37: Antifragile by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

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1. 00:00:00 ATR USB microphone.
2. 00:00:04 Yep, this is the one I used last time.
3. 00:00:07 And since you didn't complain about it, I'm going to use it again.
4. 00:00:11 Ha!
5. 00:00:12 That works.
6. 00:00:13 That works.
7. 00:00:14 It wasn't too bad.
8. 00:00:15 I was going through the editing process with that the last time around.
9. 00:00:20 And it seemed fine.
10. 00:00:21 I mean, I noticed it's not a mile for sure.
11. 00:00:25 Like, I noticed that.
12. 00:00:26 But other than that, I mean, you got to run a little bit to get some of the background
13. 00:00:30 stuff out of it.
14. 00:00:31 But I tend to run that anyway.
15. 00:00:33 It just means it actually does something on this mic as opposed to the aisle.
16. 00:00:37 So I'm not going to complain about it.
17. 00:00:40 Nice.
18. 00:00:41 Sway goes.
19. 00:00:44 I will say that I, at least on my end, I started sitting down again.
20. 00:00:48 Sorry about that.
21. 00:00:49 Slacker.
22. 00:00:50 Ha!
23. 00:00:51 Ha!
24. 00:00:52 Ha!
25. 00:00:53 Yeah, it has a little bit to do with me not having the correct setup for a standing environment.
26. 00:01:04 Because if I said something with a P and it boomed a little bit, it would have this ringing
27. 00:01:11 that would work its way down into the back end of the microphone, which is not good.
28. 00:01:19 Because the way that it was mounted had a little bit of...
29. 00:01:22 It was flexible a little bit, so it would have this ringing in the background.
30. 00:01:26 Not a good thing.
31. 00:01:27 So, until I have a legit stand-up scenario for a microphone, I'm going to sit down.
32. 00:01:34 Fair enough.
33. 00:01:35 It's the way it goes.
34. 00:01:39 I suppose I got to get show notes up that way.
35. 00:01:41 I actually know what we're talking about today.
36. 00:01:43 What are we talking about today?
37. 00:01:44 I don't know, but I guess I'll get the notes up to figure it out.
38. 00:01:48 I don't know what we're talking about.
39. 00:01:50 But Mr. Tlaab is smarter than we are.
40. 00:01:53 I will give him that.
41. 00:01:54 For sure.
42. 00:01:55 This is the first book I read that made me sound like...
43. 00:02:00 Or made me feel like an idiot.
44. 00:02:03 It works.
45. 00:02:07 There's a lot in this book.
46. 00:02:11 For sure.
47. 00:02:12 For sure.
48. 00:02:15 But before we get there, we need to jump in to follow up.
49. 00:02:18 And you have a lot here.
50. 00:02:19 I do.
51. 00:02:20 And I am proud to say that I actually did all of these things.
52. 00:02:25 So the first one...
53. 00:02:27 Is this...
54. 00:02:28 Well, hold on.
55. 00:02:29 Hold on.
56. 00:02:30 Is this the first time...
57. 00:02:32 Because I hit all of one of mine, this might be the first time we know for certain that
58. 00:02:38 we've hit all of our follow-up.
59. 00:02:39 100% on the follow-up?
60. 00:02:40 Is it the first time?
61. 00:02:42 It might be.
62. 00:02:45 That's almost scary.
63. 00:02:46 We're 37 episodes in and we finally hit all of our follow-up from the last round.
64. 00:02:51 It was bound to happen at some point.
65. 00:02:53 At some point we were a success.
66. 00:02:56 These were fairly easy.
67. 00:02:57 Let's think about my allies.
68. 00:02:59 Was pretty easy.
69. 00:03:01 It was a good exercise.
70. 00:03:02 It's not something I think that I'll go back in reference.
71. 00:03:05 I think I may have mentioned that in the last episode.
72. 00:03:07 I don't really see a whole lot of value in going back to this thing all the time.
73. 00:03:11 But it was definitely good to go through the thought process, the exercise of identifying
74. 00:03:17 the people who are my allies.
75. 00:03:19 I think that's going to change over time too.
76. 00:03:22 You're going to share this list or is this a secret mic list?
77. 00:03:25 This is a secret list.
78. 00:03:26 It's going in the bat cave.
79. 00:03:29 That works.
80. 00:03:33 Sometimes I feel like we make lists and people always want to know what is on that list.
81. 00:03:38 I'm like, "I can't share that.
82. 00:03:40 It causes all kinds of problems if I share that."
83. 00:03:43 I understand.
84. 00:03:45 I know you did want to be on the list.
85. 00:03:47 I will say that you are on the list.
86. 00:03:50 You made the cut show.
87. 00:03:52 I win.
88. 00:03:53 That's all I wanted to know.
89. 00:03:55 To me, I don't care who else else is on the list, but that one makes me happy.
90. 00:04:00 Yay.
91. 00:04:01 Nice.
92. 00:04:02 Next one for me was develop an idea bank.
93. 00:04:05 I started doing this.
94. 00:04:06 I've got a perspective in my OmniFocus, which has a little money bag icon.
95. 00:04:13 Just called the bank.
96. 00:04:14 Nice.
97. 00:04:15 At least it's not the money flying away.
98. 00:04:19 This is one that's going to stick, I think.
99. 00:04:22 Let me give you one example of this that I've used even this week.
100. 00:04:29 Hosting the productivity show, that's one of my areas with Asian efficiency.
101. 00:04:34 I'm responsible for laying out the roadmap of episodes, topics that we're going to cover.
102. 00:04:42 That means also that I'm responsible for grooming the backlog for the scrum process that we
103. 00:04:48 use.
104. 00:04:51 Every couple of weeks when I groom the backlog, I have to identify some topics and I have to
105. 00:04:56 create the issues inside of JIRA, which we use to track all of our work at Asian efficiency.
106. 00:05:03 Every two weeks, I find myself in the situation where I'm like, "What are we going to talk
107. 00:05:09 about?"
108. 00:05:10 Occasionally, there's something that lines up with a release or some chronological event.
109. 00:05:18 Habits make sense at the beginning of the year when everybody's talking about, "I'm
110. 00:05:22 going to go to the gym and New Year's resolutions and stuff like that."
111. 00:05:26 For the most part, it's like, "Okay, we've got to create awesome content now for the next
112. 00:05:29 two weeks."
113. 00:05:31 I find that I get podcast ideas all the time.
114. 00:05:35 If I jot them down in drafts with just Idea, Colon, and then the podcast episode, I can
115. 00:05:42 send those to my Idea Bank.
116. 00:05:44 It's like, "Oh, yeah, I've got to find some topics."
117. 00:05:46 I just go there and I pick the two that I like the best, just from reading through it quickly.
118. 00:05:51 I think that if I figure out other specific use cases like that, it's going to exponentially
119. 00:06:00 pay off, but already I'm seeing returns from this idea.
120. 00:06:05 This Idea Bank is one that you're storing inside of JIRA for Asian efficiency.
121. 00:06:13 Do you have a personal version of that that you're holding onto for your own projects,
122. 00:06:18 or is this something that you're trying to do primarily for AE?
123. 00:06:24 That's a great question, and that's where it's going to evolve a little bit.
124. 00:06:27 The ideas are actually stored inside of my personal OmniFocus, but when I pick them
125. 00:06:32 and I'm like, "Okay, this is an idea we're going to do now for the next sprint," then
126. 00:06:37 I create the issue in JIRA and remove that essentially from the Idea Bank.
127. 00:06:45 I know that I can find other areas where this is going to be applicable, but I haven't put
128. 00:06:52 it into practice yet.
129. 00:06:53 What I'm thinking is that with OmniFocus, you can hack your way around using tags.
130. 00:07:02 I want to do hashtag podcasts to get my podcast ideas or hashtag dojo for dojo module ideas.
131. 00:07:09 You could use this anywhere.
132. 00:07:12 You could use it hashtag blog for blog posts, but that part I haven't fully figured out
133. 00:07:17 yet, but just implementing it for the podcast already, it's been great.
134. 00:07:22 The only thing I heard in all of this was OmniFocus.
135. 00:07:26 I thought you were off of OmniFocus.
136. 00:07:28 What's this all about?
137. 00:07:31 If you go back to the tape, I think I'm justified in saying that, I said I will be back.
138. 00:07:39 I'm a little bit annoyed because by the end of November, they were supposed to have released
139. 00:07:45 the multiple contacts to the tags and the incessant reminders that Todo has.
140. 00:07:53 In fact, Matt Ryan told me initially, he's like, you probably don't even need to move
141. 00:07:56 to Todo because this stuff is coming to OmniFocus.
142. 00:08:00 But I can't case from the OmniGroup just published an updated roadmap and now that's not coming
143. 00:08:05 until at least Q1 2018.
144. 00:08:09 Little bit annoyed, but OmniFocus is great and with iOS 11, it is great-er.
145. 00:08:15 The drag and drop between OmniFocus and Apple Mail is awesome.
146. 00:08:19 I know you just switched everything to paper, but this is a Joe workflow right here.
147. 00:08:27 You can go split screen on an iPad and you can drag an email from Apple Mail to OmniFocus
148. 00:08:35 and it creates a task in your inbox and it's got the link back to the original message.
149. 00:08:40 It's genius the way that they've implemented this.
150. 00:08:43 Common sense, it makes so much sense to do it that way.
151. 00:08:47 Common sense isn't so common, especially when you get really smart developers that are trying
152. 00:08:51 to push all the technical stuff.
153. 00:08:53 I just think that the way that they implemented that is awesome and it makes me really excited
154. 00:08:58 about that platform.
155. 00:09:00 It's interesting.
156. 00:09:02 The thing that I hung up on with these types of things is I don't have an iPad.
157. 00:09:07 The drag and drop thing, I still don't fully understand because I've never played with
158. 00:09:13 it.
159. 00:09:14 That's almost sad to say, but it's not something that I'm going to get super thrilled about
160. 00:09:20 or even use just because I don't use an iPad in that way.
161. 00:09:26 I have yet to figure out why I should own an iPad, which is a weird way to come at it.
162. 00:09:30 That's a whole other topic, Mike.
163. 00:09:33 That is a whole other topic.
164. 00:09:34 To be honest, I mean-
165. 00:09:35 I mean, especially with the stuff that you've been doing with the analogs, I think if you
166. 00:09:42 were to use a 10.5-inch iPad Pro with an Apple Pencil for a week, you'd be hooked.
167. 00:09:49 You would have to use the right applications, like good notes, for example, but it would
168. 00:09:53 give you all of the flexibility that you have for the analog stuff.
169. 00:09:56 Then, as soon as you wanted to turn any piece of it digital, you could do it using something
170. 00:10:03 like drag and drop.
171. 00:10:04 You could have another application open and be like, "Oh, I wrote this handwritten note
172. 00:10:06 over here.
173. 00:10:07 I'm just going to drag this into this other application.
174. 00:10:08 It's going to OCR it for me and it's going to store it."
175. 00:10:10 I can reference it later whenever I want.
176. 00:10:12 You're not going to have to worry about transferring notebooks full of information every time you
177. 00:10:17 get to the last page.
178. 00:10:19 I actually did solve that.
179. 00:10:20 I'm actually not transferring anymore.
180. 00:10:23 Okay.
181. 00:10:24 I shouldn't say that.
182. 00:10:25 On a weekly basis, I am, but on a long-term list, I'm not.
183. 00:10:30 I do keep that digital anymore.
184. 00:10:33 I think I would convert to some iPad stuff if they bring some of the iPad pro features
185. 00:10:43 to the mini.
186. 00:10:44 If they took the iPad mini and gave it all the pro features, I would be hooked on that
187. 00:10:49 because it's so much smaller and I simply want it for doing notes and such with the pencil.
188. 00:10:56 If they bring that, yeah, I'll be hooked on that.
189. 00:10:59 But until that point, I still don't see how that's helpful versus, because with the new
190. 00:11:06 MacBook Pros versus the iPad pro, my stepdad was just here this past weekend and we were
191. 00:11:14 working through, he's got one of the full-size iPad pro.
192. 00:11:18 What is it?
193. 00:11:19 12.9 is the size of that thing.
194. 00:11:22 It's just a monster, gorgeous screen.
195. 00:11:24 Love that thing.
196. 00:11:26 Looking at it, by the time you get a keyboard and everything on it, it's actually thicker
197. 00:11:30 than my MacBook Pro.
198. 00:11:32 Okay, do I want an iPad pro that's bigger than my MacBook Pro?
199. 00:11:40 When personally, the way that I do things, the MacBook Pro has a lot more power for what
200. 00:11:45 I want to do with it.
201. 00:11:47 I don't see the point in that because everything I could do with the iPad I already do with
202. 00:11:52 the MacBook and quicker.
203. 00:11:54 Well, yeah, I get that.
204. 00:11:57 You can't compare the 12.9 inch to your 13-inch MacBook Pro because you're right.
205. 00:12:04 The screen size is exactly the same and you're sitting there looking at, "Well, this is basically
206. 00:12:08 the same size.
207. 00:12:09 I can do way more on this."
208. 00:12:11 What you need to do is you need to use a 10.5 inch, not a mini.
209. 00:12:16 Believe me, I had the same thought process you did.
210. 00:12:18 I've had a mini for years.
211. 00:12:19 I've had multiple revisions of the mini.
212. 00:12:24 The 10.5 inch is the sweet spot.
