Bookworm Transcripts

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So I'm considering a new purchase, Mike.

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Yeah, what's that?

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It's one that I have considered here recently,

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but a lot of people probably going to hear me say this

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and be like, "Yes, all this coming."

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And other people are going to be like,

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"What is wrong with Joe?"

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Okay.

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So just to get it out there, I'm considering an Apple Watch Series 8.

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Okay.

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Just let that hang out there for a second.

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This might be a bad idea.

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I've been against the Apple Watch for quite a while.

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I shouldn't say against.

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I've been a naysayer for a while.

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Is that safe to say?

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Yeah, so that is absolutely safe to say.

00:00:38

So what changed your mind?

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There has been a number of developments in the world of Joe's ADHD.

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And I think people should let me know if this is accurate,

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but one of the things I always struggle with is time blindness,

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as we call it in the world of attention deficit.

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And basically, I tend to lose track of where I'm at in the day

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and what's coming up next and when.

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Like sometimes the amount of time that has passed,

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it might be four hours, but it feels like ten minutes to me.

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Like, I'm not exaggerating that difference in scale.

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And there are other times that it's ten minutes,

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but it feels like it's been an hour and a half.

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And that's not inaccurate.

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It's just, again, the scale there.

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So trying to figure out ways to bring that time passage more

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to the forefront through some form of an alert or something I can glance at.

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But that doesn't really apply because I tend to not glance at it.

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So some form of an alert that's not in other people's faces at the same time.

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But also, I have been doing a bit of an experiment

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with actually using Apple reminders just to kind of schedule the day out.

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This is similar to time blocking of sorts I figured out,

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but it's the concept of if not now, when.

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Like that's the question I know I've brought up before.

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I forget where it originated.

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I know Patrick Roan brought it up at one point,

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but I don't know if he was the one that coined that or if it came from elsewhere.

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But I've been slowly taking the tasks I need to do

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and actually putting them on the calendar instead of just on a list.

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Which is a challenge to nail down, but at the same time,

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very, very helpful, at least to me.

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So trying to make that to where I can see those things a little bit easier

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without having to constantly glance at my phone.

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You're smiling at me like there's something here obvious

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that I should have seen a long time ago.

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But that's kind of where I'm landing right now.

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I'm just enjoying you here.

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I'm enjoying hearing you say that time blocking is working for you

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without you saying time blocking is working for you.

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Oh, okay. I see what you're getting at.

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Got it. Got it.

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It feels very different to me than what the,

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at least the way I'm coming at it is very different than the way I've come at time blocking before.

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Sure.

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Like I've typically time blocked like themes, if you will.

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Like this time of the day, I'm going to do administrative work.

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As opposed to during this time slot,

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I'm going to put together my budget for next year.

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If you catch the difference there, it's like versus the generalized idea.

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Like let's nail down the exact task that's going to happen at that time.

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And it might be a 10 minute block that we're talking about for that.

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So that's kind of what I've been working towards.

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But the trick is like if it's on my phone or if it's on the computer,

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it's way too easy for me to jump to something else.

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And the phone is of course obnoxious about this because I'll easily have a notification there.

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And instead of going to the thing to see what was next,

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I am immediately distracted and ended up in some other app or other place

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and 15 minutes goes by and then I'm way off schedule for where I needed to be.

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So anyway, all I have to say, trying to find different ways around that one.

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And it seems like some of the health tracking stuff and the awareness

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that the watch would bring in that sense might be helpful.

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But it could also be a big distraction and I'm not sure if it's going to exacerbate the problem

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or make it better. That's my main hang up right now.

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I think the health stuff on Apple Watch is severely underrated.

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I know some people think that those Apple, the Apple Watch saved my life.

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Commercials are a little extreme, but I don't think they are.

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Sure.

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I think that is, that's the type of thing that this device can do and that's amazing.

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I think in terms of intentional technology use and a device that actually can make your life better,

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the Apple Watch is the best Apple device that fits that criteria.

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Sure.

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So I'm all in favor of it.

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I don't know if the health stuff would really click for you.

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You seem fairly healthy anyway.

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So I think it really is like if you're having trouble getting into a rhythm with some of the health stuff,

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then that stuff can be helpful.

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Just a little nudge in the right direction.

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But yeah, I think this is cool.

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I think you should definitely get one.

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I want you to get the, I want you to get the Ultra just so I can see it.

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But I know you're not going to get that one.

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The benefits I've seen from the 8 to the Ultra just don't, like I'm not a diver.

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I agree.

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And whenever I buy watches, I buy the smallest ones anyway.

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So like that would be the opposite direction of where I would need to go just from size stance.

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So no, don't expect that one.

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It would be cool, but no.

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Yeah.

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Anyway, there's that's that's that's an exploration.

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But the reason I came to that was actually because of one of my action items, which is why I brought this up.

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In that I have been doing some of this PKM work every day.

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And one of the things that I was inadvertently, I didn't realize I was working my way there was a borderline journaling.

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But at the same time, it was not just collecting and making some thoughts around ADHD and what I know about what works and what doesn't work for me.

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And for the general ADHD population.

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And whenever I was doing that, I inadvertently started the whole time blindness notes of sorts of like, this is what goes wrong with that.

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And here are some ways that people combat that and all of those had to do with some form of like alarms or notifications or whiteboards or something that was a visual at all times.

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And that's that's what got me thinking about some of the experiments I've been doing with reminders and stuff and trying to make that a glance away no matter where I matter what I'm doing.

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And I moved too much.

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Like the whole move goal thing like that's a no brainer easy thing like that's not even a driver because I know that those are easy to hit for me, but trying to make that stuff more visible at all times like that's kind of the main driver behind that thought process.

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But that all comes from the PKM stuff.

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So if you need yet another accolade for why you should do this, there you go.

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So I have been fighting COVID over the last week.

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And I have not been very productive, but one of the things that I tinkered with during my quarantine was, you know, you broke apart the whole Bible for me inside of obscene.

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Right.

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So I could link my sermon notes together, build my own cross reference library.

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Well, I applied yaml metadata to the top of every single verse.

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So there's a tag Bible slash whatever.

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And I went through a couple other resources that I have and transferred all of those and created all these tags. So I have now in my tag pane Bible and then like 114 verses tagged with promises 65 tagged with healing 62 tagged with Holy Spirit 43 tagged with faith.

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And I have a whole bunch of themes.

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And you just click on any one of these tags and it just opens up all of those verses obviously that take that way.

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I'm thinking of packaging this all into a like a starter vault sort of a thing.

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Okay.

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For people who may be interested in this because I think at one point I made available the King James version that you did for me because I did a YouTube video on it and people were asking them like, can I download that and use it myself.

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So this is basically the same thing except that every one of the verses has tags at the top. They're not actually in the contents of the note itself, but it allows me to basically create a topical Bible inside of obsidian based on my own personal notes, which is pretty cool.

00:09:29

I would definitely be all for getting a look at this. This actually kind of plays into, so I had the two action items. The second one was like doing some research on something I could do for obsidian kind of like an artificial intelligence like finding notes that are similar to each other.

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I did do quite a bit of research on this.

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And what I wanted was some way for me to build a plugin that would do this for you.

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Like you just install the plugin and it would find all this stuff. The problem is you have to train these things in order to like generalize the concepts out of a note to be able to tie them together because part of what I had going through my head was if I take those verse by verse from the Bible notes and then get the concepts like what's the general idea out of it and then link notes based on that.

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Kind of like what you're talking about with tags, but do it via AI. Like to me that would be really, really cool, but trying to train something in order to get it to do that is a challenge and typically would require me to force the whole subscription use cloud based thing to make it work.

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Like I found things that would let me do that, but I don't really want people to have to pay yet another subscription to get that to work. So I haven't found a way around that part yet because you basically got to put a trained library in your obsidian vault in order to make that work.

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Yeah, see, I want something that's not that exactly because I don't want every verse that uses the English word, whatever, you know, I have a Bible college degree and I've gone through and I've kind of collected these resources myself.

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So that's the value of this for me is not, this is not a Google search for which verses use whatever. It's these are the ones that based on my own personal study relate to this particular theme.

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So, yeah, I'm happy with it. And I guess if other people are interested in it, let me know. I'm thinking I'll offer it as a downloadable thing, but I don't know if it's going to be interesting anybody else with me.

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Yeah, I know, like, I was trying to think I've got, I think, four or five of the Bible versions on my computer downloaded and split out by verse at this point, just because I was testing all the scripts I wrote to make that work.

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So this is trying it on different versions. So I've got like five of them locally, not going to say publicly what those are for certain reasons, but I do have those.

00:12:03

So that's, I guess we've through that covered a couple of my two pieces of follow up. You've got four here, Mike.

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I do.

