239: Proust and The Squid by Maryanne Wolf

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1. 00:00:00 Well, before we get into the reading brain,
2. 00:00:04 we have a couple of housekeeping things we have to talk about here, Corey.
3. 00:00:08 So first of all, I want to just share with everybody that we completely changed
4. 00:00:14 the technical plumbing of the podcast.
5. 00:00:18 So if you had trouble getting this episode, I apologize.
6. 00:00:23 I have tested everything and I think it is all working.
7. 00:00:26 I got the feed redirected.
8. 00:00:28 So with multiple people, I was able to verify that in different podcast players,
9. 00:00:33 the new episode was showing up without having to resubscribe to the feed.
10. 00:00:38 But yeah, we're on Transistor now and that gives us some new cool stuff.
11. 00:00:45 Like if you go to bookroom.fm, it will redirect to that transistor page.
12. 00:00:49 And if you click on the episodes button, you can actually search all of the episodes right there.
13. 00:00:54 Corey pointed out that while you could do that on the desktop website previously,
14. 00:00:58 it was really, really hard to find on mobile.
15. 00:01:02 And yeah, I'm not enough of a developer to fix that sort of thing.
16. 00:01:08 So we move the show over to Transistor.
17. 00:01:10 That gives us a much better technical foundation for the show going forward.
18. 00:01:16 If you go to bookroom.fm, you should be able to just see the new page.
19. 00:01:20 And the episode numbering works the same.
20. 00:01:22 So if you go to bookroom.fm/237, it'll take you directly to the page
21. 00:01:27 for episode 237.
22. 00:01:31 If it doesn't do that, then my redirects don't work.
23. 00:01:33 But I spent a lot of time on those, even dove into the world of Regex, as I showed Corey.
24. 00:01:39 And yeah, I think all the pipes are connected correctly.
25. 00:01:43 But yeah, if you have any trouble, you can actually just go back to the bookroom.fm
26. 00:01:47 and resubscribe to the page there.
27. 00:01:50 Did you use AI to do your Regex stuff?
28. 00:01:52 Oh, for sure.
29. 00:01:53 Yes, OK, cool.
30. 00:01:54 I was like, please tell me you used some AI to do Regex, because I was doing Regex
31. 00:01:58 earlier today, actually, this morning.
32. 00:02:00 And I was like, AI for the win.
33. 00:02:02 Go ahead.
34. 00:02:02 Yeah, so actually, I used Claude code.
35. 00:02:05 Well, Claude, I guess I didn't actually use the terminal or anything like that.
36. 00:02:08 But I said, I want to redirect this to this.
37. 00:02:13 And how do I do that?
38. 00:02:15 And then how do you do using Regex?
39. 00:02:17 And then it's like, OK, well, that didn't work.
40. 00:02:18 Oh, I forgot this piece.
41. 00:02:20 Eventually, I got it to do exactly what I wanted it to do.
42. 00:02:24 And there's no way I would have figured it out on my own.
43. 00:02:28 AI for the win.
44. 00:02:28 AI for the win.
45. 00:02:31 I have one other thing I need to mention here, because this episode will go live
46. 00:02:34 actually right before this starts.
47. 00:02:36 But I am going to be doing a live practical PKM cohort in January.
48. 00:02:40 It kicks off January 5th.
49. 00:02:42 And I am trying to make this one as accessible as humanly possible.
50. 00:02:48 So basically, there's two ways you can join.
51. 00:02:50 You can either get the practical PKM hybrid cohort, which gives you lifetime
52. 00:02:55 access to all of the videos and the custom AI agent and the monthly Q&A calls.
53. 00:03:02 That is $497, which is still considerably less than a lot of other workshops.
54. 00:03:08 But you can also-- I've decided if you join the library, so even if you join--
55. 00:03:14 it's $49 a month for the Pro Tier, you pay quarterly.
56. 00:03:17 So it would be $147.
57. 00:03:19 As long as you are a member of the library, you can join this live cohort for free.
58. 00:03:24 Which means if you want to join this cohort, which I charged $800 for last time that I did it,
59. 00:03:30 you can pay $147 and join it live.
60. 00:03:33 You won't get lifetime access to everything.
61. 00:03:35 You'll basically have access to it for as long as you stick around.
62. 00:03:38 So obviously, the goal here for me is to get people who are tire kickers to give it a shot,
63. 00:03:46 join the cohort, which by the way, also gets you access to Life HQ, which I sell for $197.
64. 00:03:51 So you won't get updates to that unless you're remaining a member, but you get it for significantly
65. 00:03:58 less than I should mathematically be charging for this stuff, probably.
66. 00:04:03 But I just want to get a bunch of people in this cohort.
67. 00:04:05 It's been a while since I did this one live.
68. 00:04:07 I've got a few ideas for how I want to change this based on when I went through the right
69. 00:04:11 of passage cohort with David Perrell.
70. 00:04:14 And I think this is going to be the best one.
71. 00:04:15 That's also the most affordable one.
72. 00:04:16 So basically, you can get access to the live one for $147.
73. 00:04:20 But if you go to join.pricelpkm.com, that's the website for the hybrid cohort, and if you
74. 00:04:25 buy either of those options, you will get access to this cohort as well when it's ready.
75. 00:04:33 Nice.
76. 00:04:34 Awesome.
77. 00:04:35 Indeed.
78. 00:04:36 So now, let's talk about action items.
79. 00:04:37 Did you talk to Katie about crafting commerce?
80. 00:04:39 I didn't.
81. 00:04:40 I didn't.
82. 00:04:41 I just want everybody in the audience to know that if Mike could punch me through the Internet,
83. 00:04:47 he might punch me right now.
84. 00:04:49 Because he wants me to do this so bad.
85. 00:04:52 And I am not intentionally not doing it.
86. 00:04:55 I just don't remember.
87. 00:04:57 My memory is so bad when it comes to certain things.
88. 00:05:01 And I just didn't remember.
89. 00:05:02 But hold on one second.
90. 00:05:03 I'm going to-- I feel like I wrote this down last time and then didn't do it.
91. 00:05:07 You did.
92. 00:05:08 So that's the only reason I left it down here, by the way.
93. 00:05:09 I'm not trying to shame you into going.
94. 00:05:11 Oh, no.
95. 00:05:12 You literally last time, though, because I reviewed the episode and published it right
96. 00:05:14 before we recorded this one.
97. 00:05:16 Like you said, I'm going to put this in my reminders and I'm going to talk to Katie.
98. 00:05:19 So follow up with me on this one.
99. 00:05:21 That's the only reason I am.
100. 00:05:26 It's OK.
101. 00:05:27 I will have my spectacular moment of follow-up failure momentarily.
102. 00:05:30 All right.
103. 00:05:31 So I put it in my thing again.
104. 00:05:34 And we'll see if this actually works.
105. 00:05:36 I don't know if it's going to work or not, but at some point, we're going to work.
106. 00:05:40 By the way, I'm playing around with Apple reminders and we'll see how that works.
107. 00:05:44 And OK.
108. 00:05:45 So my next one.
109. 00:05:46 Apple reminders.
110. 00:05:47 Apple podcast.
111. 00:05:48 Just use all the Apple.
112. 00:05:49 I know.
113. 00:05:50 I know.
114. 00:05:51 It's kind of hard to not because they're built into everything, which that's a whole
115. 00:05:53 other conversation.
116. 00:05:54 Yeah.
117. 00:05:55 Apple podcast is very good, by the way.
118. 00:05:56 And if you want to hear me talk about my experiment with it, that's in the Pro Show.
119. 00:05:59 That is in the Pro Show.
120. 00:06:01 OK.
121. 00:06:02 So I was supposed to create a storyboard for the last book, which I did.
122. 00:06:06 I'm really happy with that.
123. 00:06:08 It was good.
124. 00:06:09 I liked it.
125. 00:06:11 I like doing that.
126. 00:06:12 Now, here's what I'll tell you immediately.
127. 00:06:14 I did not create one for this book.
128. 00:06:19 You'll understand why as we talk about this book, but I did not create one for this book.
129. 00:06:27 And this is an interesting part of our conversation because I was like gung ho.
130. 00:06:31 This was like a cool new way to think about these things.
131. 00:06:35 And I actively chose not to do that for this book.
132. 00:06:38 Like 100% actively chose not to do that.
133. 00:06:41 So I did not do it for this book, but I did it for the last book.
134. 00:06:44 Cool.
135. 00:06:45 And then create one for the Institute.
136. 00:06:46 I haven't done that yet, but that's a plan for over the break.
137. 00:06:49 So when I say break, so I'm a faculty member.
138. 00:06:52 And that means we just took finals.
139. 00:06:54 I'm in the process of finishing my grading.
140. 00:06:57 And then I have like a couple weeks off before the spring semester starts.
141. 00:07:00 So I'm prepping for next classes, but I have a little more time to do some thinking around
142. 00:07:04 different things.
143. 00:07:05 The Institute is a like mini seminary thing that I'm doing, so I'm trying to make connections
144. 00:07:08 throughout the Bible and throughout scripture and theology and those type of things.
145. 00:07:11 So I'm planning to do that one.
146. 00:07:13 I just didn't have time because of finals, but that's still on the list.
147. 00:07:16 Oh, I guess I had one more.
148. 00:07:20 Develop my during questions.
149. 00:07:21 Nope.
150. 00:07:22 Nope.
151. 00:07:23 Nope.
152. 00:07:24 Nope.
153. 00:07:25 Nope.
154. 00:07:26 Nope.
155. 00:07:27 Nope.
156. 00:07:28 Nope.
157. 00:07:29 Nope.
158. 00:07:30 Didn't even think about that one.
159. 00:07:31 Never even crossed the brain.
160. 00:07:32 So that one's out.
161. 00:07:33 All right.
162. 00:07:34 How about you?
163. 00:07:35 I don't like the term ID integration board still, but sublime is definitely the thing
164. 00:07:41 I want to use for mixing ideas, shall we say?
165. 00:07:45 Okay.
166. 00:07:46 And I went all in with sublime.
167. 00:07:49 I bought the lifetime.
168. 00:07:51 Nice.
169. 00:07:52 Yep.
170. 00:07:53 So they're shipping me one of those deadline candles where it actually says deadline on
171. 00:07:57 it.
172. 00:07:58 And the goal is to like write your book before you get down to the bottom.
173. 00:08:01 Okay.
174. 00:08:02 Okay.
175. 00:08:03 Yeah.
176. 00:08:04 I'm a big fan of just the whole ethos of this, this company.
177. 00:08:07 They have these zines that they publish periodically.
178. 00:08:11 And the latest one was all about human creativity and AI.
179. 00:08:17 And they pull in interviews with like Kevin Kelly and those types of people who are really
180. 00:08:23 thinking about this stuff in in good ways, you know, good as subjective, I guess, but
181. 00:08:28 people who I think are really thinking about this stuff the right way.
182. 00:08:32 And yeah, I think this is going to, this is going to go places.
183. 00:08:35 Maybe not.
184. 00:08:36 You know, maybe I lose momentum and I walk away from it.
185. 00:08:39 I did the same sort of thing with Rome back in the day.
186. 00:08:41 I paid the five year thing and then I was like, these people creep me out.
187. 00:08:44 I'm not going to do this anymore.
188. 00:08:46 That was my, that was my question is, do you know anything about the people who make sublime?
189. 00:08:50 Like, do they have a history?
190. 00:08:52 Do you know anything?
191. 00:08:53 Or I wouldn't have, I wouldn't have looked into it.
192. 00:08:55 I'm just asking if you did.
193. 00:08:56 No, no, I guess, you know, no news is good news on that front with Rome.
194. 00:09:00 I kind of, kind of had an idea, but I can't be that bad.
195. 00:09:03 It was that bad.
196. 00:09:04 I'm sorry.
197. 00:09:05 I'm sorry.
198. 00:09:06 Yeah.
199. 00:09:07 And it's subjective.
200. 00:09:08 I mean, some people still use Rome, I think actually in lore use it.
201. 00:09:11 The tool is actually pretty cool, but yeah.
202. 00:09:14 Connor would say stuff and the insider calls, they called them like cult gatherings and
203. 00:09:18 stuff.
204. 00:09:19 And I'm just like, I don't want to be a part of this.
205. 00:09:21 Just wasn't for me.
206. 00:09:22 Got it.
207. 00:09:23 Um, so yeah, that one is, uh, is, is good.
208. 00:09:25 And that is kind of what instigated the Apple podcast experiment that we talked about in
209. 00:09:29 the, the pro show, the next follow up item that I had here was to create the queries
210. 00:09:36 for the light bulb, the key, et cetera.
211. 00:09:38 I didn't do this yet.
212. 00:09:40 Uh, I intended to, but, uh, I, it just fell through the cracks for me.
213. 00:09:45 Uh, same with check out the workshop.
214. 00:09:47 I actually went in there and poked around a little bit.
215. 00:09:50 I do have access to that, that circle group and, uh, did not have time to watch any of
216. 00:09:55 the videos.
217. 00:09:57 Uh, I mean, just so I don't like to make excuses.
218. 00:10:02 This these last two weeks though, Adelaide got pneumonia, Malachi broke his foot in addition
219. 00:10:07 to all the other like end of the semester stuff.
