:00:36 I won't click on the link. I will continue to read the article and more likely forget to go back up and click on the link later.
668. 01:00:43 You know what I do? I command click it.
669. 01:00:46 So then it opens an tab behind what I'm doing. So then I finish and then I go through the tabs.
670. 01:00:50 And I realize that I could do that, but for whatever reason, that's not typically what I do.
671. 01:00:57 And again, I'm willing to accept that I'm weird on this.
672. 01:01:02 But I don't know. It's something that I really just haven't struggled with in terms of how I use the Internet.
673. 01:01:10 Now, I do believe that these links, hypermedia, the real issue here is that maybe how people approach their use of the Internet.
674. 01:01:22 So maybe the average person just wants to surf the web to see where they end up.
675. 01:01:26 That's never really been me. Whenever I go on there, I have a very specific purpose or thing that I want to check.
676. 01:01:31 Even if it is checking Twitter or Facebook, I have a destination in mind.
677. 01:01:36 But I totally get the psychological desire that people have to want to be interrupted.
678. 01:01:45 And he mentions that we want to be interrupted because each interruption brings us potentially a valuable piece of information.
679. 01:01:51 So to turn off these alerts, it's to risk feeling out of touch or even socially isolated.
680. 01:01:55 So that could apply to notifications. It could also apply to how many tabs you have open.
681. 01:02:00 Maybe you got Facebook and one Twitter and another, news site and another, and you just hop between them.
682. 01:02:05 I've definitely done that in the past. One of the things that I wrote down in my take away, and I don't really think that there's a specific action item associated with this.
683. 01:02:16 But it's be okay with being socially isolated.
684. 01:02:19 It's be okay with not knowing the latest trending topic on Twitter.
685. 01:02:25 And occasionally I'll go in there because that's how I check my news.
686. 01:02:28 I find that that is a better indication of what's actually going on in the world rather than what CNN or Fox News is reporting because no matter which side you land on,
687. 01:02:38 pretty much any news site you find is going to be very, very biased.
688. 01:02:42 Whereas Twitter trends tend to be, this is what people are, our actual people are saying. This is what everybody's talking about.
689. 01:02:49 So sometimes I'll go in there and I'll just see what some of the top trending topics are and that's how I get my news.
690. 01:02:55 But for the most part, I've wrestled with this issue of the fear of missing out or formal.
691. 01:03:02 And I've come to the conclusion that I'm okay with not seeing the latest thing or watching the latest TV show.
692. 01:03:10 Everybody talks about the Walking Dead, House of Cards, all these things.
693. 01:03:13 I've never seen a single episode of any of those shows and I'm completely okay with that.
694. 01:03:17 Because not watching those things, not staying up to date on those things, has allowed me to instead create something.
695. 01:03:24 So instead of consuming this content using the internet, I'm able to use the internet to produce some content,
696. 01:03:29 which I've shared my story on this podcast before, how that actually led to my current position with Asian efficiency, me getting connected with you.
697. 01:03:36 So there's a lot of good things that come out of the internet, but again, it's how you actually use it.
698. 01:03:41 And FOMO is a big way to completely gut the internet of any positive outcomes.
699. 01:03:49 He has a whole section in here about artificial intelligence and Google.
700. 01:03:55 And Google is on this mission to create artificial intelligence, which I never really thought about it that way,
701. 01:04:03 but once he explained and showed the quotes from the co-founders, I suppose that would make a lot of sense that they're on that mission.
702. 01:04:11 But he goes through this whole rationale of why artificial intelligence cannot exist, I guess.
703. 01:04:21 I don't know that he would say that, it cannot exist, but that was the impression I got.
704. 01:04:26 And I understand there's a lot of people that say artificial intelligence AI that it will become a thing at some point.
705. 01:04:35 I tend to fall in the camp that I don't think it will simply because our brains are way too complex to recreate,
706. 01:04:43 and it has a lot of gray areas, no pun intended with the gray matter thing.
707. 01:04:49 There's a lot of middle of the ground pieces that seem to come with our brain and the ability to grow and shrink in different areas.
708. 01:04:57 And computers are binary, on or off, with individual bits.
709. 01:05:04 And you can simulate the intelligence of our mind, but I don't know that you'll ever create something that thinks in and of itself.
