65: Drunk Tank Pink by Adam Alter

Click any line to jump to that moment.

1. 00:00:00 Welcome back, Mike.
2. 00:00:01 Hey, thanks.
3. 00:00:02 It's been a while.
4. 00:00:03 Well, actually, by the time this episode releases, it'll probably be back on schedule.
5. 00:00:09 But...
6. 00:00:09 Sure, you want to say that publicly?
7. 00:00:11 [laughter]
8. 00:00:12 I do.
9. 00:00:12 I do.
10. 00:00:13 I'm committed to making this thing work.
11. 00:00:15 For one thing, we launched in the last episode the Premium Membership for the club.
12. 00:00:21 And we've had a handful of people who have signed up for that already.
13. 00:00:24 And as we're recording this, it's not even been 24 hours since we launched that,
14. 00:00:28 which I know you mentioned before, that people signed up quicker than you thought they would.
15. 00:00:33 So I just want to give a shout out to everybody who did sign up.
16. 00:00:36 Thank you so much for supporting the show.
17. 00:00:39 And for people who might be interested in that sort of thing, we're still adding stuff to the membership.
18. 00:00:43 But kind of what we've landed on for now is that there's going to be a special Premium section of the Bookworm Club,
19. 00:00:51 which is going to have a bunch of extra stuff in it.
20. 00:00:53 Right now, it's got all of my book notes.
21. 00:00:57 So the entire archive of all of the mind maps that I've been making, I think I uploaded like 42 of them yesterday.
22. 00:01:03 It's a lot.
23. 00:01:05 It is a lot.
24. 00:01:05 It's like, it's all these like, holy buckets, there's a lot in here.
25. 00:01:08 There is a lot there.
26. 00:01:09 So if you want to go back and look through all of those, and it's not just the ones that we've covered for the episodes,
27. 00:01:14 it's all of my gapbook stuff that anything, basically, that has a lot of information in it, I upload it.
28. 00:01:19 Some of them, I didn't really take a whole lot of notes.
29. 00:01:21 So I didn't upload those.
30. 00:01:23 But there's a ton of stuff in there.
31. 00:01:25 I also created a 4K desktop wallpaper, which has the Bookworm logo on top of like this reverse radial gradient sort of a thing.
32. 00:01:35 It's pretty subtle and I think it looks pretty sweet.
33. 00:01:38 But I'm curious to get your thoughts on it.
34. 00:01:41 I'm kind of a wallpaper snob of sorts.
35. 00:01:46 So when I saw this, like, oh my, you're doing a wallpaper.
36. 00:01:51 But I hadn't seen it yet.
37. 00:01:53 And I'm one that typically has really dark colored backgrounds.
38. 00:01:59 So when I did see this, like, oh, I can actually get behind that one.
39. 00:02:03 Like, I'm picky with this sort of thing.
40. 00:02:05 So I did use it.
41. 00:02:06 So I'm using it now.
42. 00:02:07 Yeah, it's pretty subtle.
43. 00:02:10 It's, I think it looks pretty good.
44. 00:02:12 Obviously I'm biased and I'm not a graphic designer.
45. 00:02:14 By the way, inside baseball, the easiest way to make a radial gradient like that that looks good
46. 00:02:22 is in keynote.
47. 00:02:23 Oh, interesting.
48. 00:02:25 So literally what I did is I created a keynote slide, which was 4K by 2K and then exported as an image.
49. 00:02:33 Well done, Mike.
50. 00:02:34 But yeah, it looks pretty cool.
51. 00:02:36 So there's that.
52. 00:02:37 What else did we put in there?
53. 00:02:39 Oh, and then there's like the little badge on the Bookworm Club.
54. 00:02:43 So you get the same little Bookworm logo thing that you and I have as co-host when you are in the club.
55. 00:02:49 It's kind of like a little status symbol sort of a thing.
56. 00:02:52 And the other thing, which is not to be overstated, our undying gratitude is how I labeled it up
57. 00:02:59 in the sales page.
58. 00:03:01 But really, like, I'm blown away that people are willing to contribute a couple bucks a month
59. 00:03:05 to help us keep the show going.
60. 00:03:07 Because there were a lot of people.
61. 00:03:08 I went through some things.
62. 00:03:09 You went through some things.
63. 00:03:10 We had to reschedule before I went on vacation.
64. 00:03:12 I went on vacation.
65. 00:03:13 I got sick when I got back.
66. 00:03:15 So there were a handful of people who were saying basically,
67. 00:03:18 "Is the show still live?"
68. 00:03:20 I don't want to see Bookworm go.
69. 00:03:22 And that kind of accelerated the whole, "Well, how do we make this thing sustainable?"
70. 00:03:25 Because we really were in the middle of, "Okay, we got to just put out the--"
71. 00:03:30 I was anyways.
72. 00:03:31 I got to just put out the fires and do the urgent things.
73. 00:03:33 So how does this fit in there?
74. 00:03:37 And for people to put money behind the show really means a lot--
75. 00:03:42 I'm speaking for you, Joe-- but it really means a lot to both you and I.
76. 00:03:45 And so I want to say thank you to everyone who did that.
77. 00:03:49 Thank you to everybody else who listens to the show and left a review.
78. 00:03:52 And all the other ways that you can support the show.
79. 00:03:54 But a special thanks to the people who are willing to chip in a little bit every month
80. 00:03:59 to help keep the show going.
81. 00:04:00 That really means a lot.
82. 00:04:01 Yeah.
83. 00:04:01 I continue to be amazed by the people who have conversations with us on the club.
84. 00:04:08 And that do go through the process of leaving reviews.
85. 00:04:11 These are things that I'm not great at.
86. 00:04:12 So it always just completely surprises me whenever people start to engage with that sort of thing.
87. 00:04:20 And then support us financially even on top of that.
88. 00:04:23 So just blown away by the generosity there.
89. 00:04:26 Thank you to the listeners who continue to do that and continue to send in things like
90. 00:04:32 recommendations and interact with us on the club and on social media.
91. 00:04:36 Like it's kind of fun.
92. 00:04:36 It's kind of cool to see the connection that happens there.
93. 00:04:39 So it's a lot of fun for me to make those connections with the folks who listen on the
94. 00:04:45 other side of the microphone.
95. 00:04:47 You and I get to talk on this side of the mic all the time.
96. 00:04:49 But it's very different coming from folks on the other end of the
97. 00:04:53 on the other end of all the cords and cables and stuff.
98. 00:04:55 So thank you team.
99. 00:04:57 Yes.
100. 00:04:58 Thank you very much.
101. 00:04:58 Thank you also to everybody who has bought a bookworm shirt.
102. 00:05:02 We haven't mentioned this in a little while, but there is a Cotton Bureau campaign which
103. 00:05:06 is basically eternally open.
104. 00:05:09 So if you want to buy a bookworm shirt, you can do that.
105. 00:05:13 There's t-shirts and sweatshirts there.
106. 00:05:15 That doesn't make us a whole lot of money, but we do get a couple of bucks every time we
107. 00:05:21 get a sale through there.
108. 00:05:22 And the shirts are really nice.
109. 00:05:24 I've lost track of the number of Cotton Bureau shirts that I've bought in over the years.
110. 00:05:29 I just bought one for for drafts.
111. 00:05:31 Oh, nice.
112. 00:05:31 Which is super comfy and I love drafts.
113. 00:05:35 I use it every single day.
114. 00:05:36 So happy to support Greg Pierce, the developer.
115. 00:05:39 And so if you wanted to if you wanted to get your own bookworm shirt, you can do that.
116. 00:05:43 We'll have a link in the the show notes.
117. 00:05:45 But enough of the self promotion stuff.
118. 00:05:47 Let's get into our action items here.
119. 00:05:49 Yeah.
120. 00:05:49 And I'm just quick.
121. 00:05:50 No, I'm wearing my sweatshirt right now.
122. 00:05:52 Of course you are.
123. 00:05:54 Yep.
124. 00:05:55 Love this thing.
125. 00:05:55 It's because we're recording on a Saturday and I don't dress up on Saturdays.
126. 00:06:00 So here we are.
127. 00:06:00 That's it.
128. 00:06:01 Okay.
129. 00:06:02 Follow up.
130. 00:06:03 I am wrapping up my digital declutter today, Mike.
131. 00:06:06 Yeah.
132. 00:06:06 And I so tomorrow is Sunday.
133. 00:06:09 I don't know how this is going to go because tomorrow is kind of my first day
134. 00:06:14 like to to be done with that and slowly start inter theoretically slowly start introducing
135. 00:06:21 things.
136. 00:06:21 But it's Sunday.
137. 00:06:22 I normally don't do a whole lot with computers and stuff on Sundays.
138. 00:06:26 I'm like, okay.
139. 00:06:26 Maybe I'm just gonna make it a 31 day just to make sure it's like Monday before I come back
140. 00:06:32 into things.
141. 00:06:32 Overachiever.
142. 00:06:35 It's mostly because I don't want to just, you know, goof off on my phone whenever
143. 00:06:40 I'm coming back from like when it's after church on Sunday.
144. 00:06:44 Like I just don't want to do that.
145. 00:06:45 So.
146. 00:06:46 Yep.
147. 00:06:46 Anyway, it's been an interesting process.
148. 00:06:49 It's been fascinating to see the number of times when I would have just been spending time on my
149. 00:06:55 phone or doing things on my computer that I probably shouldn't be, you know, goofing off
150. 00:07:00 and doing research on things that don't matter.
151. 00:07:03 Like things like that.
152. 00:07:05 I've been cutting out quite a bit, but kind of a, the other half of this,
153. 00:07:11 one of my other action items was to list out leisure activities.
154. 00:07:14 And I'll drop these into the club.
155. 00:07:16 But I haven't.
156. 00:07:18 I haven't found myself reaching outside of that, but I've been, you know, pulling things from that
157. 00:07:24 list of things that I enjoy doing to try to fill some of the time that I'm now regaining.
158. 00:07:30 And I didn't realize I was regaining.
159. 00:07:31 It's been a very enlightening process.
160. 00:07:33 I know you don't like the idea of a digital declutter, but I think it would be very helpful for it.
161. 00:07:37 So.
162. 00:07:37 As somebody who works in the tech industry and heavily so, this was an enlightening experience.
163. 00:07:44 Nice.
164. 00:07:45 Well, I have a little bit of an update here.
165. 00:07:48 I've not done a digital declutter, but since we spoke last, David and I interviewed Shahid Ahmed
166. 00:07:55 for the Focused podcast because I was actually on vacation.
167. 00:08:00 And in the relay Slack channel, Shahid had mentioned that he read
168. 00:08:04 digital minimalism by Cal Newport and the general channel.
169. 00:08:08 So we started chatting and I was like, so did you do the digital declutter thing?
170. 00:08:13 Because Shahid is a video game developer.
171. 00:08:14 Right.
172. 00:08:15 And he said, yeah, I did it and I love it.
173. 00:08:19 And I went from an iPhone 10 to an iPhone SE and he eliminated all sorts of crazy stuff.
174. 00:08:26 All of his phone from it.
175. 00:08:27 We recorded that episode.
176. 00:08:29 It'll be live by the time this publishes.
177. 00:08:31 So we'll put a link in the show notes.
178. 00:08:33 It was a really cool conversation and he's moving the needle for me.
179. 00:08:41 He basically, he's a definition that I really liked of infinity pools as opposed to like the
180. 00:08:47 endless feeds.
181. 00:08:48 Because he called out that like he needed to order some screwdrivers to fix something.
182. 00:08:52 And so he went into the Amazon app and then he realized that he just kept looking at stuff on
183. 00:08:56 Amazon.
184. 00:08:56 He's like, oh, that's an infinity pool delete.
185. 00:08:59 Yeah.
186. 00:09:00 You know, those things that you don't typically think of.
187. 00:09:02 And so I have my own action items that we'll get to here in a second.
188. 00:09:07 I have not done the digital declutter, but Shahid made a very compelling case for it.
189. 00:09:12 I think you should do it.
190. 00:09:13 Just saying.
191. 00:09:15 We'll see.
192. 00:09:16 It's helpful.
193. 00:09:17 So, so yes, I am wrapping that up soon.
194. 00:09:21 Next time we record.
195. 00:09:22 I may have some, you know, some interesting feedback on that.
196. 00:09:26 The only other action item I had here was to experiment with the concept of building a
197. 00:09:30 plugin for discourse forums that removes the functionality to like posts in their entirety.
198. 00:09:38 Decided against this.
199. 00:09:40 Mostly because I have no market for it.
200. 00:09:43 Yeah.
201. 00:09:44 And it would be a fairly significant amount of work.
202. 00:09:48 Sure.
203. 00:09:49 So research complete answer is no.
204. 00:09:52 If someone wants to sponsor it, it'll become a yes.
205. 00:09:54 However, Joe will not be sponsoring that out of his own foot.
206. 00:09:57 So here we are.
207. 00:09:59 All right.
208. 00:10:00 So I've got four different action items.
209. 00:10:04 The first one is to list the benefits that I get from the platforms that I use.
210. 00:10:10 And then the second one kind of related to that is to delete all social media off of my phone.
211. 00:10:16 So I did this and making the list really was the thing that got me to keep Instagram off of my
212. 00:10:25 phone.
213. 00:10:25 Instagram is one of those things that like I'll delete it and then I'll end up re-installing it
214. 00:10:30 because I like Instagram.
215. 00:10:33 It seems friendlier than a lot of the other social media platforms that are out there.
