Bookworm Transcripts

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Hey, Mike, welcome back from Vacation.

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How are you?

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Good.

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Slightly tan, a little bit tired, fighting a cold a little bit.

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You might hear it in my voice today, but well rested and excited to talk about books again.

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I think I know the answer to this, but you flew, right?

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Like you didn't try to drive from Wisconsin, did you?

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No, we flew with the entire family, which is always an adventure.

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But we've got it down to a system at this point.

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It explains why you're sick though, right?

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Because you sit in a tin can with a bunch of other people during 60s and then here you are.

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You know, you come back and you're in your six.

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So we'll welcome back.

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How's the snow?

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Is it?

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Is it crazy?

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It's weird.

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So we went to Naples area in Florida.

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And actually when we took off from there to come back on Tuesday, it was about 70 degrees.

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And then when we landed in Milwaukee, it was 73 degrees.

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So that was really weird.

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But then the next day we got freezing cold and snow.

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So it was very short lived.

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Honestly, I think that's probably where my little bit of a raspy voice is coming from.

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It's it's more so that the crazy weather changes than actually being sick.

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I feel, feel fine.

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And just if you hear me, hear me struggle a little bit with pronunciation or it sounds a little bit gravelly.

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That's why I got my T.

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I'm good to go.

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Makes sense.

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That makes sense.

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All right.

00:01:34

Let's get in to follow up.

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So you had a de bono book and you didn't remember that you had that book.

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Yeah, it was funny because right after we recorded, I was going through the

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library in my home office looking for some books to bring on vacation with me.

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And I remember we had talked about the lateral thinking idea and he's written several other books, but that was the one that was kind of interesting.

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And I even said on the podcast, it wasn't interesting enough that it made me want to go pick it up.

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And then as I was going through my books, I came across lateral thinking by Edward de Bono.

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I actually had it already.

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So I sent you a picture like, Hey, check it out.

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Look what I got.

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Apparently someone else had recommended this book to me at some point in the past.

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And I had thought highly enough of it at that point to pick up the book.

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But I did not bring it with me on vacation.

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And so I have not read it, but thought it was humorous that I was like, no, I don't think I'm going to get that other book.

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And I already had it.

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I got a good laugh out of that.

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When you send it to me, I was like, Oh, that's so that's so makes sense with your

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style of like when somebody sends me a recommendation, I buy the book.

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If I trust their recommendation and then Kevin Kelly in our book today talked about doing that, but doing it digitally and the not remembering that you had all those in your Kindle library.

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So I thought that was, I thought that was pretty clever.

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All right.

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So then mine, one of mine that I've talked about in the last was I want to try an iPad mini.

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I wanted to see if it was too small to try to put my note on one side and my book on the other side and then read digitally like that.

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I'm not sold on this whole paper book thing.

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It just, it just does not feel right to me.

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I mean, I get it.

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Like I understand what we're doing here, but the way I want to take notes and the way I want to, you know, decompress as I'm reading the book or kind of digest as I'm reading the book.

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But what I will tell you is I learned that it's too small.

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And then I learned that my iPad with the mine note on one half of the screen.

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So it's 12.9 inch iPad with a mine note on one side of the screen and the book on the other half screen.

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That's, I mean, I think I might have found it.

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Like I think I might have found it.

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That's a sweet spot.

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Yeah, that's I might have found it.

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The biggest problem I have is when the keyboard's hooked up to it, the battery drains real fast.

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So yeah, so there's like, so there's the battery issue.

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But the other one is Apple Vision Pro, which I tried to convince you while you were in Florida to go sign up for it and go check it out.

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Here's what I'll tell you.

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I think it's going to be revolutionary.

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Not yet.

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So it's like we're on the cusp of it doing really, really cool and changing a lot of stuff.

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But I don't think we're there yet.

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It's too expensive.

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It's too limited in terms of what it can do.

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I don't think for most normal people, it'll it's flying right now.

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But what I'll tell you is when you got into there, it was it was really, really neat.

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Different demos.

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They had you do different interactions they had you do.

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I did have one glitch that they kept blaming on the seal, like how it sealed to my face.

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But I don't think that was true.

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The one video was like choppy.