220. 00:10:10 It's just, it's enough.
221. 00:10:11 Let it be over.
222. 00:10:13 See.
223. 00:10:14 So Mike, here's the difference between you and I, Mike doesn't like to make excuses.
224. 00:10:17 I don't think that's an excuse.
225. 00:10:18 I think that's an explanation.
226. 00:10:19 I'm just going to throw that out there.
227. 00:10:21 Like I think that's an explanation and I will gladly make an explanation.
228. 00:10:25 What happened to me this week, finals done, like done.
229. 00:10:29 It's an explanation of why things didn't get done finals.
230. 00:10:32 So.
231. 00:10:33 Yeah.
232. 00:10:34 So, um, I still intend to do those.
233. 00:10:36 Those aren't, you know, ones that I'm going to walk away from.
234. 00:10:38 The create queries, that's actually something I think will be useful and I want to add that
235. 00:10:42 actually probably to life HQ at some point.
236. 00:10:45 And then, uh, the workshop, I, I want to go through it because I want to know what, what
237. 00:10:49 is in there so I can reach out to Jolt and, and see if you would be willing to do, uh,
238. 00:10:55 a presentation for the library, but yeah, I haven't had time to do that.
239. 00:11:00 Well, there's always, so one out of three, I guess, hey, always put off today.
240. 00:11:06 What could be done tomorrow?
241. 00:11:07 Isn't that the saying?
242. 00:11:08 Isn't it the way it is procrastinated on purpose?
243. 00:11:11 Is that what you're saying?
244. 00:11:12 You know, I don't know what you're talking about, I don't know what you're talking
245. 00:11:16 about.
246. 00:11:17 Okay.
247. 00:11:18 Let's talk about the reading brain.
248. 00:11:19 Today's book is Proust and the squid, which I have to apologize because for years, I've
249. 00:11:25 been calling this the Proust and the squid is actually Proust and the squid, Proust as in
250. 00:11:31 Marcel Proust and this is by Marianne Wolf.
251. 00:11:35 I had read a book previously by her called reader come home, which is kind of the reason
252. 00:11:42 that I picked this one for Corey because in that book, she kind of talks about how information
253. 00:11:46 hits different from an analog book versus a digital screen and, uh, didn't really get
254. 00:11:52 there in this one.
255. 00:11:54 This was a deep dive into the science of reading, which when I was going through this, I was
256. 00:11:58 like, this is fascinating.
257. 00:12:01 And I wonder what Corey's going to think about this because in my mind, there are two extreme
258. 00:12:05 options available.
259. 00:12:07 One is I'm a university professor.
260. 00:12:08 This is totally my jam.
261. 00:12:10 Everyone in my class needs to know this stuff.
262. 00:12:12 The other one is I do not care for those of you who can't see my head shaking because,
263. 00:12:20 you know, you're listening to the audio version of this.
264. 00:12:22 And he said, uh, this is great.
265. 00:12:24 I'm a university professor, blah, blah, blah.
266. 00:12:26 No, I was shaking my head hard.
267. 00:12:27 No, like absolute hard.
268. 00:12:29 No.
269. 00:12:30 Now I respect her.
270. 00:12:31 Like she knows her stuff.
271. 00:12:33 I mean, she's doing it.
272. 00:12:34 Like this is where the world she lives in.
273. 00:12:36 She loves this.
274. 00:12:37 I am really glad.
275. 00:12:39 Like I'm really, really glad for her.
276. 00:12:41 But the neuroscience of reading and like where reading developed from and all of those things,
277. 00:12:48 like I could have cared less about like 90% of this book, like, like, I mean, there's
278. 00:12:55 maybe 10% of this book that I'm like, yeah, like, okay, this was good.
279. 00:12:59 But 90% of this book could have cared less.
280. 00:13:01 I will.
281. 00:13:02 I was going as far as to say because I think this is a good example for, for our listeners.
282. 00:13:06 I would not have read this book.
283. 00:13:08 I would have stopped reading this book had, had you and don't read that as like, it's
284. 00:13:13 a poor quality book.
285. 00:13:15 I just have zero interest in the subject matter.
286. 00:13:18 And don't like, again, I don't want you to be offended by that either.
287. 00:13:21 It's like, so hopefully you're not offended by that.
288. 00:13:23 I'm not offended.
289. 00:13:24 Okay.
290. 00:13:25 Good.
291. 00:13:26 Because it's like, you had no idea.
292. 00:13:27 I got no idea.
293. 00:13:28 I got like a chapter and a half.
294. 00:13:29 I had a little bit of an idea.
295. 00:13:30 I had like, I knew it was going to be science based.
296. 00:13:32 I knew she was going to talk about like the neuroplasticity and stuff like that.
297. 00:13:38 I guess I didn't know quite how deep she would.
298. 00:13:40 She would go though.
299. 00:13:41 I mean, I mean, we're talking, you know, Sumerians and we're talking the Egyptians and we're
300. 00:13:46 talking about looking at images versus processing.
301. 00:13:49 I know.
302. 00:13:50 It's incredible, isn't it?
303. 00:13:51 No.
304. 00:13:52 I mean, sure.
305. 00:13:53 Yeah.
306. 00:13:54 It is incredible.
307. 00:13:55 But I think it just like went too far into my interest level when it comes to reading.
308. 00:14:01 I actually do think though, based on here in your description, reader come home, I think
309. 00:14:05 is a much more interesting book to me than, than this one is.
310. 00:14:11 Because I, that one would challenge me more.
311. 00:14:14 This one was more of an information thing.
312. 00:14:17 The other one I'll bring up and hopefully I'm not putting the cart before the horse for
313. 00:14:20 you Mike.
314. 00:14:21 But like the other one that's big in this one is dyslexia.
315. 00:14:24 So if you are dyslexic or you're interested in dyslexia and like the science behind that
316. 00:14:29 and kind of the application of that, this is a really cool book for folks who either
317. 00:14:35 have dyslexia or teach folks with dyslexia.
318. 00:14:38 Like that would be another really good engagement point for those of you who are in that world
319. 00:14:44 and care about that world.
320. 00:14:45 I'll say that too.
321. 00:14:47 All right.
322. 00:14:49 Well, this is going to be an interesting conversation.
323. 00:14:53 Yeah.
324. 00:14:54 Okay.
325. 00:14:55 So a little bit of background on Marianne Wolf.
326. 00:14:57 She's a professor, was at a university on the East Coast now works at UCLA, I believe.
327. 00:15:05 Okay.
328. 00:15:06 So I think she was at MIT then.
329. 00:15:08 Because MIT is bringing in my brain that she had a colleague at MIT.
330. 00:15:11 I remember her saying that in the book somewhere.
331. 00:15:13 Yeah.
332. 00:15:14 She said the name of the university, I didn't shut it down because honestly, just wasn't
333. 00:15:18 important.
334. 00:15:19 She doesn't work there anymore.
335. 00:15:20 But we've talked to her for the Focus Podcast.
336. 00:15:23 She's one of the kindest, smartest people you will ever meet.
337. 00:15:28 And what was the context of the Focus Podcast?
338. 00:15:31 Like what would you bring her on for?
339. 00:15:34 David and I both read, read or come home and we're like, we got to talk.
340. 00:15:37 Oh, you just wanted to talk to her about read or come home?
341. 00:15:40 Yeah.
342. 00:15:41 Because, I mean, one of the themes of Focus is analog, obviously.
343. 00:15:46 And so I've been trying to get David to read analog books for a long time.
344. 00:15:51 I mentioned this book.
345. 00:15:52 He read it.
346. 00:15:53 He's like, this is amazing.
347. 00:15:54 I'm totally in.
348. 00:15:55 We got to talk to this lady and he reached out to her and she came on the show.
349. 00:15:59 And it was amazing.
350. 00:16:00 It was awesome.
351. 00:16:01 It was one of my favorite episodes, honestly.
352. 00:16:04 That's my action item from this book.
353. 00:16:05 Just so you know, I'm going to go listen to your favorite book.
354. 00:16:08 Listen to that.
355. 00:16:09 I didn't catch that episode.
356. 00:16:10 So I'm going to go listen to the episode with her because that sounds great.
357. 00:16:14 Yeah, it was, it was really cool.
358. 00:16:15 And we recorded initially on video.
359. 00:16:18 I remember it was about negative 30 that day in Wisconsin.
360. 00:16:22 So my internet was flaking out.
361. 00:16:24 Maybe that's not why the internet was flaking out.
362. 00:16:25 But that's my, I was the only one home.
363. 00:16:28 There was no one else using it.
364. 00:16:29 Right.
365. 00:16:30 Fairly extreme weather conditions.
366. 00:16:32 And we had to turn off the video at one point.
367. 00:16:34 But prior to that, she's taken her laptop around and showing us, look at this stack of
368. 00:16:38 books over here in the kitchen and look at this stack of books over here in the, the
369. 00:16:41 den, you know, it was, it was amazing.
370. 00:16:43 She's your spirit.
371. 00:16:44 Well, that's for sure.
372. 00:16:46 Yeah.
373. 00:16:47 Uh, probably.
374. 00:16:48 And, um, yeah, so where was I going with that?
375. 00:16:51 I, I like the approach that she takes with this.
376. 00:16:53 I think actually, like her writing style, this is getting sound reading, I guess, but
377. 00:16:57 it's, it's very, uh, narrative based.
378. 00:17:00 So if you just are interested in the topic at all, I feel like you could just sit down
379. 00:17:04 with this book.
380. 00:17:05 She's going to share a whole bunch of stories.
381. 00:17:06 She's done a whole bunch of research, and it's going to be told in a very compelling
382. 00:17:09 fashion.
383. 00:17:10 Yeah.
384. 00:17:11 It's kind of interesting to me, you know, you mentioned, I'd not totally get this where
385. 00:17:14 if you're just not interested in the science of reading at all, then yeah, you're not going
386. 00:17:17 to, not going to like this.
387. 00:17:20 And I guess that's the thing is like, if you find something that piques your interest,
388. 00:17:24 this is the exact type of book that I would want to read to get into that stuff.
389. 00:17:27 And I am fascinated by this stuff.
390. 00:17:29 I've been fascinated with the, what's the, the term, um, study of the brain.
391. 00:17:36 Yeah.
392. 00:17:37 Neuroscience.
393. 00:17:38 No, how neuroscience.
394. 00:17:39 Yeah.
395. 00:17:40 How like the amygdala is the emotional center and it hijacks the rational thinking process
396. 00:17:44 and all those different pieces that connect.
397. 00:17:46 I love that kind of stuff and I will even admit that she talks about it so much that it was
398. 00:17:50 a little bit hard for even me to follow along with it.
399. 00:17:54 But I think it's, I think it's really cool to understand how all the wires are connected.
400. 00:17:58 And then as she goes through the book, there's three different parts, how the brain learned
401. 00:18:02 to read, how the brain learns to read over time.
402. 00:18:04 So kind of history and present.
403. 00:18:05 And then when the brain can't learn to read, I feel like this is kind of the future based
404. 00:18:08 part where even if you're not dealing with dyslexia specifically, it's sort of like,
405. 00:18:13 well, everybody's different and here are some of the issues.
406. 00:18:16 So how do you use all this historical context and these things that we've talked about previously
407. 00:18:21 with these challenges that you may be facing right now in order to become the best version
408. 00:18:26 of yourself, for lack of a better term, keep learning, keep going, keep growing that sort
409. 00:18:34 of thing.
410. 00:18:35 And it's not prescriptive, it's not a systems book.
411. 00:18:38 It is definitely an information dump, but I loved every second of it.
412. 00:18:41 Well, and what I'll tell you is, I mean, I've read a lot of academic writing, like a lot
413. 00:18:46 of academic writing.
414. 00:18:48 This is a really good example of taking heavy academic ideas and things that like are made
415. 00:18:57 up in, you know, hundreds of academic journals and papers and were presented at conferences
416. 00:19:02 and things and making it accessible to a whole other set of people.
417. 00:19:06 So it's like from that standpoint, like she's, she's very, very skilled at taking complicated
418. 00:19:13 ideas and translating them into something that like everybody, you know, like, 'cause I don't,
419. 00:19:18 I know nothing about neuroscience really.
420. 00:19:20 I know even less about the neuroscience of reading, like you, when you write the word
421. 00:19:25 amygdala into a book, I stop caring for the most part, right?
422. 00:19:29 Like, I mean, I just, it's like whatever, like, you're gonna talk about the amygdala,
423. 00:19:32 I don't really care about the amygdala, but what I'll tell you is like, this was very,
424. 00:19:37 very well done.
425. 00:19:38 I'm going to say translated, like it's very well translated from academic speak to normal
426. 00:19:43 people.
427. 00:19:44 Normal person speak.
428. 00:19:45 So that was, that was really cool to, to see and it was a good example for me if I ever
429. 00:19:50 think about taking like really heavy academic things and trying to turn them into a more
430. 00:19:54 popular text.
431. 00:19:55 Yeah.
432. 00:19:56 I, I'm surprised, I mean, really the neuroscience, I guess I can get why that isn't a thing,
433. 00:20:03 but essentially it's how things work and yeah, I don't know, let's, let's get into it.