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So I've already mentioned that I caught COVID. So I failed at a lot of this stuff. I will say I tried to read more than one book at once. This is still a colossal struggle for me.

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I'm not going to lie. Where's my note? I have a note somewhere. This isn't it. I wrote it, I wrote a note down and it just says this will fail next to your action item. I was fairly certain this one wasn't going to work.

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I tried it. I tried it. It did fail. I'm committed to trying to continuing to try this work on this, though. I have done a lot of reading recently.

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And reading is one of those things that in the business of the day to day always feels like it's a lot of effort. And then when you actually just do it, it isn't that much.

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And then when you actually find it very restorative, much more so than watching TV or something like that. So I watched a lot of movies less several days too.

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But I want to just start reading more. And I think as I start reading more, it'll be easier to read a couple of things at once. But I'm definitely feeling the friction trying to do that right now.

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The other one's taking a reading sabbatical. This was not going to happen. I guess technically you could say that this, I did this one by accident because I've been in quarantine. I've been reading.

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Nice. That count. Sure. I'll count it. All right. But the idea exchange at the day job.

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That hasn't happened yet. And then the light workshop, I signed up for this. I started in on the first session and have not been able to keep up with it.

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So hoping to get caught up with that. But it's not looking good at this point.

00:14:04

I don't know what your deal is. Are you just like low on energy lately? What's the deal Mike? That doesn't mean to us.

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Yes. Yes. In fact, the first day, I was like, you know what? I got nothing to do for the next several days. I'm just going to crank through all these courses.

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Like I also have mastering convert kit that I bought from Brendan Dunn. And I was going to go through that.

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And I went through the first video, fell asleep, never opened it again.

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So it was really interesting. But I haven't, well, no, it's it is. It's really well done. I just am sleeping 14 hours a day at the moment.

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It's totally fair. Totally fair. I guess I'll give you a buy, but only barely. Okay, thanks.

00:14:54

All right. Is that your list? Yeah, it looks like it is. So I guess that brings us to today's book. I suppose.

00:15:05

Since we're following a repetitive pattern in our episode here. You could say ritual. You could say it's a ritual. Yeah, you absolutely could.

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Which is today's book. Nice. They're ritual by Demetris Ziggalatus. I don't have the tagline in front of me, which I should have.

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But let's see if I can grab it here quick. But this is all about ritual and like repetitive. I don't want to say habits or routines.

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We'll talk about that particular piece here in a bit. But the tagline on it is how seemingly senseless acts make life worth living.

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And we'll talk about some details here, but essentially it's all about these not always communal, but societal patterns that we put ourselves through and the benefits behind them and why we do them.

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And there's lots and lots and lots in this book, I will say. I have to admit that whenever I picked this up, I was just kind of curious to see like what's some of the science?

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Like what are some of the health benefits of ritual? I wasn't really expecting to get some of the detail that was in here.

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And I certainly wasn't expecting to get this much for examples for rituals either. But I do think it was a super cool read at this point to kind of set the stage there.

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But anyway, what were your initial thoughts, Mike?

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I agree with you. It's a cool read. I did have that thought as I was going through it through this. I was like, what was Joe thinking when he picked this? Not like I can't believe you picked this book, but I don't think this is what he thought it was.

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No, it wasn't. It wasn't at all.

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It's an anthropological look at ritual, not a productivity look at ritual.

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Yeah, it's absolutely different than what I was thinking. I kind of had in my head that I was looking at ritual in my mind whenever I picked this up was choosing this was around the process of start up and shut down routines.

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And that concept, the process of making your coffee in the morning, that ritual that we go through every day and that pattern of behaviors that help us become more effective at what we're doing each day, that's the concept I had in my head.

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That is absolutely the background bias, I guess, in this case, like what I think of when I hear the word ritual, that is not what Demetris took us through at all.

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I mean, there is a small element of that, but we're just talking about a hint of that in here. It's absolutely more geared towards the bigger, broader societal rituals.

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Why do communities have religious rights, like rights of passage, that type of thing is more what it's geared towards. So, sorry if I let us all astray, but I still think it was a fascinating read.

00:18:12

I don't know if I would have picked it had I known where it was going to take us.

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Yeah, I that's my two cents when I, but time I finished it. I was like, this wasn't what Joe thought it was, but it was a fascinating diversion.

00:18:29

Yes, it is an interesting diversion.

00:18:33

I will say, before we start jumping into the book here, I did kind of the how to read a book pre skim of the book, if you will. And I wrote down three things.

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I wrote these down before I read the book. This was during that skimming piece.

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One of which was he really likes fire walking. I wrote this down before I read the book. And two was, I noticed he had a number of scriptural passages in it. When I read that pre skim, it turns out that's not a very common theme.

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I just happened to catch those when I walked through it. And the third one was COVID that there's a fairly strong COVID thing that comes up in this. We'll get to that point, I think.

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But that's definitely not a theme that carries throughout the whole book either.

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And I bring that up because I think it's interesting how sometimes when you do those pre skims, it doesn't always line up with what you end up seeing in the book. Sometimes it does. Sometimes whenever I do that pre skim, it's like, oh, yeah, these are the five main points.

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He's going to take me through in the whole book. And you kind of get that before you ever start through it. This one kind of led me astray.

00:19:45

Yeah, I get that because I had that same experience recently with another book that we're going to be covering shortly. I think I don't think it was necessarily a bad thing. I don't think it.

00:19:57

I don't know. I wouldn't say it led you astray per se. But yeah, that's not representative of the majority of the material in this particular book.

00:20:11

Sure. So I guess let's jump into the book. And the first chapter here is the ritual paradox.

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And the paradox that he's referring to here is that most people, when asked about a ritual, they will tell you that it's a vital part of their existence and a vital part of who they are, and a very necessary thing that they're doing.

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And yet, if you ask them why they do it, they will oftentimes just tell you, well, we've always done it.

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Like, is this what our ancestors have done from the beginning of time? Like, that's as far as it gets with them. They can't really explain that to you.

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And yet it's a very, very important component to their existence. And obviously, there's a whole bunch of stories that revolve around this, but that's ultimately what the paradox is.

00:21:12

Yeah. The thing I thought of when he's laying out these rituals and we'll get into how the social aspect of this plays out.

00:21:24

But that was immediately where my mind went because of the examples that he used. He used a lot of religious examples, not Christian, just tiny towns, tribes, like, why do they do what they do.

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And I thought immediately of bowling alone.

00:21:44

And that's a different approach, and it's not focusing on the religious aspect so much, but it's really like, why do we do things in the groups that we do them with.

00:21:55

And when you're talking about the ritual paradox and the groups of people and sharing the examples of some of the crazy rituals that people have, that's kind of the framing that was set in my mind.

00:22:08

So thank you, how to read a book for encouraging us to typically read. I'll just share a couple other definitions here from the mind map that I created that habits are casually transparent.

00:22:20

You're talking about habits versus rituals, where rituals are transparently opaque.

00:22:25

And what that means is that when you do a habit, it's immediately obvious why you're doing the habit.

00:22:31

Whereas with a ritual, you kind of don't see the outcome. So going to the gym and exercising, that's a habit because you get healthy, you lose the weight, whatever, whereas a ritual, it's not as evident what you're gaining from the exercise.

00:22:49

Yeah, there's definitely like an inherent benefit to it. Like there's not a thing that you can tell just from the outside, like what you're saying.

00:23:01

So if I were to participate in, say, a Sunday morning service, people can kind of get an idea of why you're doing that purely because that's such a prominent ritual that people go through.

00:23:13

Were it not for that fact? It would be very confusing almost for other people to understand why you're doing that, which is the experience I had whenever I read some of the stories of people crawling on their hands and knees up this rocky road to get to a temple.

00:23:31

Like, what? Why? Why would you do that? That doesn't, like that hurts. Why would you do that? That doesn't make sense.

00:23:38

But whenever you read the rest of the book, you realize, no, that's a very vital part to their culture. It's a very important part to their community.

00:23:46

You can't take that away. It's a vital component to who they are. You're basically removing a piece of their identity by removing that particular ritual.

00:23:58

So it's a very important act. We'll talk about why they're important as we go through here, but they're important. I guess that's the point I'm trying to say. They're important. Don't skip them.

00:24:11

They are important. I found myself a little bit uncomfortable as he's going through some of these rituals because he's basically laying them all out side by side and saying none of these have any real tangible value essentially.

00:24:33

He didn't explicitly say it that way, but that's kind of the idea that you're getting. Because some of the rituals that he describes, like you mentioned, they're crawling up this thing and they got all these pins and needles in their body.

00:24:47

And so he's kind of going for the shock value. Like, why would anybody do that? And when I compare that to the rituals that I participate in, I don't think they are the same thing.

00:25:00

I feel like these are apples and oranges, but he would probably argue that everybody is going to say that about their rituals compared to anybody else's.