216. 00:10:38 Yeah.
217. 00:10:38 But it's also iPhone or mobile only.
218. 00:10:41 So you can't run it except in a stupid looking blown up window.
219. 00:10:46 On your iPad.
220. 00:10:47 So that's the thing that's always made it not be gone for long on my phone before.
221. 00:10:54 But recognizing that I really don't get a whole lot out of Instagram,
222. 00:10:58 that's one of those infinity pools or endless feeds that typically I just end up looking at
223. 00:11:02 stuff instead of posting things.
224. 00:11:04 Right.
225. 00:11:04 So yeah, Twitter is off of my phone.
226. 00:11:07 Instagram is off of my phone.
227. 00:11:08 I still check Twitter on my iPad, but having it on my iPad instead of my phone has kind of
228. 00:11:13 transformed the way that I use it. So instead of pulling it out to check it periodically,
229. 00:11:17 I basically end up looking at it once or twice a day.
230. 00:11:21 And it does make things a little bit more inconvenient, which is why I think I forgot.
231. 00:11:27 As I'm talking right now, I realize I forgot to tweet that I published the episode yesterday
232. 00:11:32 because I normally would just pull out my phone and do that.
233. 00:11:36 Yeah.
234. 00:11:36 And I don't have that anymore.
235. 00:11:38 So I kind of have to create new muscle memory there, have to get my iPad out of my bag
236. 00:11:43 if I'm going to do that.
237. 00:11:44 But sure.
238. 00:11:45 But yeah, it's been been positive.
239. 00:11:48 A miniature version of all the digital declutter benefits that you were mentioning.
240. 00:11:51 I'm sure you're saying like, just go all in with this because it's this time's,
241. 00:11:55 you know, whatever exponential, but.
242. 00:11:57 Yep.
243. 00:11:58 Because that's just one small aspect of it.
244. 00:12:00 Yep.
245. 00:12:01 Good start though.
246. 00:12:02 Yep.
247. 00:12:03 I also have one here.
248. 00:12:04 Never click like again.
249. 00:12:05 I did this once.
250. 00:12:07 And as soon as I did it, I'm like, dang it.
251. 00:12:09 Ah, that's what I would never do this.
252. 00:12:11 I would never do this.
253. 00:12:12 I would never do this.
254. 00:12:14 Yeah.
255. 00:12:14 But I think like, I think the, the action item has served its purpose where it's broken
256. 00:12:20 the habit of doing that sort of thing.
257. 00:12:22 So literally I have done it once.
258. 00:12:25 And when I did it, like I said, I had that immediate reaction like,
259. 00:12:28 ah, I said I was never going to do this again.
260. 00:12:30 And then I just left it.
261. 00:12:33 I didn't unlike it, whatever.
262. 00:12:35 Yeah.
263. 00:12:35 So I guess my question there is, so you're not liking things.
264. 00:12:38 Have you replaced that like the sentiment intention there?
265. 00:12:43 Like what you intended to say by liking something?
266. 00:12:45 Did you replace it with like a post and reply to a phone call?
267. 00:12:50 Like did you replace it with something?
268. 00:12:51 Or did you just skip by that altogether?
269. 00:12:54 Well, not necessarily.
270. 00:12:55 I mentioned in the last episode that I do do that occasionally with stuff that friends will post.
271. 00:13:02 But I found that the like specifically for me was triggered by Instagram.
272. 00:13:08 So by removing Instagram, I have basically removed the temptation to hit the like button.
273. 00:13:13 Sure.
274. 00:13:13 Interesting.
275. 00:13:15 I just, I don't know.
276. 00:13:16 Like it seems more natural to say, yeah, I like this picture rather than to leave a comment
277. 00:13:22 on Instagram.
278. 00:13:23 Instagram comments, I'm sure it works the same way as every other social media platform,
279. 00:13:28 whatever, but it just feels weird when you leave them.
280. 00:13:30 Like, I'm not sure if this person's actually going to see this.
281. 00:13:33 Yeah.
282. 00:13:34 So that was something that I recognized that's just been ingrained in me that I hit the little
283. 00:13:40 hard icon.
284. 00:13:41 And now that Instagram is not there, I don't really do that.
285. 00:13:44 So that was by the way, though, the one time that I hit it was before Instagram was permanently
286. 00:13:49 going off my phone.
287. 00:13:50 That's kind of the thing that got me to go along with it for sure.
288. 00:13:53 Okay, seriously, this is the thing that's causing this other action item to fail.
289. 00:13:58 Yeah.
290. 00:13:58 This is gotta go.
291. 00:13:58 It's interesting how probably all of your action items here
292. 00:14:04 can all be summed up to some degree with Instagram.
293. 00:14:08 Like yeah, fighting Instagram.
294. 00:14:11 Interesting.
295. 00:14:12 Well, not the last one.
296. 00:14:13 The last one was figure out my own own low information diet as Cal put it.
297. 00:14:19 And I really like this idea.
298. 00:14:20 I have not stumbled onto what exactly this looks like for me yet.
299. 00:14:24 I was hoping that Apple News Plus would fit this bill because I would look at the Wall Street
300. 00:14:31 Journal and probably nothing else except that they don't give you the full Wall Street Journal.
301. 00:14:36 And there's a whole bunch of other stuff that they're trying to get you to look at instead.
302. 00:14:40 Right.
303. 00:14:40 Just the way that it's laid out, I didn't like it at all.
304. 00:14:42 You can't just go read like today's episode of the Wall Street Journal.
305. 00:14:46 It presents all the information in that endless feed type format,
306. 00:14:50 which completely made it a non-starter for me,
307. 00:14:54 even though they've got a whole bunch of other magazines as I was looking through them.
308. 00:14:57 I'm like, well, this one looks cool.
309. 00:14:59 That one I would read occasionally.
310. 00:15:00 And then I'm like, wait a minute.
311. 00:15:01 This isn't stuff that I'm reading right now.
312. 00:15:03 I had no desire to read this stuff before I looked at it.
313. 00:15:06 Like why would I create more information for myself to consume?
314. 00:15:10 So I signed up for they give you like a free month after the to check it out.
315. 00:15:17 I signed up for it, realized the Wall Street Journal wasn't there in any navigatable form
316. 00:15:22 and instantly unsubscribed.
317. 00:15:25 Yeah.
318. 00:15:25 So the same day, and I know that once you unsubscribe, your access is turned off.
319. 00:15:31 So people will say, oh, just set a task or an alarm, whatever, to unsubscribe before the month is up.
320. 00:15:35 And I was like, nope, not even going to go there.
321. 00:15:37 Right.
322. 00:15:37 Just going to get rid of this.
323. 00:15:38 So I still had to figure out what my low information diet looks like,
324. 00:15:42 though when you just have RSS to stay on top of, at least the way my RSS is set up,
325. 00:15:48 it's a lot more manageable than trying to keep up with that, plus the Twitter feeds,
326. 00:15:52 plus Instagram, all the other things.
327. 00:15:54 Keep it simple.
328. 00:15:55 Yeah.
329. 00:15:56 Yep.
330. 00:15:56 So I still want to go through and call a bunch of things out, curate it,
331. 00:16:00 because I do see a lot of like repeat stories and stuff like that.
332. 00:16:05 I recognize because I follow, you know, John Gruber and Federico Vitticci and Steven Hackett
333. 00:16:10 and Jason Snow and all these people who are basically saying the same thing.
334. 00:16:14 And then when somebody has a really good article, they all link to it anyway.
335. 00:16:17 Right.
336. 00:16:17 Right.
337. 00:16:18 Right.
338. 00:16:18 So that is the next step that I haven't finished yet.
339. 00:16:21 Fair enough.
340. 00:16:21 Well, good luck with that.
341. 00:16:23 I don't think the news thing is going to cut it.
342. 00:16:26 I don't have any interest in it because there's so much stuff that's in that that I don't want
343. 00:16:30 to read or won't read.
344. 00:16:33 So yeah, not worth it.
345. 00:16:35 But I also confession, I get the paper version of the Wall Street Journal.
346. 00:16:39 So that's where I get most of mine.
347. 00:16:42 Well, maybe that's what I got to do, but it's so expensive.
348. 00:16:48 Yeah.
349. 00:16:48 I've been so close to subscribing a bunch of times because I do like the information
350. 00:16:53 that is in the Wall Street Journal.
351. 00:16:55 And if I were to just read that every day, I feel like I would be
352. 00:16:58 very well informed of the things that I want to keep up with
353. 00:17:02 and wouldn't necessarily be made sad by all the political commenting.
354. 00:17:06 Right.
355. 00:17:07 So it's kind of the ideal source for these things, but it is so dang expensive, even for just
356. 00:17:13 the digital one.
357. 00:17:14 So when Apple News was launched in $10 a month and it includes Wall Street Journal,
358. 00:17:19 I got to check this out because that's like half of just the discounted
359. 00:17:23 digital subscription.
360. 00:17:24 Right.
361. 00:17:24 But you're still talking about $120 a year.
362. 00:17:26 Yeah.
363. 00:17:27 Yeah.
364. 00:17:28 Well, I think the digital subscription was like $38 a month or something after the initial
365. 00:17:33 period goes off.
366. 00:17:34 Sure.
367. 00:17:34 $38 a month for digital.
368. 00:17:36 Give me a break.
369. 00:17:37 And then we talked about that in one of those books that we covered.
370. 00:17:40 Which one was that?
371. 00:17:41 Was that the predictably irrational that used that example from the economist?
372. 00:17:46 Yep.
373. 00:17:47 Yep.
374. 00:17:47 Yep.
375. 00:17:47 Yep.
376. 00:17:48 Well, yes.
377. 00:17:51 All of these action items come from Digital Minimalism by Cal Newport.
378. 00:17:56 And a couple of books that Cal talked about in Digital Minimalism, one of which the one you
379. 00:18:03 just mentioned, predictably irrational by Dan O'Reilly.
380. 00:18:07 But Dan O'Reilly actually wrote a quote for the one we're going to go through today,
381. 00:18:12 Drunk Tank Pink, which was also mentioned in Digital Minimalism.
382. 00:18:15 Dan O'Reilly wrote, "Alter's book will change the way you look at our world."
383. 00:18:21 I think it's a fair assessment having read this.
384. 00:18:23 So Drunk Tank Pink by Adam Alter.
385. 00:18:26 And he's also the author of another book called Irresistible.
386. 00:18:31 But the tagline on this one today is Drunk Tank Pink and other unexpected forces that shape
387. 00:18:39 how we think, feel, and behave.
388. 00:18:41 And Mike and I were talking a little bit before we hit the little red record button.
389. 00:18:46 And this might be an interesting book to go through because it's super fast-paced.
390. 00:18:52 There's a lot of little tiny stories that are just one after another, tons and tons of research.
391. 00:18:57 Mainly the reason I picked it was because I thought the title was really cool.
392. 00:19:03 Because like Drunk Tank Pink, what?
393. 00:19:07 So such a weird title.
394. 00:19:10 As soon as I read the story about it, it made perfect sense.
395. 00:19:12 But it was just fascinating to me.
396. 00:19:16 But this book basically goes through a lot of different aspects of our daily life.
397. 00:19:24 And then tries to explain, and successfully so, in many cases,
398. 00:19:28 tries to explain why they impact us the way they do.
399. 00:19:31 Why does the color pink affect us a certain way?
400. 00:19:36 Why does this color do this?
401. 00:19:38 Why does this symbol do that?
402. 00:19:40 When you're around other people, this happens.
403. 00:19:42 Just a lot of that stuff.
404. 00:19:44 I just found it very fascinating.
405. 00:19:46 So I think this will be an interesting book to go through today.
406. 00:19:48 Yeah, side note, you mentioned that Dan O'Reilly had the quote on the back.
407. 00:19:56 And I noticed that when I was about halfway through this book,
408. 00:20:00 and I was like, "Ah, that explains a lot."
409. 00:20:04 Yep.
410. 00:20:07 So we'll get into the specifics here.
411. 00:20:10 But I guess spoiler alert, just like, predictably irrational, I believe,
412. 00:20:15 neither of us have action items associated with this.
413. 00:20:18 Yes.
414. 00:20:18 This is a lot of information and kind of bugs me from a bookworm perspective,
415. 00:20:23 because it's like, "Okay, I know this stuff, but what's the takeaway here?
416. 00:20:28 Like, how am I going to do anything with what I just invested with reading this?"
417. 00:20:34 And there probably is some stuff that's going to stick with me,
418. 00:20:37 and I'll recognize like, "Hey, this is happening and shaping my interpretation of these events that
419. 00:20:43 are happening in front of me, but I am not optimistic that this is going to have any sort of long-term
420. 00:20:52 effect on the way that I live with my life."
421. 00:20:55 Yeah.
422. 00:20:55 Which is kind of frustrating, to be honest.
423. 00:20:58 Yeah, this is one of these books that it's not really geared towards driving you to do something
424. 00:21:07 about it, not necessarily.
425. 00:21:09 He does call something out in like the last paragraph of the book, or maybe was it the last sentence,
426. 00:21:15 that I kind of wish he had, you know, expanded on a little bit more.
427. 00:21:21 Let me see if I can get this.
428. 00:21:24 Yeah, right here.
429. 00:21:25 So let me just read this last little bit to you.
430. 00:21:27 So no matter where you go, drunk tank, pink, and other cues will follow.
431. 00:21:33 And having read this book, you'll be in a much better place to identify them,
432. 00:21:36 recognize how they'll affect you, and harness to overcome them to maximize your health, wisdom,
433. 00:21:41 wealth, and well-being.