710. 01:05:14 Correct, yeah, and he's totally making the case that at some point these computers are going to run our lives because he talks about research done in 1950 or 1960 with that ELISA project
711. 01:05:25 where people were having these conversations with the computers.
712. 01:05:29 Yes, but look at the current state of Siri and you know that we're not in any danger any time soon.
713. 01:05:36 I really like I completely agree with the approach that Google is not necessarily this company that's looking to benefit mankind and they've got your best interest at heart.
714. 01:05:57 I tend to fall more towards the Apple camp where they respect privacy and don't like a lot of what Google is doing.
715. 01:06:07 That being said, the whole idea and the whole way that he frames this, that Google is evil, he frames it as the church of Google, I thought was completely too extreme.
716. 01:06:18 And the religious framing, again, he cherry picks these quotes from people, like Google is God or Google's viewed as God and things like that.
717. 01:06:29 I'm reading this and I'm like the only reason that you are using this terminology is not necessarily because of the context of those quotes, but because you know that this is a very religion in particular, very polarizing.
718. 01:06:42 You're going to get people who either completely agree or completely disagree.
719. 01:06:47 The whole idea of there's this particular way is absolute truth.
720. 01:06:55 I don't necessarily agree.
721. 01:06:57 And I don't think that even the founders of Google, if you were to sit them down in a room, are going to say that this is absolutely the only way that you can do things.
722. 01:07:04 Most of the stuff that I read anyways in the technology space talks about, well, yeah, there's multiple ways that you can approach this problem.
723. 01:07:11 Google approaches these problems by gathering personal data and using that to offer you services, which honestly are a lot better than some of Apple's services.
724. 01:07:22 Apple is getting a little bit better, but they try to not look at your personal data.
725. 01:07:27 Famously, there was the case of the San Bernardino shooter where they had the iPhone and the FBI was trying to force Apple to unlock it so that they could get at the data, Apple refused.
726. 01:07:39 So, again, there's different camps here.
727. 01:07:42 There's different people who are going to agree with different ways of doing this, but to say, especially with the framework of everything else in this book, that the Church of Google is after your books, they want to digitize everything.
728. 01:07:52 They want to run the world with their information, and eventually there's going to be artificial intelligence that Google is going to create based off of all this information that's going to run your life.
729. 01:08:00 I was like, okay, this is a little sensational.
730. 01:08:03 I did think that it was interesting to hear Sergey Brin and Larry Page mention at the beginning that they were against ads because they thought that that would negatively taint the experience of the whole search algorithm that they had created.
731. 01:08:21 Because Google ads are definitely now a thing, but it's not how it started out, apparently.
732. 01:08:29 The one part of this whole artificial intelligence piece that really struck me was not so much the artificial intelligence that is created within a computer as much as the opposite view of the artificial intelligence that's created in our own minds through the use of computers,
733. 01:08:46 which is the side of the story I hadn't really thought about, but things like Siri and what is it, Cortana on Windows? This is how well I know Windows.
734. 01:09:00 Those digital assistants, the fear that I have with it that I hadn't really considered was that if we use some of the brain science that we've learned about in the past with mirror cells and how we tend to mimic other people so that we can relate with them and be empathetic with them.
735. 01:09:18 We learn how to interact with different people by mirroring and trying to understand or read the other person's mind, which is kind of weird to think about.
736. 01:09:27 I still don't fully understand how it all works. The part that I know is there are these mirror cells and it's our way of understanding what the other person is and being empathetic with what they're going through.
737. 01:09:38 It's a big deal and it's a way of us learning and understanding our surroundings and creating culture as a whole.
738. 01:09:45 So it's a very vital part to that.
739. 01:09:47 Where it gets tricky and where it gets complicated is where we have these digital assistants and we make the translation in our mind that it's not a computer.
740. 01:09:58 It's an actual person or it's an actual human being in some sort. It's a personality that you're interacting with.
741. 01:10:05 This is another potential issue with online communications and not seeing them as people.
742. 01:10:12 You tend to make the jump between those two between the digital assistant and the internet communications that we have with other individuals.
743. 01:10:20 Whenever you start to think of those as one and the same, you start to mirror and be like the computer itself and you can start to work the way that the computer works.
744. 01:10:32 That might be a bit of extreme and I'm not sure I would fully embrace that full mindset but it's at least the inkling of something that might cause a pretty big issue in that we stop thinking as humans and we start thinking like computers
745. 01:10:47 because we think of computers as humans and we start to do that mirror method with a computer as opposed to other actual, real people.