213. 00:12:27 It's incredible.
214. 00:12:28 It's so light that you probably are thinking, "Well, the mini is going to be more portable.
215. 00:12:32 I can just grab it and go somewhere."
216. 00:12:35 The 10.5 inch is so light and it is so portable that I think it would meet all of your requirements
217. 00:12:41 in that regard.
218. 00:12:42 Plus, having that larger screen to actually draw on is really, really nice.
219. 00:12:47 Here's why I want the mini because I don't disagree with you.
220. 00:12:51 The 10.5 I could see having a lot of valid pros versus the cons.
221. 00:12:59 I already carry around a book quite a bit.
222. 00:13:03 Currently, I've developed this habit of carrying around a notebook along with that.
223. 00:13:07 I've got my normal reading book plus my analog task management stuff that I've been using
224. 00:13:12 lately.
225. 00:13:13 I'm already carrying those two around and they're roughly the size of the mini.
226. 00:13:19 That's why I want that because then it would just be something I carry around all the time
227. 00:13:23 and it would be thinner than my notebook.
228. 00:13:25 I could see that, but the 10.5, that's a whole different level that I'm carrying around
229. 00:13:30 with me all the time.
230. 00:13:31 That's why I'm interested in that.
231. 00:13:34 Yeah, I get that.
232. 00:13:35 I don't know.
233. 00:13:36 I carry a 10.5 around in a book quite frequently.
234. 00:13:40 The 10.5 is a little bit bigger, but it's not too bad.
235. 00:13:44 Are you carrying that around in a backpacker by hand?
236. 00:13:47 Well, when I am out and about, I'm carrying it in a backpack, but often I will grab just
237. 00:13:53 my iPad and a book and go somewhere.
238. 00:13:56 If I know that I'm not trying to achieve maximum productivity during this particular
239. 00:14:03 session, I'm not on the clock, so to speak, then often I will grab just the iPad Pro with
240. 00:14:10 I've got a smart keyboard cover, which is actually really thin.
241. 00:14:14 It's way thinner than a lot of the other keyboard cases.
242. 00:14:16 I know that there's some complaints about the actual keyboard in that, but in my experience,
243. 00:14:21 it's not bad at all.
244. 00:14:23 It's a full-size keyboard, so it feels really good when you're typing.
245. 00:14:27 Then a book because books come on.
246. 00:14:30 Bookworm, you have to have a book.
247. 00:14:32 Life is not moving unless you have a book in your hand.
248. 00:14:35 Exactly.
249. 00:14:36 Okay, I'll maybe think through this a little more.
250. 00:14:39 I've got a lot that I've been collecting on this, trying to nail down what I think about
251. 00:14:44 it.
252. 00:14:45 I haven't...
253. 00:14:46 It's an expensive experiment to just go buy one just to see how it's going to work.
254. 00:14:53 It's expensive to do that, especially at the level that I would want to purchase said
255. 00:14:57 iPad, so I don't see myself doing that just on a whim.
256. 00:15:04 It's likely going to be something that here is the use case that warrants this level of
257. 00:15:10 purchase, because I'm trying to change my mindset over from having these devices as
258. 00:15:16 a place that I hang out versus a tool to use.
259. 00:15:20 If I'm going to purchase an iPad, I want it to be a tool that has a very specific and
260. 00:15:25 yet highly valuable purpose behind it.
261. 00:15:31 Fair enough.
262. 00:15:33 There's our Apple and iPad rant.
263. 00:15:35 Quite the tangent for an IdeaBink.
264. 00:15:38 I'll start by OmniFocus.
265. 00:15:40 You scoundrel.
266. 00:15:41 Oh, Omni.
267. 00:15:42 I still love Omni.
268. 00:15:44 I just am not using it as much as I hate to say that.
269. 00:15:48 Yeah, actually the thing...
270. 00:15:50 Okay, so the thing that really bugged me about the new post from Ken Case is that OmniFocus
271. 00:15:58 too has been around for years, so it is due for a major update.
272. 00:16:04 They're talking about adding these multiple contexts and adding these recurring reminders.
273. 00:16:07 The two is that exist in other applications already.
274. 00:16:11 In the last post, he mentioned that that's going to be released as OmniFocus 3, which
275. 00:16:16 I know means another major investment in order to use this tool, which I know I'm going
276. 00:16:21 to buy it.
277. 00:16:24 I've resigned myself to that fact, but the fact that this stuff has been teased for so
278. 00:16:29 long and now it feels like, "Oh, we're going to just roll this over into the new version
279. 00:16:34 and that's going to be a paid upgrade."
280. 00:16:37 That feels a little bit weird because I haven't heard anything else about new design or anything.
281. 00:16:42 Those features enough, I don't think justify a major version release, but we'll see how
282. 00:16:49 that shakes out.
283. 00:16:50 I just listened to the MacPower users' podcast where they had Ken Case and Dave Tier.
284. 00:17:01 Oh, yeah.
285. 00:17:02 Yep, the developer roundtable.
286. 00:17:04 Yeah, so I listened to that.
287. 00:17:09 Two of the three were doing subscription models, whereas Ken Case and Team are not.
288. 00:17:15 Don't you do it on me.
289. 00:17:17 Don't you do it.
290. 00:17:20 I can't help but think they'll eventually get to that point, just because they have such
291. 00:17:25 a long release cycle that they have to lengthen it out a little bit in order to justify the
292. 00:17:34 cost because if they're releasing a new version every three years on something, they're usually
293. 00:17:40 pretty major updates when they do that.
294. 00:17:45 That's a good thing whenever they really push the envelope when they do that, but it also
295. 00:17:50 means that they have to charge quite a bit for their apps and whenever they do push out
296. 00:17:57 a new one, it's going to be another paid upgrade.
297. 00:18:00 You still have to pay to do that.
298. 00:18:02 I can't help but think that the pace of app development in today's world is so fast that
299. 00:18:08 you almost have to go subscription just to keep the lights on to keep things moving at
300. 00:18:13 a quick pace.
301. 00:18:15 You're going to get me on a soapbox as a developer with all this stuff.
302. 00:18:20 That's just the way things are going lately.
303. 00:18:22 Yeah, I'm not excited about that.
304. 00:18:24 I hope that Omni is able to figure out how to crack that nut.
305. 00:18:30 Something that I thought was cool, I've mentioned the set app service before.
306. 00:18:34 I'm pretty sure on Bookworm, but I really like this idea and they just added to do as
307. 00:18:41 an application in the set app service.
308. 00:18:44 So yeah, they've got and actually they announced they're over 100 apps now and they curate all
309. 00:18:50 the apps so they're pretty quality apps and I'm excited to see where that service goes.
310. 00:18:57 I hope that that model is sustainable for software developers because I think that's
311. 00:19:01 much more palatable for a consumer than, hey, sign up for this service and this service
312. 00:19:05 and this service and this service and this service.
313. 00:19:08 Because then it gets expensive.
314. 00:19:11 You start tacking all those together.
315. 00:19:13 Yep.
316. 00:19:14 Okay.
317. 00:19:15 Are we done with our bunny trail?
318. 00:19:17 I think so.
319. 00:19:18 I think so.
320. 00:19:19 So the next one, who knew that an idea bank would be for that?
321. 00:19:23 I kind of did as soon as I said, Omni Focus.
322. 00:19:25 But it's all your fault.
323. 00:19:29 The next one here is my outside in analysis, which I did.
324. 00:19:33 And I'm not going to share all of my problems here on the podcast, but I will say that it's
325. 00:19:39 a little bit humbling and I've got a lot of stuff to work on.
326. 00:19:45 But yeah, I think that this was again a really good exercise and I also think that some of
327. 00:19:52 these things I wouldn't have discovered had we not done bookworm for the last, what is
328. 00:19:59 it like year and a half, almost two years that we've been doing this?
329. 00:20:04 It's been, so we just launched it before a max stock two years ago.
330. 00:20:08 Okay.
331. 00:20:09 Yeah.
332. 00:20:10 So a little, a little over a year.
333. 00:20:11 You're pushing a year and a half.
334. 00:20:14 But it was, it was kind of cool to see like, even though it was a hard exercise because
335. 00:20:18 I'm basically putting myself under the microscope and pointing out all my flaws.
336. 00:20:23 It also showed me the areas or the ways that I've grown, like just being able to notice
337. 00:20:31 some of these things I knew is like, oh, I wouldn't have, I wouldn't have noticed that
338. 00:20:35 before I read this book and understood this, this point and got this perspective, if that
339. 00:20:41 makes sense.
340. 00:20:42 So bittersweet, I guess, but it's done.
341. 00:20:46 It's one of those things that you need to do this because I am convinced that, and a
342. 00:20:53 lot of people say this, self-awareness and understanding how you work and what you, like
343. 00:20:57 why you do the things you do.
344. 00:21:00 Those are some of the most important things you ever learn in life.
345. 00:21:04 If you know how to get yourself to do a lot of high quality and very pointed and focused
346. 00:21:10 work, that's huge.
347. 00:21:12 But at the same time, if you know that you struggle to help people through problems and
348. 00:21:19 you're working in, say, IT, that's an issue and you need to be very aware of that.
349. 00:21:25 So I feel like this outside in analysis is a very good thing to do.
350. 00:21:29 I'm a little afraid to do this thing, but I understand the value of it.
351. 00:21:34 I just don't want to do it.
352. 00:21:36 Yeah, it's fair.
353. 00:21:39 So that's the outside in analysis and the last one, play video games.
354. 00:21:42 I definitely succeeded at this one.
355. 00:21:45 I am hooked on FIFA.
356. 00:21:47 Although, it can be a little bit frustrating because whenever you play any sort of video
357. 00:21:53 game online, which is fun, I mean, you can connect and you get plugged in with somebody
358. 00:21:59 who's in the same division as you and it's always like a pretty good game.
359. 00:22:04 And literally it just takes a couple of seconds to set that up.
360. 00:22:07 That's really cool when you think about it.
361. 00:22:09 But also it shows me that there are a lot of other people who spend way more time playing
362. 00:22:14 video games than I do and are way better than me.
363. 00:22:18 It also locates me as not very good.
364. 00:22:22 Another humbling experience.
365. 00:22:23 Yep, exactly.
366. 00:22:25 I suppose that means you're done and I have to go.
367. 00:22:30 Yep.
368. 00:22:31 So the one that was on my list from the last round was project planning methods.
369. 00:22:38 And what I mean by that is trying to nail down a way to keep track of what project, when
370. 00:22:45 and where.
371. 00:22:47 And it's very similar to, you know, from the GTD world of task management, but doing that
372. 00:22:53 on a project level.
373. 00:22:55 So it takes you up to the next, what would that be, horizon one versus the runway, whatever
374. 00:23:02 you want to call it, the 1000 foot level in GTD.
375. 00:23:05 So trying to manage that level.
376. 00:23:07 So I know what project to do, what day of the week, where things at in the process.
377. 00:23:11 And I did nail down and I've had this for a little while.
378. 00:23:17 It's a way to use the whiteboard in my room because I love my whiteboard.
379. 00:23:22 And I have it set up such that there are projects that might go forward.
380. 00:23:28 And I guess I should back up.
381. 00:23:31 It's primarily for all of my client projects.
382. 00:23:33 I don't manage like my bookworm projects for each episode.
383. 00:23:37 Like I don't manage that level of work in here and I don't manage like my household
384. 00:23:42 projects on it.
385. 00:23:44 But it does all of my client projects, which is like the one thing that's been stressing
386. 00:23:48 me out lately is what is, where is everything in this flow?
387. 00:23:52 Clients just pull no way.
388. 00:23:55 Never.
389. 00:23:56 That's never going to happen.
390. 00:23:58 So I needed a way to keep track of where all these things are at the process.
391. 00:24:04 I could use something like Trello.
392. 00:24:06 I could do that.
393. 00:24:08 But at the same time, it's helpful for me.
394. 00:24:10 I'm learning the value of the analog system.
395. 00:24:13 So bear with me.
396. 00:24:14 I have this thing set up such that there are four really five categories that things can
397. 00:24:21 be in.
398. 00:24:22 Like the projects that I might be moving forward on, some that I have a commitment on but aren't
399. 00:24:26 scheduled or the first payment's not in on it.
400. 00:24:29 So they're in the queue.
401. 00:24:31 So there's those two.
402. 00:24:33 And then after the work is done, I've got like I'm waiting for a response from them
403. 00:24:37 before I send the final payment or it's pending payment, meaning it's done.
404. 00:24:42 I'm just waiting for that invoice to come in.
405. 00:24:44 So there's those four categories.
406. 00:24:46 And then the big one is in the middle of what week am I actually going to be doing this
407. 00:24:50 work so I can plan out here are the two three clients I'm going to be working on this week,
408. 00:24:55 next week here are the two that I'm working on the following.
409. 00:24:58 Here's four that I'm working on and then you know so on and so forth.
410. 00:25:01 And I usually plan about four, sometimes five weeks out.
411. 00:25:06 So it's helpful for me to know where are these, where are these projects in the queue
412. 00:25:11 and what week am I going to be working on them?
413. 00:25:13 Because if I'm talking to somebody new, say this afternoon, I need to be able to tell
414. 00:25:17 them, yeah, I'm going to start this in two and a half weeks and we'll be done by the
415. 00:25:20 end of that week.
416. 00:25:21 So I need to be able to say that.