434. 00:21:43 And to me, you know, he's basically calling out, like, "You're going to identify these things
435. 00:21:50 because of this," but it doesn't even tell you what to do about it, which I'm not sure was his
436. 00:21:55 intent.
437. 00:21:55 No.
438. 00:21:56 So I have a hard time faulting him for that.
439. 00:22:00 I think that has to do more with a personality of, or a preference for the intent of the book.
440. 00:22:06 Which his did not align with what we normally request of authors.
441. 00:22:11 So with that, like, I have a hard time faulting him for it, but at the same time, I'm with you.
442. 00:22:16 I was like, "Yes, I don't have any action items here."
443. 00:22:18 But I have a lot of things that I'm aware of that I normally wasn't, or previously wasn't,
444. 00:22:25 aware of.
445. 00:22:25 So in that regard, I feel like I have a lot.
446. 00:22:28 But as far as what do you physically do with it?
447. 00:22:31 Maybe talk to people about it?
448. 00:22:34 I don't know.
449. 00:22:34 What's about it?
450. 00:22:35 Right.
451. 00:22:36 Well, the other piece to this, and we'll get into some of the specifics here, but a lot of this stuff,
452. 00:22:43 I feel like, was fairly common sense.
453. 00:22:47 Like, look people in the eyes, sort of a thing.
454. 00:22:52 And that stuff, it's kind of like, "Well, okay, do I really need a reminder for that sort of thing?"
455. 00:23:00 The rest of this stuff that was new, I feel like there's no way I'm going to
456. 00:23:07 recall that in a moment's notice when I need it, other than if I were to go back and look through
457. 00:23:13 this outline.
458. 00:23:14 The most powerful story I thought in the whole book was that first section about
459. 00:23:19 "Drunk Take Pink."
460. 00:23:21 And then from there, I feel like it went downhill.
461. 00:23:25 Yeah.
462. 00:23:27 So, "Drunk Take Pink" is a really cool idea. Let's start there.
463. 00:23:31 You want to explain this?
464. 00:23:32 Yeah. So "Drunk Tank Pink," this is a part of what was it, the prologue?
465. 00:23:37 I think so.
466. 00:23:38 I think it was.
467. 00:23:39 Yeah.
468. 00:23:40 So there was an experiment done when was this.
469. 00:23:45 It was a paper that came out in 1979.
470. 00:23:48 And the author of that paper was Professor Alexander Shoss.
471. 00:23:53 And it was a simple experiment that they did.
472. 00:23:56 There was about 150 men that were a part of it.
473. 00:24:00 They took two large pieces of colored cardboard in a lab.
474. 00:24:05 And they had people come in and they had some men stare at these two colors of cardboard.
475. 00:24:13 One was blue.
476. 00:24:14 It was like a deep blue color.
477. 00:24:16 The other, it was bright pink.
478. 00:24:18 So for half of the men in the experiment, they stared at the blue color.
479. 00:24:23 For the other half, they stared at the pink color.
480. 00:24:26 After a minute of this, the researcher asked the men to put their arms straight out in front of them.
481. 00:24:34 And he would put pressure down on their arms just to see what kind of strength they had in that.
482. 00:24:41 So once he had done that, and then after they'd recovered their strength,
483. 00:24:46 the researcher wrote some things down and then repeated the experiment
484. 00:24:50 with them staring at the other color of the cardboard.
485. 00:24:55 The part that was interesting was that those after having stared at the pink cardboard,
486. 00:25:03 it didn't matter if you did it first or second, but they had less strength
487. 00:25:09 after staring at the pink as opposed to the blue.
488. 00:25:16 It was just weird to me.
489. 00:25:17 All you're doing is looking at a color.
490. 00:25:20 Why does your strength change because you're looking at a color?
491. 00:25:23 But this is apparently something that was repeatable.
492. 00:25:27 They did do it at a second experiment.
493. 00:25:30 Only they used some more accurate ways of measuring the strength and confirmed it.
494. 00:25:34 And this ended up being a thing that some different organizations
495. 00:25:40 read the study, decided to do some larger scale experiments and started to paint like prison cells
496. 00:25:48 pink.
497. 00:25:48 You know, that's where some of the drunk tank pink name comes from.
498. 00:25:53 Throw in somebody in the drunk tank, well paint the drunk tank pink,
499. 00:25:56 and it settles people down.
500. 00:25:59 It's so much so that some police stations when they did this were reporting that incidents of
501. 00:26:06 violence were ceasing altogether or dropping very significantly.
502. 00:26:12 All because they painted the cell pink, thus drunk tank pink.
503. 00:26:18 I thought this was a fascinating story.
504. 00:26:19 Yeah.
505. 00:26:20 And it kind of made me stop like whoa, hold up, what's going on here.
506. 00:26:24 So it's kind of an interesting one.
507. 00:26:26 Yeah, like I said, this is the strongest story in the entire book, in my opinion.
508. 00:26:32 But just to add a few more details to what you were sharing, one of the things that they did
509. 00:26:38 after the initial study, there were two officers at the US Naval Correctional Center in Seattle.
510. 00:26:43 I believe they were Gene Baker and Ron Miller, and they painted one of their cells this pink color,
511. 00:26:49 and that is that pacified new inmates where no violent incidents had occurred in the seven-month
512. 00:26:55 trial period.
513. 00:26:56 You kind of alluded to that.
514. 00:26:58 And then from there, the smaller jails, they started throwing the violent drunks in these
515. 00:27:02 pink painted cells, and that's where they got the name drunk tank pink.
516. 00:27:05 But they saw the application of this in a lot of other places as well.
517. 00:27:10 They mentioned that United Way employees would receive two to three times the amount of donations
518. 00:27:17 when they wore pink.
519. 00:27:18 And there were a couple of universities, University of Colorado and the University of Iowa,
520. 00:27:23 that painted visitor locker rooms pink to try to pacify their opponents until
521. 00:27:28 the conferences said, "No, you can't do that."
522. 00:27:31 Yeah, I thought that was genius.
523. 00:27:33 That is brilliant.
524. 00:27:35 As soon as I heard that story, I'm like, "Oh man, that makes so much sense.
525. 00:27:40 I can't believe everybody didn't try to do that."
526. 00:27:42 Right.
527. 00:27:43 But yeah, this story was awesome.
528. 00:27:46 And then from there, I guess I've been trying to figure out for a while why I liked this story
529. 00:27:53 so much and not so much a lot of the other stories that they mentioned.
530. 00:27:56 I feel like it has to do with the amount of impact that it had.
531. 00:28:03 Because they went from having a whole bunch of violent incidents to zero violent
532. 00:28:08 incidents during this seven month trial period I mentioned at the US Naval Correctional Center in
533. 00:28:12 Seattle.
534. 00:28:13 So that's pretty drastic.
535. 00:28:14 And the rest of them, there's usually percentage statistics that go along with them.
536. 00:28:21 Like if you do this, then you see a 10% increase, which is obviously a lot.
537. 00:28:24 And I'm just like, "No, it's not."
538. 00:28:26 It feels a lot less impactful.
539. 00:28:30 And I think it has a lot to do with just the scope of the change that was
540. 00:28:35 implemented from the concepts that he's talking about.
541. 00:28:38 And this one is so strong that everything else feels pretty weak by comparison.
542. 00:28:43 Yeah, I think I would agree with you that this particular story was one that stood out to me
543. 00:28:49 way more than any of the others.
544. 00:28:51 So much so that, and we'll get into the outline here, there's a lot, a lot of stories here,
545. 00:28:56 but not a lot of them stood out to me.
546. 00:28:58 Having just finished reading this very recently, I don't have a lot of the stories and the studies
547. 00:29:05 that I could just readily recall and repeat to you.
548. 00:29:09 There's not a lot of those, partially because it was such a huge influx of them.
549. 00:29:12 But I think this is my speculation.
550. 00:29:17 I think that particular story struck me similar to the way it did you, partially because
551. 00:29:22 it was the first story we read that involved things that we normally think of that don't
552. 00:29:30 have any impact on us, but actually have a big impact on us.
553. 00:29:33 Yep.
554. 00:29:34 Like that seemed like this story broke that barrier when none of the rest of the stories did,
555. 00:29:40 because that had already been broken down.
556. 00:29:43 So maybe that's why it had that impact.
557. 00:29:45 It could also be that I'm speculating that just because now I don't trust anything because of this
558. 00:29:50 book.
559. 00:29:50 So everybody's trying to impose something on me now.
560. 00:29:55 So, well, let's get into some of these other stories, and I feel like as we compare them
561. 00:30:01 that the listeners can decide for themselves, but I feel like that the proof is in the pudding here.
562. 00:30:07 So after this introduction section, which talks about drunk tank pink,
563. 00:30:13 the rest of the book is broken into three different sections.
564. 00:30:16 Hey, three parts.
565. 00:30:16 Whoa, never seen that before.
566. 00:30:18 Part one is the world within us.
567. 00:30:20 Part two is the world between us, and part three is the world around us.
568. 00:30:26 And each one of these sections has three different chapters.
569. 00:30:30 So the first section, the world within us, let's start here.
570. 00:30:35 There's three chapters here, which talk about names, labels, and symbols.
571. 00:30:41 Now, in the names section, when I started this chapter, I was really looking forward to this,
572. 00:30:45 because I personally believe based on my belief system, that names are very important.
573. 00:30:54 And if you study Christianity and Judaism, the names that they gave people when they were born,
574. 00:31:00 that was kind of like a proclamation of who they were going to be.
575. 00:31:04 Okay.
576. 00:31:05 And my wife and I kind of believe that as well.
577. 00:31:07 So the beginning of this chapter, the chapter is called names,
578. 00:31:11 the birth of nominative determinism.
579. 00:31:13 I thought this was going to be totally in line with like the other stuff that I've
580. 00:31:18 read and the importance of names and stuff like that.
581. 00:31:20 But that's not really what you find here.
582. 00:31:23 You find a story about this guy who was born to Vietchislav and Marina,
583. 00:31:28 and his name is ready for this.
584. 00:31:31 Yeah, good luck.
585. 00:31:31 All right.
586. 00:31:32 Right. B-O-H-D-V-F-260602.
587. 00:31:38 And it stands for biological object human descendant of Veronus,
588. 00:31:43 and I don't even know how to pronounce these.
589. 00:31:45 V-O-R-O-N-I-S and F-R-O-L-O-V-A-S, which I believe were the last names of the parents.
590. 00:31:52 Born on June 26, 2002.
591. 00:31:54 What in the world?
592. 00:31:59 And the reason they give behind this is that they wanted to escape the implicit
593. 00:32:03 meaning of the name that they would give their son on page nine.
594. 00:32:05 They have a quote that says, "This will make life easier.
595. 00:32:07 My son will be void of his father's legacy."
596. 00:32:10 But I have so many issues with this in particular.
597. 00:32:16 But even with that, like you still have to refer to him as something.
598. 00:32:20 Exactly.
599. 00:32:21 And you're not going to say, "Hey, B-O-H-D-V-F-260260202."
600. 00:32:26 Whatever it is.
601. 00:32:27 You're not going to yell at your kid that way.
602. 00:32:29 It's just not going to happen.
603. 00:32:31 So they call him "Botch."
604. 00:32:32 When I saw him, wait, is that because you botched his name?
605. 00:32:37 Like, is that why you did that?
606. 00:32:39 But yeah, I thought this was just a challenge.
607. 00:32:43 Well, here's a crazy idea.
608. 00:32:44 How about you take ownership of the legacy that you're going to leave your son and make it a good one?
609. 00:32:50 Sure.
610. 00:32:52 Yeah.
611. 00:32:53 That's my goal.
612. 00:32:55 Like, why this just bothers me?
613. 00:32:59 Why do we assume that they should not want to be associated with anything that their parents did?
614. 00:33:09 I feel like with some situations, and they share a little bit of the backstory,
615. 00:33:15 I believe that this guy's dad was not something that he was proud of, basically.
616. 00:33:24 He wanted to move away from that, but you don't have to change your name in order to say,
617. 00:33:31 the buck stops here.
618. 00:33:33 You can make choices and chart your own course without resorting to naming your kids
619. 00:33:40 a bunch of random numbers and letters.
620. 00:33:42 But this is just the beginning of the weirdness in this chapter because the other story,
621. 00:33:49 which again, like this is the type of thing he uses to make his points,
622. 00:33:52 and I was just scratching my head like, "Huh?"
623. 00:33:55 He said a 1979 study found that 38% of the top 200 brand names began with a K or a C sound.
624. 00:34:04 Okay, I guess maybe that's interesting.
625. 00:34:08 And 93% had the K sound somewhere in their names.
626. 00:34:11 So kind of the connection that he's making here is the power of the K sound and the power of the
627. 00:34:18 brand. And I was like, "Huh?"
628. 00:34:21 Like, just because you named something, and just as an example, a local company here at Kimberly
629. 00:34:29 Clark, that totally fits his description here. Or maybe it's just an easy name to say, and that's
630. 00:34:34 what people think of when they need to go by diapers.
631. 00:34:37 And seriously, we don't need to look too much into this stuff, I think.
632. 00:34:41 And I feel like we're trying to make all these connections that aren't really there with a lot
633. 00:34:46 of these stories that he tells.
634. 00:34:47 So I don't know about that particular piece of it, but one, the big beef I had with the whole book,
635. 00:34:56 okay? He gives study after study after study.