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So it looked like the people were like, just like across the screen.

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And I kept telling them, I'm like, hey, this video is choppy and that doesn't make it.

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It shouldn't be like that.

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And they're like, you're right.

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It shouldn't be like that.

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And they were like, it's probably because the light seal isn't fixed or isn't said enough.

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And I was like, okay, maybe it is.

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Maybe it isn't.

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So I was not.

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I was not in anywhere enticed to actually buy it.

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That's way too much money.

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But it was fun to play around with.

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I thought it was interesting, literally the day after we recorded, I guess, is when you went and had your

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Apple vision pro demo.

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And you also mentioned that, hey, I like this.

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This iPad mini.

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And I was like, don't get it.

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Don't get it because it needs to be updated.

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But yeah, I always kind of thought that was a little bit small for what you're trying to do in split screen anyway.

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And the Apple vision pro is interesting because I feel like it kind of hits on some of the stuff we're going to talk about in today's book.

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But Kevin Kelly had no idea that this was even a thing back in 2016 when he wrote it.

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Yeah.

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The other unofficial action item I had because I mentioned in the last episode, the only action item I can think of is go give this book to the business coach that we worked with because it would have been helpful when he works with annoying people like us.

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And I got done recording that episode at my co-working space, walked out and he's in the conference room.

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With another client away.

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It's like, hey, Todd, how's it going?

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So I did actually give him the book and he's like, oh, this sounds great.

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Thanks.

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That's awesome.

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No confirmation yet, whether he's actually read it or applied it, but I totally see him using this.

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He's if he if he actually reads the book, I guarantee he'll he'll implement it because his personality, I could totally see him like grabbing the hats off the table and putting him on as he's standing in front of everybody.

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Okay, everyone.

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Now we're in red.

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That's a hat mode.

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That's totally something he would do.

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Well, and it's valuable.

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Right.

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So one of one of mine was using the capstone using the six thingy hats and capstone design, which I did.

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It works really, really well.

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I don't use it necessarily as methodically as it's described in the book, but at times we'll pull it out and we'll call out one of the hats and it'll work very, very well for that for that.

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And I was surprised at how well the students actually took it.

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They didn't treat me like the lie role, right?

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But they didn't I roll that bad.

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So so that's a lot of fun.

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Last one I had was I had to look up the po book.

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Right.

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So this this very interesting catchphrase that he has in it.

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I looked it up.

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I read about it and I immediately closed the browser and said, yeah, I'm not not interested in that one.

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There's too many other good things to read.

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I don't doubt that it's valuable.

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I don't doubt that it has something there, but it did not entice me enough to actually make the make the purchase.

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So.

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All righty.

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So let's get into today's book.

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If you're ready, are you ready?

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Let's do it.

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All right.

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So today's book is the inevitable.

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And the full title is quite long.

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So let me get there the inevitable understanding the 12 technological forces that will shape our future.

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It was written in 2016 by an author named Kevin Kelly.

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And Kevin Kelly was the founding editor of Wired magazine.

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So a technology magazine.

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He did he was popular for a thing known as the whole Earth review.

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He's written multiple books.

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I actually learned about Kevin Kelly through a blog that he did.

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And then he turned that blog into an actual paper book and it was called Cool Tools.

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So I don't know if you've ever experienced cool tools or not, but it was basically what it sounds like.

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It was it was a catalog for like big kids is essentially what it was.

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So that's where I learned about Kevin Kelly and the work that he does.

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And then one of the other cool things that it'll tie into the rest of the book as we talk about it was he was an advisor on the movie minority report.

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So he talks about that in the book, which you'll understand or if you if you read the book, if you already read the book, you understand how that actually ties into all the all the different aspects of it.

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The book has an introduction and then 12 chapters.

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And then there's very little like he has like a paragraph at the end of the last chapter that closes out the book, but it really just like it just stops.

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The book just stops there.

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So the focus of it is let's think about these 12 technological forces over the next 30 years.

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So that's kind of a premise to the book and we'll we'll roll into the introduction.

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So in the introduction, really, he's trying to set the stage on computing and technology and virtual reality and then this idea of inevitable.

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So when he gets into the idea of inevitable, he doesn't mean how like how can I describe it.