434. 00:20:12 So part one is how the brain learned to read and there's three chapters in this, this part.
435. 00:20:17 I think we'll actually tackle each chapter because he's got very specific ideas that
436. 00:20:21 she's presenting in, in each of the chapters.
437. 00:20:24 So chapter one, reading lessons from Protestant and the squid chapter two, how the brain adapted
438. 00:20:28 itself to read and then chapter three, the birth of an alphabet and Socrates protest.
439. 00:20:32 Those are all in this first section.
440. 00:20:35 So let's start with chapter one, reading lessons from Protestant and the squid.
441. 00:20:42 Now, as mentioned earlier, Prowst refers to Marcel Prowst, who once described a reading
442. 00:20:47 sanctuary, that sounded amazing.
443. 00:20:51 And then the squid is an analogy to understand how neurons fire and transmit to each other.
444. 00:20:56 Kind of the idea here is, you know, how squid learn to, to swim.
445. 00:21:02 And I think that's interesting. I like the pyramid of reading that she describes here
446. 00:21:07 where there's like the different levels, there's the surface behavior, there's the cognitive
447. 00:21:11 level, the neurological structures, the neurons and then the genes at the very bottom.
448. 00:21:18 I'm not sure I'm, I'm scared to go all the way down there because I feel like the further
449. 00:21:21 down you go, the more maybe understanding you have of why something is, but the less practical
450. 00:21:27 stuff becomes.
451. 00:21:28 There's an 80/20 with this for sure. But the, the major point she makes, which is fascinating
452. 00:21:33 to me is that reading is a great example of the brain's plasticity and ability to learn
453. 00:21:37 a new skill because we were never born to read huge point, huge point that we weren't
454. 00:21:42 born to read is like, I was like, Oh, shoot, we weren't born to read like that makes total
455. 00:21:46 sense.
456. 00:21:47 Yep. And the other thing I really like in here is the three principles to help the brain
457. 00:21:52 learn to read, which is the capacity to make new connections from older structures, the
458. 00:21:56 capacity to form areas of exquisitely precise specialization for recognizing patterns and
459. 00:22:01 information. And the ability to learn to recruit and connect information from these
460. 00:22:06 areas automatically. There's some cool quotes in this section. One in particular, I jotted
461. 00:22:12 down, which really has nothing to do with the topic of the book. But Edward tenor says it
462. 00:22:17 would be a shame if brilliant technology were to end up threatening the kind of intellect
463. 00:22:21 that produced it. And I feel like that's exactly what we're at with the AI right now. Although
464. 00:22:26 I don't think it's really the existential threat that some other people think, but you
465. 00:22:29 know, whatever.
466. 00:22:30 I think you talked about those three principles. I think one of the cool things to do is to
467. 00:22:35 take those three principles and apply them to our world today. So the capacity to make
468. 00:22:40 connections among older among older structures. Okay, so how do we take traditional learning
469. 00:22:45 and traditional reading and apply that into our world today? You know, like how do we
470. 00:22:49 make those connections between those the capacity to form areas of exquisitely precise specialization
471. 00:22:56 for recognizing patterns of information? So that's changing right now. Like there are
472. 00:23:00 people who are better at that in the short form media and there are people who are better
473. 00:23:03 that than the long form media. And I'm by no means saying I'm going for the short form
474. 00:23:10 media stuff. I'm just saying that we have to look at this and go, this can be applied
475. 00:23:13 to what what exists today as well. And we need to pay attention to that. And then the
476. 00:23:17 ability to learn to recruit and connect information from from these areas automatically. And this
477. 00:23:21 is the one that is like, Oh man, this automatic connection is strange to me. And I don't know
478. 00:23:27 what to I don't know what to do or unpack that one. The the big quote that stood out for me
479. 00:23:31 in this one would be Joseph Epstein's, a biography of any literary person ought to do at length
480. 00:23:39 with what he read and when for in some sense, we are what we read. And I don't I mean, I
481. 00:23:46 completely completely 100% agree with this. I think we are what we read. I think we are
482. 00:23:50 what we expose ourselves to. There's this idea of good in, good out garbage in garbage
483. 00:23:56 out. And I think this is a real thing that we need to be paying more attention to in
484. 00:24:01 society that like a lot of our young people forgive me like for making this generalized
485. 00:24:07 statement. I don't like to do this. But at the same time, a lot of our young people are
486. 00:24:10 putting a lot of garbage in all the time. And it's over and over and over again. And they
487. 00:24:16 get frustrated when we ask them to put someone say it's different garbage, right? And others
488. 00:24:23 would say it's actually good stuff. So like you can debate that all day long. But like
489. 00:24:26 these ideas that are time tested and true that have made it into a book that people
490. 00:24:31 will say like we've been reading this for hundreds of years, we should continue to read
491. 00:24:34 this for hundreds of years. Like that is in my mind, the stuff that's held the test of
492. 00:24:38 time, that's the good stuff. And we need to be putting more good stuff into into people.
493. 00:24:42 And this is where I'm like a big fan of like liberal arts education, because it helps
494. 00:24:45 us put that good stuff into our brains and expose ourselves to those good ideas. So
495. 00:24:50 I do get an action item out of here. And I don't remember where it was in the book and
496. 00:24:56 I'm almost positive it was in this first chapter. So forgive me if it wasn't. She references
497. 00:25:01 a book called I'm almost positive. Maybe I might be getting it mixed up with something
498. 00:25:06 I saw online. But there's a book called Bandersnatch. And it's a book about like, you know, Narnia
499. 00:25:13 and Tolkien and, and those type of things. And I want to read that book and it tied in
500. 00:25:19 like it. I don't know if it came out of this book or not, but it melted mine melded between
501. 00:25:23 this book and in, you know, what I was looking at online, because she talks about in one
502. 00:25:27 here, Middle Earth and Narnia and those type of things in chapter one. So that's really
503. 00:25:32 what I got out of this first one, other than, you know, she tells you what the goal of the
504. 00:25:36 book is and, and kind of what she's trying to do. And this is part of why I lost it is
505. 00:25:40 she told me what the goal of the book was. And I was like, I don't really care about
506. 00:25:44 the goal of the book. So, so that's kind of where I lost it. But we're gonna, we're gonna
507. 00:25:49 do well. This is gonna be good. So I'm ready to move to. All right. Okay, so chapter two,
508. 00:25:57 how the brain adapted itself to read. This is really where she introduces three big epiphanies.
509. 00:26:07 The first one is a new form of symbolic representation. The second one is a system of symbols that
510. 00:26:13 can be used to communicate across time and space. And the third one is sound symbol correspondence,
511. 00:26:19 representing the realization that all words are composed of tiny individual sounds and
512. 00:26:22 that symbols can physically signify each of these sounds in every word. That's the gist
513. 00:26:28 of it. And then she gets into the history, which I didn't jot down all of the statistics
514. 00:26:34 and all that kind of stuff. But it was fascinating. So you mentioned the Sumerians, you know,
515. 00:26:41 the first written languages she mentions came from the Sumerian cuneiform, but also mentions
516. 00:26:46 later that there was another first in the Egyptian hieroglyphics, but they weren't connected.
517. 00:26:52 They kind of evolved separately in their own parts of the world, which is kind of interesting
518. 00:26:58 because it wasn't like something that built on something else. These were two totally separate,
519. 00:27:04 what's the term I'm looking for when you have a study and you have people into the different
520. 00:27:11 groups, like experiments groups. So two, like, there was no cross-pollination here. And they
521. 00:27:18 still ended up in the same place, which is interesting. But a couple of things that just
522. 00:27:24 minor things that kind of were interesting to me. One was that their first encyclopedia
523. 00:27:31 was named All Things Known About the Universe. What a great name. That actually would be
524. 00:27:37 a great podcast name. All things known about the universe. Yeah, I'd have trouble using
525. 00:27:42 using that title, but it reminded me of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. And then
526. 00:27:48 the other one was that going back to the first languages being Sumerian cuneiform that Sumerian
527. 00:27:53 women had their own dialects called Emissal, which was translated, fine tongue. So yeah,
528. 00:28:02 not anything that you're going to do specifically with this stuff. It's just interesting anecdotes
529. 00:28:08 there. But I think it is helpful to understand how we got here. And then the other thing here,
530. 00:28:17 kind of going back to the point about the Sumerians and the Egyptians and these processes happening
531. 00:28:22 at the same time, but at different places, she actually said that evidence suggests that
532. 00:28:25 writing was invented, quote unquote, at least three times in the last part of the fourth
533. 00:28:31 millennium BC, which is awesome. So if you're going to extrapolate that, you know, the brain
534. 00:28:41 is never meant to read. Why did we learn to read? You know, it's to make us bigger, better,
535. 00:28:49 faster, stronger. I don't know. Like it's a superpower. This is this is one of the coolest
536. 00:28:56 points of the first step, the first part of her book is the idea of like, we weren't meant
537. 00:29:00 to do this. If you look at it biologically, we weren't meant to do this yet. What I've
538. 00:29:04 just told you is in three different places or in four different, you know, times or whatever
539. 00:29:09 it is, humans did it. Like they did that like there was something in there that something
540. 00:29:15 that drove this. Now I have my reasons why I think that's true, right? Like I have my
541. 00:29:20 like internal explanations for this, but just pondering on that idea of like, Oh, physically,
542. 00:29:27 I'm physically is the wrong word, like brain wise, body wise, right? Like this isn't something
543. 00:29:32 we're much better off drawing pictures and just talking to each other. Like why would
544. 00:29:37 we need to actually make this word code system that has syllables and letters and all this
545. 00:29:42 stuff? Like that just doesn't make any sense. It seems like it makes everything harder.
546. 00:29:46 And what's cool is she's going to tie this in at the very end about why this mattered
547. 00:29:49 and how it helped us. Right. Well, I guess she's going to tie it in a couple of different
548. 00:29:52 times, but I remember it at the very end. So I think that's that's really, really neat.
549. 00:29:55 I like her idea here of mental representations of information being re presentations, which
550. 00:30:03 I've heard this before that like a representation is a representation. And I really like the
551. 00:30:08 idea of that because what are we doing when we do writing? And then we're taking this
552. 00:30:13 idea. Well, I guess visuals too. When we take visuals, we're taking an idea and we're representing
553. 00:30:18 it as a visual. When we write, we're taking an idea and we're representing it as words
554. 00:30:23 and sentences and paragraphs. And then we can adjust the way we represent that. And you
555. 00:30:28 see this in terms of the way people do it. Like some people write a paragraph and you're
556. 00:30:32 like, man, I know exactly what you're talking about. That makes total sense. And some people
557. 00:30:35 write the exact or about the exact same topic, but they write a different paragraph and you're
558. 00:30:39 like, no idea. Like what what words did you just say? Like that doesn't make any sense
559. 00:30:44 to me. And it's a really cool thing to this is why I think you have said this before to
560. 00:30:50 me. And I've heard you say this to other people as well. There is space for you to do the thing.
561. 00:30:56 So if you're if you're passionate about something and you want to tell that story, you want to
562. 00:30:59 communicate that idea, you want to teach that thing, there's space for you to do that because
563. 00:31:03 you may represent that in a way that connects with a group of people that it is never connected
564. 00:31:09 with before like they've been trying to do this their whole life and they've just never
565. 00:31:12 got it. And I think that's a that's a really cool thing. I actually think it's a really
566. 00:31:15 cool feature of AI is it gives us the ability for something to represent something in a
567. 00:31:22 bunch of different ways. And the human doesn't get tired because the system just does it.
568. 00:31:27 Now it may do it wrong. So that's a problem. But so so so many humans. So there you go.
569. 00:31:33 Like I think I do think this is a really cool chapter and I and the flow as it goes down
570. 00:31:37 is really cool to think about. We weren't supposed to do this, but we've done it a bunch
571. 00:31:41 of times, which is kind of a neat idea. Yeah. So let's go to the next chapter because you're
572. 00:31:49 kind of hitting on why would we want to create an alphabet and there's a cool story in chapter
573. 00:31:57 three about that chapter three is the birth of an alphabet and Socrates protests and mentions
574. 00:32:03 a story by Thomas Mann who said that in and he refers to the event of Moses going up the
575. 00:32:14 mountain to get the 10 commandments from God as kind of the birthplace of an alphabet,
576. 00:32:20 which is interesting to think about it that way because the point he makes is that in
577. 00:32:23 response to God, asking Moses to carve the 10 commandments on two stone tablets in a
578. 00:32:28 way that everyone could understand them. Moses had to create an alphabetic language and I
579. 00:32:37 never thought about that before, but it makes sense. You know, if you want to communicate
580. 00:32:41 something to somebody else in a specific way, you have to have a baseline understanding
581. 00:32:48 of these are the boundaries within which we're playing, I guess. And it makes sense as she's
582. 00:32:55 going through this that an alphabet would do that because an alphabet basically takes
583. 00:33:01 all of the possible options and shrinks it down into these tiny elements that you can
584. 00:33:06 put together a lot like the atomic ideas that we were talking about in the last book. There's
585. 00:33:13 the criteria of an alphabet from Eric Havelock, which I liked here. There's three criteria.