417. 00:25:23 So it's a good thing to be able to tell people when their project is going to be done, they
418. 00:25:29 seem to like that.
419. 00:25:30 So that's kind of where I'm at on that.
420. 00:25:32 It's interesting because I've got each project laid out on a post-it note and it's like the
421. 00:25:38 bigger post-it notes so I can literally just pull it off and move it from category to category.
422. 00:25:43 Much like you would with cards on Trello.
423. 00:25:44 I know that I could do this on Trello.
424. 00:25:46 Not going to do it on Trello.
425. 00:25:49 No Trello.
426. 00:25:50 Like I get enough emails about you should use Trello for this.
427. 00:25:54 No, I'm not using Trello for this.
428. 00:25:56 So that's what I'm doing.
429. 00:25:57 And it's been very helpful.
430. 00:25:58 I've been enjoying that process.
431. 00:26:00 Nice.
432. 00:26:01 Yeah, I'm not a huge fan of Trello.
433. 00:26:04 I get the idea behind Trello and it actually is owned by Atlassian now so it integrates real
434. 00:26:10 nicely.
435. 00:26:11 Oh, I didn't know that.
436. 00:26:12 I didn't know whether Atlassian stuff.
437. 00:26:13 But there's just little things about it that bugged me.
438. 00:26:15 Like you're supposed to be able to embed Wistio links which is great because we're going
439. 00:26:21 to use Trello for product development with a bunch of beta testers.
440. 00:26:24 I'm like, oh, I'll just embed the Wistio links.
441. 00:26:27 Turns out you actually can only do that in a comment which makes no sense.
442. 00:26:32 Like I want cards with the videos in them for people to review.
443. 00:26:37 And all I can do is add an attachment with a link and now they've got to go into a new
444. 00:26:41 window and just like dumb.
445. 00:26:44 But the idea behind Trello is really good.
446. 00:26:47 And I think that when you're using it with other people, specifically clients, you know,
447. 00:26:51 the people that you're going to be working with that aren't necessarily part of your
448. 00:26:54 organization, it's a great tool because people seem to pick it up and it seems to make sense
449. 00:27:00 pretty easily.
450. 00:27:03 The one thing that I've found because I have people like to recommend stuff like whenever
451. 00:27:07 you go paper.
452. 00:27:08 So here's the thing you should know.
453. 00:27:10 For the listeners, if you have any kind of an online audience and you mentioned that
454. 00:27:15 you're going to use paper for a given thing like task management, project management,
455. 00:27:22 you know, just taking notes, anytime you do that, you will get tons of people recommending
456. 00:27:28 certain apps that do the same thing digitally and that you can carry with you everywhere.
457. 00:27:32 I'm aware of this.
458. 00:27:34 So here's the backstory.
459. 00:27:37 With client work, especially the type of client work that I do, clients often have their own
460. 00:27:43 systems that they simply want to add me to.
461. 00:27:46 I'm a part of 28 Slack teams right now.
462. 00:27:49 It's intense.
463. 00:27:51 And if I turned on all the notifications on that, it would just sit here and ding all
464. 00:27:54 day long.
465. 00:27:55 Like that's how much I would get with Slack groups.
466. 00:27:58 I'm a part of a lot of to do stuff.
467. 00:28:00 I'm a part of a lot of Trello stuff.
468. 00:28:02 I'm on a lot of Atlassian stuff.
469. 00:28:04 Like I'm on a lot of these tools.
470. 00:28:07 And I think that's part of the reason I ended up on paper because I'm just tired of so many
471. 00:28:11 of these tools.
472. 00:28:12 I can tell you exactly where the pros and cons of each of them are.
473. 00:28:15 And yet I was still using OmniFocus for a long time.
474. 00:28:18 But yeah, if you want to know what all the edge cases are and what people would recommend,
475. 00:28:23 just tell people you're using paper.
476. 00:28:24 They'll give you tons of recommendations.
477. 00:28:28 Paper like the app you mean, right?
478. 00:28:30 Exactly.
479. 00:28:31 That's exactly what I'm talking about.
480. 00:28:33 Whatever.
481. 00:28:34 So with all that out of the way, and we've had our 30 minutes of fun.
482. 00:28:40 Oh, wait a minute, wait a minute.
483. 00:28:42 You know what paper is really good at is being anti-fragile.
484. 00:28:49 Segway of the year right here.
485. 00:28:56 Speaking of which...
486. 00:28:57 Here you go.
487. 00:29:00 Here's our book for the day.
488. 00:29:01 Yeah.
489. 00:29:02 And why you picked this one?
490. 00:29:04 Okay, because I'm not entirely sure why I picked this one.
491. 00:29:07 But the book for today, "Anti-fragile, Things that Gain from Disorder, New York Times best
492. 00:29:13 seller, and written by the same guy that wrote the black swan, Naseem Nicholas Taleb."
493. 00:29:19 I think I got the name right.
494. 00:29:20 I looked it up, but that doesn't mean I got it right.
495. 00:29:23 And this is a book that it was recommended in one of our other books.
496. 00:29:27 And I was really smart when I wrote down this book in my list, and I simply said, "Great
497. 00:29:33 recommendation in the book."
498. 00:29:36 And I must have got distracted or somebody stopped and said something because I never
499. 00:29:40 wrote the book title down as to what book recommended this book.
500. 00:29:45 So I don't actually know where this came from, but I was running through my book list whenever
501. 00:29:51 I was selecting these and saw it on the list and I looked it up.
502. 00:29:55 And then whenever I picked it, I was like, "Okay, well, it's a New York Times best seller.
503. 00:29:59 It's by a guy that's written a number of books at this point, and he seems to be getting
504. 00:30:03 a lot of accolades on it.
505. 00:30:05 It's a fairly big book, but we've been doing a lot of short books lately.
506. 00:30:10 Looking at you, Mike.
507. 00:30:11 Except for big books.
508. 00:30:12 And exactly.
509. 00:30:13 So my thought was, "Well, I'll pick a longer book just because we've been doing some shorter
510. 00:30:17 books."
511. 00:30:18 And then Mike selected, paid to think immediately before this one.
512. 00:30:20 Sorry about that.
513. 00:30:22 Those who were reading along.
514. 00:30:23 And that means that we had two borderline textbooks in a row.
515. 00:30:28 And here's a little pull the curtain behind or pull the curtain away for a bookworm.
516. 00:30:35 Mike and I were trying to record this particular episode a week ago, and we had failed to get
517. 00:30:41 it on the calendar right away.
518. 00:30:42 And Mike texted me saying, "Hey, are we still good to go tomorrow?"
519. 00:30:45 It's like, "Nope.
520. 00:30:46 I am nowhere near done with this book.
521. 00:30:47 Can we push it off a week?"
522. 00:30:49 So if there's an extra week in between releases, that's why I was not done with this one.
523. 00:30:55 So here we go.
524. 00:30:56 Here we are.
525. 00:30:57 Yeah, full disclosure.
526. 00:30:58 I wasn't either.
527. 00:30:59 But this one was a little bit...
528. 00:31:00 Oh, you mean it sound like you were done with it.
529. 00:31:02 You were just waiting on me.
530. 00:31:03 I could have been done with it.
531. 00:31:07 But yeah, this one was hard for me to be motivated to read.
532. 00:31:14 It was really...I'm not sure what the term would be because half the time I feel like
533. 00:31:22 he's showing off how smart he is, half the time I feel like he's dumbing stuff down for
534. 00:31:27 us.
535. 00:31:29 And I never really found the balance where I could relate to the author.
536. 00:31:35 So every time I picked it up to read, I felt one of two negative emotions.
537. 00:31:41 Like, "Why am I reading this?" or "I can't believe..."
538. 00:31:45 Like, "I have no business reading this."
539. 00:31:48 Yeah, yeah.
540. 00:31:49 I get it.
541. 00:31:50 Because this is something that I enjoyed reading it, but I think there are a number of times
542. 00:31:56 we talk about a book that's probably not designed for the bookworm format.
543. 00:32:01 And it's interesting to me that books often come with an expectation on how you will read
544. 00:32:07 it.
545. 00:32:08 And I think that's something that people really talk about because it's just a thing where
546. 00:32:13 here is a book, it's designed to read, say, a chapter per week.
547. 00:32:17 You go do something about it and you come back to it.
548. 00:32:19 Like, that's a method that they have, that they want you to read it.
549. 00:32:23 Every once in a while you run across a book like this that it doesn't have an explicit
550. 00:32:28 way that you should read it, but there's like an implied way that you should read it.
551. 00:32:34 In this case, I felt like it was designed to read four or five, maybe ten pages at a time,
552. 00:32:41 and then sit on it, and then come back to it after you've marinated on it and then read
553. 00:32:47 it a little bit more.
554. 00:32:48 So that this is a book that you read across, say, five or six months instead of a two-week,
555. 00:32:54 or in my case, maybe Mike's case, three-week time frame.
556. 00:32:58 So I think this is a case of you and I likely went through this too fast because we were
557. 00:33:05 doing it for Bookworm.
558. 00:33:07 Maybe that's something we need to pay attention to in the future.
559. 00:33:09 I don't know, but it is interesting that with something like this, there's so much in here.
560. 00:33:14 And it's a lot of cases over my head, and you can tell he's a smart dude for sure, and
561. 00:33:21 I'm interested to know how many people read this and understood the whole thing.
562. 00:33:26 I was interested in that.
563. 00:33:28 Yeah, well, I took it as we just don't have 30 to 60 hours per week to read like he does,
564. 00:33:36 because he mentioned that in here.
565. 00:33:41 But yeah, I agree that this is definitely not a page turner per se.
566. 00:33:47 It's a read a couple pages and then, okay, what did he just say?
567. 00:33:51 Yes, exactly.
568. 00:33:52 He's not figured out.
569. 00:33:53 Exactly.
570. 00:33:54 Yeah.
571. 00:33:55 And to reread a paragraph.
572. 00:33:56 Yeah, that part was kind of frustrating.
573. 00:33:59 I do like the way that it's broken down into the different books.
574. 00:34:02 There's basically seven different books inside of anti-fragile.
575. 00:34:07 And it seems to make sense the way that he broke it down.
576. 00:34:12 Like Bookworm was an introduction to the whole concept of anti-fragile.
577. 00:34:17 Book two talks about how in the modern society, we kind of deny this idea of anti-fragility
578. 00:34:24 or Book three talks about how anti-fragility is actually something that you could use
579. 00:34:31 to make better predictions.
580. 00:34:34 Number four talks about optionality and technology in terms of anti-fragility.
581. 00:34:39 Book five talks about the math stuff.
582. 00:34:41 It's actually called the non-linear and the non-linear.
583. 00:34:44 Lots of math.
584. 00:34:46 Tons of math.
585. 00:34:47 Yeah, which that was a little bit hard to muscle through.
586. 00:34:51 Book six.
587. 00:34:52 A little bit.
588. 00:34:53 Book six was my favorite one.
589. 00:34:57 It's a via negativa.
590. 00:34:59 And that basic idea there is that a lot of positive outcomes come from avoiding negative
591. 00:35:03 scenarios.
592. 00:35:04 And then the last one, Book seven, he wraps it up, which if you think about this, like
593. 00:35:10 makes no sense to end on this note, but he's talking about the ethics of fragility and anti-fragility.
594. 00:35:16 So is this an ethical idea?
595. 00:35:21 Like usually the conclusion, you're kind of bringing it in for a nice landing and he's
596. 00:35:25 tackling the medius topic at the very end of the book.
597. 00:35:28 Yes.
598. 00:35:29 Yes.
599. 00:35:30 I really wanted a conclusion and a wrap up, not a-
600. 00:35:33 Yeah, exactly.
601. 00:35:34 Give me the most difficult thing we're going to talk about and then I'm going to leave
602. 00:35:37 you on it.
603. 00:35:38 Right.
604. 00:35:39 Right.
605. 00:35:40 Which based on just reading this book, I can kind of project that that's totally his
606. 00:35:45 personality, not actually having met him, but just the way that he wrote.
607. 00:35:50 I could see him writing this and being like, yeah, I'm just going to screw the system.
608. 00:35:55 Like I'm going to do it different.
609. 00:35:57 Yes.
610. 00:35:58 Yes.
611. 00:35:59 So before we go too far, I think we need to define anti-fragility just because this
612. 00:36:06 is a word he coined and it's a word that is going, we're probably going to end up using
613. 00:36:11 it a lot.
614. 00:36:12 And unless you understand it, at least to some extent, because it's kind of a really
615. 00:36:18 abstract thing to think about, unless we define it, this whole episode is going to
616. 00:36:23 be really confusing.
617. 00:36:24 So let's start with book one.
618. 00:36:27 And I wrote down here, fragile versus robust versus anti-fragile.
619. 00:36:33 So if you think about something that is fragile, and the easy explanation I've been using on
620. 00:36:40 this whenever I talk to a handful of people about it is simply a glass.
621. 00:36:45 If you drop a glass, you're screwing with its environment, you're screwing with the
622. 00:36:49 climate that it is comfortable in, and it is going to shatter.
623. 00:36:53 If you drop it off of a table, that glass will shatter because it is designed to sit
624. 00:36:58 in a stable place on a flat surface, preferably with liquid inside of it, and not move beyond
625. 00:37:05 that.
626. 00:37:06 Like it's just not designed to be struck in any way.
627. 00:37:11 So that would be fragile.