746. 01:10:58 Yeah, I agree with that. One of the things that he talks about is don't rely on the computer to do the actual thinking for you.
747. 01:11:07 I think maybe as we progress, maybe progress isn't the right word. I'm sure that Mr. Carr would agree.
748. 01:11:15 - And we continue down the road. - Yeah, there we go.
749. 01:11:19 And virtual assistants or voice assistants become more prevalent and the effectiveness increases based on the amount of data that they collect.
750. 01:11:28 Then maybe this is a little bit more valid but right now I don't think we're at the point where how I talk to my Amazon Echo or how I talk to my phone is necessarily going to rewire my brain in a way that that's how I'm going to talk to people.
751. 01:11:45 But I could see definitely if you're spending the majority of your day talking to a technology and then all of a sudden you're in a social situation where that could be the case.
752. 01:11:55 One of the things he mentions at the very end is that interaction with nature increases your cognitive control.
753. 01:12:02 I think that's one of the keys here. Again, maybe I'm sounding like a cranky old man. I keep talking about the tools and it's not necessarily the tool that's bad but it's how you use it.
754. 01:12:10 You have to be careful that you're not going to spend all of your time working with this tool in a specific way.
755. 01:12:19 You have to have some sort of balance and it's up to you to create that balance. It's not the tool's fault if your life is out of balance.
756. 01:12:26 It's not the tool's fault if you're using it wrong and it's creasing your brain.
757. 01:12:31 And so one of the things that, and this is again something that I kind of do already at least when the weather is nice.
758. 01:12:37 I will disconnect and I'll take my dog for a walk every day in the middle of the day.
759. 01:12:41 I'll get to a point where I'm just stuck or fried on a particular task and I just need a break.
760. 01:12:47 So we'll go for a walk and getting out of the house and just walking. That helps a lot.
761. 01:12:52 It gives me time to think and process some things and once in a while I'll write down some ideas and things that come to me.
762. 01:13:00 But just getting out into an analog world as opposed to the digital and the technical one definitely has some benefits.
763. 01:13:10 You have your quote here at the end of this list as we begin to wrap up our discussion on the book itself.
764. 01:13:17 I don't have to remember anything. We kind of touched on this a little bit with where do you store information in your mind or do you just rely on searching mechanisms?
765. 01:13:26 There are a lot of people that fall into the camp of why would I ever try to learn?
766. 01:13:31 Why would I ever try to learn about something when I can always look up the bits and pieces as I need them?
767. 01:13:37 I tend to fall on the side of things that I'd like to learn about it and know and understand things.
768. 01:13:43 So I would be the fan of the memorization piece.
769. 01:13:46 So I tend to strongly disagree with that particular viewpoint.
770. 01:13:51 But I also understand that's a very popular viewpoint.
771. 01:13:54 Yeah, and again it's selective memorization.
772. 01:13:58 So for example you work with code every single day so you've probably memorized quite a bit of it.
773. 01:14:05 But you might also use an application like Dash I think it is on the Mac that has all of the documentation for whatever language you happen to be using.
774. 01:14:15 That's really helpful when you're working with code.
775. 01:14:18 To be able to go look up how to solve a particular problem at least for me with HTML and stuff like that.
776. 01:14:24 If there's something that I don't do regularly being able to go look up how to do this specific thing.
777. 01:14:31 Oh yeah, that's right.
778. 01:14:32 That's a big burden off of my head as opposed to trying many different ways, trying to figure out, okay how did I do this last time.
779. 01:14:41 Having that documentation can be very useful and it frees up my brain to memorize and focus on the things that I actually want to remember.
780. 01:14:53 I don't necessarily want to remember how to do, and this is a very basic example, but you know tables in HTML.
781. 01:15:00 I want to be able to memorize scripture and verses like one of the things that we do is we have actually life verses for each of our kids.
782. 01:15:09 I want to be able to remember those.
783. 01:15:11 I want to be able to remember things like my anniversary.
784. 01:15:15 I don't want to have to worry about trying to cram all of this stuff in there and I don't believe that your brain is just this limitless.
785. 01:15:21 Obviously it's a muscle. You can exercise it and it can become better and your memorization capacity can increase.