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He means that basically it's going to happen, but he doesn't say the way it's going to happen is inevitable.

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So the thing is going to happen.

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So for instance, the internet and the widespread use of the internet is going to happen.

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How? He doesn't try to talk about that messaging is going to happen.

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Social media is going to happen.

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These things where we are doing these things is going to happen, but it's not necessarily the actual what app are we going to use?

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How are we going to actually physically do or digitally do these these things?

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So that's a very, very big kind of disclaimer to his to the front end of his work.

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Which is kind of a cool approach to this book, to be honest.

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It's also interesting that we're reading this almost 10 years after he wrote it.

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I feel like that provides some different context than if I had picked this up and read it in 2016.

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So what happens is he's got these all different chapters and they're labeled as present participles.

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They're forms of verbs instead of like you said, specific technologies.

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So chapter one is becoming.

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Chapter two is cognifying.

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Chapter three is flowing, etc.

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And in you when he gets into the the specifics in some of these chapters, he's kind of describing what a day in the life of future him is going to be like.

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And now that we've gotten some time and distance from when he wrote it, he's kind of

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spot on.

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He is.

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Isn't it?

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It's kind of scary.

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Yeah, I kind of anticipated at the beginning of this, we were going to get like, you know, back to the future, had the hoverboards that were supposed to be out by 2015 or whatever.

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And I remember seeing posts on social media is like only one year left, you know, until this happens.

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And when you project out into the future, you can in some ways, we make significantly greater advances in some areas.

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And in some ways, we don't make nearly the progress that we think we would.

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Like we don't have the the hoverboards.

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We don't have the food hydrators, the flying cars, all that, that kind of stuff.

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So that's kind of the approach.

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I thought I was going to encounter.

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With this.

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And what I found is that this is actually a lot more accurate, but also a lot less specific, not that there's not details in here about the specific things that are going to happen.

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But because he doesn't just name the technologies, that makes it a lot more applicable.

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And he does give technological examples because he was working with different companies like you were talking about.

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And he mentions he had some experience with Google Glass and stuff like that.

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That's obviously the precursor to stuff like the Apple Vision Pro.

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So don't get the idea that because he's not naming specific technologies in these sections, that there's nothing useful or tangible here.

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It's actually the opposite.

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It's a very effective approach, I feel.

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Yeah.

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And the thing that comes out of that for me is he uses examples in the present as of 2014, 2015, 2016, and then projects out to these to these ideas.

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And he calls a mega trends, right?

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I call these mega trends inevitable because they're rooted in technology.

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So and I think that's a really interesting approach to it.

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It says to me or shows me he was in a unique position based on his background, based on the experience that he had.

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And then the other thing was access based on the access he had to different people and different conversations and different technologies that I think he was a unique person to write a book like this and write it in the way that he did.

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Now what I'll tell you is I didn't like all of his meditrons.

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Like I didn't like the way he pitched all of them.

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Some of them I thought were really, really good and made made a ton of sense.

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Some of them I was like, ah, that one feels like a stretch and that could be a me thing or that could just be a it didn't align well.

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And you know, and there was a little bit of a bit of a back fit.

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The other thing that he did throughout the book, and we probably won't talk about it in detail in the individual chapters.

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So it makes sense to talk about it here.

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He basically like says a day in the life for me, you know, flowing looks like this and boop boop boop and then he describes this day in the life and he sometimes goes on for a long time describing that, which I at times I was like, OK, come on, like I get, I get the picture.

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But it's cool because that's how he sort of projects into the future is like, this is what I think it might look like for a day in the life in this different context or under this trend.

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And I thought that was a good way to project into the future without, like you said, being too specific to where, oh, the hoverboard never happened.

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Well, we don't try to do that.

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We try to talk about these general these more general ideas.

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All right.

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Anything else on the intro that you want to hit?

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No, I'll just add to what you just said about the day in the life stories.

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I did find that I didn't actually like those as much as we went on.

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I like the general discussion of the principles.

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I feel like that opened up a lot of loops in my brain about what this could actually look like.

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But then when he tried to paint a very vivid picture, I maybe it was because, you know, we've got some distance from this at this point.