00:25:10

However, I don't know. I kind of get the feeling that he's not coming at this from a religious background. He's purely a anthropologist.

00:25:22

And so he's looking at it a little bit differently than I am.

00:25:28

Yeah, absolutely. He makes that point. Like the ones that we do, we don't even realize that it's a thing that we're doing.

00:25:35

He made the point early on in the book that he didn't feel like he had any rituals at all because they were so normal to him. It's not a ritual.

00:25:45

Like, he doesn't think of it that way because it's just, again, part of who he is and what he does. And whenever someone else looks at it from the outside, like, "Oh, yeah, absolutely, that's a ritual."

00:25:57

100%. But you wouldn't notice that on your own. And I have to admit, like, there's a lot of things like, "Oh, yeah, we do that every single week. We do that every day. We do that every year."

00:26:08

And yet, I don't think of those as rituals. But if you were someone from Africa looking at us, you're like, "What is wrong with you? Why would you do that?"

00:26:19

No, that's what we do. But I think the same thing of their tribes. Like, "Why would you do that? That's what we do." So it's all perspective in that sense.

00:26:29

Probably, although there is a little piece of my brain which says they're not the same thing.

00:26:39

You can make the argument about a lot of the religious rituals specifically because you're not going to find tangible evidence to support why I go to church, etc.

00:26:51

But I also feel like there are some broader rituals that you can specifically tie. This is the outcome that comes from these. And it's not really where he's trying to focus, but I feel like that's kind of the gray area here.

00:27:03

And then those get lumped in with all of the superstitious stuff. And it's hard to reconcile that.

00:27:10

Yeah. Well, let's keep moving through the book here. And I think some of this will start to clean itself up a little bit.

00:27:18

The next chapter here is the ritual species. I didn't feel like there was a whole lot here that was super helpful other than the fact that he talks about how there are a lot of animals in the animal kingdom.

00:27:32

There are a lot of species that also practice rituals and things like elephants returning to the site where their matrons or the sages of their herd died.

00:27:46

They will return to that place in years to come. There was one story of how an elephant had been struck. Was it struck by lightning?

00:27:57

It had died in a certain location and they moved it in order to bury it. But the elephant herd came and moved it back to where it had been killed.

00:28:08

It's like, huh, interesting. So anyway, the point was that there are many other species that also practice these rituals. So it's not necessarily just a human thing.

00:28:17

At the same time, this is something that we do significantly more than most, if maybe it's all other species out there. So this is by far something that we do more, but it's not unique to us. I think that was the point.

00:28:34

Yeah, and one of the things that he says in this chapter is that the most intelligent animals tend to have the richest repertoire of rituals. But then, like I said, the framing for the rituals is kind of like, this is all hocus pocus.

00:28:47

Whoo, stuff that is a real. Yeah. So those are kind of, I don't know, create some cognitive dissonance in my brain.

00:28:56

Yeah. But the other thing I found interesting in this chapter is the rite of passage rituals, because these exist everywhere. There's three stages to these first stages. You're symbolically separated from your previous way of life.

00:29:12

And second stage, you're kind of in this transitional period where you're neither one thing or the other. On the third stage, you reenter society as a new person.

00:29:21

And I think that's a very simple framework, obviously, for this. But I think this is a really cool model. And it's not something that just organically plays out and then you can point to it and say, oh, hey, there's the ritual at work.

00:29:38

But I'm thinking about, even like in terms of building a community, you can use this formula, not manipulatively, but you can use it to help people create deeper connections with the group and provide the identity and the support that they're after.

00:29:59

And in a church context, I'm the men's ministry of my church, thinking through like, because I've been a part of this, these sort of things before where you go away for a weekend and you have the ceremonies, whatever, and you come back and everybody's real tight because you all shared the experience.

00:30:12

I know we'll get into some of that a little bit later. But this rite of passage ritual, I think there's a lot of ways that you can, you can apply this proactively and get some positive results.

00:30:22

And I think that's a great thing to do. And I think that's a great thing to do. And I think that's a great thing to do.

00:30:29

And I think that's a great thing to do. And I think that's a great thing to do. And I think that's a great thing to do.

00:30:39

And I think that's a great thing to do. And I think that's a great thing to do. And I think that's a great thing to do.

00:30:53

And I think that's really important. This is something that this is probably an area that I wish the American culture had something to offer.

00:31:07

And I think that's a great thing to do. And I think that's a great thing to do. And I think that's a great thing to do.

00:31:14

And I think that's a great thing to do. And I think that's a great thing to do. And I think that's a great thing to do.

00:31:26

And I think that's a great thing to do. And I think that's a great thing to do. And I think that's a great thing to do.

00:31:34

And I think that's a great thing to do. And I think that's a great thing to do. And I think that's a great thing to do.

00:31:41

And I think that's a great thing to do. And I think that's a great thing to do. And I think that's a great thing to do.

00:31:51

And I think that's a great thing to do. And I think that's a great thing to do. And I think that's a great thing to do.

00:31:58

And I'm also aware of how fast this time goes. So it's just something I need to be aware of, I think.

00:32:05

Yeah. And it's funny, I didn't jot that down as an action item, probably because I've been thinking about it already for a little while.

00:32:15

And really the genesis of the whole thought process for that, for me, by the way, is just the topic that no parent wants to talk about.

00:32:27

But you got teenagers, so you got dudes. Like, how are we going to tell them about sex? Right?

00:32:32

And we decided we didn't want it to be a one time event. We wanted it to be a series of discussions.

00:32:39

So we've kind of done that and we've done it together. But I wanted to kind of culminate in this coming of age ceremony sort of a thing.

00:32:49

So I've always had that picture in the back of my mind that I wanted this to be not just this really awkward negative.

00:32:57

Never want to talk to mom and dad about that ever again phase, because that's kind of what my experience was.

00:33:04

But I want it to be like a celebration. And I want it to end on a positive, basically.

00:33:11

Well, let's start down this path of why we do these rituals, which is where he starts heading next.

00:33:18

And he's got a handful of, I guess, outcomes or reasons for these rituals that we do, the first of which he titled "Order."

00:33:29

And at first, I have to admit, I was probably about halfway through this chapter before I fully grasped what he was getting at with that.

00:33:38

There were probably three, if not four of these, it just took me a while to capture what it was he was intending with these chapter titles.

00:33:48

But to try to give you some understanding of this, sometimes we complete rituals in order to give us order.

00:33:58

And by that, what I mean is there are oftentimes areas of stress or anxiety that we tend to put a lot of "superstitions" around.

00:34:09

There are a couple of examples here like gambling. You hear of people who go to casinos and they have all their special trinkets that they set up on the slot machine,

00:34:19

and they have this whole process of this coin and then pull, and then this coin and coin, coin, pull, and then they have this whole process.

00:34:26

Even down to the amount of time that they wait between coins, right? So it's a very superstitious process. That's how we think of it.

00:34:35

But it's a ritual for them. Another one is high stakes sports. We've all seen and heard the stories of Olympians that have this set routine that they walk through every time they are ready to dive into the pool.

00:34:49

Or every single time they're ready to go up to bat for a baseball game, they have an exact series sequence of things that they do leading into that.

00:34:58

That's an example of a ritual for order in order to bring some order to that stressful situation.

00:35:07

So there's a whole lot of background to that, but that's ultimately one of the main reasons that we'll do these rituals.

00:35:16

Yeah, I immediately thought of the Michael Phelps example with the superstar athletes having the more rituals than others. That was kind of interesting.

00:35:27

Again, the more intelligent the species, the more rituals they tend to have. Also, the better they are at their craft, the more rituals they seem to have.

00:35:37

This is other interesting stuff in here too about how rituals are as effective as anxiety medication and how our brains are predictive. They tend to look for patterns.

00:35:48

But the thing that I found the most fascinating was the story at the beginning about Brontoslaw Malinowski.

00:35:55

He was one of the first to step off the veranda and live among the people. So this whole story is setting up three different eras of anthropology.

00:36:08

The first one was armchair anthropology. People who stayed in their offices in England and wrote about the people in these other lands and other nations that they heard stories about, which just sounds ridiculous when you hear that now.

00:36:24

And then there was the veranda anthropology where people would go to the countries, but they would stay on the missionary compounds or they'd stay at the governor's mansion.

00:36:35

Their form of anthropology was a couple of conversations with a few of the slaves that worked there or something.

00:36:42

But this guy actually went and lived with the locals and observed them as they lived their everyday life. And I feel like that's what the author does too.

00:36:53

He has some stories later on about how he got into firewalking, for example, which are evidence of that.

00:37:00

But I thought that was kind of interesting. I never heard that story before. I don't think there's really a big takeaway from that.

00:37:07

I just thought it was kind of interesting that we had this whole perception of how the world worked without ever actually touching it.