628. 00:37:13 The robust side of things is when you have an assembly line of sorts that is designed
629. 00:37:22 to have tolerances in it, and whenever things potentially go break, there are fail-safes
630. 00:37:28 or backups such that will account for something that is not in place.
631. 00:37:34 Like it's not fragile because you can account for issues that could arise and overcome those
632. 00:37:40 on the fly.
633. 00:37:41 When the whole assembly line is not going to completely break and stop altogether.
634. 00:37:47 So that would be the robust.
635. 00:37:50 Anti-fragile, you had to help me out here, Mike, because this gets kind of hairy quick.
636. 00:37:56 You have to think of it as the opposite of fragile, where something in the environment
637. 00:38:01 changes and the whole system could come crashing down.
638. 00:38:05 The opposite of that would not be that the climate changes and it simply doesn't come
639. 00:38:10 crashing down.
640. 00:38:11 That would be robust.
641. 00:38:13 As opposed to coming crashing down, it would actually thrive.
642. 00:38:17 So if I throw that glass on the floor, the glass would actually get stronger as a result,
643. 00:38:21 not break.
644. 00:38:22 Like that would be your anti-fragile.
645. 00:38:25 And I think the classic example here, just to put a little teeth into this, I think that
646. 00:38:33 example would be health.
647. 00:38:35 It's probably the easy one is take exercise, for example, or lifting weights.
648. 00:38:40 Say I lift weights and I'm lifting just for easy numbers, say you're lifting 100 pounds
649. 00:38:45 in some form.
650. 00:38:46 If I lift that 100 pounds today, then my body will reactlimate to that 100 pounds and it
651. 00:38:54 will overcompensate for what was lifted.
652. 00:38:58 Meaning that tomorrow whenever I go do it, I can then add, probably not tomorrow, say
653. 00:39:02 two days because you got to recover, 105 pounds.
654. 00:39:05 And then two days later, 110 pounds.
655. 00:39:07 And you can continually go up because your body is overcompensating.
656. 00:39:11 Whenever you stress it, it gets stronger and tends to grow and get better as a result.
657. 00:39:16 Thus, their tagline, things that gain from disorder, meaning a stressor or something that
658. 00:39:22 goes wrong.
659. 00:39:24 Is that a fair justification between all three of those?
660. 00:39:29 Yep.
661. 00:39:30 Yeah, the definitions that I wrote down, fragile is at best unchanged, at worst, broken or damaged
662. 00:39:35 with mishandling.
663. 00:39:37 Robust is at best or worst unchanged with mishandling.
664. 00:39:41 And anti-fragile is at worst unchanged and at best improved with mishandling.
665. 00:39:47 So there is a spectrum there, but basically there's more good than bad that comes from
666. 00:39:53 the volatility with something that is anti-fragile.
667. 00:39:56 And the example that he uses in this is from classic literature.
668. 00:40:00 Actually, I'd never heard of this before, but which, again, made me feel a little bit
669. 00:40:05 stupid when I was reading this.
670. 00:40:07 Because he's like, "Oh, obviously the example here is the hydra."
671. 00:40:11 And the hydra apparently is a creature, which is like kind of like a snake.
672. 00:40:17 And every time that a head is cut off, two grow in its place.
673. 00:40:21 So normally you would think that you cut the head off of something that's going to die,
674. 00:40:25 but in the hydra's case, what happens is that it actually grows two heads and it becomes
675. 00:40:30 even stronger.
676. 00:40:34 And that is something that I struggled with in this book because there are a lot of examples
677. 00:40:41 that he would, he names in a lot of cases, he would throw things out and the expectation
678. 00:40:45 is that you know that person or you know the story behind it.
679. 00:40:50 And yet most of those I did not know.
680. 00:40:54 And maybe that's just Joe not keeping up with the times or reading enough books.
681. 00:40:59 Who knows?
682. 00:41:00 And that's something that it was just, it was difficult because you end up having to either
683. 00:41:07 look something up or try to wait because in hope that he'll tell the story later about
684. 00:41:13 what he's getting at.
685. 00:41:14 And in some cases he did and in some he didn't.
686. 00:41:17 Lots and lots of stories, which is great.
687. 00:41:19 But at the same time, it almost requires you to have read an extra thousand books just
688. 00:41:24 to be able to read this.
689. 00:41:26 Yeah, you got to read 30 to 60 hours a week, otherwise there's something wrong with you.
690. 00:41:29 Yeah, exactly.
691. 00:41:30 What's wrong with you, Mike?
692. 00:41:33 Yeah, the term for this process of things that surviving gets stronger, I believe he
693. 00:41:41 used was Mithriditization.
694. 00:41:44 Yes.
695. 00:41:45 And the example here is bacteria or cancer cells that survive.
696. 00:41:52 So not to go onto a tangent or open a can of worms, but this is the logical example I
697. 00:41:59 think is how you see all over the place now antibacterial everything and how that can
698. 00:42:07 actually be a bad thing because if it kills 99.99% of bacteria, the 0.01% that survive,
699. 00:42:15 they've now got this immunity and they're stronger, they're more resistant to all of
700. 00:42:20 this stuff.
701. 00:42:21 And if you overdo it, eventually what you end up with is a whole bunch of bacteria that
702. 00:42:27 you can't do anything against.
703. 00:42:30 They're much stronger.
704. 00:42:31 Yes.
705. 00:42:32 For sure.
706. 00:42:33 Yes, exactly.
707. 00:42:34 I know that the classic example I have on that is from agriculture because in ag, people
708. 00:42:41 use Roundup quite a bit.
709. 00:42:42 You know, Roundup is even almost a household term anymore.
710. 00:42:47 And it comes from spraying it on fields in mass.
711. 00:42:51 And the problem with a lot of that is guys don't want to spend the money to use the correct
712. 00:42:58 rates of Roundup on the field, which means that not all the plants get killed whenever
713. 00:43:06 they spray it and the ones that survive end up being almost resistant to it.
714. 00:43:11 And then over time, they eventually do become resistant to it.
715. 00:43:15 And thus we see today a number of super weeds that are now very difficult to kill, if not
716. 00:43:22 impossible to kill.
717. 00:43:24 So it's something that I know it continues to show up in a number of areas.
718. 00:43:30 And when you're familiar with that process, you know, cancer cells is a good example.
719. 00:43:35 If you don't kill them all to begin with, it can sometimes come back strong.
720. 00:43:40 That whole process happens more and more often than what you would originally expect.
721. 00:43:45 And you notice it when it's you're aware of it.
722. 00:43:48 Yeah, totally.
723. 00:43:51 To move on to the next not comfortable example in book two of modernity in the denial of
724. 00:44:00 antifragility, he introduces the idea here of eatrogenics, which is the net harm being,
725. 00:44:08 which is net harm being done by people who have good intentions.
726. 00:44:12 So the example that he uses here is a medical example where doctors will prescribe medication
727. 00:44:21 to treat a symptom that the person is having.
728. 00:44:24 But he's arguing that oftentimes the individual is better off just being left alone so that
729. 00:44:32 their body can solve the problem on their own.
730. 00:44:35 And he says on page 125, if you want to accelerate someone's death, you can see that
731. 00:44:38 they give them a personal doctor.
732. 00:44:43 He brings up, and I thought this was interesting, domain dependence on how something that you
733. 00:44:49 know is true in one arena.
734. 00:44:52 You tend to not translate to another arena.
735. 00:44:55 And the example he used there with doctors, he seemed to like picking on doctors.
736. 00:45:00 And Paul does this.
737. 00:45:01 Yeah, true.
738. 00:45:03 He really likes picking on him.
739. 00:45:04 But he brought up that doctors often recommend exercise.
740. 00:45:11 And the idea there is kind of like what I was talking about earlier, where you stress
741. 00:45:15 your body to a point and then it overcompensates and you get stronger over time when you continually
742. 00:45:19 stress it beyond what you could do.
743. 00:45:23 So you just continually get stronger in that sense.
744. 00:45:25 And yet a doctor will prescribe a medication to prevent your body from overcompensating
745. 00:45:32 because it's helping your body to overcome, say, a cold or the flu or you name it.
746. 00:45:38 It's trying to prevent that exact process that they are promoting with exercise.
747. 00:45:43 So the concept there is domain dependence where doctors in this example understand medicine
748. 00:45:50 and how that can help you overcome certain things.
749. 00:45:53 And yet they will recommend exercise, which does the opposite.
750. 00:45:56 So it's interesting how that can happen.
751. 00:45:59 I don't know that I agree with what you should or shouldn't do in each of those scenarios,
752. 00:46:05 but it's at least something it's interesting to think about and to just be aware of.
753. 00:46:09 Yeah, totally.
754. 00:46:11 The author definitely comes across as a cantankerous old man frequently in this book.
755. 00:46:18 And this is definitely-
756. 00:46:19 We didn't find these books that are like this.
757. 00:46:21 This is definitely one of the areas where that came through.
758. 00:46:24 There was one idea in this section though that I really liked and that's the idea of
759. 00:46:28 the signal versus the noise.
760. 00:46:30 The idea here being that the more often that you check a system or look at data, the more
761. 00:46:37 likely you are to receive noise or things that don't really matter.
762. 00:46:43 And the example he gave was news, but the obvious extension of that is social media,
763. 00:46:50 in my opinion.
764. 00:46:51 Yeah, that's the obvious one for sure.
765. 00:46:55 How many times do you check Twitter in a day, Mike?
766. 00:46:58 That's-
767. 00:46:59 You and I are probably on the very low scale of the number of times we check social media
768. 00:47:04 in a day.
769. 00:47:05 Because I know some folks that are on it all the time and they wonder why their battery
770. 00:47:10 on their phone is dead all the time.
771. 00:47:12 iOS 11 was put aside.
772. 00:47:16 Outside of that, it's still an issue.
773. 00:47:19 So whenever you don't know what could be there, there's so many reasons people do it.
774. 00:47:25 But yes, I'm with you on that one.
775. 00:47:27 Yeah, what's interesting about this is that a lot of the people who are on social media,
776. 00:47:32 myself included, you do it because you want to stay up to date with what's going on in
777. 00:47:38 the world.
778. 00:47:39 That's the millennial version of the evening news, I guess.
779. 00:47:44 But what he's saying is that the more that you check it, the less likely you are to get
780. 00:47:49 the information that you want.
781. 00:47:51 Because the more noise that you get, the harder it is to distill the signal or what's
782. 00:47:55 actually happening.
783. 00:47:56 So if you were to check Twitter once a day, you're much better off in terms of getting
784. 00:48:01 information from there, stuff that you could actually act on, then you are checking it
785. 00:48:06 every hour.
786. 00:48:07 This might come back to the whole email thing too.
787. 00:48:12 You and I both promote scheduling time to go through your email as opposed to checking
788. 00:48:18 it hundreds of times a day.
789. 00:48:20 And there are definitely seasons in my life.
790. 00:48:24 And some of those have been recent where I've needed to check email on a very regular basis
791. 00:48:31 and have hit probably two or three hundred times in a day of checking that.
792. 00:48:35 And there are reasons that you could do that.
793. 00:48:38 If you're working in support, you have to do that.
794. 00:48:41 Like that is required because you're going to need to see when people, like your customers
795. 00:48:47 need help and you want to respond to that as fast as you can.
796. 00:48:50 Like you're going to want the notifications in that scenario.
797. 00:48:53 It's your job to respond to that stuff.
798. 00:48:55 So there are scenarios where that is valid.
799. 00:48:58 In most cases, people don't work in that scenario.
800. 00:49:03 And in those cases, it's easier to schedule a time, even if it's every twenty, thirty minutes,
801. 00:49:08 depending on your work.
802. 00:49:11 For Mike and I, probably more so Mike than me, you can schedule two times a day and go
803. 00:49:17 through that.
804. 00:49:18 For me, I've kind of got four just because I've got enough client stuff that moves quickly
805. 00:49:22 that I need to be able to keep my clients moving because the faster they move, the faster
806. 00:49:28 I get paid.
807. 00:49:29 So it's in my best interest to make sure that they don't stop at all.
808. 00:49:33 This is why I like Australian clients because they work while I'm sleeping.
809. 00:49:36 That's awesome.
810. 00:49:37 Now, there's also, though, I think the principle of anti-fragility can be applied to email
811. 00:49:43 because there are certain situations that you're right, that you need to respond in
812. 00:49:48 a timely manner.
813. 00:49:50 There are definitely other situations that I can think of that are email related where
814. 00:49:55 if you just don't reply, the problem solves itself.
815. 00:49:59 I love these.
816. 00:50:01 Yeah, and that's anti-fragility in action.
817. 00:50:04 So I think that the author would say that if you're able to take an anti-fragility approach
818. 00:50:09 to your email, you're not going to have as much that you're going to need to deal with
819. 00:50:13 when you do check your email.
820. 00:50:16 The trick is figuring out the balance there.
821. 00:50:21 I don't like email.
822. 00:50:24 I don't think that's a secret.
823. 00:50:26 And I know that there are a lot of ways that I've used it, but I know that especially towards
824. 00:50:33 the end of my workday, I have this tendency to want to check email towards the evening
825. 00:50:40 just because there are a lot of my international clients that will send me something mid-afternoon
826. 00:50:47 or early evening.
827. 00:50:48 And if I can get a response out to them like 30, 45 minutes before I go to bed, they can
828. 00:50:55 oftentimes have answers to me before I get up in the morning.