636. 00:34:59 No problem with that. He gives tons and tons of examples, shows how correlations with things like
637. 00:35:06 a cuss sound in a name. Like, I run a business called Pro Course, so we have that in our name.
638. 00:35:12 Which you obviously picked that because you wanted your brand to be successful, right?
639. 00:35:16 I only picked it because we work on discourse. So I was trying to do professional discourse.
640. 00:35:22 So Pro Course, that's why that's where it came from. I don't think I've ever said that publicly.
641. 00:35:28 That's where it came from.
642. 00:35:28 So if you would have called it Pro Software, you would be at least 20% less successful than you
643. 00:35:33 are right now. Totally. Completely. That's exactly the way it would work.
644. 00:35:38 My beef with all of the studies and everything is that a lot of times he would refer to,
645. 00:35:46 we had 40 people come in and do this. Or we had 50 people. We had 25 people. We took a small
646. 00:35:52 sample of this class. That's a real, like, I'm a contract data analyst right now.
647. 00:35:59 Data matters to me. And those are tiny, tiny numbers.
648. 00:36:06 Yes.
649. 00:36:06 So if I have a big beef, it's like what you're talking about here to some degree. It's that
650. 00:36:13 they are making some pretty big arching claims when the pool and the information and the research
651. 00:36:21 and the science behind it is kind of flaky to me.
652. 00:36:26 Small sample sizes and small findings. If you've got 40 people and you see an 8% increase,
653. 00:36:35 you cannot make a connection there. There's not enough there.
654. 00:36:38 Yeah. I think it would, like, the 8% piece, I'm not sure I would say that because it depends
655. 00:36:44 on what you're talking about. Sometimes 8% is huge. Sometimes it's tiny. That's just my take on it.
656. 00:36:51 I think it depends on what we're talking about. But with all of the studies, sometimes they would
657. 00:36:58 talk about there were 15,000 people a part of this or they reviewed 100,000 data points from the
658. 00:37:05 MLB. They would refer to that like those I get. But when you're talking about, we looked at the
659. 00:37:12 last 15 games of this sports team. Well, that's one season. That season may have been weird.
660. 00:37:19 So I had a hard time with some of that. I don't think I would argue that they saw the changes
661. 00:37:26 or saw the differences. Those are statistical differences that they're talking about.
662. 00:37:31 So yes, given that particular study, I would agree that that change or that thing was there.
663. 00:37:37 Do the names matter? Well, in the sample they chose. Yeah. Does the cuss sound make a difference
664. 00:37:45 and help companies be successful? Maybe? Possibly. I'll at least think about it next time.
665. 00:37:54 Maybe that's a thing that's there. But I feel like you're going to do with that.
666. 00:37:59 Yeah. Maybe I'll pay attention to it when I name things in the future, possibly.
667. 00:38:04 Just because, and I've seen this a number of times, they run across companies that don't have a
668. 00:38:09 hard continent like that in their name. And they're kind of harder names to say and make sure that
669. 00:38:16 you're saying them clearly. So something like Pro Course, it's very clear what we're talking about.
670. 00:38:21 There's not really any piece of that that's hard to grasp. So I don't know. I don't know how I feel
671. 00:38:28 about some of that, Mike. There's definitely pieces of it that I'm like,
672. 00:38:31 maybe that's what you're getting at, but you're kind of grasping at straws in some cases.
673. 00:38:35 Well, just to give you another example, going into the next chapter on labels and the impact that
674. 00:38:43 this had on me, so he's sharing all of these numbers from all of these different studies.
675. 00:38:47 I basically took notes on the studies and stopped writing down the numbers because I thought they
676. 00:38:51 were meaningless. Oh, so yeah. He mentions the Quardy, for example. And I know you're a Devorak fan.
677. 00:38:57 Yep. Right. So Quardy is the keyboard layout that is predominant in probably every keyboard that
678. 00:39:03 you would see that's not custom. And it was originally created to keep the typewriters from
679. 00:39:09 jamming. So they spaced out the keys that people use most frequently so they didn't come from the
680. 00:39:14 same section of the typewriter and didn't jam. But he talks about the layout for this and
681. 00:39:22 how people prefer right-handed words. And I was like, what? So those would be words that have
682. 00:39:31 the letters on the right side of the keyboard. So U-I-O-J-K-L-M-N-P.
683. 00:39:38 Yeah, I was just like, wait, what are those? Because I'm looking down at my keyboard. I was like,
684. 00:39:42 wait, those letters aren't there. What's on the-- Where's-- I don't have a Quardy keyboard in front of me.
685. 00:39:46 Well, yeah, I've got a Quardy keyboard. So I have a frame of reference. But when he said that, I was
686. 00:39:52 like, that's garbage. There's no way I prefer right-handed words. If anything, you're talking about the
687. 00:40:00 hard consonant sounds, like the cuff from the C or even the Quardy. That's with a Q.
688. 00:40:07 So people should prefer the left-handed words. And kind of the connection that he made is like,
689. 00:40:13 well, most people are right-handed. So they like those words that they type with the right hand
690. 00:40:15 better kind of subconsciously. And I was like, number one, if this is true, there is absolutely
691. 00:40:20 no application that is going to come from this. And number two, I don't think it is true.
692. 00:40:24 Based on your small sample sizes. That particular one, I thought was kind of odd because
693. 00:40:34 I type Dvorak. So that doesn't make any sense. But my other question to him that I was asking,
694. 00:40:41 but he didn't answer. Though I have been a long time ago, I had an action item to make contact or
695. 00:40:47 email, send a letter or something to the authors. I've been doing that for a while, by the way.
696. 00:40:52 So I have that as a particular point that I wanted to email Adam about. Because I wondered if
697. 00:40:59 it wasn't necessarily that people are right-handed. Therefore, they prefer right-handed words as much
698. 00:41:04 as they're more dominant in their right hand. So it's easier to type with their right hand.
699. 00:41:09 So it wasn't a matter of preference for words as much as just a muscle memory on that particular
700. 00:41:15 hand is more sophisticated, maybe. I don't know. I don't know.
701. 00:41:19 People are so bad at typing that they just go to the path of least resistance.
702. 00:41:23 That's kind of what your theory is.
703. 00:41:26 Yep. It's just easier that way. But I will say Dvorak is superior.
704. 00:41:33 Yeah. Well, maybe that's going to be an action item for me at some point just to give that a shot,
705. 00:41:40 but it is not going to be this day.
706. 00:41:41 All right. So side note, if you ever do that, you have to commit and you're just going to have
707. 00:41:48 to deal with it for about a year. I'm going to try this for a couple of weeks decision.
708. 00:41:54 Like you got to try this for nine to 12 months before you're going to be able to make a decision
709. 00:41:59 one way or the other. That's not a short term experiment.
710. 00:42:03 So we'll stick a pin in that one.
711. 00:42:05 Surprise. It's worth pinning.
712. 00:42:07 Yeah. Well, I'm just because I know it's going to come up again.
713. 00:42:12 I have been curious about that. I did a keyboard experiment at one point for when I was working
714. 00:42:18 with Asian efficiency with a blank keyboard. The thought process being that no key markings
715. 00:42:27 would force me to become a touch typist and my words per minute would go up. And that is,
716. 00:42:31 in fact, what had happened because I charted my progress over a series of like three weeks.
717. 00:42:36 But yeah, I'm not currently conducting experiments on myself. So fair enough.
718. 00:42:43 There were a couple interesting sections in this chapter, though. I thought there was a section
719. 00:42:48 on colors and labels and they mentioned that Russians have separate words for light blue and
720. 00:42:53 dark blue. Oh, it's fast. That actually makes it easier for them to distinguish between things
721. 00:42:58 in a test because they have different labels attached to them. I thought that was really
722. 00:43:02 interesting. And then he kind of applies that to how labels can be arbitrary going into like
723. 00:43:08 race and skin color. He mentions Tiger Woods told Oprah one time that he was
724. 00:43:15 "cablin Asian" which was interesting. It's a combination of Caucasian, Black, Indian, and Asian.
725. 00:43:22 And there was a story in here about Jane Elliott's third grade classroom, which I thought was
726. 00:43:29 really interesting because she had a student ask her why Martin Luther King Jr. had gotten shot.
727. 00:43:36 So she did this experiment so everyone in the class could feel discrimination.
728. 00:43:42 What she did is she told the blue-eyed students that they were superior to the brown-eyed students
729. 00:43:46 and they had to wear paper armbands and they couldn't drink from certain water fountains.
730. 00:43:51 And then those groups acted according to the position that they were given. And then on the
731. 00:43:56 following Monday she had them reverse the roles, told the brown-eyed students that they were superior
732. 00:43:59 to the blue-eyed students. By the time the experiment was over, both sides felt terrible and they were
733. 00:44:04 hugging and demonstrating about this experiment. And basically nobody wanted to ever have just
734. 00:44:11 have that discrimination applied to them or come from them ever again.
735. 00:44:15 That was a really cool experiment. I did too. It's like that's interesting. Like, huh, why is that?
736. 00:44:23 That's kind of an odd thing. To me it was kind of an odd thing to choose eye color.
737. 00:44:28 Because my immediate thing was to pick something like hair color just because it's more prominent
738. 00:44:33 and easier to see. But regardless, the experiment stands and I think the kids definitely got the
739. 00:44:40 point from the way it sounds. Yeah, definitely. There was another study in this section.
740. 00:44:46 I believe it was an older one like 1964 where they applied the label of bloomer at random to kids.
741. 00:44:54 And then the people who got that label, their IQ actually increased and they outperformed their
742. 00:45:01 peers simply because they had gotten this label of bloomer by 10 to 15 IQ points.
743. 00:45:06 Which is interesting because IQ is one of those things that you typically feel like you're born
744. 00:45:12 with this. I mentioned emotional intelligence on this podcast probably way too much. But that's
745. 00:45:17 kind of one of the distinguishing factors in the emotional intelligence world is that emotional
746. 00:45:22 intelligence can be developed unlike your IQ. So it doesn't matter where you start basically,
747. 00:45:28 as long as you have a growth mindset and you're looking to improve, you can develop those skills.
748. 00:45:32 But basically, this study is saying that IQ can be impacted too simply by a label and the perspective
749. 00:45:39 that you apply to yourself. So interesting. Now, I do want to say there's one more section in this
750. 00:45:46 first part about symbols. But the names and labels piece, for whatever reason, when I finish reading
751. 00:45:54 those two sections, I tend to pause between chapters when I'm reading. And it occurred to me that
752. 00:46:01 this is something that Apple takes advantage of heavily. And I'm not sure a lot of people catch it,
753. 00:46:07 but they're very particular with the way they name things. I think everybody knows that.
754. 00:46:11 They're pretty particular with the way that they label things. And sometimes whenever they
755. 00:46:16 do those two things, they get a lot of ridicule. Like, why are you calling this the iPad Air? It
756. 00:46:22 should be the three. Like, come on. But that's really important because of the way that your mind
757. 00:46:28 thinks about it, whether you intend to think about it that way or not. Like all of the terminology
758. 00:46:33 they use at their Apple events, like think about the way that they present these things. Like,
759. 00:46:37 even when Steve Jobs did this, he's like the parent of all of that mentality. He's like,
760. 00:46:43 he would refer to things as the most elegant, you know, the revolutionary device. Like, he
761. 00:46:48 referred to things that way. And despite your arguments for or against his statement, it was
762. 00:46:55 already implanted in your brain and you had a hard time. Like, you had to actually refute it.
763. 00:46:59 Otherwise, people just accepted it, you know, cart block. So yeah, I think this is a very
764. 00:47:06 interesting part. Again, we need to cover symbols, but I couldn't help ignoring or I couldn't help
765. 00:47:11 seeing the connection that Apple takes advantage of all this. Yeah, that's interesting. I did not
766. 00:47:18 make that connection when I read it, maybe because of the phrasing of this section, the world
767. 00:47:24 within us. I don't know. I guess when I read that, it kind of felt like yeah, external factors
768. 00:47:31 haven't entered into the equation yet. But I do think you're right that marketers recognize
769. 00:47:40 these things and they use them to their advantage. Right. And it's interesting, probably not a
770. 00:47:47 conversation for right now, but where is the line there with the responsibilities that the
771. 00:47:53 companies have to call things what they are and not prey on people's, I don't know, not prejudices,
772. 00:48:00 but the way that they're wired, you know, and because you want to obviously sell more of your
773. 00:48:08 widgets and your services and stuff like that. So you want to position things correctly. But if
774. 00:48:14 you do it in a certain way where you know you're manipulating the people that you're supposedly
775. 00:48:19 serving, that's not good either. So that's a tough balancing act there for pretty much anybody who
776. 00:48:26 works on the interwebs, I think. Yeah. Right. The last piece here before we move on to the second
777. 00:48:33 part symbols, all kinds of examples that he shares here, probably the most prominent one
778. 00:48:39 was the swastika. Yep. Everybody knows what I'm talking about now. And even whenever I said that,
779. 00:48:46 you know, internally you had a reaction, usually negative, hopefully negative.
780. 00:48:52 It's interesting how he does spell out how that particular symbol did exist before World War II.
781. 00:49:00 Not mainstream, but it did exist. But the meaning behind it that became a part of that symbol post
782. 00:49:11 World War II, you know, now it's considered a symbol of hate just to have that symbol anywhere.
783. 00:49:17 It's completely taken on a different life form from what it used to be. So symbols are very,
784. 00:49:23 very important and invoke a lot of feelings and meaning behind them in the fraction of a second.