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But when he did that, I could kind of see where there was some disconnect from what he thought was going to happen to what actually happened.

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And I felt like at this point, reading the book, it was a little bit detrimental because the rest of the discussion about the, you know,

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becoming or the cognifying, I mean, cognifying is all about AI.

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I'm looking forward to the types of discussions that are going to happen as we take this chapter by chapter.

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But the specifics, you know, it can kind of get in the way of the discussion as we record this in 2024.

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Yeah, I can see that.

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I can see that.

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All right.

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So let's move to becoming.

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So his first section is becoming and he gets into the idea that basically technology is going to be the series of upgrades and that we are constantly in this.

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And state of developing new becoming states in here that the problems of today were caused by yesterday's technological successes, which that is actually pretty accurate and it makes sense.

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Like, okay, what's what are the issues that we're having today?

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Well, a lot of the issues derive from social media.

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They derive from, you know, the fact that we have a smartphone in our hands all the time.

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So, okay, that's it.

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That's interesting.

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It talks about this idea of protopia, right, which is a state of becoming rather than a destination.

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It's this process.

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And he's really trying to drive home this, you know, we're constantly in this becoming phase.

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And what will we become?

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Not sure.

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What's evolving?

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We're not sure.

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Like we're going to keep, we're going to keep this going, going through.

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And then he kind of rounds out this chapter with there's never been a better time to utilize this becoming and to create something, right?

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Like, so becoming morphed into creating as, as I thought through this chapter, as I read through this chapter because it was like, hey, don't

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stop now.

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Like, don't think we've made it.

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We're in this constant flux of becoming of becoming of becoming and now launch off and create at this time.

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And he, he ties back to, oh, well, in the internet boom, like in the early 2000s, you know, people would have thought X, Y and Z.

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And now looking back on it, it was like, oh, there was never a better time to do.

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Well, similar thing happening right now.

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And you could tie it into VR and AR and like, there's really not a better time to be working in that space because it's so new and it's so in flux right now.

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If you will.

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So I thought it was a really interesting, good way to start off the book of opening up our minds to thinking about these things as a present ongoing process.

00:17:11

Yeah, he also talks about how in terms of the internet, it's still in its infancy.

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And it's interesting to see how far we've come in terms of what we think about when we talk about the internet.

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I was listening to a Cal Newport podcast this week and he was talking about this New Yorker or New York Times article, maybe from 1993 by this person who was writing this profile on Bill Gates.

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And it was the first time that he had really been profiled by a big magazine and it was really talking about email and how Bill was responding to every email that was sent to him.

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And throughout the article, they didn't use the word internet.

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They use the word information highway.

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The information, which is what it is, but we just know what the internet is at this point.

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And it was so early on when they wrote this article that they're using all these terms.

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And it feels so jarring to hear it described that way.

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And I feel like you can look back in the history of the internet and see that even from now to 2016 when this is written.

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But then think about as far as we've come, we're still just at the very beginning of this journey and who knows where it's actually going to end.

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The other thing I really liked from this section was Ted Nelson, who was the first person to envision hypertext or links between pages back in.

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You ready for this?

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1965.

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It's crazy.

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Hyperlinks in 1965.

00:18:37

So have you heard the term, "transclusion" before?

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I have, yes.

00:18:41

Yeah.

00:18:42

Well, I heard about it when I got into obsidian and "transclusion" was basically taking the text of this other note that you've linked to and embedding it in the current note that you're looking at.

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But this was a concept that came up when Kevin Kelly had talked to this guy.

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In 1984, he was talking about "transclusion."

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So it was interesting to me that Ted Nelson really believed that a hyperlinked world was an inevitability.

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And there are other chapters where we'll get into some of the specifics of this.

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But it was interesting to me to read about this and people who were so excited about this idea so long ago.

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And it helped me to kind of codify why I liked that app so much.

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And really, it's all connected notes apps, but obsidian is the one that I choose to use and have a lot of experience with.

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But people who, one of the common arguments I hear from people when they first just download obsidian and give it a shot is like, well, who cares about these links?

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I'm like, no, the links are a big deal.

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But I also think that there's a version of this that is appealing to me and a version of it that isn't where they're talking about these links, like connecting everything that ever existed.