586. 00:33:17 The first is a limited number of letters or characters. The second is a comprehensive
587. 00:33:23 set of characters capable of conveying the minimal sound units of the language. And then
588. 00:33:30 the third is a complete correspondence between each phoneme. I don't know how to say that
589. 00:33:35 in language and each visual sign or letter. So if you have those three things, you have
590. 00:33:42 the foundations of an alphabet and the 26 letters that are in the English alphabet, she
591. 00:33:47 mentions as kind of the sweet spot, but they don't have to have exactly 26. Basically,
592. 00:33:53 if you have thousands and thousands, you may as well not even have an alphabet in which
593. 00:33:59 case that activates a totally different part of your brain. If you're learning to read
594. 00:34:02 Chinese characters, although there is a foundational part of the Chinese language, I forget the
595. 00:34:07 name of it starts with a P that is sort of like an alphabet for those characters that
596. 00:34:15 when kids are in school, they learn that first. The big thing I want to talk about here, but
597. 00:34:21 I'll let you kind of share whatever you want to first, is the Socrates objections to the
598. 00:34:26 written language. So pause that for a second. Yeah, it's a little bit of a tangent. So
599. 00:34:31 for everybody, I mean, I teach at Colorado Christian University. So therefore, you know,
600. 00:34:37 you made the connection to Moses and the tablets. And this is a really interesting thing if
601. 00:34:42 you think about it contextually. So earlier in the Bible, right, and whether you believe
602. 00:34:45 in the Bible or not, that's not the point of this. But like for somebody who reads the
603. 00:34:49 Bible and does, earlier in the Bible, there was the Tower of Babel. And the people tried
604. 00:34:53 to create the technology and the technology was created in essence to be like God. Like
605. 00:34:59 that was the reason why they did it. So God said, okay, no, we're going to split you up
606. 00:35:02 and we're going to give you all a bunch of different languages. And that was where like
607. 00:35:05 the Tower of Babel came from. So the idea that we then tie back into, oh, and then Moses
608. 00:35:11 from God creates the alphabet, which is like the one universal thing to like tell everybody
609. 00:35:17 what I want to tell them. It's just really cool. Like I'm going to say that again, I
610. 00:35:21 don't care about the neuroscience of this book. It's just a really cool idea. That is a really
611. 00:35:27 cool thought experiment to go, wow, I had never thought about like they got scattered
612. 00:35:32 and they're all speaking different languages. And then he's saying, you know, God's saying
613. 00:35:36 Moses, write this one thing down. And it's what everybody's going to look at. Like it's
614. 00:35:39 a really cool idea. Before we get to Socrates, another one I want to say is she makes three
615. 00:35:44 claims about the unique contributions of the alphabet. The alphabet's increased efficiency
616. 00:35:50 over other systems. The alphabet's facilitation of novel thoughts never before articulated.
617. 00:35:53 And the novice readers ease in acquiring an alphabetic system through their awareness
618. 00:35:58 of the sounds of speech. And it's like, I like those three ideas when they tie into the
619. 00:36:03 three that you talked about, right? Like in terms of what makes up an alphabet. And you
620. 00:36:07 say like, okay, does it increase my efficiency in doing things? She's going to drive that
621. 00:36:11 home later in the book that it does increase our efficiency at kind of gaining information
622. 00:36:15 and communicating information. The alphabet's facilitation of novel thoughts. Writing is
623. 00:36:22 thinking, right? And we've talked about this before, like when we write something down,
624. 00:36:26 it changes the way we think about it, whether we like it or not. So writing is thinking.
625. 00:36:31 And then you get in this idea that the novice readers ease of acquiring the system. And really,
626. 00:36:37 I mean, we're teaching our kids to read right now, like, and we've done it, we're on number
627. 00:36:40 four. And it's crazy. Like, wow, it's complicated. And you have to teach them the difference
628. 00:36:45 between there and there and why they're spelled different and why they mean different things.
629. 00:36:49 When you think about it, it's actually not that hard. Like it really isn't that complicated.
630. 00:36:55 And then some of you who are who speak more of a Latin based language, I think it's even
631. 00:36:59 easier in that, right? Like, so the ones where the root meanings actually stay consistent
632. 00:37:04 and then you change the ends and things like that. I think English actually makes it more
633. 00:37:07 complicated. What is it, Mike? I think German makes it even more complicated. Like, you
634. 00:37:12 know, the Germanic languages do just crazy stuff. And I think she calls this out here
635. 00:37:16 as that finishes like the craziest one. It just does absolutely wonky, wonky things.
636. 00:37:22 At this point, let's talk about Socrates. Well, the other thing I want to mention with
637. 00:37:28 what you just just shared there. So I, our youngest Adelaide is learning, learning to
638. 00:37:37 read. And we've learned from previous experience because she's our fifth. Some of our kids like
639. 00:37:45 picked it up really quick. Some of them took a while. They all got it. They all read great.
640. 00:37:50 So never really worried about it. But last night, after reading this book, I'm sitting
641. 00:37:55 there on the living room floor reading with Adelaide. And like, well, let's read this
642. 00:38:00 book together. You do the voice for this character. I'll do the voice for this other character.
643. 00:38:05 And seeing her sound out the words and actually read, I had this context of all this stuff
644. 00:38:11 that was going on in her tiny little brain. And I was like, this is amazing. I agree with
645. 00:38:16 you there, right? Like, I, because I've thought about my children as I've read this book and
646. 00:38:19 like the way they learn to read and things they mess up and things they get right and
647. 00:38:23 all that. It is amazing. Like I agree with you. Yeah. Okay, so Socrates, Socrates was
648. 00:38:29 against the spread of written language. And why was he against the spread of written language?
649. 00:38:35 Well, there were three specific objections, but really it ties back to the fact that ancient
650. 00:38:39 Greeks had amazing ability to recall information. And so personally, I just think he was really
651. 00:38:44 good at something. And something came along that made that thing not as important. And
652. 00:38:49 he was not happy about it. The three objections were the inflexibility of the written award,
653. 00:38:59 the destruction of memory and the loss of control over a language. I think there's actually
654. 00:39:07 a little bit of validity to some of this stuff, specifically the destruction of memory, because
655. 00:39:12 when you have to memorize all these things, you are able to do it. Your brain adapts to
656. 00:39:20 absorb information a certain way and recall a certain way when you can just write it down
657. 00:39:25 and you have a record and you can go look it up. It's different. And that is exponentially
658. 00:39:30 more the case in our digital world today, where lots of people don't know things because
659. 00:39:40 they can go look them up. And that's contributed to the fact that we can only remember six characters
660. 00:39:46 of a phone number instead of the whole thing, stuff like that. So I do think there's something
661. 00:39:52 to this, but it's definitely a bit of an old man yells at cloud. And it's interesting because
662. 00:39:57 Socrates was against it. His mentee Plato was kind of ambivalent like, I could take
663. 00:40:03 it to leave it whatever I see both sides. His mentee Aristotle love to read. So Socrates
664. 00:40:10 was never going to win this fight. I'm not sure why he would pick this hill to die on,
665. 00:40:16 but he did. Yeah, the hardest one I have for him is she says later here that his concerns
666. 00:40:23 are disarming, but they're really not. It's the third one that he calls out is this he
667. 00:40:29 passionately advocated the unique role that oral language plays in the development of
668. 00:40:32 morality and virtue. And I like that one just doesn't I don't understand why like oral
669. 00:40:39 language and speech plays so much more in morality and virtue in his mind. Like I would
670. 00:40:44 love to, you know, if I cared more, I would love to understand that more because I just
671. 00:40:49 don't see, I don't see the difference there, but I think it's interesting how against
672. 00:40:55 it was. And I agree with you that I think a big part of this was, I mean, we're speculating
673. 00:41:02 on somebody that's, you know, thousands of years old at this point, but you know, I
674. 00:41:07 think there's a lot of like, I'm really steeped in this culture of the oral tradition and
675. 00:41:13 we debate and we discuss and we do all this stuff. And then you're bringing this new technology
676. 00:41:18 in and we see this all the time. Oh, this new technology is going to change everything.
677. 00:41:22 I don't want it to do that, right? Like it's going to it's going to mess with my oral tradition.
678. 00:41:26 It's going to mess with our debate. It's going to mess with what we're going to do. And instead
679. 00:41:29 of us going to a room in dialoguing and having that debate, we're now going to go and sit
680. 00:41:35 in the library and read books and we're not going to dialogue anymore. And that like just
681. 00:41:39 blew his mind in terms of in terms of that. So that was the same argument that the clergy
682. 00:41:45 had with the printing press too. It's like, well, we have the Bible in Latin. We're the
683. 00:41:49 only ones who understand it. We're the experts. Now everybody's got it. Everybody's an expert.
684. 00:41:54 This isn't good. Yeah, I think one of the areas where I don't know if he articulated
685. 00:41:58 it this well, but it comes into my mind is the idea of I do think we as a society don't
686. 00:42:05 memorize enough. Yeah, we don't try to put enough into our brains and keep it there.
687. 00:42:11 Whereas the oral tradition would require you to do that. Oh, if I want to go talk elegantly
688. 00:42:16 about this, I have to know the stuff. And I mean, I fall victim to this all the time.
689. 00:42:20 Well, I don't need to know it. It's it's in my obsidian vault. Like I don't need to know
690. 00:42:23 it. I can go look it up. I can Google it. I can ask AI. I can do whatever it is. That
691. 00:42:28 does us a disservice. I think that if we were able to know more and have it memorize, I
692. 00:42:35 think that we better better for us. 100% agree. All right. Ready to go to the next section?
693. 00:42:43 Part two. All right. So part two is how the brain learns to read over time. And the first
694. 00:42:52 chapter here is chapter four, the beginnings of reading development or not. The reason for
695. 00:42:57 the or not is that there is a huge gap between kids who come from homes where they are encouraged
696. 00:43:04 to read and kids who come from homes where they are not encouraged to read the gap. She
697. 00:43:09 said at one point is somewhere something like 32 million words. By the time the kids are
698. 00:43:17 in kindergarten, which is a that's a lot. And this chapter kind of explains why that's
699. 00:43:24 a big deal. A lot of science in this one, just a couple of things, I guess, to kind of pick
700. 00:43:32 out here, reading to your child at an early age makes the connection between reading stories
701. 00:43:37 and feeling loves. So if you want to instill love for reading, do it early around 18 months,
702. 00:43:43 there's a major breakthrough. And that's when children learn that everything has a name.
703. 00:43:47 Never really thought about that before. That was kind of interesting. Learning about the
704. 00:43:50 feelings of others is not simple, even for a lot of adults, but reading stories actually
705. 00:43:56 is a big boost to that. And the ability to learn is tied to the brain's ability to produce
706. 00:44:03 myelin. Now, are you familiar with myelin? Have you heard that before? Okay. So I first
707. 00:44:08 came across this concept when I read deep work by Kale Newport, because he talked about
708. 00:44:13 how when you're doing deep focused work, your brain produces more of the myelin, which is
709. 00:44:17 what helps the neurons fire faster and cleaner. So that's the process that's going on in the
710. 00:44:23 brain that helps you learn. So more myelin is good. Now, your brain may not produce it
711. 00:44:32 as well as other brains. And like, you really can't do anything with that. But well, I guess,
712. 00:44:39 you know, not to get to part three of the book anyways. But the big thing here for me is that
713. 00:44:45 the areas of the brain associated with the integration, divisional, verbal, and auditory
714. 00:44:48 information. And that part of the brain is called the angular gyrus. That doesn't get
715. 00:44:53 sufficiently myelinated until between five and seven years old. So before five and seven,
716. 00:44:59 all of the stuff that happens in the brain, which allows you to read because it is a combination
717. 00:45:05 of all of those different skills, the visual, the verbal and the auditory. All of that has
718. 00:45:10 to come together in order for you to learn how to read. And that happens somewhere between
719. 00:45:15 five and seven years old. So if your kids not reading any kindergarten, don't forget about
720. 00:45:18 it. Yeah, exactly. This is one of those places where when she gets into logistic or sorry,
721. 00:45:26 phonological development, semantic development, syntactic development, morph morphological
722. 00:45:31 development, these are interesting to me. But this is where she went into like academic
723. 00:45:37 mode a little bit too strong for me. And I just wasn't, I wasn't that interested. So
724. 00:45:41 I kind of, I guess there was another one, pragmatic development. But like, these are,
725. 00:45:46 interesting to me to reflect on my children and what they're getting out of the fact that
726. 00:45:52 we are reading to them and those kinds of things. But my bigger interest in this chapter was
727. 00:45:56 the overall idea of, I've always heard that it's good to read to your kids. I've always
728. 00:46:02 heard that you should read to your kids, right? And there's a bunch of different reasons why
729. 00:46:06 you should do that. This gave it like the boost. It was like, oh, like here, here's why
730. 00:46:11 you should read to your end. And it's like, she's built the developer, the trust with me,
731. 00:46:16 that I'm like, okay, I'm gonna actually pay attention to what she's saying here. And I'm
732. 00:46:19 gonna actually care about why I should read, I should read to my kids. So like that was,
733. 00:46:25 that was good for me. It also made me like sad. You know, when I think about this chapter,
734. 00:46:31 and then I think about the, the kids who grew up and they don't have books and the kids
735. 00:46:35 who grew up and they're not read to and, you know, she makes a statement here, when words
736. 00:46:40 are not heard, concepts are not learned. When syntactic forms are never encountered, there
737. 00:46:45 is less knowledge about the relationship of the events of a story. And like, this is just
738. 00:46:50 on the sheer, you know, you talked about the 30 with 32 million words or whatever it is,
739. 00:46:54 right? Like, so there's, there's that idea in itself, but then there's also the creativity
740. 00:46:59 side of it. Like, I think about like, you know, we read, read to our kids, and then they come
741. 00:47:03 back and they're, they're acting like the knight, or they're acting like the, the monster
742. 00:47:08 or they're doing whatever. And there's this whole creativity side of it that those, that
743. 00:47:11 exposure gives them. And if you're not read to, like, I think, how do I say this? It forces
744. 00:47:18 you to make a mind picture. Like, I don't care whether you're three years old, or whether
745. 00:47:22 you're 37, or whether you're 104. It forces you to make a mind picture of what's happening
746. 00:47:27 in the book. And if you're not forced to make that mind picture, you don't make the
747. 00:47:31 mind picture. So like, I think it just made me a little bit sad when I'm, when I'm reading
748. 00:47:37 this and thinking to myself, man, like, there's a whole group of young people out there by
749. 00:47:42 no fault of their own. They're not exposed to books. They're not read to. They just don't
750. 00:47:47 have this development that I think is critical. And I think we see the latent effects of this
751. 00:47:53 as they, as they grow up. So she did a really good job convincing me of, of the need for
752. 00:48:01 this, even though I was, I was a captive audience at the start of it. So I thought chapter four
753. 00:48:06 was hit hard. Yeah, and just to extend that a little bit, you know, if you were from a
754. 00:48:15 disadvantaged position, you can be upset about that and say that's not fair, or you can take
755. 00:48:22 control of your situation where you're at. I mean, yeah, this does paint a picture of
756. 00:48:28 this, this gap that exists at the beginning. But she ends the book and when she talks about
757. 00:48:33 dyslexia, with some of the most successful people in the world who weren't able to read
758. 00:48:40 until much later. So just because you had a bad start doesn't mean that you have to finish
759. 00:48:45 poorly. So if you feel like you're, you're in that position, it's, it's not all all doom
760. 00:48:50 and gloom, you have more agency there, maybe than you, you realize, but as a parent, yeah,
761. 00:48:54 you want to set your kids up for success and do whatever you can for them. And she makes
762. 00:48:58 a really compelling case that one of the best things you can do for your kids is to read
763. 00:49:02 to them. Yep, absolutely.