786. 01:15:30 But I think that there is some value in certain things, but being selective about the things is an important thing.
787. 01:15:37 Choosing what to remember and what not to remember.
788. 01:15:41 He uses the term on page 196 of pancake people who are spread wide and thin, which I really liked.
789. 01:15:48 And I totally get how that can be the default mode of operation.
790. 01:15:52 That you just have all this information coming at you and you're trying to pick out and cherry pick these individual details
791. 01:15:59 and just gets all jumbled up in one big mess and you can't figure out what things were connected to what things.
792. 01:16:07 Totally get that.
793. 01:16:08 But the phrase here where he says, "I don't have to remember anything."
794. 01:16:12 I don't agree with that completely, but again, like we talked about at the beginning, I think that David Allen would say that this isn't necessarily a bad thing because his "your brain is for having ideas not for holding them."
795. 01:16:25 I mean, if you were completely against this particular statement, you would not use a task manager.
796. 01:16:33 And you and I specifically would probably be like, "Well, you don't use a task manager how foolish because now you're trying to remember everything.
797. 01:16:40 You're never going to remember everything no matter how hard you try.
798. 01:16:43 You're going to get stuck in emergency scan modality.
799. 01:16:46 You're going to have all these different fires that you have to put out.
800. 01:16:48 Why would you do that to yourself?"
801. 01:16:51 And so again, the tool isn't necessarily the bad thing, but it's how to leverage the tool in the correct way.
802. 01:16:57 And I think that it's a good thing that we can be more selective about what we choose to remember.
803. 01:17:02 And again, maybe this is just because of the age that we live in.
804. 01:17:07 And I wasn't around in 1920 and I don't fully understand everything that my ancestors were able to do.
805. 01:17:13 Maybe their memorization capacity, they didn't need a task manager because life was so much slower and they were able to handle everything without a care in the world.
806. 01:17:20 I kind of don't think that was the case though.
807. 01:17:23 Let's take the task management thing one step further here and then we need to jump into action items.
808. 01:17:30 So take example how I tend to operate with mine.
809. 01:17:35 So I've written a whole video course and produced that for OmniFocus.
810. 01:17:41 And so it's pretty obvious I'm a heavy user of a task manager.
811. 01:17:45 Well, I tend to go through the list of things that I need to accomplish in the morning,
812. 01:17:53 decide what it is I need to do that day, and I typically don't open it again until towards the end of the day.
813. 01:18:00 I'm not really using it throughout the day because I know what it is I need to get done.
814. 01:18:04 I don't have to rely on it to go do that.
815. 01:18:07 The difference there in the dissonance that comes with that is that you have a tool that you're using to recall things that are probably not going to stick in your mind for very long,
816. 01:18:21 or that you're going to need it very regularly.
817. 01:18:24 You're using a tool to remember those.
818. 01:18:26 And that's where I think Google and searching the web can come in.
819. 01:18:30 I'm not going to remember everything I always run across, but at least I know how to get to that.
820. 01:18:36 At the same time, there is a lot of information and a lot of details out there that I do need to have permanently fixed in my mind.
821. 01:18:45 How a model view controller works in Ruby and Rails needs to be firmly planted in my mind.
822. 01:18:51 Like that needs to be absolutely solid.
823. 01:18:54 So it's something that I know partially because I use it so much.
824. 01:18:58 That's something I need to memorize.
825. 01:19:00 Knowing all the methods and the syntax and all of those pieces, those are things that I need to have memorized, but not the entire library, because there's a good chance that 75% of a library of methods and stuff that I could use, I'm probably not going to use.
826. 01:19:16 Most of those are probably not something I'm going to use very often, but I can always go back to them when I need to.
827. 01:19:20 I don't have to remember everything, but I do need to remember some things.
828. 01:19:27 Yep, I agree with that, but let's just take that a step further and talk about the checklist manifesto.
829. 01:19:35 In that book, we talked about the surgeons.
830. 01:19:39 These surgeons do the same thing every single time.
831. 01:19:43 They need to know.
832. 01:19:44 They need to memorize how to do these surgeries.
833. 01:19:47 They probably have memorized it.
834. 01:19:49 If you were to give them a test, they would be able to pass it because they would know every single step that they have to do.
835. 01:19:55 But in reality, when it's time to do the surgery, there's variables and there are things that they will skip over.