829. 00:51:00 That is borderline addictive sometimes for me because it's something that I know I should
830. 00:51:06 not do because the times that I'm not able to check it at that time, it's uncanny the
831. 00:51:12 number of times that they will have their answers for themselves.
832. 00:51:17 Like, oh, well, I didn't get that response from you.
833. 00:51:19 So I checked with this person and that they got this to me.
834. 00:51:22 So let's do this instead.
835. 00:51:24 And that is amazing for me because it means I don't have to do anything in order to solve
836. 00:51:32 that problem.
837. 00:51:33 And I wish more email did that.
838. 00:51:35 So maybe I need to stop checking it so much even with the client stuff.
839. 00:51:39 That should be your action item.
840. 00:51:41 Not checking email.
841. 00:51:42 To do nothing.
842. 00:51:43 Yeah.
843. 00:51:44 Let email solve it.
844. 00:51:45 Yeah, we both have like a on our action list.
845. 00:51:52 What do I do with this?
846. 00:51:53 Maybe that's my action item.
847. 00:51:54 I'm not checking email less.
848. 00:51:55 All right.
849. 00:51:56 So that's book two, modernity in the denial of anti fragility.
850. 00:52:01 Book three is a predictive view of the world.
851. 00:52:04 There's not a whole lot here that I took notes on, but there was one interesting idea
852. 00:52:10 which was this barbell strategy.
853. 00:52:15 And this is where he introduces a character called Fat Tony.
854. 00:52:18 And Fat Tony seems like the kind of guy that you wouldn't think is real bright, but he's
855. 00:52:26 just totally anti fragile and pushes back against everything.
856. 00:52:31 And that actually turns out really well form.
857. 00:52:35 And this chapter, he introduces a narrative between Fat Tony and another guy named Nero.
858. 00:52:41 And basically Nero is a little bit, if I'm my interpretation, like Nero is a little bit
859. 00:52:48 flabbergasted that Fat Tony is so successful.
860. 00:52:52 And all Fat Tony is doing is he's betting on the things that are anti fragile.
861. 00:53:00 He's identifying the things that are gaining from disorder.
862. 00:53:03 And he's just going that way as opposed to thinking logically about all the different
863. 00:53:09 situations of problems that he faces.
864. 00:53:11 Is that fair to say?
865. 00:53:13 I think that's fair.
866. 00:53:14 I mean, Nero is a book reader.
867. 00:53:18 Fat Tony doesn't read like anything.
868. 00:53:20 So time you translate all that out.
869. 00:53:22 I think you're dead on.
870. 00:53:24 Okay.
871. 00:53:26 And the other principle that he introduces here on page 155, he says that men feel the
872. 00:53:31 good less intensely than the bad.
873. 00:53:33 So what he's saying here is that you want to embrace this barbell strategy to litigate
874. 00:53:42 the risk that you are exposing yourself to.
875. 00:53:45 If you have two opposite strategies and you don't know which one is going to work, you
876. 00:53:51 can do a test essentially and see which one is responding well and then go all in with
877. 00:53:56 that one.
878. 00:53:57 Is that fair?
879. 00:54:00 It's a classic A/B test.
880. 00:54:01 I mean, if you do like an email newsletter, like I recently converted my newsletter stuff
881. 00:54:09 over to ConvertKit just because I've heard a lot of good things about ConvertKit and
882. 00:54:15 based on what I've been seeing with using ConvertKit, it's rather awesome.
883. 00:54:20 So there's my plug for ConvertKit link in the show notes.
884. 00:54:25 So there's something that they do and they do it extremely well with A/B testing, especially
885. 00:54:31 with email newsletter subject lines and it lets you put in two different titles for that
886. 00:54:40 email and you can send them out either in small groups or to the whole thing and then
887. 00:54:44 see which one works better and then you can send the one to the broader group that is
888. 00:54:51 the more successful of the two, if that makes sense.
889. 00:54:53 So that's, to me, that's exactly what's going on here is you can take two different strategies
890. 00:54:57 and if you don't know which one works, test them on a small scale and then whichever one
891. 00:55:03 works better, then blow up with that.
892. 00:55:05 Who's the, what's the app, buffer?
893. 00:55:10 So they do the social media scheduling.
894. 00:55:13 They do this heavily and I know that they've done as many as five or six different titles
895. 00:55:20 for blog posts to see which one will get the best response and they will run with whichever
896. 00:55:27 one gets the most clicks very quickly and they've got it nailed down how to test that
897. 00:55:34 and it's something that they do a lot.
898. 00:55:37 Clear down to testing colors of buttons and placement of buttons to see which ones work
899. 00:55:42 out the best.
900. 00:55:43 So this is not, like even YouTube does this heavily where they're always testing out new
901. 00:55:49 UI elements and changing things around.
902. 00:55:51 If you ever want to see the frustration with that, listen to Cortex with Mike and Gray, like
903. 00:55:55 they talk about this a fair amount where YouTube is just different every single day for different
904. 00:56:01 people.
905. 00:56:02 Like you cannot do a screencast on how to do something on YouTube.
906. 00:56:05 It'll be different before you release it.
907. 00:56:07 Like that's just the way that they do things to try to figure out what is the best way
908. 00:56:11 to get clicks and get people to see the ads.
909. 00:56:13 Like they're always testing this stuff.
910. 00:56:16 That's the exact thing that I think this addresses is find the two or three or ten different
911. 00:56:23 strategies, test them at a small scale, whichever one works the best.
912. 00:56:27 Blow it up.
913. 00:56:28 Yeah, that's an interesting example.
914. 00:56:31 I kind of can't believe I didn't think of that when I read this.
915. 00:56:35 I was thinking of it more in terms of like the, even the job that you would take.
916. 00:56:43 A lot of the companies that are in our space, I would say, tend to start with like a project
917. 00:56:53 basis.
918. 00:56:54 I've heard about a lot of other like startup type companies where they're not just going
919. 00:57:02 out and hiring a whole bunch of developers.
920. 00:57:05 And I know that that's kind of the way things used to be.
921. 00:57:08 But if you're looking for somebody to fill a specific position, you kind of like have
922. 00:57:12 a probationary period or trial period of 90 days or something just to see if this is really
923. 00:57:17 a win.
924. 00:57:19 And I was thinking about specifically my own experience I guess and how I got connected
925. 00:57:24 with Asian efficiency.
926. 00:57:25 But I know other people who have been in the same sort of situation where it's like, well,
927. 00:57:28 I'll do a little bit of work for this company or this site or this person.
928. 00:57:34 And if that works, we'll do a little bit bigger project.
929. 00:57:37 And if you start off as a, let's just say a creative, you know, you're creating something,
930. 00:57:43 whether that be you're writing for different sites, you're creating videos, you're podcasting,
931. 00:57:48 whatever, if you can kind of hedge your bets, essentially doing an A/B test with your career,
932. 00:57:55 then you can mitigate the risk because one of these things is going to work.
933. 00:58:01 And then once you figure out which one is going to work, you just ride that one.
934. 00:58:05 But like you said, yeah, this happens every single day with anybody in the online world
935. 00:58:09 who's creating content because you could put a article out there in the headlines bad
936. 00:58:14 and it just tanks and nobody opens it.
937. 00:58:17 But most likely you're going to do this A/B test, especially with the email subject lines
938. 00:58:22 to get, get opens and you're, you're not going to have nobody look at it because one
939. 00:58:26 of the headlines that you're trying is going to work.
940. 00:58:29 Obviously, it's not guaranteed to work.
941. 00:58:31 You have to have a little bit of skill in writing these things.
942. 00:58:34 But yeah, you are basically eliminating the risk, which is the barbell strategy in action.
943. 00:58:41 And I also like how you brought it into technology because that's actually the whole theme of
944. 00:58:46 number four, optionality, technology and the intelligence of antifragility.
945. 00:58:50 Yeah, exactly.
946. 00:58:53 So this book, there were a couple points in here that I really liked and there was one
947. 00:59:01 specifically that I put in the show notes on page, or in the outline.
948. 00:59:05 Page 220, he says, "History is truly written by losers with time on their hands in a protected
949. 00:59:09 academic position."
950. 00:59:12 So obviously he has very strong opinions about the people who are, I would even argue his
951. 00:59:20 peers.
952. 00:59:21 It seems like he's a pretty smart guy.
953. 00:59:22 He's got the grease.
954. 00:59:24 But he's got a problem with the traditional academic person who is just sitting at their
955. 00:59:29 desk and writing this stuff and not actually getting out into the real world to see how
956. 00:59:34 this stuff actually works.
957. 00:59:36 And again, my brain went to social media and rephrasing this.
958. 00:59:42 You could say social media is truly written by losers with time on their hands.
959. 00:59:45 They don't necessarily even need to have a protected academic position.
960. 00:59:49 But just think about all the negativity that comes from Twitter with the gamer gate stuff
961. 00:59:54 or all of the abuse specifically with women.
962. 00:59:59 These are people who have nothing better to do than tear other people down.
963. 01:00:05 They're internet tough guys who in real life, they don't have this platform.
964. 01:00:09 They're not going to say anything.
965. 01:00:11 But on social media, they feel empowered.
966. 01:00:15 And I think it's important to recognize that when you're going into these worlds, whether
967. 01:00:22 it's an academic world like the author is talking about.
968. 01:00:26 So he sets foot on a college campus because he's going to give a speech.
969. 01:00:31 He's already got a guard up because he knows the type of people that are going to be there.
970. 01:00:37 And I think the same can be said for social media as well.
971. 01:00:42 Now there are certain pockets of social media, certain communities within the internet that
972. 01:00:47 are definitely not in that description.
973. 01:00:52 But I think that there are few and far between if you were to take a look at the whole.
974. 01:00:59 I will never forget that in college, I took a number of economics classes and the professors
975. 01:01:11 that I had in those classes taught a lot about business strategy.
976. 01:01:18 And they spoke a lot about how you should or shouldn't run the finances of said business.
977. 01:01:24 And at one point, I was having a conversation with a classmate and my question was, why
978. 01:01:31 are we learning this from a person who has never run a business?
979. 01:01:37 Why am I being taught all of this information from someone who's never been tried and tested
980. 01:01:46 on running a business?
981. 01:01:47 Because in this case, my professors were ones that had gone to school, went and got their
982. 01:01:52 master's, went and got their PhD in business and then gone right into being a professor.
983. 01:01:55 They'd never worked in the private sector in any way whatsoever.
984. 01:02:01 So I was always a bit confused by that.
985. 01:02:05 And I think in this case, if you read the beginning of the introduction and stuff, what
986. 01:02:10 is it, the prologue on this one, Taleb is he tries to explain things and talk about things
987. 01:02:19 that are real.
988. 01:02:21 He does spell out this whole process at the beginning that he doesn't want to teach or
989. 01:02:25 promote something that he himself is not putting in action or that he himself has not genuinely
990. 01:02:32 learned firsthand.
991. 01:02:33 He wants to spell all that out.
992. 01:02:36 Having been, because he was a professor, is a professor, I forget, he works in academics
993. 01:02:42 in the academic arena.
994. 01:02:45 And he gets to see a lot of the backside of the professorship side of things, a whole
995. 01:02:52 bunch of sides in that phrase, sorry about that.
996. 01:02:55 But the interesting thing to me is he does know the back end of this.
997. 01:02:59 And he knows that there's a lot of stuff being written and shared by people who don't
998. 01:03:05 have, as he would call it, a practitioner level of information.
999. 01:03:10 They're not people who have actually practiced the thing that they're teaching, which is
1000. 01:03:14 kind of concerning.
1001. 01:03:15 You and I have a very different perspective on school with our kids.
1002. 01:03:21 And this is partially why.
1003. 01:03:24 I mean, there's a lot of aspects as to why you and I have the views that we do.
1004. 01:03:28 And I think this might play into it a little bit where people who are simply academic and
1005. 01:03:33 have never practiced the things that they are doing in quote unquote, the real world,
1006. 01:03:40 because of that, it's kind of difficult to trust them and to go back to your quote,
1007. 01:03:46 history is truly written by losers with time on their hands in a protected academic position.
1008. 01:03:50 It's probably a bit harsh.
1009. 01:03:52 The author's words, not mine.
1010. 01:03:54 Yeah, I mean, that's a direct quote out of the book.
1011. 01:03:56 So maybe that'll tell you a little bit about the author's style.
1012. 01:04:00 But this is something that I feel like is maybe a bit harsh, but at the same time, there's
1013. 01:04:04 a little bit of truth to it because I feel like there's a lot of this out there where
1014. 01:04:09 the people that are promoting the science and the research and telling us what is going
1015. 01:04:13 on in the world and how the world operates are not people working in that sector.
1016. 01:04:19 Like the people that you would want to hear from are the people who are too busy to write
1017. 01:04:23 about it.
1018. 01:04:25 They're doing too much on a day to day basis to sit down and try to coach the world on
1019. 01:04:30 what you should or shouldn't do.
1020. 01:04:32 They'll do it on a one on one basis or a mentorship basis, but not necessarily from
1021. 01:04:37 a broader research level.
1022. 01:04:39 Yeah, absolutely.
1023. 01:04:41 And really, like page 248 is kind of the validation for a lot of the points that you
1024. 01:04:47 just mentioned, not to go back into the whole, "This is why we homeschool thing."
1025. 01:04:52 If you want that discussion, listen to the episode 36.