764. 00:49:04 All right, so the next chapter is chapter five, the natural history of reading development.
765. 00:49:13 And this one talks about the different types of readers. There are five emerging pre readers,
766. 00:49:18 novice readers, decoding readers, fluent comprehending readers and expert readers. She talks about
767. 00:49:22 the first couple in this chapter and then the next chapter talks about the, the others.
768. 00:49:27 And I don't know that I really want to go into all of the different characteristics of
769. 00:49:30 these different, different, uh, classifications of readers, but a couple of interesting points
770. 00:49:36 here. Fluency is being able to utilize all the special knowledge a child has about a word,
771. 00:49:42 its letters, letter patterns, meanings, grammatical functions, roots and endings, fast enough
772. 00:49:46 to have time to think and comprehend. That is a great definition of the word fluency,
773. 00:49:52 though she says in the book, I think that there's no like standard agreed upon definition.
774. 00:49:57 She shows a couple of different ones. This is the one I jotted down that because I think
775. 00:50:00 this is really good. The goal of learning to read is to understand what message the author
776. 00:50:07 is communicating and then have the time to think about it, understand what they're saying
777. 00:50:12 and then respond to it. So this is like a book and book in my opinion to what's the name
778. 00:50:19 of it? How to read a book? Mortimer Adler. Okay. Link for a second. Mortimer Adler. I hated
779. 00:50:24 that book when I read it. I was Corey Hicks in reading Preston the Squid when I read how
780. 00:50:28 to read a book and I was like, I never want to pick this up again. It is so boring. It's
781. 00:50:32 300 pages. I already know how to read a book, leave me alone old man. And as I went on from
782. 00:50:38 that book years later, I was like, that was actually really profound. Those four levels
783. 00:50:42 of reading that he talked about, that made a lot of sense. And the more I read, the more
784. 00:50:45 I understood the importance of being able to work a book like that. And that has definitely
785. 00:50:52 influenced how much I've been able to get out of the books that I read from that point
786. 00:50:57 on. Now, I don't think Preston the Squid is going to have that same level of effect, but
787. 00:51:03 you can see that it is laying the foundation for like, if how to read a book is the tactical,
788. 00:51:10 this is how you argue with the author and make it your own. Preston the Squid is the science
789. 00:51:15 behind why that works. So I guess, having read how to read a book that gave me context
790. 00:51:20 for the what was actually happening. And then in this section specifically, she's talking
791. 00:51:26 about the science behind it. Oh, I get it now. Like another thing she talked about here,
792. 00:51:31 which I thought was fascinating. And I totally thought of you when when I read this is comprehension
793. 00:51:35 monitoring, I would wager to guess that there are a few students where you if you could
794. 00:51:40 open up their brains and download some knowledge into the matrix style, you would inject into
795. 00:51:45 them comprehension monitoring, which is knowing when you need to reread a text in order to
796. 00:51:50 comprehend it, because then you will do well on the test. This is one of the things that
797. 00:51:56 it actually made me think about the way I read is it's not just words flying past.
798. 00:52:02 It's do I actually understand this? Do I actually understand this? And what I'll tell you is
799. 00:52:06 I was not effective at standardized testing when I was coming up through young grades
800. 00:52:14 in middle school and high school, because I was not good at this. Like I could read a
801. 00:52:19 passage, but I couldn't retain it and apply it then like in comprehend it in a way like
802. 00:52:26 I had to go back and reread it. I had to go back and reread it. So I now know that's
803. 00:52:30 like I needed to know the question that way I was actively reading, because I'm not the
804. 00:52:34 most active reader in the world. So like, but I did no idea of that when I was young,
805. 00:52:40 I just knew that like I don't like the English part of this like the English part of the exam
806. 00:52:44 is terrible when I wish I didn't have to take it. I'm more of a math guy, right? Like that
807. 00:52:48 was the way I had always lumped it in, but it was really that idea of I didn't have that
808. 00:52:53 comprehension idea of am I actually picking up on this am I actually picking up on this
809. 00:52:58 and it's just a it's if I wish I knew then what I knew now, you know, kind of a thing
810. 00:53:05 because I would change that I would I would actually do some things differently. Other
811. 00:53:09 than that, I didn't really get a ton of stuff out of this chapter. So I mean, it was it
812. 00:53:16 was fine, but nothing really much came out of this one for me.
813. 00:53:19 All right. Let's go on to the next one then. So chapter six is the unending story of readings
814. 00:53:29 development. And this talks about the timeline of the of reading that has the the different
815. 00:53:39 milliseconds on the the timeline and the different brain modes. That's interesting, but I don't
816. 00:53:45 know that there's a whole lot I do with that prior to the the next section, I guess. But
817. 00:53:52 the three major jobs of the reading brain, I feel like are fairly important. And that
818. 00:53:55 is recognizing patterns, planning, strategy, and feeling. So this is interesting because
819. 00:54:04 you don't really think of when I am reading a book like Prowston the squid, this is helping
820. 00:54:09 me develop the ability to plan strategy and feel more deeply. Yeah. And I I guess, you
821. 00:54:20 know, the the takeaway from this is if you really want to do the most with what you've
822. 00:54:28 got to work with, readings got to be a part of the equation. It's it's easy to see for
823. 00:54:34 me anyways, understanding this why that old adage readers are leaders or I came across
824. 00:54:40 a statistic, which is actually the genesis of the bookworm podcast that the most successful
825. 00:54:45 CEOs, one of the common traits they had was that they read 24 books a year. So basically
826. 00:54:50 two books a month and do the math. Well, if we read a book every two weeks, that's probably
827. 00:54:56 two a month. Yep. So you want to show up on a podcast and talk to me about this? Well,
828. 00:55:01 is an accountability mechanism? Well, that's great. That's great. I mean, I think that's
829. 00:55:05 that's so that's part of the reason why I do this. You think about those recognizing
830. 00:55:09 patterns, planning, strategy, and feeling. If I think about the books that we read on
831. 00:55:14 here and the reason why I listened to bookworm before I became, you know, cohost on this on
832. 00:55:18 the show is because I was trying to figure out what are the patterns across people that
833. 00:55:23 I don't know if I respected is too strong of a word, but that had done good things before
834. 00:55:28 me. Okay, so you've done these good things before me. Like are there patterns I can pick
835. 00:55:31 up across these books? Then I'm thinking about what am I going to do in the future? That's
836. 00:55:35 your planning strategy part. And then we read whole, whole books that are really about like
837. 00:55:39 go get them at a boy, like, you know, climb the mountain kind of a thing. So it's like
838. 00:55:44 these three things connect directly to to what we do and how we try to apply these things
839. 00:55:50 to our life. So I'm I'm good on that. She makes a statement in here that I think changes.
840. 00:55:57 It's like the the core component of the book. And I know it's I she probably wouldn't say
841. 00:56:01 that. But for me, it's the core component of the book. The fluent comprehending reader's
842. 00:56:04 brain is on the threshold of attaining the single most essential gift of the evolved
843. 00:56:08 reading brain time. And I think about that and I go, what on earth does that mean? And
844. 00:56:13 then she unpacks it as we as we go through this that like you're trying to read quickly.
845. 00:56:21 So that's your fluent comprehending read quickly with understanding. So you have the
846. 00:56:26 time milliseconds might not it's not a minute. It's not a hundred years. It's not anything
847. 00:56:31 like it's milliseconds to then apply that and recognize a pattern and do do do do do.
848. 00:56:37 And this is a really interesting idea to me. Like why do why do we read? Why do we want
849. 00:56:42 to be a good reader? Why do we want to be a fluent reader? It's because then I can make
850. 00:56:45 the connections that I need to make. Then I can actually apply this and I can do things
851. 00:56:49 like recognize pattern playing strategy and feel. It's such a interesting idea. Like I
852. 00:56:57 just think it's such a cool a cool idea that I had never thought about when I thought about,
853. 00:57:01 you know, why why do I want to become a good reader? Oh, so I have that time to make connections.
854. 00:57:06 I have that time to play and I have that time to feel it's a it's a really cool idea.
855. 00:57:10 Yeah, and that's that's kind of what's explained on that timeline of reading with the different
856. 00:57:13 milliseconds and she's got a visual in the book of the different areas of the brain that light
857. 00:57:17 up at different points along that that timeline. But ultimately how that gets expressed. I think
858. 00:57:24 she has a single sentence which beautifully encapsulates this. We bring our life experiences
859. 00:57:30 to the text and the text changes our experience of life. So what you read changes who you are
860. 00:57:37 and who you are influences what you read, which is why I think everybody should choose books like
861. 00:57:45 this to wrestle with even if it's uncomfortable. And I can say that because I've had to do the
862. 00:57:50 same thing myself without a read a book. Yeah, I hated that book when we read it. I was like,
863. 00:57:56 why in the world are we reading this? We've read 41 books already. We know how to read.
864. 00:58:03 It was the driest, most boring book I have ever read. It's probably also one of the most
865. 00:58:07 influential. But it wasn't until months and years after I read that that I realized what it did to
866. 00:58:13 me. And I was like, Oh, wait, I think I've heard about this before. Oh, yeah, those four levels
867. 00:58:18 are reading. I see how that's getting played out in my life now. Yeah, so she she ties back
868. 00:58:23 into something else, Mike, that I want to have a direct confrontation with you with about. So
869. 00:58:28 okay, are you ready for this? I mean, just gear up. I'm giving you the I have no idea, but sure.
870. 00:58:33 She talks about Middle Earth, Narnia Hogwarts, and developing metaphor, inference, analogy,
871. 00:58:40 right? All these things. Mike, you don't like to read fiction. You are an anti fiction person,
872. 00:58:48 just like I am an anti physical book person. Right. And while we can exist on this earth
873. 00:58:55 and in harmony, we should have this conversation. Why don't you read fiction books? That's a great
874. 00:59:05 question. And I think at this point, actually, I'm not anti fiction. It's just the fiction books are
875. 00:59:11 never the ones that I'm excited to pick up and read. I have several fiction books that I want to read.