836. 01:20:02 There were statistics that we shared in that particular book where the percentage of successful surgeries went down when they didn't use a checklist, which is a very basic task management system.
837. 01:20:15 But that is going to be a little bit deeper than what you were talking about.
838. 01:20:27 If you were to put every single step that you have to do for all these different tasks in a task manager, I would argue that that is not going to be a negative thing, although from the perspective of, well, you're not going to be able to memorize as much in this book and in the shallows.
839. 01:20:44 He kind of frames that as a negative thing.
840. 01:20:46 I would argue that not every use case of those test managers, of this technology, which requires you not remember all the individual details, that's not necessarily a bad thing.
841. 01:20:57 There's some definite positive outcomes.
842. 01:20:59 And in the case of the surgeons, it's the difference between life and death for a lot of people.
843. 01:21:04 They shared the statistics with them.
844. 01:21:05 They showed them the effectiveness of it.
845. 01:21:07 And they said, I forget what that, exactly what it was, but it was over 90%.
846. 01:21:11 I believe it said that if they were the ones having surgery, they would want whoever was doing the surgery on them to use the checklist.
847. 01:21:18 Even if that person was never on the internet and they had amazing memorization skills, I would argue they would still want them to use that checklist.
848. 01:21:26 And so checklist is a very basic technology, which Nicholas Kyler would probably say it's had negative impacts on our lives.
849. 01:21:34 But again, there's definitely some great things in this book. This is one of the things though that I kind of disagree with.
850. 01:21:42 Not completely though, because like I said, I think that there's definitely value in memorization.
851. 01:21:47 It's definitely something that I regularly try to do.
852. 01:21:51 But I'm not going to just try to memorize everything for the sake of my brain not changing.
853. 01:21:57 Yeah, that's fair, completely fair.
854. 01:21:59 Action items, one topic that came up in the book, and I have seen this mentioned in people who have put these in place digitally quite a bit in recent years.
855. 01:22:11 Common Place Book.
856. 01:22:13 And the concept behind a Common Place Book is that as you run across bits of information that you think are highly valuable, you write them in this book or you collect them into this book.
857. 01:22:25 And it becomes your book of growing knowledge.
858. 01:22:29 I have been interested in this idea for quite some time.
859. 01:22:33 I have never implemented it because I didn't understand it.
860. 01:22:37 And that comes to a lot of the mindset that Nicholas Karr talks about in this book of why would I store all this in one place when I can always search and get it when I need it.
861. 01:22:48 This ties me into the second action item that I have, which is the actual intent behind a Common Place Book I found out, is to memorize the quotes and bits of information that you put in that book.
862. 01:22:58 And it's your reference point on where you go to basically double check and start your memorization process of these quotes and bits of information.
863. 01:23:08 So I would like to implement this because I feel like I want to step into more of this memorization piece.
864. 01:23:16 To me, I think there's a lot of value in being able to recall two or three sentences or a paragraph that I've read in a book somewhere that I found highly helpful that I want to be able to use in conversation or use in my own writing.
865. 01:23:32 I would like to build on that repository in my brain. If I use the code example yet again, sorry listeners, I know a lot about different libraries and different languages within code.
866. 01:23:46 And I can pull off of different ways of doing things from different languages.
867. 01:23:50 And to me, I feel like that makes me a better developer because I've got so many different ways memorized.
868. 01:23:56 I don't feel like I have that repository to pull from in my writing and prose and how I put together sentences and paragraphs.
869. 01:24:03 I don't feel like I have that to pull from that I would in the way that I would like.
870. 01:24:08 So this is to me a way to try to build that repository very pointedly to help me out in the long run.
871. 01:24:17 There you go.
872. 01:24:18 Nice.
873. 01:24:19 Yeah, I really like that idea of the Common Place Book.
874. 01:24:21 I'd never really understood the definition of that either.
875. 01:24:25 My action items where I mentioned these already, number one, evaluate all the tools that I use and ask myself, does this tool control me?
876. 01:24:33 Do I run this tool or does this tool run me?
877. 01:24:36 I know that there are some things that I've just gotten in the habit of using.
878. 01:24:41 And so I want to reevaluate and make sure that I am the master of my technological domain.
879. 01:24:47 Yep.