1026. 01:04:57 But on page 248, he says, "What I was given to study in school, I've forgotten.
1027. 01:05:02 What I decided to read on my own, I remember."
1028. 01:05:05 And I think that that's why we do bookworm and that's the thing that I want to instill
1029. 01:05:09 in my kids is the ability to learn what you want to learn.
1030. 01:05:13 This is an important thing is to keep learning.
1031. 01:05:16 And this is also where he mentions that he reads 30 to 60 hours per week, which I think
1032. 01:05:21 is...
1033. 01:05:22 I mean, I don't even think if I had nothing to do and I didn't have to worry about money
1034. 01:05:28 at all, I still don't think I could read for 30 to 60 hours a week.
1035. 01:05:34 That's just...
1036. 01:05:35 That's intense.
1037. 01:05:36 But if you were able to do that and actually internalize all that information, yeah, more
1038. 01:05:42 power to you.
1039. 01:05:43 You would definitely change your situation and your mindset very quickly doing that.
1040. 01:05:48 And that's important.
1041. 01:05:50 On page 235 in this section, he talks about this concept of strategic drift.
1042. 01:05:56 And I think that this is where bookworm and other things like this can help.
1043. 01:06:02 His reading books in general can help, listening to podcasts can help, listening to audiobooks.
1044. 01:06:07 It can cause you to not necessarily even change your direction, but it can cause you to refocus
1045. 01:06:16 on the right thing.
1046. 01:06:18 And I've kind of experienced this a little bit myself and it does definitely mess with
1047. 01:06:23 the frameworks like the 12-week year plan.
1048. 01:06:26 For example, my last 12-week year plan, I did okay if you look at my specific goals for
1049. 01:06:34 the 12-week year.
1050. 01:06:37 One of them, I nailed and then the other two, I made pretty good progress on.
1051. 01:06:41 I didn't fully complete them.
1052. 01:06:44 But what I also did in that section, which was completely unplanned, is I started running,
1053. 01:06:49 did my first 10k.
1054. 01:06:52 I actually took second to my age group for that, that was my first race.
1055. 01:06:57 And fitness wasn't even on my radar at the beginning.
1056. 01:06:59 I also entered the Toastmasters Humor's speech contest.
1057. 01:07:03 And as we're recording this in a week and a half, I go down to Madison to compete at
1058. 01:07:10 the district level.
1059. 01:07:11 So I've won the club level, the area level and the division level.
1060. 01:07:17 And the district level encompasses the entire state of Wisconsin and also the UP.
1061. 01:07:21 So this is essentially the finals of the Humor's speech contest, which I even mentioned in my
1062. 01:07:26 speech.
1063. 01:07:27 I don't really consider myself a funny guy.
1064. 01:07:30 It's about productive parenting lessons that I've learned from being a dad.
1065. 01:07:34 Because that's the only thing I could think of that was Humor's, is stuff that my kids
1066. 01:07:36 have done.
1067. 01:07:37 So all sales throw in the game.
1068. 01:07:40 Yeah, exactly.
1069. 01:07:42 But looking back at the last quarter, if I'm rigidly looking at it as the things that
1070. 01:07:48 I said I was going to do at the beginning of the quarter, I guess maybe I was successful.
1071. 01:07:53 But when I take into consideration all of the things that have happened and the strategic
1072. 01:07:58 drift as I embrace these other goals at the expense of my initially stated goals, I can
1073. 01:08:04 look back and say, yeah, that that was a success.
1074. 01:08:07 Does that make sense?
1075. 01:08:08 It makes sense to me.
1076. 01:08:10 Okay.
1077. 01:08:11 And I think this is a really important concept because especially for somebody who like me
1078. 01:08:15 is a high-fact finder and you've got the plan and you work the plan, you have to be
1079. 01:08:19 willing to chuck the plan every once in a while.
1080. 01:08:21 Going back to one of my follow-up items, that's one of the things I'm not good at.
1081. 01:08:26 Although in certain cases, I'm learning to embrace that mindset.
1082. 01:08:32 Yes, I agree.
1083. 01:08:34 You want to talk about math?
1084. 01:08:37 No.
1085. 01:08:39 But book five is about math.
1086. 01:08:41 The one thing I will mention here, actually, for the people who are into math, he mentions
1087. 01:08:46 at the very beginning something that would probably make a lot of sense to you.
1088. 01:08:51 He talks about how there's essentially two curves, two things that are fragile versus
1089. 01:08:57 anti-fragile and their curves are either convex, which means that they're positive or concave,
1090. 01:09:02 which means they're negative.
1091. 01:09:03 Those terms, without looking at the pictures, mean absolutely nothing to me.
1092. 01:09:07 I'm not a math person.
1093. 01:09:09 If you are a math person, you're like, "Oh, yeah, that makes sense."
1094. 01:09:12 The other thing, though, that I'll say about this, is there's this idea that you can't just
1095. 01:09:18 add up all these things and have them be equal.
1096. 01:09:20 One of the examples that he gave, which makes a lot of sense, if you drive into a wall at
1097. 01:09:25 50 miles an hour, that does more damage than driving into a wall at five miles an hour,
1098. 01:09:33 10 times.
1099. 01:09:35 You have to be careful how you apply this stuff.
1100. 01:09:39 If you just go all in right away, if you don't do those A/B tests, if you don't head your
1101. 01:09:42 bets, then you could end up being, you could end up on the wrong side of the curve, essentially.
1102. 01:09:52 So one of the things that I'm going through this section, I'm with you on the Too Much
1103. 01:10:00 Math thing.
1104. 01:10:01 I like to think that I'm good at math.
1105. 01:10:05 I use calculus and derivatives and such whenever I'm doing a lot of programming, because it
1106. 01:10:10 seems like a lot of folks want calculations to run on the back end of a website or a
1107. 01:10:16 plugin that I'm working on.
1108. 01:10:17 I get that.
1109. 01:10:19 So I end up using some fairly sophisticated math to build those programs, because they
1110. 01:10:25 just simply run better whenever you can use some of these higher level formulas and such.
1111. 01:10:30 So I like to think that I understand math at a pretty decent level, but this kind of got
1112. 01:10:36 over me on some of it.
1113. 01:10:39 Okay, I think I understand what you're getting at.
1114. 01:10:44 I get the idea that you're trying to get across.
1115. 01:10:50 I just want this to be done.
1116. 01:10:53 Are we done with this section yet?
1117. 01:10:54 Like even right now, can we go into the next book section, please?
1118. 01:10:58 Yeah, and he does give you permission to do that at the beginning.
1119. 01:11:01 To be fair, he says if you're not in a math, you can just skip this one and go straight
1120. 01:11:06 to book six.
1121. 01:11:07 So maybe we should skip this one and go six now.
1122. 01:11:11 Yeah, exactly.
1123. 01:11:12 Okay.
1124. 01:11:13 So book six is via negativa.
1125. 01:11:15 And the idea here is that positive outcomes come from avoiding negative scenarios.
1126. 01:11:23 So it's kind of addition by subtraction.
1127. 01:11:25 One of the ideas that I really like from this section is on page 315.
1128. 01:11:30 He mentions that technology is at its best when it is invisible, which is a really cool
1129. 01:11:37 idea.
1130. 01:11:38 And if you think about specifically, it's iPhone season.
1131. 01:11:42 So as we record this anyways, you think about the iPhone...
1132. 01:11:45 You're getting a new one.
1133. 01:11:46 You're getting a tan?
1134. 01:11:47 You're going to do it?
1135. 01:11:48 I think I might.
1136. 01:11:49 I'm going to see if I can get it this year.
1137. 01:11:54 Probably.
1138. 01:11:55 If I have to wait till June, then probably not.
1139. 01:11:57 I'm going to get it between the morning.
1140. 01:11:59 And if I don't get it till next year, I'll still be happy.
1141. 01:12:01 My success is definitely struggling.
1142. 01:12:06 But the idea there, obviously, the iPhone is not invisible.
1143. 01:12:11 I would say that Apple maybe is trying to take steps to make it invisible with the Apple
1144. 01:12:16 Watch, but there's a lot of problems there because in a lot of scenarios, the Apple Watch
1145. 01:12:20 just replaces the phone in terms of visibility.
1146. 01:12:24 If you don't trim your notifications at all, then really having that with you doesn't mean
1147. 01:12:28 that you're paying more attention to the thing that you're supposed to be paying attention
1148. 01:12:31 to.
1149. 01:12:32 It just means that you're getting your notifications and your interruptions using a different medium,
1150. 01:12:37 which is always physically attached to you.
1151. 01:12:42 So I don't really like that idea.
1152. 01:12:45 And I think it's important to consider what the technologies are doing in our lives.
1153. 01:12:50 So the iPhone, as an example, this is something that I think the author would really rail
1154. 01:12:58 against based on this quote, "Technology is at its best when it's invisible."
1155. 01:13:02 Because you see people walking around with their faces down, looking at their phones.
1156. 01:13:05 The iPhone is definitely not invisible.
1157. 01:13:09 That being said, it's also a great example of the antifragility of the technology because
1158. 01:13:16 he also says in here that the longer a technology lives, the longer it can be expected to live.
1159. 01:13:21 It's in essence, it's non-perishable.
1160. 01:13:24 And the iPhone now has been around for a while.
1161. 01:13:25 A smartphone has been around for a while.
1162. 01:13:28 And he's arguing that the longer that something stays around, the less likely it is to just
1163. 01:13:33 be replaced by something else.
1164. 01:13:36 Which is an interesting idea because you hear about companies that are always looking for
1165. 01:13:42 the next new thing.
1166. 01:13:43 We talked about it in the last book with Kodak and paid to think.
1167. 01:13:47 And the example there, they had the new technology.
1168. 01:13:49 They had digital camera technology that they didn't chase.
1169. 01:13:54 And I think that reading this, it kind of validates some of their actions where they
1170. 01:14:01 drag their feet and then it actually is something that ushers out the old era and ushers in
1171. 01:14:07 a new era.
1172. 01:14:08 But what the author is saying here is that that's not the default.
1173. 01:14:14 As a general rule, you can say this thing has been around for 100 years.
1174. 01:14:19 Like the automobile, it's not going to go away anytime soon.
1175. 01:14:25 I say this at our church quite a bit because with, you know, I run sound at our church.
1176. 01:14:31 And if you've ever been to one of our services, you would see that we have a fairly sophisticated
1177. 01:14:38 way of running sound.
1178. 01:14:40 Our church is large enough and we have some very generous people such that we have some
1179. 01:14:45 really cool equipment that we can do some things with it.
1180. 01:14:49 And I tell people that as a sound person, as the IT guy, my goal is to never be noticed.
1181. 01:14:57 Like that is my goal.
1182. 01:14:59 If no one knows I'm here, that was a successful day.
1183. 01:15:02 Like that is just the way it works.
1184. 01:15:05 And that has a lot to do with, you know, lights have to be set correctly.
1185. 01:15:09 The slides have to run smoothly.
1186. 01:15:12 Sound should be clear and never accidentally muted at the wrong time.
1187. 01:15:16 Like all of that should be in place such that you never know I'm in that booth.
1188. 01:15:23 If everybody turns around and looks at me, that means I did not do my job.
1189. 01:15:27 Like something I screwed it up somehow.
1190. 01:15:30 Like that is what happened.
1191. 01:15:32 And this I think spells that out to a T because with all of the tech, you want it to be in
1192. 01:15:39 place such that it runs automatically and it doesn't ever get in your way.
1193. 01:15:45 And this is something that I know I've seen some.
1194. 01:15:50 And this is partially what led me to going to a paper system.
1195. 01:15:54 And I know I haven't really talked about that on bookworm at all.
1196. 01:15:59 But that whole system is partially because so much of say, Omni-focused to-doist, to-do
1197. 01:16:08 wonder list or to use Hurley's vendor list.
1198. 01:16:12 Like if you want to go with to-doist, all that stuff, go for it.
1199. 01:16:15 But the thing is with all of these, they all have some form of structure in them.
1200. 01:16:20 And no matter what you do, there is always a way that you are supposed to use that tool.
1201. 01:16:25 And you have to learn what that way is, like what that method in syntax is and how you
1202. 01:16:30 should enter tasks and how you should enter projects and what you can and can't spell
1203. 01:16:34 out inside of it.
1204. 01:16:35 Like you're always in the back of your mind thinking that through, which tells me that
1205. 01:16:39 the tech isn't out of the way.
1206. 01:16:42 But the tech isn't just flowing behind the scenes and letting you work the way you should,
1207. 01:16:47 which is why I've gone over to paper because I'm locked into zero structure with that.
1208. 01:16:52 I can impose my own structure on it and do whatever I want within that.
1209. 01:16:56 But I can always break the rules and draw pictures in the middle of a task list.
1210. 01:17:00 Like I can do that.
1211. 01:17:01 I can't do that in Omni-focused.
1212. 01:17:02 I can't do that in any task manager that I know of.
1213. 01:17:05 So that level of getting out of the way, I don't think we've gotten to yet, which is
1214. 01:17:11 why I've gone in a log.
1215. 01:17:13 But I would love to see it get to that point.
1216. 01:17:15 I mean, I have all kinds of ideas on how to build one of these things.
1217. 01:17:18 That's a huge undertaking.
1218. 01:17:19 Don't do it.
1219. 01:17:20 So I have ideas on this, but at the same time, we're not there.