876. 00:59:18 Toby, Joshua, Rachel, they all love fiction books. And I see them reading them and they talk
877. 00:59:25 about how great the stories are. And I pick them up and I'm like, I'm going to read this one. And
878. 00:59:29 then I start reading it. And it just isn't isn't doing it for me. And the argument, you can't make
879. 00:59:35 the argument that I should be reading those fiction books because of the empathy that it's going to
880. 00:59:39 develop in me. We talked, I even made the argument earlier about how it helps kids understand things
881. 00:59:45 from other people's perspectives. So if you want to give me an action item for that, you can. I will
882. 00:59:50 probably fail at it, but I am willing to try again. I can't, I can't, I don't think it's fair to give
883. 00:59:55 you an action to read a fiction book. I think though, no, no, no, I think it is. Do it. Do it. Mike,
884. 01:00:01 read a fiction book. It's going in the oven. My big thing is like, don't read a whole fiction book,
885. 01:00:06 read a fiction short story. Like find, find sure. Like, have you ever, do you know, did you ever hear
886. 01:00:12 of a book called The Velt? All right, I'll send it to you. I'll send it. It's a book from a long
887. 01:00:17 time ago. It actually is very timely today. And you'll understand why, why we do it. But it's a short
888. 01:00:23 story. And it's a really interesting take on the world at the time. And then it's very applicable
889. 01:00:30 to right now. But I just think there's a both and here, right? Like, in what I struggle with,
890. 01:00:37 she talks about metaphor, inference, and analogy. And what I, what it made me do is it made me go,
891. 01:00:43 do I read fiction books to actually think about metaphor, inference, and analogy? Or do I just
892. 01:00:48 read them to be entertained? Like, do I, do I just want to go into another world and like kind of
893. 01:00:53 escape what we're doing? And I think most of the time, that's what I do. And this is where I've
894. 01:00:58 always, you know, for lack of a better way to put it, like poo-pooed, you know, literary analysis.
895. 01:01:06 And like these lit classes where it's like, we're going to take this person's work and we're
896. 01:01:09 going to study the in-depth meaning of this work. And I've been like, why? Like, let's just be,
897. 01:01:14 let's just have fun. Like, let's just entertain this. And, and, but I think there's something there.
898. 01:01:18 And I, and I think it happens more than we realize is you're reading this, this fiction book.
899. 01:01:25 And you're really comparing, oh, well, how does that relate to my life? Or, oh, how does that relate
900. 01:01:30 to the way somebody else handled this in a different context or in a different book? And
901. 01:01:34 how did he develop this world versus this world? And I think, like, so one of the books that really
902. 01:01:40 kind of just wrecked my, why world in terms of doing this is have you, have you read Ready Player
903. 01:01:45 One? Okay, so Ready Player One, you'd get a kick out of it because you're a child of the 80s,
904. 01:01:51 like I am. So, so you'd get a kick out of Ready Player One. I think, I think it'd be one for you.
905. 01:01:57 Don't watch the movie first. Read, read, read the book first. I promise you. But it's a, you really
906. 01:02:04 kind of place yourself in the world, at least I did. And you're like, what would it be like
907. 01:02:09 to be in this world? Like, what would it be like to be in this world and kind of go from there?
908. 01:02:13 So, the short story would be the, the long story would be Ready Player One. It's, it's nerdy enough
909. 01:02:18 that I think you'd like it. And I'll get off my, my fiction soapbox now. Okay. So, you'll have to
910. 01:02:27 send me the links for those so I can put them in the, the show notes. I will, for sure. But Ready Player
911. 01:02:33 One, I, that one I have. And you know what, Corey, I'm going to buy this right now. It will be
912. 01:02:43 here Sunday, December 21st. As we record this, that will be before the episode comes out.
913. 01:02:48 But there's my Christmas fiction book. And if, if you hate it, blame it on the audience,
914. 01:02:54 not me. Not sure that's how that works, but okay. All right. Ready to move on to the next one?
915. 01:03:04 I am. Okay. So let's talk about dyslexia. Actually, it's not just dyslexia. Chapter, or part three
916. 01:03:11 is when the brain can't learn to read. Chapter seven is dyslexia's puzzle and the brain's design.
917. 01:03:18 So this one does talk a bit about dyslexia. And I find it fascinating how she talks about this.
918. 01:03:28 Mentiones that dyslexia is not a reading disorder since the brain was never intended to read. Very
919. 01:03:33 interesting point. Never thought about it that way before. And there's lots of potential sources
920. 01:03:38 of dyslexia. So some of the ones she mentions here are a flaw in the older structures of the,
921. 01:03:43 of the brain, a failure to achieve automaticity. So that's basically the efficiency on the timeline
922. 01:03:49 that she talked about in the last chapter, an impediment in the circuit connections among the
923. 01:03:54 structures, a completely different circuit being formed for reading, or the hard one, multiple
924. 01:04:00 structures, multiple deficits, and multiple subtypes. So basically, you're never going to find a single
925. 01:04:07 cause for this, but kind of hears, you know, what, what happens. I liked the definition of
926. 01:04:16 disconnection syndrome, which is when the different parts of the brain necessary for a given function
927. 01:04:21 are cut off from one another, causing the function to break down. So this is really at the heart of
928. 01:04:26 what she's talking about mentioned earlier, you've got the visual, you've got the auditory,
929. 01:04:31 all these different parts coming together when you learn to read. So if one of those
930. 01:04:36 isn't functioning correctly, it can cause the whole system to not work. And that's basically what
931. 01:04:42 happens with with dyslexia and brain scans of children with dyslexia show that the brain actually
932. 01:04:48 creates a completely different reading circuit. And she's got lots of examples of those
933. 01:04:54 potential circuits that could be created based on the different deficiencies inside the book,
934. 01:04:58 which is really interesting. I think the larger point she alludes to here, which is kind of fast
935. 01:05:06 and fascinating, is that readers with dyslexia use far more right brain structures. So the larger
936. 01:05:12 point she kind of drives at in the next chapter specifically is the right side of the brain is
937. 01:05:18 the one that is more creative. So dyslexia in a way can just kind of push you in a different
938. 01:05:25 direction and you develop strengths in other areas, which is really cool. And I love one other
939. 01:05:31 phrase here, learning to read. So this is kind of like, what could go wrong, right? This specific
940. 01:05:37 sentence is awesome. Learning to read like Red Sox baseball is a wonderful thing that
941. 01:05:42 can go wrong any number of reasons. And that's a great taste of her writing style.
942. 01:05:50 So Mike, help me remember, right brain is creative, left brain is analytical. Am I
943. 01:05:56 thinking about that right? Okay, I was trying to remember that. I think one of the important
944. 01:06:02 parts is when you get into part three of this book is she has a kid with dyslexia and it's part
945. 01:06:09 of her family as well. Like, and she describes how dyslexia has, you know, been part of her
946. 01:06:16 great grandfather and then it kind of moved down through her thing. So she's passionate about this.
947. 01:06:21 The other one is like, you can very much see how she's trying to apply this in her academic
948. 01:06:27 work now. So she's done all this work on writing. She's in all this work on reading. She's done all
949. 01:06:32 of this work on alphabets and all that stuff. And now you can see where she's moved into. She's
950. 01:06:37 moved into this idea of like, let's apply this to understanding dyslexia and understanding and
951. 01:06:42 trying to help people who struggle with dyslexia to overcome this. And she's, I love authenticity.
952. 01:06:53 I love the fact that people are intellectually honest about certain things. She talks about it
953. 01:06:57 at one point time that only time and more evidence will tell the truth, right? Like, so she's not
954. 01:07:01 trying to come out with this book and say, we figured it out. Here you go, done, which if you can do
955. 01:07:07 that, that's great. But she's just saying, we understand this is a problem. And here are the
956. 01:07:11 connections we're trying to make and we're trying to understand this. And this is what we know so
957. 01:07:15 far and time's going to tell the truth. I actually think this stuff while it really has no direct
958. 01:07:23 impact on my life, you know, kind of thing. I mean, I may have students who struggle with dyslexia.
959. 01:07:29 That's probably the closest connection that I have to this. This is like the most interesting
960. 01:07:33 section of the book to me is like, this is just cool to think about like, Oh, because of all this
961. 01:07:39 stuff I told you before, there can be challenges with this. And look what it does. Like, it impacts
962. 01:07:45 in this way and like it challenges in this way. And then here are all the like latent effects on this.
963. 01:07:50 And I think the reason why I like this so much is because it makes me think in systems. It's like,
964. 01:07:54 there's all these systems, the late effects and not the late effects and all that stuff that comes
965. 01:07:59 through here. So she talks about it in one situation. There's a there's a gap in time or an
966. 01:08:04 asynchrony between their visual and auditory processes and how that like plays out in their
967. 01:08:09 information processing and how it plays out into the implications. I just think she does a really
968. 01:08:14 good job talking about dyslexia and then she goes into into a section there and that's where you
969. 01:08:20 got the Red Sox baseball quote. If I had five minutes to talk to parents, teachers and parents
970. 01:08:25 everywhere and then blah and like she just unpacks she just like unloads and I was like, man, we found
971. 01:08:32 her. We found her thing. Like, we found her thing that she's super passionate about. It's just a
972. 01:08:37 really it's a really good section on kind of the the background of dyslexia. Yeah, well, that
973. 01:08:43 actually leads into the next chapter. So let's let's go there and continue this conversation.
974. 01:08:48 Chapter eight is jeans, gifts and dyslexia. And one of the reasons that I think this is personal
975. 01:08:54 is not just that she has a child with dyslexia, but also she identifies some of these traits in
976. 01:09:03 herself, even though she doesn't have dyslexia. So she mentions in chapter eight, the left hemisphere
977. 01:09:10 tends to be more precise and time efficient, which makes reading easier, but creativity harder.
978. 01:09:16 Okay, and that time efficiency, if you don't have that, she talks about how it influenced her ability
979. 01:09:22 to maintain tempo in music. This, okay, so I'm obviously left brained at this point because
980. 01:09:29 one of the things that drives me crazy is when people just cannot keep a beat. And I'm not a drummer,
981. 01:09:36 you know, that's that's not how I'm wired. But I know people who, you know, if they play guitar
982. 01:09:42 and sing by themselves, they sound amazing. But when you try to sit down and jam with them,
983. 01:09:45 they cannot walk in and it's like, dude, I don't even know where to go with you.
984. 01:09:52 And I never made the connection that was a heightened right brain, decreased left brain,
985. 01:09:58 sort of a thing. But I think that those, the things that contribute to dyslexia, like you,
986. 01:10:06 you can kind of see, you know, the letters are scrambled or not, you know, that's oversimplifying
987. 01:10:11 it. It's not that simple. But you can, you know, you can clarify, I think, with enough testing,
988. 01:10:18 if somebody has dyslexia. But at what point do you cross that threshold? And it's not just
989. 01:10:24 dyslexia that this shows up in this influences everything in your entire world. So I think it's
990. 01:10:30 really important to understand yourself, to understand the way that you're wired. And then
991. 01:10:38 what do you do with that? You don't try to minimize your weaknesses. You, because that's one of the
992. 01:10:47 the, I think natural reactions is, well, this is a weakness. I'm just going to work on this
993. 01:10:53 until it's not a weakness anymore. And then you just become kind of average at everything.
994. 01:10:59 I think the better approach is to recognize where your strengths are, figure out how you can
995. 01:11:02 leverage those doesn't mean you don't work on your, your weaknesses at all. But what are you
996. 01:11:08 optimizing for here? And some of the most successful people in history have had dyslexia. Thomas Edison,
997. 01:11:17 Leonardo da Vinci, Albert Einstein, she said, we're all considered to have had dyslexia. And I never
998. 01:11:24 heard that before. There were lots of other examples. And there was one story specifically she mentioned
999. 01:11:29 about the race car driver, I forget the person's name. But yeah, the point was they had a hard time
1000. 01:11:38 learning to read, but they were very successful in other ways, because they learned to lean into
1001. 01:11:42 the, the things that actually worked for them. And I feel like that is a great strategy for
1002. 01:11:49 absolutely everybody. She doesn't frame it as that. But that's how I read this section. And I'm
1003. 01:11:54 like, Oh, this is totally applicable to everybody everywhere. It's not just, you know, what do you
1004. 01:11:58 do with if you know somebody with with dyslexia? I feel like this is a very, it's not cleanly
1005. 01:12:04 generalizable because of the way that it's packaged. But there's definitely a lot of, a lot of stuff
1006. 01:12:10 that, that we can apply to our own lives from this. And this is consistent with, you know, you think
1007. 01:12:15 about somebody who's blind or deaf or something like that, where a lot of times that their inability
1008. 01:12:22 to see gives them a heightened sense of hearing, you know, or, you know, like, like those kind of
1009. 01:12:27 things, it's, it's, it's a very similar idea to hear to me is, Oh, my brain doesn't make connections
1010. 01:12:32 in terms of reading and writing, you know, like yours might, or like understanding that alphabet,
1011. 01:12:37 or whatever it might be. But I've, I can account for that in other ways. And it's allowed me to
1012. 01:12:42 develop these things in this other way. And I think it's just really, really cool to see
1013. 01:12:48 how this applies or that same idea applies in the, the brain of a reader who doesn't read like
1014. 01:12:55 everybody else does or makes connections differently or whatever. I think that's a really neat point.
1015. 01:13:01 I'm ready to go to nine. All right. The last chapter of the book,
1016. 01:13:09 which is titled conclusions. It's not a true conclusion, but really it's a subtitle here from
1017. 01:13:17 from the reading brain to what comes next. And I'm not quite sure how to, how to summarize this,
1018. 01:13:26 this chapter, but this is where she starts to get into some of the digital stuff.