785. 00:49:31 That was something that I thought was kind of interesting because they would refer to these
786. 00:49:37 some studies where they would have someone looking at a screen and then they would
787. 00:49:41 show an image for like one or two frames, which is so fast that you really can't tell what it was.
788. 00:49:47 And yet it would have an effect on their results, like they would, you know, be mean towards another
789. 00:49:56 student or be kind to them depending on whether or not they saw or had the image of a swastika
790. 00:50:02 shown to them versus the image of a church having those two competing with each other.
791. 00:50:07 You can't even recognize what it is. How is it supposed to have an effect on you? But apparently
792. 00:50:12 it did. Did they do it enough times? I don't know. I don't know if it's just speculation, but
793. 00:50:17 I thought that was fascinating. Yeah, this is where I start to call BS.
794. 00:50:25 So I understand that symbols have meaning and based on the symbols that you show people,
795. 00:50:32 it can impact the way that you look at things around that particular symbol.
796. 00:50:39 And that was one of the studies that they did in this section on priming. They mentioned symbols
797. 00:50:45 can prepare us for particular thoughts or behaviors. The swastika is kind of associated with aggression,
798. 00:50:51 hatred, anger, and negativity. So one study they did showed that students who were exposed to the
799. 00:50:56 swastika were primed to associate a character with being immoral and to deserve extreme punishment.
800. 00:51:02 And the number that they shared here was they were 10% more likely to do this.
801. 00:51:05 And at this point, I'm like, well, duh. So the swastika is not something that you see every single
802. 00:51:14 day. Maybe if it was more normalized, people would just not be impacted by it. But if you're seeing
803. 00:51:22 a series of images and you see a picture of a, if someone were to show me a series of images,
804. 00:51:27 and all of a sudden there's a swastika there, it's kind of jarring because it's not something
805. 00:51:31 that you see every day. And those things that have that sort of shock value, they do put you
806. 00:51:37 in a certain state of mind. So obviously, everything else that you're going to be looking at after that,
807. 00:51:44 your brain is kind of on guard is like, okay, so we are looking at some crazy stuff here.
808. 00:51:50 And so you're kind of leaning that way where maybe you wouldn't be normally leaning that way.
809. 00:51:54 At least the way I'm wired, I would not normally be leaning that way. Does that make sense?
810. 00:51:58 It does to me. Yeah.
811. 00:52:00 Yeah. So the fact that the 10% more likely to assume that a character has impure motives and
812. 00:52:08 deserves punishment when they're shown a picture of a swastika that just seems natural to me.
813. 00:52:14 And honestly, 10%, this is one of those ones where it's like, you're going to use that number
814. 00:52:19 to justify your claims really. I would expect this to be like 50%.
815. 00:52:23 It's almost like so little that it's not even worth mentioning.
816. 00:52:28 Right.
817. 00:52:29 You know? And I just think that what are you going to do with this? Are you going to
818. 00:52:36 assume that everything you watch on TV is sending you subliminal messages and you got to be on
819. 00:52:41 guard against this stuff? I don't think that's any sort of solution. So you deal with this junk
820. 00:52:48 when you see it. But other than that, why worry about it? I don't know if it's so much worrying
821. 00:52:53 about it. It's just being aware of it. Just my thought. I guess. But I already know swastikas are
822. 00:53:00 bad. So why do I need to be told that swastikas are bad? Fair point.
823. 00:53:05 You know? I don't know. And then also, like he mentions that these symbols,
824. 00:53:10 they don't have any meaning until they're associated with some existing meaningful concepts.
825. 00:53:15 Okay. So if you are a child who knows nothing about World War II, Adolf Hitler,
826. 00:53:24 and Nazi Germany, and you see a swastika, are you naturally leaning that way? I'm guessing
827. 00:53:32 probably not. Okay. So for somebody who doesn't have negative associations with certain symbols,
828. 00:53:39 and I would argue the swastika probably is one that you want people to associate negative
829. 00:53:44 feelings with when you see this, this is bad. Okay, stay away from this symbol. But to a lesser
830. 00:53:51 degree, do we need to explain things in a way where it's like, Oh, you shouldn't do this because
831. 00:54:00 this is the way that it can be interpreted? Like to a certain degree, I kind of think
832. 00:54:04 for some of this stuff ignorance is bliss. I guess the Bible way to define it would be to
833. 00:54:10 the pure, all things are pure. Like, why do we have to teach all the subliminal possible messaging
834. 00:54:17 with every single symbol that we have so that we can be manipulated by them? If that makes sense.
835. 00:54:21 Or just seeing how other people are attempting to use them against you.
836. 00:54:27 That was that was maybe the piece of this that I enjoyed. Through all of these different pieces
837. 00:54:34 was that it showed me how a lot of people are trying to like specifically attempting to use
838. 00:54:42 these things against me and to influence me and to be aware of that to combat it to some degree.
839. 00:54:49 Like that's that was kind of my meant might after about a chapter or two, that was kind of the
840. 00:54:54 mindset that I took with it. Gotcha. Okay. So my next question then would be,
841. 00:55:00 why do we want to be so aware and I'll use the term worried, maybe you're not worried,
842. 00:55:08 but I feel like if you're going to be made aware of what potential impact things around you can have,
843. 00:55:14 that's kind of the logical next step is like, Oh my gosh, this stuff has been impacting me for
844. 00:55:19 so long and I didn't even realize it, right? So now I'm on the lookout for for everything.
845. 00:55:25 Why not flip this and instead of worrying or being concerned about the things that other people
846. 00:55:33 are trying to influence you with, why not just internalize your own set of symbols,
847. 00:55:40 your own values, vision, whatever, and just make that super strong so it overrides everything else.
848. 00:55:47 I totally get what you're what you're saying and that's kind of the way that this chapter is
849. 00:55:52 positioned is like all these things are around you and they're impacting you all the time,
850. 00:55:56 but that's not the real application of this in any sort of positive form, I feel.
851. 00:56:02 Like people are selfish, people are jerks, they want what's best for them. And so whenever anybody
852. 00:56:08 else is showing you symbols, you should have that reaction of like, Oh, how are they trying to
853. 00:56:12 manipulate me? Like there's the potential for that anyways. And really the only sort of beneficial
854. 00:56:17 application of this is like, okay, so what are the things that really mean a lot to you? What are
855. 00:56:22 the things that you really want to internalize and say like, this is who I am, this is what I do?
856. 00:56:27 That's a positive application of the symbols, but that's not really what he talks about at all.
857. 00:56:32 Yeah, I think my take on this, and we got to keep moving here, but my take on it is that
858. 00:56:39 I don't know that I'm trying to watch out for it to see where people are trying to influence me
859. 00:56:45 and then reject that. I'm just somebody who likes to pick up details. Like I like to pick up
860. 00:56:51 subtleties. I like to notice that sort of thing. Not for any real, I don't think for any real
861. 00:56:58 meaningful action from that as much as just my own curiosity. Maybe there's some strategic
862. 00:57:04 things that come with that just in daily life, but overall, I just like to notice things.
863. 00:57:09 If that's that's my own preference on that. I don't really know why I do that, but I do.
864. 00:57:15 Fair enough. All right, part two, the world between us.
865. 00:57:18 So this again has three different chapters. I'm not sure how much of this will go into the
866. 00:57:24 first one, chapter four, is the mere presence of other people.
867. 00:57:27 Chapter five is the characteristics of other people, the social motives. And then number six is
868. 00:57:33 the is culture, seeing objects in places through a cultural lens. The first one here,
869. 00:57:38 the mere presence of other people, it's in the eyes. If I were to sum this up in a single thought,
870. 00:57:44 it would basically be that the image of a pair of eyes, whether it is an actual pair of eyes belonging
871. 00:57:52 to another person or simply a picture of a pair of eyes, can cause you to do what's right.
872. 00:57:57 Is that fair? Yeah, which is kind of interesting because, okay, this might get deep, but
873. 00:58:09 there's a body of thought in our culture, maybe this belongs in the culture section of this,
874. 00:58:17 that states that humans are inherently good people. This directly contradicts that.
875. 00:58:25 Yeah. Because it states that people become better morally and ethically if they feel that they
876. 00:58:35 are being watched by other people, but that they are inherently more evil or more bad
877. 00:58:42 when they feel like they're in isolation on their own and no one's watching them.
878. 00:58:47 That's basically what I took away from this. So I know that a lot of people have a tendency to
879. 00:58:56 think that we're good people, we just are led to bad things. If you read this particular section,
880. 00:59:02 you can't help but see the opposite. So people are jerks and less convinced to act
881. 00:59:07 act nicely. Yep. Through manipulation or through brute force punishment? I mean,
882. 00:59:18 because there's a lot of different examples here. One of them they mentioned that people paid
883. 00:59:22 almost three times as much to the honesty box when there was a picture of a pair of eyes
884. 00:59:27 and playing with her being watched. So basically, if you bought something from the
885. 00:59:31 company cafeteria, whatever there was a box where you were supposed to put your money and if you're
886. 00:59:36 there and no one's watching you, you're tempted to just grab your thing and not put any money in
887. 00:59:40 the box. But you're three times more likely to put the money in just because there's a picture of
888. 00:59:45 a pair of eyes there. But there's also examples from here that have to do with the police departments
889. 00:59:52 and there was one called Operation Momentum where they put up posters which featured a pair of
890. 00:59:57 piercing eyes as he puts it with the slogan, "We've got our eyes on criminals and local officers
891. 01:00:03 reported a 17% reduction in robberies from these signs," which is not a small thing. But then there
892. 01:00:11 are other examples which I don't know, maybe this is a bigger deal than it sounds, but they used the
893. 01:00:16 Opower Company which got people to reduce their power usage by 2.5% by giving them symbols
894. 01:00:26 that went along with their power usage. So people who did great got a couple smelly faces, people
895. 01:00:30 who did well got a single smelly face and they're saying that isn't this great simply by using
896. 01:00:35 these symbols, we're able to reduce power consumption by a ton. And he did throw out some specific
897. 01:00:40 numbers of like the amount of money that it saved and stuff like that, but 2.5% really doesn't
898. 01:00:47 sound like a whole lot to me. Yeah, but this is where like sure 10% of one thing doesn't sound
899. 01:00:54 like a whole lot, but 2% of this is actually a huge number. I forget what it was, it was millions of
900. 01:01:01 dollars. Yeah, but based off of how many people, I mean there's millions of dollars for tens of
901. 01:01:09 millions of people could or could not be a lot. And I feel like by saying, "Oh, these symbols are the
902. 01:01:17 thing that drove 2.5% decreased the usage by 2.5%. What were the other options and what was the other
903. 01:01:25 impact?" So you could say like, "Oh, look at this made a big impact, but I kind of feel like there's
904. 01:01:31 a lot of other stuff that you could do that could make a 2.5% difference or greater." And it's kind of
905. 01:01:38 weird to say like, "Oh, this is the thing," which is kind of how all this stuff is presented is like,
906. 01:01:42 "Oh, look at this specific example, isn't this thing great? Everybody should do this sort of thing."
907. 01:01:47 And then backs it up with some numbers and 2.5% is solo that he actually did have to give us a dollar
908. 01:01:53 value here. But when your sample size is big enough, those numbers almost mean nothing. You know,
909. 01:02:00 it's kind of like if people talk about the budget of the United States and wasting millions of dollars,
910. 01:02:06 well, when you're dealing with billions and trillions of dollars, millions don't really
911. 01:02:09 matter. So it's all based on the scale here and then also because he's selecting these stories
912. 01:02:15 and presenting them to us, we really don't know what any of the other options were.
913. 01:02:19 To defend Opower, the Smiles was the only thing they changed that led to that. Everything was
914. 01:02:25 operating the same, which is why I think that's an interesting number. I did look it up. It's a
915. 01:02:31 billion kilowatt hours. So I guess my question to you is if you didn't know the 2.5% per person
916. 01:02:39 number, but you were told the billion kilowatt hours number, it sounds a lot more impressive
917. 01:02:47 than 2.5%. Yeah, but when you say, "Oh my gosh, the United States Senate is slashing our budget
918. 01:02:54 by millions of dollars," right, yeah. Billions to work with, it's the same effect. It's like,
919. 01:02:59 "Oh my, how could they do that?" Those jerks don't they care about the kids? But when I think about
920. 01:03:07 my own power usage and you were to say, "Okay, figure out a way to decrease your power usage by 2.5%."
921. 01:03:14 Okay, that's not a lot. I could do that very easily. And could you instigate that with a couple
922. 01:03:23 of symbols on my bill? Maybe. But there's got to be more effective ways to do that too.
923. 01:03:29 You know, like one of the things that I think about when I think about my situation and how do
924. 01:03:33 you make this decrease by 2.5% just get the kids to turn off the lights when they leave them.
925. 01:03:37 Yeah. That would make a much bigger difference than 2.5%. And I'm not going to show them a smiley face
926. 01:03:43 and then all of a sudden they're going to get that. All right, so the second chapter here are the
927. 01:03:47 characteristics of other people. This chapter, it's entirely based on Abraham Maslow's hierarchy of
928. 01:03:58 needs. And I, for a long time, have struggled with that particular pyramid.