1220. 01:17:25 I would love to see us get there, but we're not there.
1221. 01:17:28 Yeah, definitely.
1222. 01:17:29 And the other thing about the technology and the systems that you have in place, the more
1223. 01:17:34 pieces that you add to those systems, the more opportunities there are for things to
1224. 01:17:39 break.
1225. 01:17:40 That makes the point in this chapter that technology is by nature fragile.
1226. 01:17:45 And so in many instances, less is more.
1227. 01:17:49 And I would say that is true of the system that you have at your church.
1228. 01:17:54 Like every piece of technology that you use that's plugged into the system has to have
1229. 01:18:00 a specific function.
1230. 01:18:01 And if it doesn't have a function, you don't want to be sending sound through this thing.
1231. 01:18:04 That's really not adding anything to the mix because that's another piece of equipment
1232. 01:18:08 that could go bad.
1233. 01:18:10 And now it's something in the chain that you have to identify.
1234. 01:18:14 And I think you probably know more about running sound than I do at this point.
1235. 01:18:18 So is that fair to say?
1236. 01:18:21 Yes.
1237. 01:18:22 I mean, the classic example, as a sound person that runs live events, the number one thing
1238. 01:18:30 that you're always trying to pay attention to is feedback because you're trying to get
1239. 01:18:34 volume, but you don't want feedback, like that is the killer of all live events.
1240. 01:18:41 And what I can do because I've run it enough is I can look at a stage setup and I can tell
1241. 01:18:46 you the exact instruments that are potentially going to have feedback just by looking at how
1242. 01:18:51 things are laid out on stage.
1243. 01:18:53 The way the monitors are pointed, the way all the microphones are set up, I can tell you
1244. 01:18:56 where my potential problems are.
1245. 01:18:58 And when we do a rehearsal, if I hear even a tinge of feedback, I can usually tell you
1246. 01:19:04 the exact instrument that is coming from without even looking at the board.
1247. 01:19:08 Like I can do that because I know how all of that stuff is set up and there may be 15
1248. 01:19:14 microphones on that stage with say seven or eight monitors plus the main speaker system.
1249. 01:19:20 Like it can get intense with how much is on that stage and how much volume and stuff is
1250. 01:19:26 flowing from place to place.
1251. 01:19:27 But it can get really sticky.
1252. 01:19:30 But if you do big events, like we've done some things in one of the parks here in town
1253. 01:19:36 has an amphitheater that you can set up and you can rent it out and blah, blah, blah.
1254. 01:19:41 And I go help set that up and I don't run it, but I at least set it all up.
1255. 01:19:45 And we've done that enough that I can tell you when you're setting up the subs or you're
1256. 01:19:49 setting up the main speakers, there are very specific ways you want that set up.
1257. 01:19:54 Always put it in front of the microphones if you can, like that whole thing.
1258. 01:19:58 It can get hairy very quickly and you have to know, you have to know how to set up a
1259. 01:20:04 lot of stuff with that clear down to EQs and compressors.
1260. 01:20:07 They can change all the feedback things.
1261. 01:20:09 But most of what you're doing is mitigating feedback.
1262. 01:20:11 That's mostly what you're doing.
1263. 01:20:13 Yeah.
1264. 01:20:14 And when you get feedback and you've got a hundred different channels that that could
1265. 01:20:19 be coming from the more sliders you add to your board, the more likely you are to hit
1266. 01:20:23 the wrong one really is exactly the point here.
1267. 01:20:26 And also the more that you add, the harder it gets to define the specific thing that
1268. 01:20:33 you're doing.
1269. 01:20:34 Now that's not a big deal when you're running sound because really what people are looking
1270. 01:20:38 for is just that whatever sound happens to be being, being, whatever sound is being made
1271. 01:20:45 that it sounds good.
1272. 01:20:46 But also, this comes back to the whole idea of selling yourself specifically online.
1273. 01:20:55 Like we talked about in the last episode and I'm reminded of a quote by Sean McCabe who
1274. 01:20:59 wrote the book Overlap.
1275. 01:21:00 He says, "You can be known for something or you can be known for nothing."
1276. 01:21:03 And really what he's saying is that you have to identify what you're going to project.
1277. 01:21:08 And you may have all of these different skills and do all of these different things, but
1278. 01:21:13 you have to distill it down to one thing.
1279. 01:21:16 If someone were to ask you, "What do you do?" and you say, "Well, I do this, this, this,
1280. 01:21:19 and this," you're going to be filed in that person's mental junk drawer.
1281. 01:21:23 But if you say, "I am a wedding photographer," then when they're going to get married, they're
1282. 01:21:28 going to think of you as a potential solution to the problem that they're having.
1283. 01:21:34 And so that's another idea that he visits in this book, which I thought was really good.
1284. 01:21:38 And then the last thing in here, which kind of stood out to me, was this rule that he
1285. 01:21:45 has where he only reads books that are older than 10 years.
1286. 01:21:51 The theory being here that only good books survive, I'm not sure this is true.
1287. 01:21:57 I'm interested to get your thoughts on this.
1288. 01:22:00 I enjoy reading books that push the modern envelope a little bit because you always get
1289. 01:22:09 to see what's the latest science on things, what are people in today's world thinking
1290. 01:22:12 about.
1291. 01:22:13 So I kind of disagreed with him on this.
1292. 01:22:15 I think there's a lot of value in reading older books.
1293. 01:22:19 And I wish, I shouldn't say I wish, I think I may select more older books in the future
1294. 01:22:26 for a bookworm just because they've been around for a reason.
1295. 01:22:30 And we haven't really gone down that path.
1296. 01:22:33 Most of the books we read are five years old or less.
1297. 01:22:35 And a lot of cases are one or two years old, which is interesting because there's a lot
1298. 01:22:39 of more, a lot more interesting aspects and ideas that pertain to what we're doing today
1299. 01:22:48 and how our culture operates in today's world.
1300. 01:22:50 So I think there's a lot of value in the more modern books, but at the same time, there
1301. 01:22:56 are a lot of old books that have ideas that I think we could benefit from here on bookworm.
1302. 01:23:01 So I may select some of those.
1303. 01:23:02 It was maybe a thing that I considered, it wasn't really even worth putting an action
1304. 01:23:06 item for it.
1305. 01:23:07 It was just an interesting idea.
1306. 01:23:09 Yeah, I think there's a lot of those things that just really aren't worth putting an action
1307. 01:23:13 item for interesting ideas in this book.
1308. 01:23:16 Yes.
1309. 01:23:17 So the point there he's making is that we're more likely to notice the things that change
1310. 01:23:22 than the things that don't.
1311. 01:23:24 And we give them artificially more importance, even if they don't necessarily deserve it.
1312. 01:23:31 Now you've got a point in here, which also this could be a big topic, but the whole idea
1313. 01:23:36 of health and antifragility, because he says in this section that a lot of health conditions
1314. 01:23:41 are cured simply by removing something.
1315. 01:23:43 Like if you were to remove sugar from your diet, that may clear up a lot of the health
1316. 01:23:47 issues that you happen to be experiencing.
1317. 01:23:51 I put this on the list because I struggle with migraines.
1318. 01:23:54 I don't know if you know this or not, Mike.
1319. 01:23:56 I feel like I've told you about this at one point, but I don't know if it's come up on
1320. 01:23:59 bookworm or not.
1321. 01:24:01 But I shouldn't say on a regular basis, but about once a month, sometimes more frequently,
1322. 01:24:08 I'll get migraines that are bad enough that my vision gets blurry and I can't sit down,
1323. 01:24:15 you can't stand up, you can't lay down.
1324. 01:24:17 Nothing helps on these things.
1325. 01:24:21 And it can strike at weird times.
1326. 01:24:24 It usually will hit me at about 10, 30 or 11 o'clock in the morning.
1327. 01:24:29 And I know that whenever I get up in the morning, I can tell you if I'm going to get one that
1328. 01:24:34 day.
1329. 01:24:35 Nothing in the morning, 5, 36 o'clock in the morning, I can tell you this is what is going
1330. 01:24:41 to happen today.
1331. 01:24:42 And I know it's going to happen.
1332. 01:24:43 And I usually have to send out emails telling people, "Today's probably not going to get
1333. 01:24:48 a lot done on your project.
1334. 01:24:49 It's just not going to happen.
1335. 01:24:50 It's going to have to wait until tomorrow or the following day."
1336. 01:24:53 And I try to tell them, "I've got this whole migraine thing, blah, blah, blah, blah.
1337. 01:24:57 It's bad enough I've got a text expander snippet for it."
1338. 01:25:00 So it's a thing that I don't enjoy.
1339. 01:25:04 However, I bring this up because I have learned a number of triggers that cause these things.
1340. 01:25:12 And oddly enough, these things come back to not enough sleep, sugar intake from the following
1341. 01:25:20 day, stress levels impact it quite a bit.
1342. 01:25:25 And if you compound any of those, you know, sleeping in a different bed, like there's
1343. 01:25:29 a lot of little things that add up to it.
1344. 01:25:33 It does have a lot to do with health, what I'm eating.
1345. 01:25:36 It seems to impact it quite a bit.
1346. 01:25:38 So these are things that I've learned that impact it at the same time because I've noticed
1347. 01:25:45 that say sugar can impact this, I've cut back on how much sugar I will consume, which
1348. 01:25:51 means that whenever people bring, say, desserts over for our small group or we go to an event
1349. 01:26:00 and they have cookies or something.
1350. 01:26:02 I actually need to avoid those in today's world for me because I know that I have no tolerance
1351. 01:26:09 for that level of sugar anymore because I've been cutting it so much.
1352. 01:26:13 And that means that if I eat a cookie that someone else made, I'm most likely going to
1353. 01:26:18 get a migraine tomorrow.
1354. 01:26:20 That is the level of impact that it's going to have.
1355. 01:26:24 So it's kind of the opposite of what we've been talking about here where you consume a
1356. 01:26:29 thing and you build up your tolerance to it.
1357. 01:26:31 It works the other way too because I'm not consuming a thing as regularly.
1358. 01:26:37 It then leads me to having potentially bad health effects as a result from that.
1359. 01:26:43 So it's something that I've noticed impacts health quite a bit.
1360. 01:26:47 And I love talking about the health piece with anti-fragility because I feel like it's
1361. 01:26:51 a perfect example of how it works because you tend to overcompensate in both directions
1362. 01:27:00 depending on how much you're consuming of a thing or how much you're not consuming of
1363. 01:27:03 a thing or how much you're stressing your body or how much you're not.
1364. 01:27:05 Those things all impact it and your body tends to acclimate to the environment that you're
1365. 01:27:11 putting it in.
1366. 01:27:12 I just don't like migraines.
1367. 01:27:14 So I have been trying to find ways to prevent these things.
1368. 01:27:18 Yeah, that's a really good point because it illustrates something that he mentions earlier.
1369. 01:27:23 But the essential idea is that we react to pain more than pleasure.
1370. 01:27:31 We want to avoid pain more than we want to experience pleasure.
1371. 01:27:34 So telling somebody like you should change your diet because you'll live longer or it's
1372. 01:27:40 going to have some desirable effect, that's not going to be as impactful as removing something
1373. 01:27:46 in order to stop your head from feeling like it's going to explode.
1374. 01:27:52 What exploding equals bad?
1375. 01:27:54 Yes, yes.
1376. 01:27:55 Should we move on to the last one?
1377. 01:27:58 Sure.
1378. 01:27:59 All right.
1379. 01:28:00 The one that neither one of us really care for either.
1380. 01:28:03 There's a book five or seven we don't like them.
1381. 01:28:05 We're not going to spend a whole lot of time in this one.
1382. 01:28:09 A book seven in the last book here is the ethics of fragility and anti fragility.
1383. 01:28:17 So this is a whole can of worms that you could probably launch an entire podcast and just
1384. 01:28:24 never get to the bottom of this particular topic.
1385. 01:28:28 But the thing that stood out to me in here, which I think is a really valid idea, he said
1386. 01:28:33 it a little bit different, is this whole idea of skin in the game.
1387. 01:28:36 He mentions the Roman architects had to spend time under the bridges that they built.
1388. 01:28:43 And that's a very valid idea.
1389. 01:28:44 If you are going to create this thing and there's the potential that it will harm other people,
1390. 01:28:52 you should have enough confidence in it to say, look, it's, I'm going to do this and it's
1391. 01:28:58 not going to harm me.
1392. 01:29:00 The term I think for this nowadays would be dog fooding where you want to listen to people
1393. 01:29:07 who are practicing what they are telling you to do.
1394. 01:29:11 You don't want people who are saying one thing and doing another.
1395. 01:29:17 This is why I struggle to use apps and services where the creators themselves don't use it.
1396. 01:29:27 So if I build a thing, I want to make sure that's a thing that I'm using.
1397. 01:29:31 If I build a plugin for discourse, I want that plugin installed on my own instance of
1398. 01:29:37 discourse, like I want that thing on my system because if it breaks, then I need to have
1399. 01:29:47 my system break as well because it creates that urgency and then my customers sense that
1400. 01:29:52 as well and then they're better off as a result.
1401. 01:29:54 So anytime I create a thing like that, write code in some way that I'm going to be selling,
1402. 01:30:01 I want it on my thing.
1403. 01:30:03 That's the way I tend to come at it.
1404. 01:30:05 Now if I'm building a thing for a client, there's no way I should be running.
1405. 01:30:09 I mean, those things are so specific to their environment.