1019. 01:13:31 There were a couple of things in here that she mentioned, which got me thinking, but this book
1020. 01:13:35 was written so long ago that it doesn't cleanly map to where we are right now. She mentions that
1021. 01:13:41 as technology advances, our capacity for good or bad will be accidentally increased. I mean,
1022. 01:13:47 could totally understand and see that playing out. And she asks the question, well, the next
1023. 01:13:52 generation's capacity to find insights be altered. And I think absolutely it will be the technology
1024. 01:13:59 that we use, not just the, you know, what we read, but how we read it influences who we are. And
1025. 01:14:06 then it's gone beyond just reading now. It's, you know, the video and the audio and the TikToks
1026. 01:14:11 that you were mentioning earlier in garbage in garbage out, which I think, you know, this is
1027. 01:14:15 where you start to see the genesis of the idea she's turning around in her head and leading into
1028. 01:14:20 reader come home, the next book that she read, which is really, really good. I liked how she talks
1029. 01:14:26 about reading is an example of how the brain can go beyond itself, you know, the neuroplasticity,
1030. 01:14:30 who knows what we're actually capable of. New thoughts come more readily to a brain that has
1031. 01:14:35 already learned how to rearrange itself. And that I think I've seen evidence of in my own life too,
1032. 01:14:41 the more books I read, even if it's not related to the content that I read, the more ideas I'm able
1033. 01:14:46 to have, the better those ideas tend to be. Online literacy challenges, the traditional roles of author
1034. 01:14:51 and reader. And the point she's kind of making there is when everybody can just throw up a blog
1035. 01:14:56 post, the barrier to entry is pretty low. I actually don't think this is all bad, but I get the point
1036. 01:15:03 that she's talking about here. I would not be a writer if I had to go through a traditional
1037. 01:15:11 publishing route. I would not be a video producer if I did not have YouTube. I would not be a
1038. 01:15:15 podcaster if tools like transistor did not exist. You know, and I think that's actually a good thing
1039. 01:15:22 that people can unleash their creativity in those different ways. There's a bunch of stuff in here.
1040. 01:15:29 I guess the other thing here, the internet may cause people to not think for themselves. Yes,
1041. 01:15:34 absolutely. The digital world makes us used to getting information immediately. Absolutely,
1042. 01:15:39 we're not not patient anymore. And there's a quote here I like. I fear that many of our children
1043. 01:15:46 are in danger of becoming just what Socrates warned us against, a society of decoders of
1044. 01:15:50 information whose false sense of knowing distracts them from a deeper development of their intellectual
1045. 01:15:54 potential. I kind of feel like at this point, what do you do with that? You worry about yourself,
1046. 01:15:59 not everybody else. Do the best you can with what you've got. And then humans today don't need to
1047. 01:16:05 be binary thinkers. If two choices appear before you, there's usually a third. I love that idea.
1048. 01:16:10 I hate the whole binary model. This is my issue with goals. You either achieve it or you don't.
1049. 01:16:15 If you can get beyond there's just these two options. I feel like there's a whole
1050. 01:16:18 other world of possibilities there. Yeah, I'm going to start with your decoders of information
1051. 01:16:24 and not critical thinkers. And I worry that they're not even worried about being decoders
1052. 01:16:30 of information anymore. They're not even trying to get to that far where they try to understand.
1053. 01:16:35 And this is where I think media literacy matters so much. So you have that idea.
1054. 01:16:41 She calls out in a series of questions earlier, unguided information lead to an illusion of knowledge
1055. 01:16:47 and curtail us from the more difficult time consuming critical thought processes that lead to
1056. 01:16:50 knowledge itself. And I think this is something we're seeing with AI. This is something we're
1057. 01:16:55 seeing with all these models. We're letting it try to do the difficult time consuming process
1058. 01:17:02 to connect the dots and make make these different connections and we're not doing that. And I think
1059. 01:17:06 that's a worry. Now, I am pro AI when it comes to certain things. So I'll give you an example of this.
1060. 01:17:13 Mike and I are talking about red jacks. I don't think you going to AI and saying, hey,
1061. 01:17:19 here's what I want to do in red jacks. Help me with the syntax of this. I don't think you're doing
1062. 01:17:24 yourself a major disservice there. Like, I really just don't think you're doing it. Because what are
1063. 01:17:28 you going to do? Otherwise, you're going to go to a forum, you're going to look up the red jacks
1064. 01:17:31 syntax and you're going to figure it out from there. Or you're going to go read a manual and
1065. 01:17:35 you're going to because really what you're looking for is you're looking for the syntax.
1066. 01:17:38 And if you do that and you keep doing that and you keep doing it, whether it's AI, whether it's
1067. 01:17:42 the manual, whether it's a forum, whatever it is, you're going to learn how you need to write the
1068. 01:17:47 red jacks. It's a very formulaic process. That's very different than me reading your blog posts
1069. 01:17:53 in Marion Wolf's blog posts and reading somebody else's blog post and somebody else's blog post
1070. 01:17:58 and then making ideas that thread through that and connect, connect through that. That's a very
1071. 01:18:02 different thing. When you combine this with the idea that there's a worry, and I can't remember
1072. 01:18:08 if you and I've talked about this before or not. So if we have, I'm sorry, there's an idea that as
1073. 01:18:12 these AI tools continue to condense information, they're condensing wrong information. And then
1074. 01:18:21 they're essentially going to make themselves dumber that we're not like training them like,
1075. 01:18:26 Hey, what you just bit back there is wrong. The next AI model is then built on the wrong model.
1076. 01:18:33 And we continue to perpetuate this idea of or sorry, these wrong ideas or just this stuff that's
1077. 01:18:38 factually incorrect. And there's there's a chance that these AI models actually don't give us the
1078. 01:18:44 right thing a generation or two generations or three generations from now and they continue
1079. 01:18:48 to lose trust because they're not giving us the information. And I think this is something that
1080. 01:18:52 humans can easily identify, like, especially if you're an expert in the field or you're knowledgeable
1081. 01:18:57 about the field, you'll be like, wait, that's just way wrong. Like Mike doesn't make a show
1082. 01:19:02 about baking sourdough bread. Like he just doesn't do that. Like, and I know that because I follow
1083. 01:19:06 Mike, right? And he would talk about sourdough bread all the time. If you bake, if you made a
1084. 01:19:09 show about that. Whereas it, it gets this wrong information and then perpetuates it down. And I
1085. 01:19:14 think so I think even though this book was kind of pre the AI, you know, transition and all and
1086. 01:19:21 all that all those things, I think there's a lot of stuff in here that's really applicable to right
1087. 01:19:27 now. And that we can, we can think about these, these things right now in terms of how they,
1088. 01:19:33 how they impact us. I like then that she gets into the idea of how do we use this and how do we
1089. 01:19:39 apply this right in the transmission of knowledge, the children and the teachers of the future
1090. 01:19:43 should not be faced with that choice between the two. Like I like, like you said, it's not this
1091. 01:19:47 binary. It's we live in this world. How do we make the most of this world? This is what we live in.
1092. 01:19:53 We don't get to control that. We got to make the most of it. We got to do what's right,
1093. 01:19:56 right? For this. So for instance, you know, we shouldn't like should we listen to everything
1094. 01:20:02 with smart speed? This is what we talked about in the in the in the pressure, right? So this is
1095. 01:20:06 everything with smart speed and with, you know, silence removed or should I do everything through
1096. 01:20:12 a filter of somebody else that's filtering it for me? Or should I actually go and really wrestle
1097. 01:20:16 with the information and really like dig into that thing? And I think that the answer is some stuff.
1098. 01:20:22 Do they do the smart speed? Do the skip silence? Do do the summarized version of that other stuff?
1099. 01:20:27 Don't you need you need to dig into that and you have to make that choice. And are we teaching
1100. 01:20:32 people to make that choice? And so I think she ends the book really, really well in terms of
1101. 01:20:37 wrapping it up and tying back into to other things. And then she she doubles down,
1102. 01:20:43 triples down quadruples down. I don't know what it is. This gift of time to think beyond
1103. 01:20:48 just the text on the page and actually to make those connections and develop those thoughts.
1104. 01:20:52 I mean, I think she does a really good job, you know, wrapping it up.
1105. 01:20:57 Yeah, she asked the question in this chapter, how will technology change our neural pathways
1106. 01:21:01 in the future? So I think the important thing to recognize is that it is changing our neural
1107. 01:21:07 pathways. And then deciding for yourself, is this important or not? If it is important,
1108. 01:21:12 then don't shortcut. Put in the effort and force yourself to make sense of it. Don't just ask AI
1109. 01:21:20 for the the summary and make all these connections for me. And so with the regex thing, if I really
1110. 01:21:27 wanted to know regex, I should be reading the forms. I should be figuring it out. I'm not a web
1111. 01:21:34 developer. I will never need to know regex again, most likely. So just give me the answer. And then
1112. 01:21:41 I'll move on to what I am actually optimizing for the thing to be aware of, though, is that just
1113. 01:21:47 because I created this regex, I don't know regex. Okay, just because I can retrieve an answer does
1114. 01:21:53 not mean I am a knower of things. So decide for yourself what is actually worth knowing and chase
1115. 01:22:00 that with curiosity and don't shortcut that it's it's not a problem to be solved. And then you just
1116. 01:22:06 check the box and you move on to the next thing. It's something to be wrestled with as you develop
1117. 01:22:12 what you actually think about something beautiful, beautiful, well said. All right, well,
1118. 01:22:21 anything else from this book before we go to action items? Nope, I'm ready to go to action items.
1119. 01:22:27 All right, so other than the fiction book that you gave me, reading Ready Player One,
1120. 01:22:37 I have no action items from this book. And I think that's appropriate.
1121. 01:22:44 You don't either. That doesn't bother me at all. And again, I can't I don't even remember if my
1122. 01:22:49 action item comes from this book or something else that I saw. But I agree, like I don't have
1123. 01:22:55 many or any action items from this. So and I'm okay with that. All right. Well, let's go to
1124. 01:23:03 style and rating then. And I think the style of this book is amazing. I can totally understand
1125. 01:23:12 why if neuroscience isn't your thing, you probably aren't interested in this this topic. If you are
1126. 01:23:19 even vaguely interested in neuroscience and how it relates to the ability to read, I don't think
1127. 01:23:25 you could pick a better package. So Marianne Wolf is a phenomenal writer. You mentioned the
1128. 01:23:33 Bander Snatch previously, and like the tying together of the the worlds. So you mentioned,
1129. 01:23:40 let's see, Lord of the Rings, Narnia, and Harry Potter, right? And so she'll use like those three
1130. 01:23:47 things in a list. And then the next sentence she'll use she'll write a sentence in a way to
1131. 01:23:53 prove her point, where she'll reference like main characters from each of those three stories.
1132. 01:23:58 And the way that she does it, it doesn't add a whole bunch of length to the book. It doesn't
1133. 01:24:03 feel like just get to the point already. It's brilliantly woven together. It's a nonfiction book
1134. 01:24:11 that almost reads like a fiction narrative. It's interesting to read if you're interested at all
1135. 01:24:19 in the topic and the story that she is telling. And she says right at the beginning what it's about.
1136. 01:24:23 So I don't blame people who are like, nah, this isn't for me. But that's the difference I think
1137. 01:24:27 there is like she's not she's not holding the the powder until until the end. I agree. This is what
1138. 01:24:32 this is about. Now I'm going to tell you why I think this. So if you're interested in it all,
1139. 01:24:37 I think it's a I think it's a really, really good book. There is so much science in this book. If
1140. 01:24:42 you look at the back and all of the references, I mean, she has put in the work, she has a whole
1141. 01:24:47 bunch of colleagues. She's worked at places where they have whole programs devoted to this stuff.
1142. 01:24:53 She is the world's expert in this. If you had to pick one person, she's the she's the source.
1143. 01:25:01 And unlike a lot of other people that I have read, you know, they are the source for this
1144. 01:25:07 particular thing. And while I guess about a read what they wrote about it, very dry, very boring,
1145. 01:25:12 that's not Marianne Wolf at all. There's a lot of personality that comes through in the way that
1146. 01:25:17 she writes. And honestly, like, I can't think of a better author at like weaving together these
1147. 01:25:25 historical narratives with modern research with personal stories. I think it's interesting that,
1148. 01:25:34 you know, we go through this book and there are zero action items associated with it.
1149. 01:25:40 But like I said, I do view this as a book into how to read a book. Yeah, the how to read a book
1150. 01:25:45 is the how. Pressed in the squid is the why. And if you don't care about the why, you're going to
1151. 01:25:53 want to skip this one. If you are at all interested in the why, this book is amazing. The story and
1152. 01:25:59 science of the reading brain that it's exactly what it what it says on the on the tin. I am going
1153. 01:26:07 to give this book five stars. I was hesitating. I was kind of going back as I was reading it between
1154. 01:26:12 four and five. But having to wrestle with the fact that I think anyways, you didn't really like this.
1155. 01:26:19 I kind of clarified for me what this book was intended to do. And I recognize that it's not
1156. 01:26:26 going to be for everybody. So it's sort of like a five with an asterisk. But I, I really enjoy this
1157. 01:26:33 book. I really like Marianne Wolf. It's sort of the best version of what I expected from this.
1158. 01:26:42 I guess I feel a little bad because I didn't even consider the fact that maybe you wouldn't.