00:37:13

Yes, which makes lots of sense, right? Well, we all do that in some way, shape or form, right?

00:37:18

No, we don't. It's just a few people.

00:37:24

I know that in this chapter, he does talk about, I don't think he intended this to be a definition for ritual, but he calls out some characteristics of a ritual that is designed for the bringing about of order.

00:37:42

So again, like I was saying earlier, this is an area that we're trying to, if you think about stressful or anxious scenarios, like this is how these rituals, like ways that these rituals can come about.

00:37:55

They're characterized by rigidity. So it's very strict rules around how the ritual is to be performed. There's repetition. It happens every whatever scenario.

00:38:07

So every time you're up to bat, every time a president is inaugurated, every time you're getting up in the morning, you have these rituals and there's a very strict set of rules that is repetitive, right?

00:38:22

And then there's redundancy inside of them. So oftentimes there is an action and then another action that technically does the same thing, but it might be slightly different.

00:38:33

It might be the exact same action. So it's repetitive, but within the same ritual, which makes it redundant if you're with me on that.

00:38:42

So because of that, it means that you end up with this sequence of actions that you're taking. You know what's coming next. Well, when you know what comes next, it tends to create this like peace and calm in your soul, I guess.

00:38:58

And it can be a way to combat the anxiety and the stress. So that's why a lot of these athletes will do that because it's a known so they know what's coming next.

00:39:08

There's not a big scary monster that's going to jump out and get them because they know the process and know the sequence of events is coming up.

00:39:16

Yeah, that was one of the big takeaways for me from this chapter was that rituals about an area of life that are stressful or uncertain.

00:39:24

Basically, the parts of our life that we can't control, we compensate by gaining control in other areas, which even the superstar athletes, like you mentioned, the rituals tend to be reserved just for uncertain aspects of the game.

00:39:39

So like a lot of rituals will exist around pitching or hitting in baseball, but there's hardly any that pertain to fielding.

00:39:47

Right. Because that is completely skill-based or feels like you have more control over that.

00:39:53

Yeah, it's pure reactionary. It's not set up.

00:39:58

Well, the next chapter here is called glue, which again, wait, what? When I first read that, think of it. Think of it this way.

00:40:09

You have a big collective group that's together, a big ceremony. Let's take a sporting event, right?

00:40:17

You're at a football game, and in that football game, there's some form of a chant or something that happens together.

00:40:26

I'm in Minnesota. Let's take the Vikings. Packers don't count.

00:40:30

The Vikings have this chant of chanting skull, and I'm not going to take you through the whole thing because I'm not a Vikings fan, so I can't really tell you the details, but I know that this is a thing.

00:40:41

And whenever they do that, it's a way for the entire set of Vikings fan in that stadium to come together at one moment and do the same action and make the same noise, make the same movements.

00:40:56

It's a way that they collectively work together. And whenever they do that, all sorts of things happen, but it helps you feel like you're a part of an overall group.

00:41:08

It helps you feel like you're a part of that society that you're joining into.

00:41:13

And you can see this with conferences for tech groups. You can see it in weekly religious ceremonies on Sunday mornings.

00:41:23

There are these repetitive, like I was talking about earlier, actions that people do communally that will help you feel like you're a part of that group.

00:41:35

There's all sorts of science that comes in with this, but I did think it was really interesting that, okay, whenever you're doing this, it's kind of a component of you feel like you belong.

00:41:46

And we've talked about that in the past. Like, that's one of the core human experience needs.

00:41:52

It's like, we need to feel like we're a part of a group. This is a very strong way to do that is participating in these rituals.

00:41:58

Yes, I'm curious. Were you ever like a super intense sports fan?

00:42:05

No, not really. Like, that's something that like I would play the sports, but was never, I've never been a huge sports fan of any team. Like, I followed teams and I'm like, oh, yeah, they won last night, but I didn't watch the game.

00:42:18

So obviously I'm not a huge fan.

00:42:20

Okay, I used to be and I noticed over the last probably close to 20 years, my interest in sports has waned. And I shouldn't even say interest, but I'm just I'm not a diehard packer fan anymore. I'm in Wisconsin.

00:42:40

So that's the thing. Everybody in Wisconsin is a packer fan. It is literally the culture in Green Bay.

00:42:46

And I found that over the years, like, I don't care if I catch the game or not. If it's on, I'll watch it. I enjoy it.

00:42:54

But they lose. My week isn't shattered. Like it used to be. And I was kind of reading this chapter. I was thinking about that transformation over the last bunch of years.

00:43:04

And I was like, why is that? And I think this chapter kind of highlighted it. I feel like with sports specifically, it can become a form of religion.

00:43:17

And when he's talking about the glue and the way that people bond together by going through these different rituals and when you were talking about the ones that the Vikings fans do, I can list a whole bunch of them that Packers fans do.

00:43:30

I know everybody tailgates, but packer fans really tailgate. Like, that's part of the experience. It's a whole day thing.

00:43:39

And I see that as like people go and they do that. And that's how they get their community. And I guess reflecting over the last several years, we've gotten very involved in our church.

00:43:55

And I think that's probably a primary driver for why I don't feel the need to connect with that group of people anymore. There's another group I would rather connect with who aren't going to be 50% more likely to go commit domestic violence when their team loses.

00:44:11

Yep. There is that. Yeah. But I think it's interesting. And I think it's also, it's good to be aware of that we have this natural desire, I guess, for what they call phenotypic matching, where we as humans are and also other animals.

00:44:30

And we have to generate inferences on the basis of the similarity of ourselves to their, to our group. So we're kind of looking for people who are like us, people that we can identify with.

00:44:43

And so the rituals provide us a way to enter into those, those groups. And I feel like this chapter does a really good job of highlighting the fact that this is a basic human need.

00:44:54

I'm associated with this, but if I were to advise people as they're reading this, be consider where you're getting your, your identity from, because there's positive and negative versions of this out there, I would argue.

00:45:06

And even some stuff like sports fandom, that's not a bad thing, but it can be Packer culture. I mentioned like that statistic. That's actually something I heard in college. I went to school in DePere, which is right next to Green Bay.

00:45:21

And actually when they do their training camp, they come and they stay at the dorms at the college that I went to, St. Norbert College. So one year, I couldn't get into my dorm on time because the Packers were still there.

00:45:30

And the air conditioners in all the dorm rooms, you could walk by, you could see all the air conditioners, you could see all the fancy cars in the parking lot, and then the minute that the students in the air conditioners come out.

00:45:41

So I know what that is like, you see the Packers around town just because they just own that whole community, like they're worshiped there.

00:45:50

And that is an actual statistic that when the Packers lose, the Green Bay Police Department gets 50% more domestic violence calls. And that's super sad.

00:46:01

And that's just people who are upset because they've identified, I would argue with the wrong culture.

00:46:08

Yeah. And just to take this to a non-sports scenario, because like sports is of course a very big thing. But this can play out even in like work scenarios that are seasonal.

00:46:22

I know growing up, I grew up on a farm, right? Well, every harvest, everyone in the farming community had the same goal. Everybody was doing the same thing.

00:46:33

Everybody's taking the crop out of the field and you are either putting it in grain bins or you're driving it to the local elevator to have them store it or sell it, etc, etc.

00:46:44

Everybody's doing the same thing, which means that whenever you are at the John Deere dealership picking up parts, you are at the elevator trying to get contracts, taken care of or finished up, you are delivering grain.

00:46:57

Anytime you're doing this, you're running into other people doing the exact same thing. This happens over and over and over again, which means that during that time, everybody's doing roughly the same tasks.

00:47:08

So you have this collective, let's all work together to get this great big task done. I get that everybody's in their own independent place.

00:47:16

But what that did for me was it kind of has me in a spot where like, okay, that is kind of part of my identity growing up. And it meant that everybody had their alliances with what color your tractors were, what type of trucks you were driving, like all these things are part of that.

00:47:35

And of course, you razz each other about it. This is why I say if it's not a green tractor, it's not a tractor. This is why I say these things, right? So it's because of that. And then I have to use this glue analogy. It's kind of brought that whole group of people together to this point where now if I run into somebody and I find out they either grew up on a farm or they are currently running a farm.

00:48:00

And it's like finding a brother or sister is what it's like, oh, great. What do you do for XYZ? Like, it's still ingrained in me, even though I've been away from the farming community for a long time now.

00:48:14

That is so deep into what I grew up with. I think it's because of this. Because of that collective component of we're all working together to do this thing.

00:48:26

And it was done so often at so many different times, like planting season was the same thing. Middle of summer, we had all your spring and delivery times. It was all the same thing. Everybody was doing the same thing.

00:48:38

I'll quit talking about it. But I feel like that's a big part of things sometimes is when you have a seasonal job that can come about.