1406. 01:30:12 I shouldn't be running those and they just have to let me know.
1407. 01:30:15 I mean, that's a little bit of a different scenario, but I do think that if you're selling
1408. 01:30:19 something on a regular basis, an app or a service or a website, et cetera, you need
1409. 01:30:24 to be using it a lot yourself.
1410. 01:30:26 And there are a couple of cases where I feel like I slack on this a little bit and need
1411. 01:30:31 to be a little bit better at it, but at the same time, like this is a thing that I'm very
1412. 01:30:34 aware of and I wish more people would do it, Mike.
1413. 01:30:36 Yeah, and it's not just using the thing.
1414. 01:30:38 Like there's different levels of commitment to the tool or the that you're promoting or
1415. 01:30:45 even the message that you're sending out.
1416. 01:30:50 Reminds me of the chicken and the pig.
1417. 01:30:55 The story here is that they're going to start a restaurant.
1418. 01:30:58 They're going to serve bacon and eggs.
1419. 01:31:01 And the chicken is involved, but the pig is committed.
1420. 01:31:04 Like there is very, very real ramifications for the pig, but not so much for the chicken.
1421. 01:31:12 And I think that you can tell when somebody is authentic in their message, when they've
1422. 01:31:17 lived it out, that resonates and they have that authenticity that the person who's like,
1423. 01:31:23 hey, yeah, you should just try this thing.
1424. 01:31:25 It may work.
1425. 01:31:26 Like that's not what they say, but that's how it comes across.
1426. 01:31:29 So you can see that in the message that they're sending out.
1427. 01:31:33 So that's a big piece here is that if you're going to promote a thing, if you're going
1428. 01:31:39 to have a message, then make sure that you can fully support what you are saying because
1429. 01:31:45 you fully believe it.
1430. 01:31:47 And then the other big thing here is that just because something is legal does not mean
1431. 01:31:51 that it's ethical.
1432. 01:31:52 And we intentionally did not get into any of the politics stuff.
1433. 01:31:57 Also in this chapter, he talks about how the net gain, so yes, some people are going to
1434. 01:32:08 suffer, but if it ends up being a net gain, sometimes that's okay.
1435. 01:32:13 My words, not his, I guess, trying to distill what he said.
1436. 01:32:17 That's the way I read it though.
1437. 01:32:20 And obviously there's a whole lot of, you got to be careful when you're embracing that
1438. 01:32:26 idea.
1439. 01:32:27 Right.
1440. 01:32:28 And he even calls that out.
1441. 01:32:30 He knows that this is not a thing that I like, that some people need to suffer for the greater
1442. 01:32:38 good of the population.
1443. 01:32:40 He doesn't like that.
1444. 01:32:41 So thankfully he does call that out.
1445. 01:32:44 And I was glad that he did call that out.
1446. 01:32:47 But at the same time, like there are cases he brings up, some stories he brings up where
1447. 01:32:52 a number of people died.
1448. 01:32:55 And that was a good thing.
1449. 01:32:56 Like that is what he's saying.
1450. 01:32:58 He's like, I don't like that that's a good thing.
1451. 01:33:00 But the greater population, this business failed.
1452. 01:33:03 That's a good thing for the general entrepreneur base because it means there's a hole for people
1453. 01:33:09 to fill.
1454. 01:33:10 Like he goes through that, like the broader culture gets better as a result of some of
1455. 01:33:16 that, but it's still not a thing that's positive in that moment for those people.
1456. 01:33:22 So I was at least grateful he called that out.
1457. 01:33:24 Yeah, he may not like saying that message, but I think he does like putting it at the
1458. 01:33:29 end of the book and seeing how uncomfortable it makes you.
1459. 01:33:32 Yes, I think he's just trying to get you fired up right at the end.
1460. 01:33:36 Yeah, I don't think I'd like this guy if I'm at it.
1461. 01:33:37 I feel like he would just try to push all my buttons.
1462. 01:33:41 And I don't think it would be terribly hard to do given his topic matter.
1463. 01:33:44 No, not at all.
1464. 01:33:45 Like, oh, you work in railroad here.
1465. 01:33:49 Let me tell you how a broken rail line is a good thing.
1466. 01:33:52 What?
1467. 01:33:53 Yeah.
1468. 01:33:54 So you mentioned this earlier, but neither of us have any action items for this book.
1469. 01:34:02 So which is weird given how long this thing is.
1470. 01:34:05 Yeah, theoretically follow up should be short next time.
1471. 01:34:10 But yeah, the way that it's written, this reminded me of shoot, what's the name of the
1472. 01:34:17 book, the Ken Robinson book.
1473. 01:34:20 I don't think I had any action items for that one either because it was a lot of monologue
1474. 01:34:27 about a topic, but nothing really tangible.
1475. 01:34:30 Like, okay, go and do this.
1476. 01:34:32 Like there's some ideas in here which are going to be important, like the barbell strategy.
1477. 01:34:38 And I can see myself putting that into practice at some point, but it's not something that
1478. 01:34:44 I'm going to make sure that I embrace every single day.
1479. 01:34:47 It's not something that I can make a habit out of and it's going to provide a change.
1480. 01:34:52 So it's, and therefore it's not something that I really enjoyed to read.
1481. 01:34:58 I don't like to just collect information.
1482. 01:35:02 I like it when the information inspires action.
1483. 01:35:06 And I really don't think there's a whole lot of action that's coming out of this book.
1484. 01:35:11 You're talking about out of our minds, Ken Robinson.
1485. 01:35:13 Yes, yes, that's the one.
1486. 01:35:15 Yeah.
1487. 01:35:16 So I'm with you on that.
1488. 01:35:17 Very similar to that where there's a lot of interesting facts and a lot of stories.
1489. 01:35:22 And from a content standpoint, I think there's a lot that you can learn in this book.
1490. 01:35:28 So if we're going to, you know, no action items, I don't know if that's good or bad.
1491. 01:35:33 But you know, from a style standpoint, it's hard to read.
1492. 01:35:37 I found it hard to read just because it feels like you need to read 30 to 60 hours for the
1493. 01:35:43 books every week for a few years to be able to really comprehend everything that he has
1494. 01:35:47 here.
1495. 01:35:48 And I don't really see that as a positive because very few people are going to read
1496. 01:35:53 at that level.
1497. 01:35:54 So it kind of limits the number of people that are going to understand everything in
1498. 01:35:59 this.
1499. 01:36:00 So you kind of have to just be okay with not understanding every reference he makes, which
1500. 01:36:05 I guess is a good thing because it means there's something in there for everybody, I suppose.
1501. 01:36:09 So it's hard to read in that sense.
1502. 01:36:12 And I felt like there was a, again, there's a lot of good things you can take from it,
1503. 01:36:17 but at the same time, I'm probably not going to recommend this to very many people, very
1504. 01:36:23 few at all, just because it's tough.
1505. 01:36:27 Yeah, it's definitely tough.
1506. 01:36:31 And the, if you were to just cherry pick sections of this book, there's a good chance that I
1507. 01:36:38 would like the writer's style, but when you take it in totality, the entire thing, I feel
1508. 01:36:44 like he's the way that he writes is almost condescending.
1509. 01:36:51 Like he thinks he's really funny and you're an idiot if you don't understand his jokes.
1510. 01:36:57 I can't think of any specific examples of that, but just like the way that he words
1511. 01:37:00 things, he words it in a way where like, I think back to the TED talk that you had sent
1512. 01:37:06 me of Ken Robinson, where he's actually a very funny guy.
1513. 01:37:12 I feel like if you were to take Mr. Taleb and put him in that arena, he would be laughing
1514. 01:37:21 at his own jokes, but no one else would get it.
1515. 01:37:24 That's fair.
1516. 01:37:25 That's fair.
1517. 01:37:26 Yeah.
1518. 01:37:27 So I get it.
1519. 01:37:28 So I mean, all of this put together, I think from a ratings standpoint, I think I would
1520. 01:37:33 put it at maybe 3.5, I think is where I'll put it because there's some interesting stuff
1521. 01:37:38 in it, but it's a tough one to get through.
1522. 01:37:41 Yeah, I think that's fair.
1523. 01:37:42 I was on the fence between a three and a 3.5 because you're right.
1524. 01:37:49 Like actually talking through this with you, I realized that I got more out of this than
1525. 01:37:53 I first thought.
1526. 01:37:55 There are quite a few points in here that I think are going to stick with me like the
1527. 01:38:02 barbell strategy and the whole idea of improving something by removing something.
1528. 01:38:08 Like those are pretty powerful, powerful ideas, but definitely didn't enjoy this book.
1529. 01:38:17 And definitely not something that I would just recommend to somebody like you mentioned.
1530. 01:38:21 I totally agree with that.
1531. 01:38:22 So I'm going to say 3.0.
1532. 01:38:24 Fair enough.
1533. 01:38:26 There you go.
1534. 01:38:27 So let's put this one on the shelf.
1535. 01:38:30 And what are we doing next time, Mike?
1536. 01:38:33 Next time we are doing another reader recommendation or listener recommendation, which is mindset
1537. 01:38:40 by Carol Dweck.
1538. 01:38:42 And this is shorter than both of these books, the last two that we've done.
1539. 01:38:47 So a little bit of a break.
1540. 01:38:49 But then you've got another long one.
1541. 01:38:52 Yes, it's a long one, but this is one that has made the rounds.
1542. 01:38:58 It's a listener recommendation.
1543. 01:39:00 I'm kind of surprised we haven't gone through it yet.
1544. 01:39:03 It's the 40x, the four disciplines of execution.
1545. 01:39:07 And I feel like this is right up our wheelhouse.
1546. 01:39:11 And yet we've not done it.
1547. 01:39:12 A listener recommended it.
1548. 01:39:13 So here we are.
1549. 01:39:15 All right.
1550. 01:39:16 I've actually started reading this book, could not finish it.
1551. 01:39:20 So spoiler alert.
1552. 01:39:25 That's good to know.
1553. 01:39:26 I've actually already read it and synthesized it to a point because we did it for the pro
1554. 01:39:33 side of the guild, the productivity guild.
1555. 01:39:35 So we did it for that.
1556. 01:39:36 And I wanted to talk through it with you because we talked through books and I feel like I
1557. 01:39:40 synthesized them better when you and I talk about it.
1558. 01:39:42 True.
1559. 01:39:43 So you're going to make me muscle through this one.
1560. 01:39:44 I'm a force it.
1561. 01:39:46 All right.
1562. 01:39:48 Gap books.
1563. 01:39:49 I've got Perennial Seller by Ryan Holiday, which I know that you've read.
1564. 01:39:54 It's just read this one.
1565. 01:39:55 Yeah.
1566. 01:39:56 I love Ryan Holiday.
1567. 01:39:57 We covered the obstacles the way on Bookworm and it was really good.
1568. 01:40:01 So I make just to dive into this one.
1569. 01:40:03 And you've got a book that I actually picked for a gap book at one point.
1570. 01:40:07 We may need to turn this into an episode.
1571. 01:40:09 Well, I did Perennial Seller for a gap book at one point too.
1572. 01:40:12 So we're like trading gap books.
1573. 01:40:14 That's true.
1574. 01:40:15 Mine is Make Your Bed by William McRavin.
1575. 01:40:16 So I think maybe we should just do fillers and just do both of those.
1576. 01:40:25 Make Your Bed is a really cool book for the Bookworm format.
1577. 01:40:31 It's short, but it's got a lot of stories that have a lot of good points that we could
1578. 01:40:38 definitely unpack and turn into a two-hour podcast.
1579. 01:40:41 There you go.
1580. 01:40:43 Although the book probably only takes you about two hours to read.
1581. 01:40:48 Good to know.
1582. 01:40:49 I haven't officially started it yet.
1583. 01:40:51 That's this evening.
1584. 01:40:52 So good to know.
1585. 01:40:54 If you want to recommend a book, you can do that by going to bookworm.fm/list.
1586. 01:41:02 And you will see a list of all of the books that we've covered, the ones that are planned,
1587. 01:41:08 and the ones that are recommended.
1588. 01:41:09 And on the sidebar, you will see there is a link to recommend a book.
1589. 01:41:14 So if you want to make us go through another textbook, you can go there and recommend it.
1590. 01:41:19 But we won't please promise that we will go through it.
1591. 01:41:23 And if you want to interact with us in any way, there are a couple ways you can do that.
1592. 01:41:30 The first and the most exciting one is to leave an iTunes review, link in the show notes,
1593. 01:41:37 click the link.
1594. 01:41:38 You can leave us a review there.
1595. 01:41:39 That helps out a ton because it helps other people find us.
1596. 01:41:42 And it's been fun to watch the Bookworm listenership grow lately.
1597. 01:41:46 It seems like it's starting to gain some traction, which is exciting.
1598. 01:41:50 So we ask that you would leave us a review on iTunes.
1599. 01:41:53 And if you want to leave comments on that review, go for it.
1600. 01:41:56 If you have other comments that you want to share, there will be a link in the show notes
1601. 01:42:00 to the Guild where we tend to do comments on the podcast.
1602. 01:42:04 So if you have questions, you're looking for a link that I failed to get into the show
1603. 01:42:07 notes, you can always post it there as well.
1604. 01:42:10 All right.
1605. 01:42:11 So if you're following along, the next book is Mindset by Carol Dweck.
1606. 01:42:16 And we will talk to you next time.