1159. 01:26:47 No, no, I'm better for having read it. So don't do that at all. Yeah, don't do that.
1160. 01:26:51 Okay, okay, good. So if you're if you're interested at all, especially in like the the neuroscience
1161. 01:26:57 behind reading and how this impacts how you read what you read. I don't think it's, you know,
1162. 01:27:04 very tactical, but it's it's really interesting. And I would recommend for that type of person,
1163. 01:27:11 you pick this one up. If you if the topic doesn't resonate with you, if you've read if you listen
1164. 01:27:16 to this episode, you got to this point, you're like, yeah, I know everything that I care to know
1165. 01:27:20 about reading in the brain, then skip this one. But if this is a topic of interest, this is a
1166. 01:27:26 great book. Yeah. All right, so I am so, so, so, so torn on this. Okay, so I'm going to address
1167. 01:27:35 a couple of things that you said. And then I have to try to work my way into a rating because as of
1168. 01:27:42 me talking right now, I don't know what I'm going to rate this book. So Bookworm, our tagline for
1169. 01:27:48 the for the show. Bookworm is dedicated to doing more than reading just just reading books. Mike
1170. 01:27:52 and Corey read a book every two weeks and discuss the ways the authors lessons apply to the rest.
1171. 01:27:56 Okay. We don't say that we read books that we like. You know, we just say we read a book and we apply
1172. 01:28:03 it to our lives, right? So I think about this and I say, okay, I read a book and I apply it to my life.
1173. 01:28:09 Having talked to you about this, this is an interesting book. It's an incredibly well-written
1174. 01:28:15 book. I could not this I could not agree with you more that like there is no qualm about the fact
1175. 01:28:21 that she is a great writer. There's no qualm about the fact that she is an expert in her field.
1176. 01:28:25 I've already said earlier that she takes complex academic topics that I'm sure she's written
1177. 01:28:33 tens of hundreds of however many papers on these complex academic topics in her research group,
1178. 01:28:38 and she's had grad students write a one and she takes it and she makes it packageable
1179. 01:28:42 to everyday people, non-academics, people that are just interested in neuroscience and reading
1180. 01:28:48 and all of these things dyslexia and all this stuff. She does a fantastic job. Absolutely
1181. 01:28:53 fantastic job. There's no way I'd read this book again. Absolutely zero way like you I mean you
1182. 01:29:00 have to pay me a decent amount of money for me to read this book again. And it's just because
1183. 01:29:07 I don't care. I'm not that interested in most of what she wrote. That's not a slide on her.
1184. 01:29:15 That's not even a slide on the book. That is a that is a thing that is acknowledging the
1185. 01:29:19 disconnection between my interest and this topic and what she wrote about. It's nobody's fault.
1186. 01:29:26 That's totally fine. I have nothing negative to say about what she did. And you've heard me
1187. 01:29:33 in the past. I will say negative things. I have no problem saying saying something negative like
1188. 01:29:38 I didn't like this section. I didn't like the way the author did this. I didn't like the structure.
1189. 01:29:41 I didn't like whatever it is. I have none of that. I have none of that. It was just a pure
1190. 01:29:46 disconnect between what I'm interested in and what she wrote about. Now one of the things you'll
1191. 01:29:52 acknowledge having listened to the episode is like I still got stuff out of this book.
1192. 01:29:56 Like I still got a decent amount of this book. And then what's important here too is I got a lot
1193. 01:30:01 out of the conversation that Mike and I could have around this book and like trying to make
1194. 01:30:06 connections here and trying to do you know the the application to life and those kind of things.
1195. 01:30:10 So that was important for me as well. So do I walk away from this book being like this was a
1196. 01:30:15 gigantic waste of my time and I wish I wouldn't have done it? No. Would I read the book again?
1197. 01:30:21 No. Absolutely not. I have no interest in reading the book again. Did I make my
1198. 01:30:26 idea integration board or my book on a page for this? No. Am I going to make an idea integration
1199. 01:30:31 board or book on a page for this? Absolutely not. Like I'm just not going to do it because
1200. 01:30:36 I don't see what's in this book connecting to the knowledge management or the knowledge
1201. 01:30:43 graph that I want to build in my life. I think there will be a summary page for this that says
1202. 01:30:49 this is what this book talks about. It was cool. Reddit for bookworm. Kind of a thing right? But
1203. 01:30:52 I'm not going to take the time that the you know I would do for other books or that I'm going to
1204. 01:30:57 do for other books. So this is where I get into a problem. Like I don't feel that it's fair
1205. 01:31:03 to give this book a low rating because it was a disconnect with what I'm interested in.
1206. 01:31:09 I really don't. But if you listen to this episode and then you see that I rate this
1207. 01:31:13 book like a four and a half you're going to be like wait what? Like this doesn't make any sense.
1208. 01:31:18 So I actually started to think about should we change the rating system of the show? And I was
1209. 01:31:23 like Corey you can't do that. We're on episode 239. But you can't you know you can't change the
1210. 01:31:29 rating system. But I was like there needs to be a rating system that says bra rating
1211. 01:31:35 based on Corey and then rating for the intended audience. Because I think if you rate this for
1212. 01:31:41 the intended audience it's easily a five star book. Like for the intended audience who is who
1213. 01:31:45 cares about neuroscience who cares about reading who cares about dyslexia like this is without
1214. 01:31:50 a doubt clearly a five star book. Hands down 100% five star book. But then what do I rate it Mike?
1215. 01:31:56 Like and this is an actual question. This is not me like buying time before I give it a number.
1216. 01:32:02 Mike what what should I rate this book because okay so so let's let's clarify the rating. I'm
1217. 01:32:07 glad you actually mentioned that because I just moved everything over to transistor and I was
1218. 01:32:10 thinking through like we've stuck to the numbers in the past. But my I think the best version of
1219. 01:32:17 these ratings is if you were to go on Amazon and leave a review how many stars would you give it.
1220. 01:32:24 So I actually think in transistor we should we should force ourselves to choose one two three four
1221. 01:32:29 or five stars and I'll just put the number of star emoji under the mics rating. So this is purely
1222. 01:32:35 Corey's rating. Okay so we can all of the the audio the hour and a half of talking that's the
1223. 01:32:41 justification for who it's for. Now go ahead and stamp it with whatever you think this book is
1224. 01:32:47 in your personal tier list. My problem is I would never do that. Like I would never stamp it with
1225. 01:32:52 just five stars. I would stamp it with five stars and then the asterisk is for the intended audience.
1226. 01:32:59 Like that's the I would have to do it that way because if you didn't let me do it that way I
1227. 01:33:03 can't stamp it five stars because then if you ask me about the book I'm not going to say it's a
1228. 01:33:07 five star book for me for me personally. So I don't know what to do. I mean my gut would say
1229. 01:33:13 out of respect for what she's done and her and like it's a five star book. Like I don't want anybody.
1230. 01:33:20 It's Corey's rating and we know that you don't like this so it can't be a five star book.
1231. 01:33:25 Yeah but like I it's just me like it's not you it's me right like this is purely one of those
1232. 01:33:30 it's not you it's me thing to where like for me to rate this like I mean it's definitely it's
1233. 01:33:35 definitely higher than a three. You know I mean I got to go four and like the only reason it's
1234. 01:33:41 getting the one star knock is because it didn't resonate with me and what I care about. So I'm
1235. 01:33:45 gonna go for I don't feel good about it. I'd feel much better about a five with an asterisk
1236. 01:33:50 and we took way too long for me to tell my rating so far.
1237. 01:33:55 No I think it's I think it's totally fine to say this is a great book for certain types of people
1238. 01:33:59 and it's not for me and to rate it lower. In fact I will probably do that at some point in the near
1239. 01:34:04 future. Okay that took time. All right. No no that's fine. Okay so let's put Prostin the Squid
1240. 01:34:12 on the shelf. What is next Corey? All right so the next book I don't know a ton about this book.
1241. 01:34:19 I looked at it online and thought it sounded cool. I read the description. I looked up the
1242. 01:34:24 people and said okay let's give it a shot. It's called hacking the human mind the behavioral
1243. 01:34:29 science secrets behind 17 of the world's best brands. I'm just intrigued with you know branding
1244. 01:34:36 and how those things lead to I don't know like how they how they mess with other people's minds and
1245. 01:34:44 can what we can apply to the things that we're doing in life Mike and just how we can take good
1246. 01:34:50 ideas and keep making them good. So this book is by Richard Schotten and then Michael Aaron Flicker.
1247. 01:34:58 So it's called hacking the human mind if you are reading along with us pick that one up that's
1248. 01:35:02 gonna be our next episode. Mike what's after that? So I have a question about that name by the way
1249. 01:35:07 because Michael Aaron Flicker on the Amazon page. Michael Aaron is all one word but the first A and
1250. 01:35:14 Aaron is capitalized like it's a second name. Is that correct? So on the actual cover of the book
1251. 01:35:21 Michael Aaron is the name and it doesn't it doesn't do but they use that like in all caps font.
1252. 01:35:27 So yes it's it's Michael Aaron. Right so in the Amazon listing okay yeah so it's all one word it's
1253. 01:35:34 kind of weird that it's capitalized in the middle kind of camel case in in the bio in the bio it's
1254. 01:35:41 all one word again with the capital A. So yeah I mean that's that's just a it's a nature of it.
1255. 01:35:47 Interesting okay so after that we're gonna read my gap book from last time and that is intentional
1256. 01:35:57 by Chris Bailey. Now I'm going to tell you right now Corey because I've read this book and I like
1257. 01:36:04 this book and there will be other podcasts coming out before this one probably where I talk about
1258. 01:36:08 this book. There is no pressure for you to rate this highly simply because I might. I'm picking this
1259. 01:36:17 one because it's timely. It's about to be released as we record this it will be released by the time
1260. 01:36:24 this episode I believe goes live or right before yeah I can't remember math is hard.
1261. 01:36:32 It's coming out at the beginning of January and I want to start to try to pick more timely books
1262. 01:36:41 that way. I feel like if people are gonna listen to the bookworm because they need a filter for
1263. 01:36:46 like which books are actually worth reading and it makes sense to do that kind of thing and
1264. 01:36:51 yeah I guess spoiler alert I've read this and and I like it and I think it's going to be a really
1265. 01:36:55 cool conversation so. Does this connect with the course he just put out? Oh you mean the course that
1266. 01:37:00 I helped him create? Yes it does. It does okay I assume so but I didn't want to I didn't want to
1267. 01:37:05 over assume but I assumed it connected. So the course the course talks about some of the models
1268. 01:37:09 and things that he talks about in this this book. It's not a just a different version of the the
1269. 01:37:15 book. The course includes a an assessment and then like a whole bunch of tactics for actually
1270. 01:37:22 applying the concepts that he'll talk about in the the book but it's a book about goal setting
1271. 01:37:28 that I don't hate. Okay that's that's uh my one sentence summary. There you go. I should put
1272. 01:37:34 that on the uh on the Amazon page. No he's got like Charles Duhigg and some many more fancy lads.
1273. 01:37:41 Yeah but he doesn't have the mind map guy right. Like that's what he does. Right okay you got any
1274. 01:37:49 gap books? No absolutely not. No I'm not. What about Bandersnatch? I thought you don't read that.
1275. 01:37:53 I said I'm going to read it. I didn't say I was going to read it as a gap book between now and
1276. 01:37:57 now and then to know no gap books intention. Well my gap book is going to be uh Ready Player One
1277. 01:38:03 which is on its way. There you go. I might read that with you just because it's fun and I want
1278. 01:38:07 to read it again. Okay I know nothing about this. I just know it was a big deal back in the back
1279. 01:38:13 in the day and everybody talked about it but I never I never read it. I hope you're gonna like it.
1280. 01:38:17 I think I will. All right well thanks for listening. Uh if you want to recommend a book by the way
1281. 01:38:24 you can do that much more easily now by going to bookworm.fm/recommend it'll take you to the form.
1282. 01:38:30 You can put in the book the author um the link if you've got it so it's easier for us to find
1283. 01:38:37 but uh we'd love to get some recommendations. If you want to support the show that would be amazing.
1284. 01:38:45 We have a pro show which has an extended ad-free episode in a private feed. So today the pro show
1285. 01:38:54 we talked about my switch to the Apple Podcast app and how I surprisingly enjoyed it. Uh there's uh
1286. 01:39:03 also a bootleg feed which gets released right after we record this so usually that's about two
1287. 01:39:08 weeks before the episode goes live so if you want it hot off the press join the join the the membership
1288. 01:39:15 and you'll get access to the the pro pro feed and the bootleg feed you'll also get access to a
1289. 01:39:20 bookworm wallpaper and the video replay of the reading masterclass that I did uh two and a half
1290. 01:39:27 hour workshop on uh on how to read better and all of that is seven dollars a month you can go to
1291. 01:39:36 patreon.com/bookworm.fm or just bookworm.fm/pro and uh if you would love to support the show that
1292. 01:39:44 is a great way to do it. Thank you to all the pro members who are willing to throw some money
1293. 01:39:49 our way to help us keep this show going. If you're reading along with us pick up hacking the human
1294. 01:39:55 mind and we look forward to talking to you soon.