00:48:45

Yeah, makes sense. Anything else about glue? No, we should talk about effervescence though. So effervescence. I had to look up the term. Do you have to look this up? I feel like this is one of those weird gaps in my knowledge sometimes sometimes I look upwards.

00:49:03

I feel like this is the term I should have looked up, but I was too tired to look it up. Yeah, basically, there's a technical scientific definition for it, which I didn't understand.

00:49:16

The one that did make sense was extreme excitement. That was the definition that I got for it. Basically, think about this as you're at a, the easy one I felt like was if you're at a concert.

00:49:29

There's a huge group of people there. Again, this is a big congregation of sorts of people. You're dancing all the rhythm of the same song. It's a synchrony component.

00:49:45

It can create this extreme elevated excitement level that is very difficult if not impossible for you to achieve single-handedly. This is very, very high levels of excitement, heart rates, skyrockets, and all sorts of weird science things come about, which I'll talk about here in a minute, but that's ultimately what it is.

00:50:09

Extreme arousal, I guess, is the term that the scientists would use, but super exciting. It's derived from the Latin verb furvir, which is to boil.

00:50:22

It is basically the escape of gas from an aqueous solution and the filming or fizzing that results.

00:50:30

That's the science term thing that I didn't... Wait, what? Okay, great. Super fun.

00:50:36

Yeah, I'm sure there's a connection there between the science definition and the point he's trying to make here, but the thing that just kind of stood out to me...

00:50:47

Well, actually in this chapter, this is one of the things I jotted down in many ways. Sportsfan is a lot like religion, but the intense collective rituals expand the sense of self. So I have a hard time mapping those two definitions together, but I like the fact that this is produced when everybody is in sync.

00:51:06

That's one of the things he talks about, is that heart rates sink during intense rituals based on the depth of the emotional relationship he talked about the story of the people who were firewalkers and the people who were actually walking across the fire, their heart rates were matched almost exactly by their family members, which were in the stands.

00:51:22

They weren't participating at all, but they were connected, and so they had the same sort of physiological change that happened. And it's cool to see, I think, how that manifests, again, firewalking is such an absurd example to me.

00:51:41

I have a hard time relating to that. That's what he studied, so I'm sure he understands it completely. But I'm thinking about this in terms of the community worship in a religious service at our church.

00:51:56

How this manifests, I would argue there's something else that happens there in addition to the natural effervescence, but just isolate that for a moment.

00:52:12

That alone is reason why you're never going to be able to replicate the experience you would have in the building with the people on a live stream. It's just not the same. It's not the same impact. It's not the exact same words delivered the exact same way. It's not the same message.

00:52:32

You don't receive it the same. And this chapter was really just a call to collective rituals I felt.

00:52:41

You touched on the science piece here, but this heart rate synchrony from the people enacting the ritual versus people standing by and watching. There's a lot to do with the mirror neurons. We've talked about that before.

00:52:55

If I stand next to someone on a cross my arms, the person I'm talking to is likely to have a tendency to cross their arms without realizing that they're doing it. So it's that concept.

00:53:07

You tend to get in sync with other people, whether you're the one participating or you're the one viewing this ritual being completed. And because of that, it creates this neurological, physiological connection with the group.

00:53:26

And you all start to work together. Now, this has very strong positive benefits, right? But this can also flip and go the other direction.

00:53:39

We've heard of mob mentality. Guess where this comes from? That's the same concept. It's just in the negative.

00:53:47

Which doesn't really go into that. I don't feel. So it's a component here that like, yes, this has strong positives. But I feel like you have to be careful with that because whenever you're in these scenarios, if it's something that's like a part of your culture and a part of your history, like, I feel like that's one thing.

00:54:09

But when it's like the one offs, they take a sports event like what you were talking about with the sport events when the Packers lose. Collectively, that's where sometimes there gets to be violence in the streets.

00:54:21

And the mobs take over after a sporting events like take the world cup whenever somebody loses. It seems like there's always violence in the street afterwards.

00:54:30

It's kind of the same thing. Yeah. It's that follow the leaders sort of thing. I thought of the Jamestown guy. I forget his name. Drink the Kool-Aid.

00:54:44

Oh, yes. Yeah. Like, that's obviously the extreme negative version of this. They also mentioned later on, I think in the book, the people who thought the world was going to end in the 1950s and the aliens phoned the person and said,

00:54:59

"You know what? You did a good job, so we're not not going to destroy you or something." I forget the specifics of that because it was just so ridiculous.

00:55:08

But I think the big thing to call out here, he didn't actually talk about this. And you're right, he didn't include the negative examples because he's trying to build a case for why these things are good and why you should be secret.

00:55:18

Correct. Yes.

00:55:19

I think the takeaway for anybody though, like you can't ignore that part. You have to go into it with both eyes open. You have to recognize what you are giving and what you are getting when you participate in these collective rituals.

00:55:33

Don't just go with the flow. But choose who you're going to link yourself with. And then when you do that, there is a whole nother level of this effervescence they call it, but he also mentions that flow is linked to effervescence.

00:55:47

So maybe a good definition for effervescence is like collective flow, where you can get in your own individual flow and you're working on something, but there's something that's more powerful when everybody is in the same flow.

00:55:59

Just don't be stupid.

00:56:02

Yeah.

00:56:03

Look at the outcomes. Look at the fruit. Count the cost before you do it.

00:56:08

Yes. Absolutely. I think that's my point is like, like you were saying eyes wide open, like just be aware that whenever you're in these,

00:56:16

collective communal rituals, it just makes sure you're not being dumb.

00:56:24

Stay true to yourself in that scenario.

00:56:28

It's okay to go with what everyone's doing, but if what everyone is doing goes against your own principles, that's when you've stepped outside the bounds of what's okay.

00:56:40

Yeah. And it's, I don't know, because there's a balance here. You have to balance your own personal identity with the group identity. I think we're actually going to talk about that a little bit here.

00:56:51

So it's not just getting everything your own way, but when it comes to religion specifically, this is one of the things that I feel a lot of people have trouble with is they view any sort of self-sacrifice as being cultish.

00:57:09

And that's not true.

00:57:13

I go to my church. I do the things that I do there. I give willingly of my time and my money, but I get something out of it. I recognize what I'm getting from that investment.

00:57:27

It's not just because, oh, somebody told me to.

00:57:31

That's the big difference. And I think you have to understand that. You have to think about that and decide for yourself whether the investment is worth it.

00:57:44

But don't just write it off because you don't understand it either because like the whole idea behind all these rituals, the whole reason this book was written was like they have this opaque nature.

00:57:55

The benefit isn't obvious, but I guess thinking about liminal thinking and surrounding myself with people who think differently than myself in terms of broadening my own worldview.

00:58:11

I would just encourage everyone to think that because somebody is doing something and you don't understand it, don't just think they're crazy.

00:58:18

That's probably a good place. Let's go on to the next chapter. The next one's called Super Glue.

00:58:25

This one I feel like is in here for shock value, but let me just spell it out in at least a little bit of detail in that.

00:58:33

Think of what we were talking about with Glue, standard glue versus super glue.

00:58:40

You have these collective ceremonies that you're doing that help you feel like you're part of the community.

00:58:45

Take that and amp it up and basically bring about physical pain in the midst of this in order to...

00:58:56

I don't want to say rights of passage because it's not always that, but it's that concept.

00:59:01

But you're basically doing these extreme rituals in order to build an even deeper bond within the community.

00:59:10

The example at the beginning of this is the bullet ant gloves.

00:59:16

Oh my gosh.

00:59:17

And I could not... What is wrong with people was my thought.

00:59:22

I get it, but man, this was hard for me to just read, let alone envision, but this is a Brazilian Amazon tribe, I believe.

00:59:30

And there's a thing referred to a critter, a bullet ant. It's a very large ant.

00:59:36

I guess it's sting is considered one of the most painful insect bites, stings in existence.

00:59:46

So it was referred to.

00:59:48

Called a bullet ant because it feels like getting shot.

00:59:50

Yeah. And what they do is they capture these things through a whole process.

00:59:56

They string them up to where their stingers are inside a pair of gloves and they put the gloves on when the ants wake up.

01:00:05

And they have to endure many, many, many of these stings on their hands.

01:00:11

And it causes paralysis and convulsions and all sorts of stuff. It's a bad deal.

01:00:19

But it's basically a part of a rites of passage ritual.

01:00:25

Okay.

01:00:26

If you can get through that, in my mind, is what I'm thinking, it's like, yeah, you deserve to be a part of the community.

01:00:32

Absolutely. If you can get through that. But it's a very common thing.

01:00:36

That's like an extreme ritual that helps bring people to a very strong tie to that community.

01:00:44

Thus, superglue. That's where that comes from.

01:00:48

I didn't like this chapter.

01:00:50

I didn't either.