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I don't really care about how other people are linking things.

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I do care about how I create those links.

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But the description that they have here of how everything is always going to be connected, I don't really care for that all that much.

00:20:10

So I, one of the things I want to know as we go through these, did the chapter bring up any questions for you?

00:20:17

Right.

00:20:17

So think through that as we're as we're talking about these, like I can tell you one that that comes from exactly what you're talking about and then the way he describes it.

00:20:25

I thought, well, I wonder what it would be like if I could link the internet to other parts of the internet, but not like just through web page links to where I got one page to another.

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But like I could like deep link into the page and then trust that that page wasn't going to change.

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So 10 years later, when I'm looking at something, I could go back to it.

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And there are things that try to do this, right?

00:20:49

So there, there was a, I don't even know if it was an app or what it was, but it's kind of like a layer that you put over the internet.

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It's called hypothesis.

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And you could, you could try to do these linkings and annotations through there.

00:21:01

And I started to think, I was like, man, that would be really cool if we could link to specific things, like very, very detailed things.

00:21:08

On other parts of the internet and then link it to a book.

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And then, and he kind of talks about that a little bit with, with these connections.

00:21:15

So that was one of the questions I had.

00:21:17

Did you have any things that it made you think of or questions that came out of the chapter?

00:21:21

That's interesting.

00:21:23

Uh, I didn't actually have any specific questions that came up, but it did help me to kind of think about some of these concepts in new ways.

00:21:38

And it also, it also helped me to understand a little bit better.

00:21:45

Well, like the next chapter is on, cognifying an AI.

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And that one, like for example, kind of shows me the potential of something like chat GPT, as opposed to just the, the website in isolation.

00:22:02

Because all of these things, he also talks about this in the introduction.

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They're all kind of interconnected and they all overlap.

00:22:07

So he does a really good job of layering these chapters in the specific order, like one on top of the other.

00:22:14

And it did help me understand how this stuff kind of fits together in terms of where we're going.

00:22:21

But I never really jotted down any, I jotted on zero action items from this.

00:22:26

But I also didn't jot down any specific questions.

00:22:28

Like, I want to see where this goes sort of a thing.

00:22:32

I guess it was just more dots, more puzzle pieces that I need some more time to noodle on.

00:22:38

I'm sure that there will be some things that will come up from this.

00:22:42

But there was nothing specifically that I was like, I wonder where we go from here.

00:22:48

Yeah, okay.

00:22:49

All right.

00:22:49

So let's move on to chapter two.

00:22:50

You brought it in, you brought it in, cognifying, right?

00:22:52

And I, this is one of the ones where the cognifying made sense.

00:22:55

But I really think we could have just titled this chapter AI in robots, right?

00:23:00

Like, like that's what we could have titled the chapter because that's really what the focus

00:23:04

of the chapter is is, yes, cognifying is the underlying layer.

00:23:07

It's bringing this idea of thinking, this idea of intelligence, this idea of decision making into,

00:23:14

and then particularly AI in robots is the two.

00:23:17

He talks about it.

00:23:18

This is where you had said, when we were talking about the intro, you're kind of surprised at how

00:23:23

relevant his 2016 writing was to today's age.

00:23:27

And I was like, man, like he hit the nail on the head and a lot of this stuff.

00:23:31

Like we were seeing this.

00:23:32

The business plans of the next 10,000 startups are easy to forecast.

00:23:35

Take X and AI AI, right?

00:23:37

And I was like, oh my gosh, that is so true.

00:23:39

And like, I think about the apps coming out and what are they doing?

00:23:42

They're adding AI.

00:23:43

They're adding AI.

00:23:44

They're adding AI.

00:23:45

And, and granted, we could get nitty gritty and we could talk in technical,

00:23:48

whether it's large language models or whether it's natural language processing and what type of AI it is.

00:23:53

But that's not the point.

00:23:54

The point is they're doing this.

00:23:55

They're actually adding like loose cognition or some decision making or some thinking to it.

00:24:01

And I thought that was, I mean, incredible.

00:24:04

He calls out what is going to allow this to happen.

00:24:08

Right?

00:24:09

He says the three changes to overcome AI winter, cheap parallel computation.