880. 01:24:48 Also along with that, this one is related, disconnect. So having a specific time that all the technology goes off and at the end of the night, for example, just spend some time reading, not staring at a screen.
881. 01:25:04 This is something that I've done in the past, but I've kind of gotten away from it.
882. 01:25:08 So you can definitely hold me accountable to that.
883. 01:25:11 Okay.
884. 01:25:12 All right.
885. 01:25:13 I want you to go first in terms of author style and reading, though.
886. 01:25:16 Okay. So with the author style, his method speaks to me in how I like to formulate opinions and how I like to have conversations in general.
887. 01:25:28 I like to understand both sides of the story, if I can.
888. 01:25:32 And I try to be open-minded with that.
889. 01:25:35 Because of the way he's written this, I feel like it's somewhat opposing to how I think about things to a point.
890. 01:25:43 At the same time, I thoroughly enjoyed that process of going through it with him.
891. 01:25:48 I know that might be a bit odd and it's a bit against the way that you saw it, but I'll let you get to that.
892. 01:25:54 So for me, I really enjoyed it.
893. 01:25:57 It's kind of deep.
894. 01:25:58 You kind of have to get into some of the philosophers.
895. 01:26:01 He gets into Plato and Socrates and the difference between oral culture and writing culture.
896. 01:26:06 He gets into some of that and you have to understand or he'll help you understand a lot of some of these philosophers' mindsets.
897. 01:26:15 To me, that's highly valuable.
898. 01:26:17 I really enjoyed going through that process, which is maybe a bit weird.
899. 01:26:21 That said, it's probably above the heads of some folks, but I think it's very approachable for a lot of people.
900. 01:26:29 But you have to come at this one with the mindset of understanding an argument.
901. 01:26:36 You can't come at this trying to just read it for enjoyment.
902. 01:26:39 You have to be reading it to understand one side of a very passionate person and understanding their side of the story,
903. 01:26:49 which personally I love doing.
904. 01:26:51 So that's, I'm going to preface it with that.
905. 01:26:54 All of that said, to me, I feel like this is one that I would recommend to a lot of people, like I said at the very beginning.
906. 01:26:59 And I have recommended it to a few people with a lot of these preferences.
907. 01:27:03 All of that said, my rating on this, I'm going to put it at 4.5, just because I find this quite interesting and at least it gives me a point of reference to discuss a lot of things that involve how we interact with the internet and what it's doing to us
908. 01:27:20 and potentially allow me to draw some inferences on what we should do about it.
909. 01:27:25 Even though he doesn't really get into that part, not in the way that I wanted him to, but I still feel like there's a lot of value in at least understanding this side of the argument.
910. 01:27:35 Yeah, I'll definitely agree with you in terms of what you need to understand the value of his argument.
911. 01:27:42 I do think that the title is a little bit misleading. In my opinion, it should be called the shallows what technology is doing to our brains because over half the book is talking about other technologies besides the internet.
912. 01:27:55 For a long time, I thought it was defending the value of books.
913. 01:27:58 Like he was literally so long on the benefits of paper books.
914. 01:28:04 I was like, oh, this is fitting for a bookworm.
915. 01:28:07 Right, so part of this, I'm sure, is that it wasn't exactly what I had expected.
916. 01:28:15 I think maybe you could have done two very distinct sections in this book, part one, talking about technology in general.
917. 01:28:23 Part two could have been specifically the internet stuff.
918. 01:28:26 Like you said, he didn't really get into what necessarily to do about it.
919. 01:28:31 He mentions a lot about the notifications and things like that, but I don't remember specifically in there where he's talking about, you know, the easy solution for this is just turn off your email notifications.
920. 01:28:44 The easy solution to this is don't let Google do this.
921. 01:28:48 Like he just tries to sensationalize it and get you to the point where you're so outraged that Google is collecting all of your personal information and they view themselves as God that you're about ready to start a anti-technological crusade.
922. 01:29:00 Yeah, to fight it.
923. 01:29:03 But like I said, I know that I'm a little bit weird.
924. 01:29:06 I know that a lot of the stuff that I nitpicked in here, you know, I talked about him being a cranky old man.
925. 01:29:12 I probably come across this episode as being a cranky old man.
926. 01:29:17 But I do agree that there's a lot of value here.
927. 01:29:20 And if I was in a different place, I could definitely see this being a book that I would completely recommend to people.