929. 01:04:04 Yes. So to have an entire chapter dedicated to it and then have him skip past the validity of that
930. 01:04:14 pyramid and just accept it, like without any qualms whatsoever and just accept it as truth
931. 01:04:23 to stand on that I kind of struggled with. But I had to just kind of set that aside and say,
932. 01:04:31 okay, you're not even going to touch on this. So let's just go with the rest of the chapter,
933. 01:04:36 not worry about the pyramid itself, but let's talk about the individual aspects. So
934. 01:04:40 just getting that off my chest, the core basis of this I had struggled with.
935. 01:04:45 And the same reaction. And to be honest, looking back at this, talking through it now,
936. 01:04:50 it really shouldn't have been a surprise because that's how he frames every single argument that
937. 01:04:54 he uses. He's like, oh, look, here's this thing. Here's the research that supports it. It's obviously
938. 01:04:59 true on the next one. And I also have my own issues with Maslow's hierarchy of needs because
939. 01:05:07 on one level, it makes sense. And just for people who have never heard this before,
940. 01:05:10 Maslow basically says there's five different levels, physiological. And then when you have
941. 01:05:16 those needs met, you can move on to safety. When you have those needs met, you go on the love
942. 01:05:19 and belonging. When you have those needs met, you go on a self esteem. And then when you have
943. 01:05:22 those needs met, you go to self actualization. Personally, as someone who has created a video
944. 01:05:31 course called faith based productivity with the tagline, connect to your calling, discover your
945. 01:05:35 destiny, live life you were created for, I basically take the approach that this is all backwards.
946. 01:05:40 And you should think about what's the impact that you want to have. Why are you here? What's
947. 01:05:45 your purpose? What's the thing that you're designed to do? And then do that. And the rest of this
948. 01:05:51 stuff is going to take care of itself. And obviously, there's a lot of detail that goes with that.
949. 01:05:57 If you are in a soul sucking job that you hate right now, you cannot just quit and follow your
950. 01:06:03 passion. You know, and well, it's not even go there, but I've got my own definition of passion.
951. 01:06:07 It's not what people think. But that being said, like the real way to get to the end of your life
952. 01:06:14 and say, yes, I have lived a fulfilled life is to start with the end in mind, like Stephen
953. 01:06:20 Covey talks about, it's not to climb this hierarchy of needs. Because if you do that,
954. 01:06:26 you'll never get to the self actualization. I feel like for a lot of people. And so that
955. 01:06:32 kind of tainted my perspective too of the he talks about the sexual motive, the safety motive,
956. 01:06:37 and then the power of loved ones in this this chapter.
957. 01:06:39 Yeah. And I mean, I don't know what else to say about this particular chapter. It was just,
958. 01:06:45 you know, he goes through each of those levels in the pyramid and explains how we seek those out.
959. 01:06:53 That was pretty much what what it was about. Sure.
960. 01:06:57 Well, one thing I want to call out here under the sexual motive, because they use this statistic
961. 01:07:02 that men are more than 3.5 times more likely to die from accidental causes than women.
962. 01:07:08 So basically men are stupid and he's really saying that men are doing this as a way to show
963. 01:07:15 that they are strong, daring, whatever, and in a way to attract female attention. There probably
964. 01:07:23 is an element of that. I think a big part of this though is just guys don't think stuff through
965. 01:07:30 sometimes. You ever see those pictures like the guy standing on the ladder that's like precariously
966. 01:07:34 balanced? Never known that in my life. Well, there's a whole bunch of stuff like that. I mean,
967. 01:07:41 it's again, common sense if you see this sort of thing. And he talks about the presence of a
968. 01:07:45 beautiful female causes the male to produce more testosterone, which is really the thing that
969. 01:07:50 it gets them to do this this dumb stuff. He talks about how male chess players were more
970. 01:07:56 likely to employ risky moves when their opponent was an attractive female. I don't know. I think
971. 01:08:02 the summary here is that men and women are different. Go figure.
972. 01:08:06 I don't know. At hard time arguing with him on the whole testosterone, things are different
973. 01:08:12 thing. I think there's probably a lot of truth to that one. Well, one other quick thought on this,
974. 01:08:17 okay, as a heterosexual male in a committed relationship. So basically, if I'm taking this
975. 01:08:23 stuff at face value, he is saying that if I am in the presence of a beautiful female that is
976. 01:08:31 going to cause me to produce more testosterone and I'm going to do stupid stuff in order to get
977. 01:08:36 sex from her, that's not true. Okay. I that I may have that temptation, but that is not going to
978. 01:08:43 happen. And maybe that's just my religious belief system talking. And that's coloring my
979. 01:08:51 perspective with this. But I kind of feel like in certain situations like mine where
980. 01:08:59 I have given up all the other sexual options for my life. And so does that mean that
981. 01:09:06 I don't have these reactions, these urges? No, but it doesn't mean that I'm doing it in order to
982. 01:09:15 get with the other person. And so that's kind of the disconnect for me. And I'm trying to resolve
983. 01:09:22 this in my head. Like you saying that me where I've sworn this off and it's not an option for me,
984. 01:09:30 but it's still going to be an instinctive reaction for me and it's going to cause me to do all this
985. 01:09:34 stupid stuff. I kind of think that's probably not true. So two things here. One, you did state,
986. 01:09:41 like this is your, you're not saying you don't have the temptation, you just don't act on it.
987. 01:09:47 That's part one. Self control, go figure. Yep, so control. Part two, all of those studies that
988. 01:09:54 they did that involved young males, like they were talking like teens and early 20s, most of the time.
989. 01:10:01 I had a hard time with him taking that and extrapolating it out because testosterone levels do
990. 01:10:07 change over time. So I would have a hard time seeing how that would apply to somebody in their
991. 01:10:13 80s. What? True. That doesn't. So anyway, he didn't call that out at all. He didn't make any
992. 01:10:21 adjustments based on age or any aspect of that. Are you going to have the urges? Very likely. Are
993. 01:10:30 you going to act on them? That depends on your own ability to control yourself and your belief
994. 01:10:36 systems. So that's my thought. Yeah. Well, another, another thing I didn't think about till just now,
995. 01:10:42 you mentioned young men and I forget specifically when your brain stops developing, but it's not
996. 01:10:52 till you're like age 25. So by doing for 25, yeah, something like that. Yeah. So let's say you're
997. 01:10:59 doing this with college students. Their brain isn't fully developed yet. They're literally idiots.
998. 01:11:05 Sorry guys, I was there too. You think you're seeing your situation correctly and you're not
999. 01:11:12 because your brain is not fully developed. So why are we studying these people?
1000. 01:11:16 Anyways, all right, it's a culture. Let's just move on. I don't think it's any surprise that
1001. 01:11:26 culture impacts us. Just the variety of ways that culture develops the things that exist around us,
1002. 01:11:34 but also the fact that different cultures operate differently. He does call out the extreme difference
1003. 01:11:41 between individualistic and collectivistic societies, United States being an individualistic
1004. 01:11:49 culture where people take care of themselves. He didn't, I don't think he used these terms.
1005. 01:11:57 It's not all about me, but I take care of myself first, number one first.
1006. 01:12:01 Yep. Whereas a lot of countries like China and Japan have collectivistic
1007. 01:12:08 societies where everything they do and everything they see is seen through the lens of taking care
1008. 01:12:16 of the community at large. And everything they do in their own lives is designed to be helpful to
1009. 01:12:26 the broader community as opposed to themselves. And the one story he told about this that really
1010. 01:12:34 impacted me was the fact that, and I forget what the details of the experiment, like what they
1011. 01:12:39 were testing for, but he stated that people who are from an individualistic background, if they're
1012. 01:12:46 presented a picture, say of an automobile with a backdrop of the woods, a wooded area,
1013. 01:12:55 people from say the United States would tend to focus on the car. And if you were to ask them
1014. 01:12:59 some details about the car later, they could tell you the color of it, maybe the make and model of
1015. 01:13:05 it like they would be able to tell you that. But for the most part, they wouldn't be able to tell
1016. 01:13:08 you much about the background because they hadn't focused on that. They focused on the single point
1017. 01:13:12 in front of them. Folks that grew up in collectivism, they would see the entire picture. They wouldn't
1018. 01:13:22 necessarily be able to tell you what color the car was. They wouldn't necessarily be able to tell you
1019. 01:13:26 you know what was in the background, but they could at least tell you it was a wooded background
1020. 01:13:31 with a car, whereas the folks in the US would say, yeah, there was a car, but I don't remember if it
1021. 01:13:36 was in a mountainous area, if it was in a wooded area, was it on the highway, like they may not be
1022. 01:13:40 able to tell you where it was, but they would be able to tell you that it was a car. To me, that
1023. 01:13:44 was just an intriguing connection point. I had never really heard that particular way of saying it.
1024. 01:13:52 I've always known like cultures are very different. I run a web dev business and work with almost
1025. 01:13:58 70% of our clients are international, so I work with a lot of different regions throughout the
1026. 01:14:04 world, which is fascinating, but certain areas you need to have conversations differently because
1027. 01:14:09 they see things differently. I don't know. I thought it was a very fascinating chapter.
1028. 01:14:13 Yeah, he mentioned specifically with the art example that we were talking about,
1029. 01:14:19 the Western world tends to zoom in on the face and highlight the person the Eastern world focuses on
1030. 01:14:24 more contextual detail in the background. I'm also curious how much this is impacted by the current
1031. 01:14:33 state of the culture that we live in. Like we just did digital minimalism last episode and the
1032. 01:14:39 smartphone and all of this information that we're constantly bombarded with. And I kind of feel like
1033. 01:14:46 as the amount of information that you're presented with increases, you probably lose at least a little
1034. 01:14:52 bit the ability to look at the context and the background because there's so many things just
1035. 01:15:00 flying at your face and you're just trying to keep up with things. Maybe I'm wrong on that, but
1036. 01:15:06 and maybe that's the cultural difference there too, but I'm curious how a collective
1037. 01:15:15 society responds to the endless feeds and the infinity pools differently than maybe we do.
1038. 01:15:21 Yeah, no, that's an interesting question. I don't have an answer to that, but it's interesting.
1039. 01:15:27 Yeah, me either. The other thing I really like from this section, by the way, is this conversation
1040. 01:15:33 about the culture of honor and the way he frames this kind of tick me off because he mentions that
1041. 01:15:39 the culture of honor is prevalent in the south and the west and typically there's more entrenched
1042. 01:15:45 family values and it's absent from the northern states because we don't have the same cultural
1043. 01:15:50 expectations. And I think that the whole idea of honor is really something that in the United
1044. 01:15:58 States anyways that we've lost and would solve a lot of things for us. Just something simple like
1045. 01:16:08 what's the terminology I'm looking for? When we were talking about the Atul Gawande book,
1046. 01:16:13 he mentioned his grandpa in India and he could basically do whatever he wanted because everybody
1047. 01:16:18 honored the elderly. We don't have that anymore and not that you should automatically get
1048. 01:16:24 honored because you get older. I think that's a simple example of how if we treated our elders
1049. 01:16:29 with more respect, only good comes from that, but it could apply to people in authority. You see
1050. 01:16:36 all of the nastiness on social media, Twitter specifically, and some of it is self-solicited
1051. 01:16:45 when you've got a president who's tweeting crazy stuff. People are going to respond to it.
1052. 01:16:51 But even before that, you see people in these authority positions and people are just sending
1053. 01:16:59 this nasty stuff. And every time I see it, I'm like, how can you possibly talk like that to
1054. 01:17:06 somebody like this? Maybe that's just my... What's the term I'm looking for here?
1055. 01:17:15 Obviously my upbringing and the way that I've been taught to view people and things and situations,
1056. 01:17:23 but I don't see a negative that comes from this. And the way that it's kind of framed,
1057. 01:17:30 it's kind of like, well, this is an antiquated idea. And the Northern states are more progressive
1058. 01:17:37 and they've kind of done away with this. But I think we could go a long way towards thinking
1059. 01:17:43 better of people. Yeah, I think so. I grew up in Missouri in kind of the backwoods area. So there
1060. 01:17:51 was a pretty high amount of honor and respect was expected. And I've spent a decent amount of time
1061. 01:18:01 in the Southern states down in the Texas, Alabama area. And I know that in the deep South,
1062. 01:18:10 there's a much higher expectation for this honor culture than what there is right now in Minnesota.
1063. 01:18:18 To me, it's just massive... It's just worlds different between those two. So having that background,
1064. 01:18:25 I was agreeing with him left and right when he was going through all of it. I'm not real sure
1065. 01:18:32 how I feel about your thoughts on honor being something that would help us a lot. I haven't
1066. 01:18:37 really thought that through, but it's an interesting thought pattern that I kind of want to explore.
1067. 01:18:43 Maybe you and I should talk about that at some point, but that's something I haven't thought about.
1068. 01:18:46 Let's have an interesting thought, Mike. Yeah, well, kind of the way I view it is that when you don't
1069. 01:18:56 have honor towards whoever you esteem highly, typically your perspective is just looking out for
1070. 01:19:05 yourself, what's in it for me? And I feel like any sort of perspective shift that gets your eyes
1071. 01:19:14 off of your own problems and onto the solving and helping the needs of others, that's going to be
1072. 01:19:24 a net win. And I feel like you don't have to have a religious belief system in order to recognize
1073. 01:19:31 that we've got it for the most part pretty good. And then when we focus on everything that's going
1074. 01:19:36 wrong in our lives, we can quickly get discouraged, depressed. And one of the quickest ways to snap
1075. 01:19:42 out of that is to go serve somebody else. And when you think about honor, the emphasis or the focus
1076. 01:19:48 is on the other person, and you're kind of forcing yourself to see things through their eyes. And you
1077. 01:19:54 could apply the whole concept of honor to whoever is earned it in your particular worldview.