01:00:52

Yeah. That example.

01:00:54

Yeah. Another thing I thought of in this section is just like all the college social groups and hazing.

01:01:03

Which...

01:01:04

Oh, sure. I didn't think about that. But yeah.

01:01:06

I think we can all collectively agree that's bad, right?

01:01:11

We can agree that putting these ants in these gloves and making the boys wear them for three minutes at a time and endure all this physical pain as a rite of passage, that's bad, right?

01:01:23

I can't... I have trouble thinking of a positive application to this.

01:01:31

I get his point. I see what it does. He talks about gang violence in this too. Well, gang initiation.

01:01:38

And how the people who go through it, they know the people who are beating them up.

01:01:42

They know that they went through the same thing and so it creates a special bond. I'm just like, why?

01:01:48

I understand that you want to create this really positive bond.

01:01:54

But I don't think you should go looking for the worst situations you can put yourself in order to create it.

01:01:59

I'm kind of curious if that's something that you can only achieve through these things, which I have never experienced to that degree.

01:02:08

So I can't speak to it, but I've got to believe there's another way to get to that level than to go through one of these things.

01:02:18

He mentions also the people who fight together in a war and the pain and the suffering that they go through.

01:02:25

And when I heard that part, I remember seeing a long time ago a documentary on TV about the pinning that Marines used to do.

01:02:34

They have the pins that put them in the chest. People run up and jab them and it's really painful.

01:02:39

But if you know what you're getting into in a war, that's probably pretty minor compared to some of the stuff that you're going through.

01:02:46

So I don't want to give it a pass, but also at the same time, I remember that coming out and people being like, that's wrong.

01:02:54

I shouldn't do that.

01:02:56

So this whole chapter just left me really uncomfortable. The big positive takeaway I got from it is that membership in a group does require that sort of trade-off between your personalized and in a group identity.

01:03:08

So there is some sort of self-sacrifice, but I would argue you don't put yourself in mortal danger in order to do it, and that there's this personality fusion that happens, which is the feeling that an individual's identity becomes fused with their collective identity.

01:03:23

I've experienced that myself, and so I kind of don't understand why that is in this superglue chapter.

01:03:30

Yeah, this is one of those that I think you're right. It makes me wonder, is there any positive net outcome?

01:03:40

Like, why would you do this?

01:03:43

But I also don't know the connection to a community or the outcome of having participated in this to know if it would be worth it.

01:03:54

My suspicion is that anyone who goes through this would tell you absolutely it was worth it, but it feels insane for someone to say that.

01:04:03

You know what I mean? It just seems like there's no positive way that this could come about, and yet everyone who's been through it would say that it was the best thing ever.

01:04:12

So I don't know that I want to participate in something like these, but at the same time I can't tell you that it's something that no one should participate in, so there's that.

01:04:29

That's the hard part though, because I feel like after reading this chapter I want to say that.

01:04:35

Yes, I want to make that declaration that no one should ever do these things, and yet I can't say that.

01:04:44

I mean, I guess it's quite possible that I just have not encountered the level of community that some other people have because they've gone through this extreme negative stuff.

01:04:56

Does that mean that you should go looking for that though?

01:05:02

I think it depends on your culture and what group you're a part of.

01:05:05

Sure.

01:05:06

In the United States, there's not a ritual that revolves around this that I can think of that people would participate in that's not like on the fringes and occult and known dangerous, right?

01:05:22

Yeah, true.

01:05:23

So in a positive form, I don't know that I could identify one.

01:05:29

There are many tribes and cultures of course that they could name a number of these, and they would absolutely say they're vital to their society.

01:05:40

So I don't feel like I'm qualified to say one way or the other on this.

01:05:45

It's something that I don't want to participate in.

01:05:48

I do not want to put my hands in a pair of gloves full of bullet ant stingers.

01:05:52

But making unqualified opinions is what we do on this show.

01:05:57

Correct.

01:05:58

I don't want to do this.

01:06:02

Anyway, let's move on.

01:06:06

Okay.

01:06:07

The next chapter is called Sacrifice.

01:06:10

And he starts off this chapter with some stories from the animal kingdom.

01:06:17

The one that I remember offhand is there are certain birds that when flying away from a predator will sing to their heart's desire, which doesn't make any sense because they need to be conserving all of their energy possible to escape from said predator.

01:06:32

And yet what happens is by displaying that I'm so strong that I can not only fly away from you, but I can also sing at the same time.

01:06:42

It shows that there's such a strong prey, I guess, that the predator a lot of times will give up chase and they're able to get away free.

01:06:55

And that's the initial concept behind sacrifice here.

01:07:01

Being able to give up something of yourself in order to make a statement, in order to show confidence, in order to show power, in order to show status, you're ultimately giving something up in order to make a point, which is in effect part of a ritual.

01:07:16

There's more that comes into this, like, how much you're, a lot of it has to do with money, honestly.

01:07:23

How much do you spend on a wedding?

01:07:25

Like, people can tell how much you've spent on that particular ritual that we go through with weddings.

01:07:31

And it's always a thing like, do you know how much do you spend on this wedding?

01:07:34

Like, it's a thing people talk about, right?

01:07:36

So anyway, it's in some form or another, it's all a sacrifice that people are making.

01:07:43

Yeah.

01:07:44

I want to go back just for a second for a respond to that because Blake had mentioned something in the chat that I feel like I should clarify was I mentioned the documentary with the pinning for the Marines.

01:07:52

I understand that that does not happen on a regular basis anymore.

01:07:56

Maybe it never did on a regular basis, such as the documentary that I saw, but I'm sure you could find your own example of that from whatever social group or arm of the armed forces you happen to be associated with.

01:08:11

So I don't want to pick on one.

01:08:13

I have a lot of friends who are Marines, and I thank every Marine for their service.

01:08:19

But back to the sacrifice section.

01:08:23

I like the idea here where everyone needs to pitch in, and then the collective group is stronger.

01:08:30

I think it's interesting that the people who go along end up paying more than their fair share because there's always going to be freeloaders, they mentioned.

01:08:41

So it doesn't matter if you're paying taxes to the government, or if you're paying, tithing to a church, whatever group you're a part of, essentially you could look at the value you're getting versus the amount that you're putting in, and on the surface.

01:08:58

It's going to look like you're not.

01:09:00

It's not a good investment.

01:09:02

However, I think that's not entirely the case.

01:09:13

And they found that while a lot of liberal churches were not growing, a lot of conservative churches were, even though they were more strict.

01:09:23

And I thought that was fascinating because these costly rituals, and again, I feel like this is completely different than the superglue we were just talking about.

01:09:33

A costly ritual is not a ritual that puts your life in danger.

01:09:40

But these costly rituals help these communities grow stronger, and they require some honest displays of commitment.

01:09:47

And I was able to think about my involvement with our church, and I can see a whole bunch of examples of that.

01:09:55

And I understand why this stuff is there, and I understand why some people decide that's just too much, they're not going to do it.

01:10:00

That's always disappointing when some people just make that decision.

01:10:04

For our church, for example, I met church three times a week.

01:10:09

I play on the worship team, and I'm playing every single service, two hour services, so I'm there very early.

01:10:16

An hour and a half before the service starts, and until the service ends.

01:10:21

So it's a big investment, but I don't view it as an investment.

01:10:26

I've known right away from the time we started going to the church, and I was getting a lot out of it, and I was growing a lot as a person, not just because of the information that I was receiving, but because of the group that I was associating myself with.

01:10:42

So it was never even a question for me, like, yes, this is a worthwhile investment of my time, energy, and attention, and money, ultimately.

01:10:53

And I see some people, they don't connect at a deep enough level to really experience some of those benefits.

01:11:01

They kind of like dip their toes in, and they try it a little bit, and then they'll sometimes get some success, and sometimes something happens, and they get jittery, and then they disconnect.

01:11:11

And it always is sad to me when that happens, especially with the guys, because I'm in charge of the men's ministry, so there have been guys in my discipleship group who decide, this is no longer for me, that always eats me up, that they don't want to be associated with myself, the church, God, whatever.

01:11:31

But you can't really do anything about that, you can just participate with the people who want to participate, and that's where the value lies anyways.

01:11:40

One of the notes I wrote down was the higher the cost, the more likely to be connected.

01:11:46

So the more of a sacrifice you make for a community, the more likely you are to be a strong member of that group, that community.

01:12:00

And there's all sorts of ways that this comes about, like what you were saying, like if you're making the sacrifice of time to volunteer and be a part of your church community, it tends to build a very strong tie to that group, but it also elevates your status within that group.

01:12:20

It doesn't have to, that doesn't always have to come with it, but it can be a pretty big component there.

01:12:27

You also see this where there may be, I'm trying to think of a specific example and I'm coming up blank, but if there's a group that needs something done, and you happen to be able to make the sacrifice to make it happen, it automatically binds you to that group.