00:24:13

Cool.

00:24:13

We got that in video, right?

00:24:15

Basically in video provided that for us.

00:24:17

Big data from all the data we freely provide.

00:24:18

Well, there's a whole another section later when we talk about sharing that talks about the amount of stuff we're sharing and the amount of stuff that they're

00:24:25

tracking for us.

00:24:26

So the amount of data is just astronomical.

00:24:29

And then he talks about better algorithms and neural nets and deep learning and how the field is actually advanced technologically.

00:24:36

So it is really, really cool to see how prescient he was, right?

00:24:43

Like how of how able he was to call out the things that are that are currently happening in 2024.

00:24:49

That was, that was really neat.

00:24:50

Yeah.

00:24:51

He nailed it on the head.

00:24:53

One of the things that he talked about is Google is using search to make its AI better, which I thought was interesting because there's a lot of, that's how a lot of people use the large language models, I feel, is like a replacement for a search engine.

00:25:06

And that's the conversation I always have with people who are maybe AI agnostic, like they resist it.

00:25:17

It is like, well, you're using search engines, aren't you?

00:25:21

So it's basically the same thing.

00:25:24

And the three breakthroughs, the cheap parallel computation, the big data, the better algorithms, that is the large language models.

00:25:31

So I do think that that's kind of what he is talking about when he's talking about AI.

00:25:35

Later on in the book, he talks about the, the, the people have this belief of like the dark side of AI, the matrix style, the machines are going to take over and why he believes that we'll never get to that point.

00:25:47

But the main point that he makes here, kind of the last thing in the, the chapters to race with the machines, not against them, because if we race against them, then we lose.

00:25:58

And there are certain things that the machines are not going to be able to do that he talks about later.

00:26:03

But the thing that is scary about this for, for people who don't realize kind of the context of where we are in history is the fact that the robots and AI are not going to be able to do that.

00:26:16

And AI are replacing some of the things that humans were doing specifically in the workforce.

00:26:22

And he talks about how there's four categories of robot replacement jobs the humans can do, but the robots can do even better jobs the humans can't do, but the robots can jobs that we didn't know we wanted done.

00:26:33

And then there's the jobs that only humans can do at first.

00:26:36

And I think the real, I don't want to say key, secret, whatever, but like the path forward for me as I think about this stuff is kind of tied to what Cal Newport talks about and so good they can't ignore you.

00:26:52

Just become more valuable.

00:26:55

And I think he even talks about it in deep work where the people who are going to be successful in the digital economy, and that book is fairly old at this point too.

00:27:05

But he talks about the people who know how to use the machines.

00:27:09

There's always going to be that possibility.

00:27:13

And so just figure out what the next step is.

00:27:18

Keep learning.

00:27:19

I guess, you know, how I say it in some of my YouTube videos, keep going, keep growing.

00:27:23

Like that's the approach you have to have.

00:27:25

If you just want everything to stay exactly the way it is, then yeah, it's going to be really disruptive and it could be really scary.

00:27:30

But if you have a growth mindset and you're constantly just trying to figure out what's the next step, how do I become better?

00:27:38

Then it's a pretty cool time to be alive, honestly.

00:27:42

There's a lot of opportunities out there.

00:27:44

Yeah, and to the point you made, he calls it out in the text.

00:27:48

This is a race with the machines.

00:27:50

You'll be paid in the future based on how well you work with robots, right?

00:27:54

Like it's not a matter of are they coming?

00:27:56

So this is the inevitable idea, right?

00:27:57

It's not a matter of are they coming?

00:27:59

It's coming.

00:28:00

And then he says, let the robots take our jobs.

00:28:02

Let them help us dream up new work that matters more, which then ties into a chapter at the very end of the book where he talks about the most successful humans will be the ones that ask good questions.

00:28:12

Or okay, so this all links together.

00:28:15

This all ties together.

00:28:16

There's one more section in here that I think is worth calling out.

00:28:20

But he provides a list of 20 minds or 20 or so minds, hive mind, nano mind, super logic mind, et cetera, et cetera.

00:28:28

And he says that the AI is really going to get good at being one of those or specializing in that type of mind.