1078. 01:20:04 I still think that it's missing and it's something that we should be implementing. I feel like it's
1079. 01:20:11 one of those safeguards that can keep us from doing a lot of stupid selfish stuff, if we really
1080. 01:20:16 understood it. Yeah. All right, part three, the world around us, colors, locations, weather and warmth.
1081. 01:20:26 And the first piece of this colors, I came at this from a view of the website world,
1082. 01:20:36 where colors are used very specifically. There's a lot of theory around different colors that people
1083. 01:20:44 use for buttons and backgrounds and fonts. And all of that has very specific uses. People don't always
1084. 01:20:53 realize this, but Google is always testing that Facebook has tested it tons and tons of sites have
1085. 01:20:59 tested this. There's a reason a lot of the mainstream, social media sites are all blue. Like,
1086. 01:21:04 there are reasons for that. And they're trying to not necessarily manipulate, but they're trying to
1087. 01:21:11 increase time you spend with things, we're increasing clicks. And simple things like colors
1088. 01:21:17 make a huge impact in the website world. So I see it a lot from that stance. I've seen companies
1089. 01:21:24 test 12 different shades of blue buttons to see which one gets more clicks. And it drives a bottom
1090. 01:21:31 line depending on which shade of blue they pick for a by now button. Like, it's just nuts
1091. 01:21:36 how that impacts people. So there's a lot of truth to this one. I had a hard time arguing with it.
1092. 01:21:43 Yeah, this is, I agree. I definitely this section. Oh, I had the, I don't want to say the least
1093. 01:21:51 negative reaction. But like you said, when I read through this stuff, it's going like, oh, yeah,
1094. 01:21:56 that makes sense. I agree with that for the, for the most part. One of the things that did kind of
1095. 01:22:02 stand out to me was in the 2004 Olympics, he mentions that the wrestlers who wore red instead
1096. 01:22:08 of blue one 62% of the matches. I'm not sure where I land on this one yet. I kind of feel like
1097. 01:22:16 just based on the color uniform that you're assigned, that shouldn't necessarily impact you
1098. 01:22:23 in terms of like, Oh, I got the blue one. So I'm fighting an uphill battle. That seems kind of
1099. 01:22:28 ridiculous to me. But I do agree that generally speaking, the colors can elicit different,
1100. 01:22:35 different reactions. He does talk a lot in here about the cultural differences with the colors too
1101. 01:22:41 though. So he mentions that most of the world likes blue, but Hong Kong actually associates it
1102. 01:22:46 with sadness and the US likes black because it shows strength and masculinity. But Columbia
1103. 01:22:52 doesn't because it implies sadness and formality. So a lot of this stuff is interpreted through the
1104. 01:22:58 lens of the culture that you're familiar with as well. Yeah, yeah, for sure. I don't know what I
1105. 01:23:05 have a lot to say on the colors piece. You know, I had things like red is a color of love. And he
1106. 01:23:12 goes through like the reasons for that. Blue is calming pink, of course, can disarm people from
1107. 01:23:18 violence. Like there's different colors and he goes, he doesn't go through all the colors, but he does
1108. 01:23:23 spell out quite a bit with those. So I don't know. I thought it was interesting. There's one thing I
1109. 01:23:28 want to touch on here, because he mentions the glass, Glasgow police, they installed the blue
1110. 01:23:32 lights instead of the standard white or yellow lights. Yeah, that was not that interesting to me.
1111. 01:23:37 But then he uses another example right after that on blue light being installed at a sawmill in
1112. 01:23:44 Canada, which caused night workers to be more alert and make fewer mistakes. Okay, now this,
1113. 01:23:51 I believe, has nothing to do with the color and has everything to do with the concept of the blue
1114. 01:24:00 light causing your body to not produce the melatonin that causes you to fall asleep. And I say that
1115. 01:24:06 just because I've had flux installed on my computer for years, I swear by it. And this is one of those
1116. 01:24:12 things that I've studied out quite a bit, because I was diagnosed with epilepsy when I was 18 years
1117. 01:24:19 old. So one of the things that can trigger a seizure is not enough sleep. So I have been very
1118. 01:24:26 militant in both the amount of sleep that I get and also everything, everything I can to
1119. 01:24:31 control the quality of sleep that I get. I cannot have a bad night sleep and not sleep because
1120. 01:24:37 it could literally cause a seizure the next day. And if I'm driving my car, obviously that's a
1121. 01:24:42 big, a big disaster. All right. So I really believe in this idea of the the blue light. And it's been
1122. 01:24:50 something that I've been controlling for a number of years, not trying to look at screens before I
1123. 01:24:55 go to bed, because I've noticed for myself, and some people say I don't notice any difference.
1124. 01:24:59 I believe there really is a difference here where the quality of sleep that you that you get when
1125. 01:25:04 you don't look at your phone for three hours before you go to bed, or as opposed to if you're
1126. 01:25:08 scrolling through Twitter before you lay down and go to sleep, you're going to have a lot harder
1127. 01:25:12 time falling asleep. And so I don't know that this has anything to do with colors, but the blue light
1128. 01:25:19 idea is definitely a powerful one. And I couldn't quite reconcile in my head how this fit in the
1129. 01:25:27 colors section. Oh, because of the melatonin aspect? Yeah, because that's really the thing that's
1130. 01:25:32 going on here is the blue light versus like the artificial candlelight or whatever, where your body
1131. 01:25:39 is kind of transitioning into that state of sleep. Well, you've got people who are going directly
1132. 01:25:43 against their body's grain by working at night. Right. So the color doesn't do anything to inspire
1133. 01:25:51 them to be more safe. The color causes a physiological change in their body. Now, to his benefit here,
1134. 01:26:00 just to defend him a little bit, that particular story was told as an introduction to the chapter.
1135. 01:26:05 And he only it was only like a paragraph long, but he was using it to intro the whole thing,
1136. 01:26:12 just to defend him on that one, because I don't know that he would disagree with you
1137. 01:26:16 as much as like he was just using it to introduce the chapter. Because I think that would maybe
1138. 01:26:23 confirm like he would agree with you in the sense that yes, this color does have a biological effect.
1139. 01:26:30 Because that would prove his point here that colors do affect us. Like that's not an argument
1140. 01:26:35 against what he's saying. Yeah, but when speculating, when you're talking about the light, for example,
1141. 01:26:41 I feel like that's a different argument than going back to drunk take pick at the beginning,
1142. 01:26:46 where you're looking at a piece of paper that is a certain color. I feel like color temperature
1143. 01:26:52 in terms of light is very different than the policeman's blues. That's the subtitle of this
1144. 01:26:58 chapter, the color of uniform that you might use, or the color of the lights in the area causing
1145. 01:27:08 a decrease in crime. Like literally you are trying to prevent your body from shutting down.
1146. 01:27:18 So how is this different? Because way back at the beginning of this, you were talking about
1147. 01:27:23 how even the color pink increased donations. Yep. And you made it sound like that was a good thing,
1148. 01:27:31 and you agreed with that. How is this now different? Well, that's what I'm saying. I think that the
1149. 01:27:35 color that uniform that you were increasing donations, like that is a very real thing. And
1150. 01:27:40 that argument in this chapter would make total sense. But I feel like the blue light argument
1151. 01:27:46 maybe doesn't quite fit because this is getting outside of the realm of these are the colors that
1152. 01:27:52 you see. And it has more to do with the intensity of the light and the impact that it's having
1153. 01:27:59 in your body at a subconscious level. And maybe I'm not doing a very good job of describing this.
1154. 01:28:07 I think it sounds like you're confirming him. Well, I don't know. I feel like there's a difference
1155. 01:28:11 between a color that you would see any other place in the world and the color of the light
1156. 01:28:18 temperature in the room. I feel like that one, especially as it pertains to keeping your body
1157. 01:28:25 awake and not entering into a state of sleep, that's a little bit different than causing you to
1158. 01:28:32 everything is equal, you're going to act one way or another. Having a choice between how to act is
1159. 01:28:40 very different than is very different in my mind than trying to keep your body from breaking.
1160. 01:28:51 Does that make sense? No, I think you're crazy. So I think with his point, the color itself has a
1161. 01:29:00 biological edit to your body. It does leave an impact on you. Red light would not do that.
1162. 01:29:09 Yellow light would not do that. But blue light does. I don't get your point of how,
1163. 01:29:17 because it's a light bulb, the color doesn't matter. Just as an example, blue light is going to have a
1164. 01:29:22 certain impact in your body no matter what, right? But the color blue is going to have different
1165. 01:29:28 impacts based on the culture and the association that is assigned to it. There is no option for
1166. 01:29:36 assigning anything else to the blue light. The blue light is literally going to keep your body awake.
1167. 01:29:41 In my situation, if I was in that situation, the blue light is literally going to keep me awake to
1168. 01:29:49 the point where my body is going to shut down, I'm going to have a seizure. Regardless of what I
1169. 01:29:54 would try to do in that particular situation, whereas if the United Wave volunteer comes up
1170. 01:29:59 wearing a pink shirt, I still have the choice whether I am going to donate and how much I'm
1171. 01:30:04 going to donate. And I can recognize that, oh, they're wearing the color pink. So I'm more likely to
1172. 01:30:10 write out a bigger check. But there's no option when it comes to the blue light.
1173. 01:30:16 Why does that matter? Maybe it doesn't. I don't know. But that's his point.
1174. 01:30:22 Yeah, that's the thing that makes it different in my own head. And maybe it's just because it's
1175. 01:30:27 associated with this topic of sleep, which maybe just the way that he framed it, where I felt like
1176. 01:30:34 it wasn't really fair, because he's talking about how these blue green lights cause night
1177. 01:30:40 workers to be more alert and make fewer mistakes. That wasn't a conscious choice. They weren't
1178. 01:30:44 saying, oh, well, I'm going to be more safe as opposed to I don't care what I'm going to do.
1179. 01:30:49 Like they're manipulating these people at this point. They're like rats in the machine,
1180. 01:30:53 and there's nothing they can do about it. Maybe that's what you're because drunk tank
1181. 01:30:57 pink is the same thing. Kind of. They because they did some of the testing and found like some of the
1182. 01:31:03 blood levels of, I forget what it was, some hormone, they found some of that being affected as
1183. 01:31:10 well. Like that's the same type of thing. Like it's impacting people physiologically.
1184. 01:31:14 Yeah. In the same way that this blue light does with with drunk tank. Why is one okay and
1185. 01:31:18 one? Well, with drunk tank pink, you've got the drunk in the cell and yeah, they're not in the
1186. 01:31:22 right mind, but they have the ability to choose to not be a crazy drunk anymore. Okay. If I'm
1187. 01:31:28 exposed to blue light, I don't have a choice anymore. I'm going to stay awake. Okay. And so that's
1188. 01:31:35 kind of where I feel like this is a whole nother level when he's talking about blue light as it
1189. 01:31:40 just opposed to the the colors and the associations that go with them. I mean, there's a lot of stuff
1190. 01:31:44 in here and in the next section too about the locations and and green being in nature, you know,
1191. 01:31:50 that has a calming effect. Like that that's all. That's all great. But I feel like with with blue
1192. 01:31:56 light specifically, this is something that like you're manufacturing and you're hacking people's
1193. 01:32:02 biology and that just seems so wrong. That's his point though. See, this is this is why I'm confused
1194. 01:32:10 because I feel like you're confirming his exact point. Yeah. Yeah. Because he's saying this color
1195. 01:32:16 causes this effect, which is exactly what you're saying. And his point is like it does help people,
1196. 01:32:22 it does do that. It does help them stay awake. He's not arguing whether or not they have a choice
1197. 01:32:28 or not. That doesn't apply at all. He's saying and probably most of this book is in most cases,
1198. 01:32:34 this is happening whether you want it to or not. But this does happen. Yep. Like that's anyway,
1199. 01:32:40 we should move on. But that's that was my thinking on it. So I feel like you're confirming it. Yeah,
1200. 01:32:44 I still I still think it's not resolved. Like in this he mentions in the mid 40s,
1201. 01:32:48 there was that Aurora tone films that were being introduced. And it's like different colors can
1202. 01:32:52 calm different people. So it's not as simple as like what people are exposed to this color.
1203. 01:32:56 It always elicits this reaction. I don't know. Like when it comes to to sleep and regulating your
1204. 01:33:03 body's rhythm, I feel like that's like I said, whole nother level. Yeah, you're right. I don't like it.
1205. 01:33:11 All right, locations. I don't have a lot on this one other than go outside. Like that's
1206. 01:33:18 and maybe I should lump this one in with the other one. Weather and warmth, like most of this was
1207. 01:33:23 go outside, enjoy nature. It makes you a better person. Like that was my core takeaway between
1208. 01:33:31 those two sections. Yeah, there's a couple interesting ideas in here. Number one, and again,
1209. 01:33:36 this is like for me, maybe because I'm introverted, but this just seems like the whole idea of overcrowding
1210. 01:33:43 how that causes claustrophobia, mental illness, drug addiction, alcoholism, family disorganization,
1211. 01:33:48 lower quality of life. So get out of that situation whenever you can. I think that's probably associated
1212. 01:33:55 also with this whole idea of getting out into nature, but kind of the positioning of the nature
1213. 01:34:00 argument in this chapter has to do with the green environment having a calming effect.
1214. 01:34:05 One thing that he talks about in here is the broken windows theory, which says that people are
1215. 01:34:13 encouraged to act immorally and commit crimes in neighborhoods with broken windows.