01:12:46

I probably can't give you too many details, but there's a scenario of this that I'm in the middle of right now is like, I've not traditionally gotten involved with local politics a whole lot, but there's a member of our church that I've become friends with that is now getting involved with local

01:13:05

politics and needs some tech help. I'll do that. I've complained about local politics for how long and done nothing about it. I should probably either stop complaining or do something about it. I'll do something about it.

01:13:20

I can help you in a way. I'll make that sacrifice of my time and effort in order to help you. And just inadvertently, that's now got me connected to a bunch of people in the local politics community that I was not aware that I was going to get connected to.

01:13:37

So all of a sudden, now there's this new group that I'm a part of that I didn't even know really existed until like a week ago. So that stuff can come about as well.

01:13:48

Yep. And you mentioned politics. I mentioned the church. There's other examples of this. Like a couple weeks ago, I helped somebody move. You know, you could have a friend group and you do something like that. And your buddies for life now.

01:14:06

Yeah. Because they were in a spot and they weren't going to be able to move it all by themselves. And you volunteered a Saturday to load the U-Haul, drive to the new place, help them set everything up. Right.

01:14:18

That's the kind of thing that we'll probably talk about this maybe in the next chapter. I don't know. We can go there.

01:14:26

But there's this reciprocity that comes with this sacrificial giving. Maybe he talks about that a little bit in this chapter.

01:14:36

I don't think that I want to go into those examples thinking, "What can I get from this person in the future?" That feels wrong.

01:14:47

But I think it's important to recognize that there is always a reciprocal nature there. And I would even argue that whenever you give extravagantly, you get a bigger return no matter what it is that you're giving.

01:15:03

You don't see it always right away, but it always comes back to you.

01:15:07

Yeah. So let's move on to that next chapter because it's kind of one of the themes that crosses the two lines here. So the last of these before we get into the last chapter, the book, is well-being.

01:15:20

And this is really how rituals can bring about connection and healing.

01:15:27

And there's a whole bunch involved here. This isn't necessarily a "how it goes about." This is definitely an outcome from participating in these. There's a handful of stories around people who had depression and then were recommended to participate in a communal ritual.

01:15:46

And then it helps them overcome said depression. There's all sorts of benefits like what you're talking about, Mike, with if I make a sacrifice or I have some form of a thing I give up in order to help someone else.

01:16:04

Like, it's a concept of like, if I help someone else, I'm actually helping myself, right? Like, whenever I give up an entire day to help someone move, like, I feel good about helping somebody.

01:16:16

Like, that it's not because I want help back from them. It's because I like to help other people. If someone comes up to me and says, "I have an issue with my website, there's something wrong with my domain name. It's not connecting correctly."

01:16:30

Like, I've done this so many times. It's like, "Well, did you do this, this, this, this, or this?" Chances are you didn't do the A-name setup correctly. So I know immediately what's wrong and can probably get it figured out.

01:16:44

Well, it's a very minor thing to me, but it makes me feel good about helping someone else in that scenario. Like, I don't want anything back from you. I just want to help you.

01:16:55

Let me help you. Like, that's some of that where I get benefits, the gratitude, I guess, of being able to help someone else. So there's this well-being component of it.

01:17:07

I can give you a practical example because both my wife and I got COVID.

01:17:13

So my wife, for the last, I don't know, must be six months or so. Whenever she hears about somebody going through something, she immediately forms a meal train for them.

01:17:28

Which I guess there's a service that you can use for this. People can sign up and you just drop off meals at people's houses when they can't cook on themselves.

01:17:38

And so she's done that for people who have had cancer surgeries and stuff like that.

01:17:46

And so we got COVID and we can't go anywhere. And someone from church is like, "We're going to put together a meal train for the meal train lady."

01:17:58

Yes, yes, absolutely.

01:18:03

And she never did it, I'm sure, with the intention of like, "Well, in the future, when both Mike and I have COVID, we're going to be able to reap the benefits of this."

01:18:11

Just did it because there was a need and had a way to meet it.

01:18:16

But it does feel good. And hindsight, you can look back and you can say, "Well, we've sown for that."

01:18:24

But you just got to have that attitude going into it. It doesn't matter if it ever comes back to me.

01:18:31

It's going to come back to me whether I see it or not.

01:18:33

And that's really what he's getting at in this chapter, right?

01:18:37

Sometimes these things that we do, they're for our own good.

01:18:43

It may seem like on the outside, it's just weird and strange, "Why are you doing that? That doesn't make sense. Why do you go to church every single Sunday?"

01:18:50

It's like, "It's for my own good."

01:18:52

Like, yes, it helps connect me to the community, but my mental state is significantly better on the weeks that I've done that versus the ones that I do not.

01:19:00

So it is simply a better overall personal experience of life for me to participate in those rituals.

01:19:09

Me even mentions that there are several studies, which I didn't go back and look at the references for these,

01:19:14

but several studies show religious individuals have better health, greater life satisfaction, better overall quality of life.

01:19:19

It makes sense when you've read the book up until this point why he would share those studies.

01:19:25

It's exactly what you were talking about.

01:19:28

Yep.

01:19:29

And that brings us to the last chapter of the book.

01:19:32

Harnessing the power of ritual, and at least the beginning of this is all about COVID.

01:19:40

And I thought this was really interesting that he talks about how COVID basically shut down tons of rituals.

01:19:49

He spends a large part of it just explaining the pandemic and what happened from a human pattern.

01:19:57

We were all there, buddy.

01:19:59

And I can't help but think that he did this simply so that the book would be evergreen.

01:20:06

Sure.

01:20:07

Like for you and I, it's like, really?

01:20:09

You're going to explain to me what we just lived, but I get 100 years from now.

01:20:13

It wouldn't make any sense.

01:20:15

So that I understand.

01:20:18

However, he does refer to like some of the online rituals or the quote unquote at home rituals that people did.

01:20:25

Think of like these drive by birthday parties where people would drive by wave and honk

01:20:29

and people would set out in the front yard for their birthday and such.

01:20:32

Like those became like a lot of these impromptu necessary rituals that people developed because their standard rituals were shut down and were not possible for the sake of safety.

01:20:46

So because of that, we're so drawn, like his point is that we're so drawn to these rituals and this concept of connecting in groups or participating in these behaviors that even when we're not able to, we're not allowed to, we'll make up new ones immediately in order to fill in the gaps.

01:21:06

Yeah, that was the fascinating part to me because it mentions that most rituals resist change.

01:21:12

They're very specific.

01:21:13

You have to do things in a certain way.

01:21:15

However, they are also really, really important.

01:21:18

So when you can't do them, the way that you've always done them, that's when you modify them.

01:21:25

Number one, it's interesting to think about from like how, how we navigated that.

01:21:31

Like looking back, why did we do the things that we did?

01:21:35

But I also think it's important to consider going forward.

01:21:41

Like what does this mean to us today?

01:21:45

Because you want to, I mean, I'm dealing with it right now.

01:21:49

I had the live stream service, right?

01:21:52

But I don't want to normalize live streaming service.

01:21:58

So I don't know, we're kind of in this weird spot, I feel, where we have to make these accommodations for people who can't participate fully.

01:22:10

But also you want to encourage people and maybe to the point where it's exclusionary sometimes, where you have to participate fully because when everybody participates fully, it benefits the entire group.

01:22:25

So I don't know where those lines are.

01:22:27

I'm not qualified to make those decisions, I don't think.

01:22:31

But it's interesting to think about.

01:22:33

Yeah.

01:22:34

And I think that's really, I feel like that's the point of this last chapter.

01:22:40

Like these are important so much so that whenever they become impossible, we'll come up with something else.

01:22:51

Right away.

01:22:53

Like that's the power that he's talking about.

01:22:56

Like these have such healing effects and bring about a sense of belonging, which again, as we've talked about is a core human need.

01:23:08

It helps us achieve that, which means that these have very, very high importance in our lives, whether we want to admit it or not, whether we want to acknowledge them or not, to his point at the very beginning of this whole adventure.

01:23:22

He didn't think he had any and didn't think they were that important.

01:23:25

And then it turns out these are actually vital.

01:23:28

Yeah.

01:23:29

So much so that we'll dream them up when we're not allowed to do what our normal ones are.

01:23:33

And I don't think we necessarily need to dream them up, but my one action item from this entire book here is to consider my rituals from this chapter.

01:23:45

The ones that I collectively participate in, but also I think there are rituals in my day to day that I want to think about, not just the morning evening routines like you talked about at the beginning, which you thought you were getting with this book, which you totally didn't get.

01:23:58

Correct.

01:23:59

Absolutely not.

01:24:00

But he does kind of bring it back to productivity and rituals here because he talks about Denmark in this last chapter because he lived there for a while.