928. 01:29:25 I would love to meet this guy in real life. I think that sitting down for coffee would be very, very entertaining.
929. 01:29:32 The book I didn't really like. It kind of reminded me of the innovators dilemma where I both loved it and hated it.
930. 01:29:39 Yeah.
931. 01:29:40 So I definitely think that there's a lot of value in this book.
932. 01:29:44 I'm going to go 3.5 stars for this.
933. 01:29:47 I should also point out that this was a New York Times bestseller.
934. 01:29:54 And it was also a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.
935. 01:29:59 So it's got those two accolades attached to it.
936. 01:30:03 Yeah, it's definitely a good book. It just kind of rubbed me the wrong way, I guess.
937. 01:30:10 I think you have to kind of have to have to have to.
938. 01:30:15 You have to come at this with a very specific mindset of understanding that it's a debate.
939. 01:30:22 I think if you do that, you'll read it differently than if you just read it trying to understand science.
940. 01:30:29 Yeah, I think that's completely fair.
941. 01:30:31 Okay, let's set this thing aside. What's coming up next?
942. 01:30:34 Next is Who Moved My Cheese by Spencer Johnson, which is a book that I picked because I've heard about this book a lot.
943. 01:30:44 And this is one that tends to be very polarizing.
944. 01:30:48 I looked at the Amazon reviews and found two distinct camps here where some people are like,
945. 01:30:54 "This is a completely life-changing book."
946. 01:30:56 And other people who are like, "Well, I get why CEOs like this and they give it to their employees, but this book is garbage."
947. 01:31:01 Yep.
948. 01:31:02 So this one should be interesting.
949. 01:31:04 And then the one after that is your pick, Solichu, which is much better.
950. 01:31:09 So coming up after that is the Personal MBA by Josh Kaufman.
951. 01:31:13 I have seen this recommended. Sorry to bring us back into business books.
952. 01:31:17 I saw this recommended by Sean Blanc, and he spoke all kinds of accolades for it.
953. 01:31:25 And given the number of times that I'm either consulting with businesses or trying to run my own,
954. 01:31:34 I felt like it'd be extremely helpful.
955. 01:31:37 There we go.
956. 01:31:38 Yeah. So Who Moved My Cheese is a very short book.
957. 01:31:40 The Personal MBA by Josh Kaufman is a very long book.
958. 01:31:43 Yes.
959. 01:31:44 So if you're going to follow along, you may want to get a head start on the Personal MBA.
960. 01:31:49 If you want to recommend a book, you can do that on the website.
961. 01:31:54 There's actually a page which has the complete list of books.
962. 01:31:58 If you go to bookworm.fm/list, you'll see links to all the books that we have done,
963. 01:32:03 as well as the ones that are planned, and a list of ones that are recommended.
964. 01:32:08 There's also a button to recommend a book. So I'm excited about some of these recommendations.
965. 01:32:12 Anti-fragile is one that I've wanted to read for a while.
966. 01:32:16 Sapiens is one that Tan recently has been raving about.
967. 01:32:20 Power of Habit is on here. So there's some great books, but if you wanted to recommend a book, we would love that.
968. 01:32:27 Yeah, I've got a lot that I kind of already have in the pipeline, and a lot of those come from my own book list that we've seen in other books.
969. 01:32:36 But I'm very quickly starting to shift my attention over to that recommended list because it's getting longer and there's some very interesting titles in there.
970. 01:32:44 So I have a feeling those are going to come up fairly, fairly soon.
971. 01:32:48 On top of that, now that we're done talking about the internet and how Nicholas Carr is quite against it,
972. 01:32:54 let's talk about how to use the internet.
973. 01:32:57 One of the things that we do quite a bit is try to understand what you guys think of the format and how we're doing things on the podcast and how we go about reviewing them.
974. 01:33:08 And the best way to do that is through an iTunes review. We've talked about this, I think, every episode, but it's a huge help.
975. 01:33:14 That's why we continue to talk about it. It's a big deal for us. It helps other people find the show, and it helps us continue to find the rankings and such and such.
976. 01:33:23 You understand it. So if you enjoy this, you think I'm crazy, you think Mike's spot on or the opposite, go take a look at the iTunes link in the show notes and go out there and leave us a review and let us know what you think of it.
977. 01:33:37 Thanks for joining us and we'll catch you all next time.