1216. 01:34:17 I don't know, I guess maybe I just don't hang out in those neighborhoods.
1217. 01:34:21 Well, just to give you a different story on that, I, so I work in the agriculture industry, grew up
1218. 01:34:28 on a farm, have a strong ag background. I have met more than a handful of farmers who
1219. 01:34:34 take meticulous care of their equipment. They have their tractors repainted every three years.
1220. 01:34:42 They make sure everything is in perfect working order. They make sure they get waxed on a regular
1221. 01:34:47 basis. And it's not because they just like clean and bright colored equipment. They can show,
1222. 01:34:55 and they've seen this multiple times that if they take that good of care of their equipment,
1223. 01:35:01 the people who operate it operate it more safely, and they have fewer repairs. So the repair bills
1224. 01:35:08 are significantly lower than any I've really seen elsewhere. Yeah, because they take such
1225. 01:35:12 good care of their equipment. So I don't know, I definitely can get on board with that one.
1226. 01:35:17 That makes sense. I kind of in the same way about our family vehicles, like it drives me nuts when
1227. 01:35:23 something isn't in pristine working order. Because I know that as soon as one thing is broken,
1228. 01:35:30 that's kind of a license to not take as good a care of the thing. So I agree with that.
1229. 01:35:37 But I also think that, like he mentions in one study, half of the drivers littered and through
1230. 01:35:43 the flyer tucked on their windshield when the parking lot was already full of litter, but only a
1231. 01:35:48 tenth of them did when it was clean. I don't know, but I can't see myself in any situation
1232. 01:35:54 being like, "Hey, I'm just going to check this on the ground." Right. So again, a lot of this stuff
1233. 01:36:00 is probably cultural. And if you are in a situation, in a environment where people don't take care of
1234. 01:36:08 stuff, maybe that has a bigger impact on whether you're willing to break something or not take
1235. 01:36:14 care of it than the fact that you notice that there's something broken. I'm not going into
1236. 01:36:21 my buddy's car and something's broken, so I'm just chucking trash all over.
1237. 01:36:26 Yeah. Weather and warmth go outside, stay warm.
1238. 01:36:31 Again, basically he talks a lot about sad seasonal effective disorder. There's a couple
1239. 01:36:40 of these. But anyway, he was showing how during extreme heat, people tend to be more agitated and
1240. 01:36:46 have road rage more often or the big one was Major League Baseball with pitchers hitting each
1241. 01:36:54 other's batters because the other one did it first and retaliating. There's a lot of
1242. 01:37:00 pieces around this. They had a ton of data behind that one. So that one, I was definitely like,
1243. 01:37:05 "Okay, that one's hard to refute." But there was a lot there.
1244. 01:37:10 I think having played baseball, I kind of think that maybe it has more to do with the fact that
1245. 01:37:20 the games matter when it's warmer. At the beginning of this season, you're not going out and plunking
1246. 01:37:28 people on purpose. But by the time you do get to the summer months, there's this whole culture
1247. 01:37:36 with baseball. You got to protect your players and teammates and stuff like that. That's always
1248. 01:37:42 the justification that pitchers give for hitting other people. You can totally tell when it's intentional
1249. 01:37:49 and when it's not. Every time you see it, they say the right things, "Oh, the ball slipped out of my
1250. 01:37:54 hand," whatever. But you can tell everybody on the team, the managers included, have put their
1251. 01:38:00 subversive stamp of approval on this thing. I think it has more to do with the fact that now
1252. 01:38:10 you're involved in games that matter and you're not going to let them take out your best player
1253. 01:38:16 for weeks, months at a time, which can happen when you drill somebody with a 98-mile-an-hour
1254. 01:38:22 fastball. I don't know. This argument about the baseball, the baseball batter is getting hit.
1255. 01:38:29 I know that there's data behind it, but when it was presented to me, it was presented as someone
1256. 01:38:35 who really didn't understand baseball. Maybe that's completely unfair, but that was the impression
1257. 01:38:40 I got when I read it. Well, the data they had went back to when seasons were not where the
1258. 01:38:47 important ones were in the summer. It was far enough back that that was still in springtime,
1259. 01:38:53 because the seasons have gotten a lot longer now. Some of that is somewhat corrected for because
1260. 01:39:00 of the long history that they pulled it on. I have a hard time with your argument against that,
1261. 01:39:09 but I've played a lot of baseball as well. I'm not arguing with you one bit about the
1262. 01:39:15 protector player thing at all. I'm definitely not in the professional ranks, but the ebb and flow
1263. 01:39:21 to me is like, "Okay, everybody's excited beginning of the year. All it takes is one
1264. 01:39:25 person to accidentally get hit. Now all of a sudden, you've got somebody's like, "Oh, I'm going to get
1265. 01:39:29 them back." By the time they get them back, the ums, that's enough, but by the time it gets to the
1266. 01:39:39 summer, there's certain things you can do to encourage right behaviors. I feel like they're
1267. 01:39:48 real lax at the beginning of the year. As a response, pitchers are going to take advantage of that.
1268. 01:39:55 Middle of the year, start to crack down on it a little bit. By the end of the year,
1269. 01:40:00 it's like, "Okay, guys, you really got to knock this off because we don't want our superstars hurt
1270. 01:40:03 going into the postseason. This is what people pay to see." If you try that, in September,
1271. 01:40:08 October, you'll get tossed right away. Is that a factor of the cold weather making you less angry
1272. 01:40:16 and you're 5% less likely to decide to hit somebody? Or is it more, "I better not screw this up for
1273. 01:40:23 my team and get tossed out of the game, so I'm just going to let this one slide."
1274. 01:40:27 Probably combination of things. Yeah, there's a lot there. All right, what else, Mike?
1275. 01:40:33 We should wrap this up. Seasonal, effective disorder. This is a very real thing.
1276. 01:40:39 He also mentions daylight savings here, which we just went through.
1277. 01:40:42 Daylight savings is a very stupid idea. We should get rid of this.
1278. 01:40:46 But he at least explains the thought process behind it. It's an effort to make people happier
1279. 01:40:51 by exposing them to more sun in the summer. But it can also cause a lot of stress when you
1280. 01:40:58 have to spring forward. He mentions that there's 7% higher accident rates the day after daylight
1281. 01:41:04 savings, which that should be enough to get rid of it right now. Let's just all decide that we're
1282. 01:41:09 never going to do this again. Yeah, most hospital stock, that's terrible. They book a lot more
1283. 01:41:19 nurses and staff for the day after daylight savings. Sure. Because they know. All right,
1284. 01:41:26 we should probably wrap it up there, huh? Yeah, action items. Zippo.
1285. 01:41:32 Yep. I also have no action items. Although as I was going through this and thinking about like,
1286. 01:41:37 how can I take action on this book? The one thing that kind of stood out to me is that I can
1287. 01:41:43 consider my environment in my office and I can put the right symbols, colors, cues, whatever in
1288. 01:41:49 there to help me transition into a state of work faster. Sure. I'm really not going to put an
1289. 01:41:54 action item associated with that because I've kind of gone through all that with creating my
1290. 01:41:59 home office the way it is right now. But if you were to do an action item from this book,
1291. 01:42:05 I feel like that's the only one you can really implement. Sure. Yeah, I could see that.
1292. 01:42:10 It's style and rating. So Adam Alter, I will say he's pretty easy to read. This is not a difficult
1293. 01:42:19 look to pick up and go through. Tons and tons of stories, we shared a lot here, but we probably
1294. 01:42:26 only touched, I don't know, 15, maybe 20% of them, maybe not even that. There's a lot,
1295. 01:42:33 a lot to go through here, which keeps it fast moving. That's partly why we weren't real sure how
1296. 01:42:38 this was going to go because there's so many stories you could cover. So again, super easy to read.
1297. 01:42:44 It's about the right length, I feel. No arguments against topic density here at all. As for a rating,
1298. 01:42:55 it's kind of hard because I had some definite qualms, like really serious qualms with certain
1299. 01:42:59 pieces of this, but there were other pieces of it. It's like, that is brilliant. That's,
1300. 01:43:04 I am so happy. I know that now. So parts of it, like, yeah, definitely five. And then
1301. 01:43:10 other person like, yeah, definite two, like, that's what do you do with that?
1302. 01:43:14 I bridge it out. I think I'm going to drop it at a 4.0. I think that's, yeah, I'll put it there.
1303. 01:43:22 I do think it's worth reading, though. It's at least enough to spark you to think about things
1304. 01:43:28 that are going on around you from a marketing stance, from a livelihood stance, the way people
1305. 01:43:35 things work between people. I think it's worth reading. But there's some issues we've had with
1306. 01:43:41 it. Obviously, we've talked about those. So I'm putting it at a 4.0.
1307. 01:43:45 All right. I am on the fence. I think I'm going to give it a 3.0. I kind of want to give it a 3.5
1308. 01:43:55 because there's some good ideas in here. And like you said, there's certain parts of it that
1309. 01:44:01 really do impact you. But I also found myself arguing with him a lot. And that never felt good.
1310. 01:44:11 So my overall state of mind as I went through this book was probably more negative than positive.
1311. 01:44:18 Sure. And I just can't shake that. So I'm going to air on the side of a lower score and put it at
1312. 01:44:27 3.0. All right. Well, let's put it on the shelf. What's next, Mike?
1313. 01:44:32 The next book is "Extreme Ownership" by Jaco Willink. And this is a story about taking responsibility
1314. 01:44:40 from a couple of former Navy SEALs. Have you started this book?
1315. 01:44:45 I have not, but I'm itching to. It's really interesting regardless of your take on the whole
1316. 01:44:52 military background because there obviously is a lot of that. In fact, the chapters are really
1317. 01:44:57 interesting because they tell a story from their deployment in Iraq. And then they'll go into the
1318. 01:45:06 principal. And then the third part of each chapter is the business application of the concept.
1319. 01:45:12 Interesting. So they do leadership training for businesses and stuff right now. So they
1320. 01:45:17 share stories from people that they've worked with. That sounds really interesting.
1321. 01:45:21 It's really interesting. It's a really big book. I think it's like 300 something pages. One of the
1322. 01:45:25 bigger ones that we've covered. Yeah. But it's a really easy read. And I'm learning a ton from this
1323. 01:45:33 book. I've already ordered a bunch of copies to give to people.
1324. 01:45:36 Interesting. So this will be a good one next time.
1325. 01:45:39 Yeah. I feel like this has got to be the right thing at the right time for the right person. But
1326. 01:45:43 it's right in my wheelhouse and I'm loving it so far. Cool. Following that, I have selected a
1327. 01:45:50 recommendation from the club, "Quiet" by Susan Kane. Welcome to the world of introverts.
1328. 01:45:57 This will be good. Nice. I'm excited to read this one.
1329. 01:46:02 By the way, Extreme Ownership was a recommendation too. I picked that one just because of the number
1330. 01:46:06 of votes that it had gotten in the Bookworm Club. So thank you. Yeah. We've been doing a lot of
1331. 01:46:11 those lately. Yep. All right. Gap books. I've got one which was recommended by Shahid when we
1332. 01:46:18 interviewed him. He mentioned that he liked digital minimalism. But the one book that presented
1333. 01:46:25 the same sort of arguments that he really, really enjoyed was this book called "Make Time" by Jake
1334. 01:46:30 Knapp and John Zoratsky. And so I have this one in my hands right now, but I have not started this yet.
1335. 01:46:38 And I'm excited to dig into this one. Cool. Cool. I don't have a gap book this time.
1336. 01:46:44 That's okay. Life's been crazy. We'll forgive you. Thanks. Cool. Cool. All right. So if you want
1337. 01:46:50 to recommend a book like Extreme Ownership or "Quiet" by Susan Kane, you can do that over at the
1338. 01:46:56 Bookworm Club, club.bookworm.fm. Just create an account and then go to the recommendations category,
1339. 01:47:03 add a recommendation, and then also remember to vote for it because we do look at the number of
1340. 01:47:08 votes when deciding what books we're going to cover next. And click the vote, like when you make a
1341. 01:47:13 recommendation, then turn around, hit the vote button. People keep forgetting to do that.
1342. 01:47:17 Exactly. And if you want to see a list of the books that are upcoming, you can do that on the
1343. 01:47:24 website by going to bookworm.fm/list. There's a few ways you can support the show. We've been
1344. 01:47:31 expanding that particular piece. The fun one is leaving us a review and joining the club.
1345. 01:47:38 Like those are great ways to get feedback to us to help us see, you know, what it is you like
1346. 01:47:43 about the show. So leave us a review. Tell us how we're doing. Join the club club.bookworm.fm.
1347. 01:47:50 Lots of cool conversations happening out there and those continue to expand and grow.
1348. 01:47:54 One of which being our action items, we're now posting on the club and trying to talk through
1349. 01:47:59 those as the in-between time occurs. But the one we would encourage you the most is supporting the
1350. 01:48:06 show through a premium membership. And you can do that at bookworm.fm/membership, right? Mike?
1351. 01:48:14 I got to remember what we put it at. Bookworm.fm/membership. If you go there, you can sign up
1352. 01:48:20 and donate to the show month to month. We talked about all the benefits earlier in the show,
1353. 01:48:25 but you can get all the details there at bookworm.fm/membership.
1354. 01:48:28 All right. So if you are reading along with us, pick up extreme ownership by Jocko Willink.
1355. 01:48:35 And we will talk to you in a couple of weeks.