01:24:07

Denmark is kind of known for its productivity, but they only average 26 and a half hours of work per week.

01:24:13

And he was shocked by that.

01:24:15

What were you?

01:24:16

What was your impression of that statistic?

01:24:18

Did you feel like that was?

01:24:20

I've heard that stat before.

01:24:22

Okay.

01:24:23

So it didn't really surprise me.

01:24:25

It was more of the around it stories that made sense to me.

01:24:30

Sure.

01:24:31

Well, I think we read enough books like shorter by Alex Payne, for example, that have kind of talked to this idea.

01:24:38

You don't need to work a ton.

01:24:40

You just need to be effective when you are.

01:24:42

You are working.

01:24:44

But I feel like that could be, and I know some people, probably even who listened to this podcast, who would hear that and be like, "What that is impossible?"

01:24:55

You know, successful business people who would be like, "That's ridiculous."

01:25:00

Yep.

01:25:01

It's not possible.

01:25:02

It is.

01:25:03

Just need good rituals.

01:25:04

But it has to.

01:25:05

That's all right.

01:25:06

Yeah.

01:25:07

I mean, it's coming back to this, right?

01:25:09

These things are powerful.

01:25:10

And if you build them in your life correctly, I mean, we've kind of jumped into action items here.

01:25:15

But if you're going to work through considering yours, this is some of what, basically I'm copying yours in this sense because this is such an odd book, if you will, for bookworm in that sense.

01:25:29

Because again, it was different than what I was planning.

01:25:31

And yet at the same time, I was like, "Okay, there's a lot going on here.

01:25:36

I have not considered rituals in this way.

01:25:38

But I'm very aware that there are many rituals I do morning and evening during the day with my family on my own that impact how productive I am in the day and how effective I am at achieving the goals that I'm driving towards.

01:25:58

And if I have the right rituals in place, it can help me get there much quicker in a lot better way.

01:26:07

So I'm with you.

01:26:09

That's definitely something I need to work through.

01:26:11

I don't know what that means, but I need to consider my rituals to use my exact terms.

01:26:17

Cool.

01:26:18

I suppose we kind of jumped through the outline into action items, which brings us to style and rating unless I've missed something.

01:26:23

Nope.

01:26:24

Okay.

01:26:25

So, style and rating, I will say that from a style stance, Demetris Zigalatus is pretty good at putting stories together.

01:26:35

And he's pretty good about finding stories that'll make you kind of squirm in your chair as you're reading.

01:26:42

Like, I don't want to even visualize the thing that you're explaining to me because it just sounds painful.

01:26:51

There are a number of those.

01:26:54

I get his point, though.

01:26:56

People will go to extreme measures to achieve the success of a ritual.

01:27:02

And that's how he's trying to get the point across.

01:27:06

Like, at a very extreme level, this is what these look like.

01:27:10

Part of what I wish he had done is maybe give us more of these day-to-day rituals.

01:27:14

He didn't really talk about those.

01:27:16

But that's probably because of my bias of thinking that's what the whole book was about.

01:27:20

Thinking that it was going to be around that concept.

01:27:24

But it doesn't really go there.

01:27:26

I mean, there's some illusions towards that, but not point-blank.

01:27:31

So, I wish there was some of that.

01:27:33

So, it's a little bit easier to examine cross, like, do a cross examination on the small scale versus the large scale, if you will.

01:27:42

So, there's not that.

01:27:44

I don't want to discount him for that because that's an expectation I put on it that I don't think he would have acknowledged in the scheme of this book because that was not his intent.

01:27:54

That said, he's very good at putting this together.

01:27:57

I think the whole concept of how it's laid out, I feel like this could have easily been a three-part book the way it was put together.

01:28:05

Like, you've got this ritual paradox in species where it's like explaining the background.

01:28:09

Like, that's really your introduction.

01:28:11

And then you've got Ordered Glue, Ephravescent Super Glue, Sacrifice Wellbeing, which is kind of your middle two-thirds of the book as it typically is, but it's the middle part.

01:28:20

And then you've got a conclusion at the end.

01:28:21

But they didn't do that partly because I think there's just that few number of chapters that didn't make sense to group them like that.

01:28:29

So, I get it.

01:28:30

I get why they did it.

01:28:32

But they had the opportunity to do the three-part thing that the editors always want.

01:28:36

So, as far as how to rate this,

01:28:39

I feel like there's a lot of good stuff here.

01:28:42

I don't necessarily know what to do with it other than just gather knowledge, which isn't necessarily bad, of course.

01:28:49

As far as like, change your life goes and from this is very actionable stance.

01:28:57

I feel like there's not a ton here.

01:29:00

I mean, there is some.

01:29:01

I feel like you could probably make that argument both ways, but just from my viewpoint, I don't feel like there's a ton of that.

01:29:07

So, to rate it, I think I'm going to put it at a 4.0.

01:29:11

I think there's a lot of great stuff here.

01:29:14

I feel like there's some lack of, what do I do with this in here?

01:29:21

And at the same time, I feel like a lot of people should read this because it's super interesting.

01:29:27

So, I feel like this is very much a knowledge book and not necessarily a go save the world book.

01:29:34

So, it's a good one.

01:29:36

I just don't feel like it fits into that upper echelon of books.

01:29:40

So, I'm going to put it at 4.0.

01:29:42

All right.

01:29:44

Did you catch any typos in your copy?

01:29:47

Yep.

01:29:48

Me too.

01:29:50

There's only one or twelve.

01:29:53

This was a really strange book to identify because you look at it, the cover looks nice.

01:30:03

A lot of the blurbs that are on there, I didn't recognize any of the names.

01:30:09

It looks like it's a quality book.

01:30:13

There's a bunch of sources.

01:30:14

Looks like it's well put together.

01:30:16

Dotted the eyes, crossed the tees.

01:30:18

But then there's the typos, which makes you question.

01:30:21

Did anybody fact check this?

01:30:23

Is there an editor working on this?

01:30:27

I shouldn't hold that against him.

01:30:30

I will say that this was a difficult book for me to read.

01:30:35

I started it and then found myself procrastinating on reading it over and over and over again.

01:30:44

Once I forced myself to sit down and read it, I was glad I did.

01:30:49

And I think it's an interesting read.

01:30:52

I won't say entertaining read because some of these stories are just bizarre.

01:30:58

I'm glad that I have read it, but I don't necessarily know that I would recommend this to the broader bookworm audience.

01:31:07

If you're interested in the stuff that we talked about today, I know a lot of people listen to bookworm as a screening service for these types of books to see if there's something that they want to pick up.

01:31:16

If you found the conversation here fascinating, then you'll love this book.

01:31:21

But if you're just kind of casually interested in it, I don't think I would recommend picking this one up.

01:31:27

I'm not sure there's a whole lot here other than the information that you were talking about.

01:31:32

It's kind of framed through rituals don't make sense, but this is why people do them.

01:31:37

And if that's the academic approach to the book, how do you apply that to your own life?

01:31:43

Go look for more meaningless rituals?

01:31:46

I don't know.

01:31:49

It's kind of a weird call to action at the end.

01:31:53

I can't wrap it up in a nice bow and present a solid case for rituals are absolutely critical and you got to get you some as soon as you can.

01:32:02

I don't know.

01:32:03

He stumbled into some and he's like, "Oh, I get why."

01:32:06

But it's a very, very academic book.

01:32:10

So if that's your thing, you'll probably like the style, if not, probably not going to like it.

01:32:15

I'm going to rate it at three and a half stars.

01:32:18

Again, I think it's a good book.

01:32:20

It's definitely not what I expected.

01:32:22

It's better than when I thought at the beginning of the book.

01:32:27

And I got some stuff out of it, I guess, in terms of like connecting dots for why we do things the way that we do.

01:32:38

But I wasn't looking for that type of book in the first place.

01:32:45

I have trouble envisioning the person who would be.

01:32:49

I feel like this book was written because Demetrius Ziggolotus had a personal itch that needed to be scratched.

01:32:57

And that is a fine reason to write a book.

01:33:00

However, I don't think there's a broad audience, people who are clamoring for it.

01:33:04

Why do we do the rituals that we do?

01:33:07

I just don't understand them.

01:33:09

The people who do them understand them.

01:33:13

We have had books where we've won, this is a meandering journey that they took us on.

01:33:19

There wasn't really an outcome on it.

01:33:21

They just wanted us to go on a journey with them.

01:33:23

This kind of feels like that of sorts.

01:33:26

Maybe I'm wrong on that, but that's what it feels like.

01:33:28

So I know there are a lot of people who love that type of book.

01:33:31

I just don't feel like you and I are that type of person.

01:33:34

So if that's the type of person you are, this is probably something you're going to love.

01:33:38

I just don't feel like it fits you and I.

01:33:41