00:28:35

And this is where I went, oh man, this is a really interesting topic because you're seeing the AI that rolls into our applications and our software.

00:28:44

They're pretty much doing that.

00:28:46

Like they're the general core technology, but at the same time they're being specialized to do a certain thing, reply to email, find an open spot in my schedule.

00:28:56

They're being these very, very specific minds to focus in, which I thought was really, really cool.

00:29:04

Agreed.

00:29:05

All right, so let's move to flowing.

00:29:08

So the next one was flowing, right?

00:29:10

And flowing is, he says, it's the third age of computing.

00:29:14

So instead of stocks and instead of building up a quantity of a thing, it's this interaction, I shouldn't say interaction because there's another chapter titled that.

00:29:25

But it's this idea of things like moving around and being distributed.

00:29:29

He uses the term zillion quite a bit in this book here and then later on in the book.

00:29:35

But the union of a zillion streams of information, intermingling, flowing into each other.

00:29:41

And he calls this and he refers this to the cloud.

00:29:45

He then talks about the quality where things are getting better than free and the fact that it'll give us immediacy, personalization, interpretation of the data.

00:29:54

And then interpretation, authenticity, accessibility, embodiment, patronage and discoverability.

00:29:59

Too many things to go into there because he breaks, he breaks each one of those down.

00:30:03

But it's a good way, I think, to think about it.

00:30:06

It calls out the fact that we've moved away from copying towards recalling it, annotating it, personalizing it, editing it, transferring it, transforming it, if you will.

00:30:18

And he says, "I thought these four stages of flowing are flowing, that there is, originally there's fixed and rare."

00:30:23

So he would say, "That's the book that only a couple people in the world have access to."

00:30:28

Then there's free and ubiquitous, which would mean the libraries.

00:30:31

So now we take the books and we put those into libraries and now they're free and they're around more.

00:30:36

We can get them more easily.

00:30:38

Then there's flowing where there's this network of online things that we can pass around and we can share.

00:30:43

And then he says, "There's opening and becoming," which is this more creative, more transformative thing from what I took away from it.

00:30:52

So again, this chapter, it took me a minute to grasp what he was talking about with flowing, but once I got it, I really understood getting away from this idea fixed and more into this idea of transient and intermingling was a good word.

00:31:10

I thought he did a really interesting job expounding on that.

00:31:14

Yeah, the basic idea at the beginning of this, he was talking about how we expect things and information to flow in real time and then the technologies that we use kind of accommodate that.

00:31:29

But then he gets into specifically ways that books and ebooks embody fixity and fluidity, which I thought was interesting,

00:31:38

because he talks about how ebooks, they have fluidity of the page, so you have an ereader, you can adjust the text size and so a different amount of words fit on the page.

00:31:48

When you're looking at it, there's the fluidity of the addition, so once it's done, you can go back and you can update it and then the new version is instantly delivered.

00:31:57

There's the fluidity of the container, so you can access it on different devices and there's the fluidity of growth, so it could be revised and expanded.

00:32:06

You don't have to buy another version of it.

00:32:09

And I realized that all of those things are negatives in my mind and reasons why I choose to create analog books.

00:32:20

That's hilarious because those are all positives in my mind.

00:32:23

I was like, "Yes, stick it to Mike, stick it to Mike."

00:32:26

Well, which is why I wanted to bring it up here. I feel like there's a discussion to be had here. Those can be positives, but also I think that there are drawbacks to that.

00:32:40

The first one that comes to mind, the fluidity of the page.

00:32:46

I encountered this at the very beginning of Bookworm when I wanted to reference a specific section of a book.

00:32:56

Because I read the analog books, I was able to say, on page 35, and if you don't have on page 35, then you have no idea where you are.

00:33:06

In Vision, you probably run into this a little bit being a professor in an educational setting too. If people have a paper book versus an electronic book, it's harder if you don't have the link to send people to, like you're just verbally describing it.

00:33:20

It's hard to get everybody, "This is exactly where I am."

00:33:23

It's even harder when different people are using different.

00:33:27

So you've got half of the people using one, half of the people using another, and then other half of the people using the international version of the book.

00:33:33

So that's a good drawback, but I'm going to tell you, I think the pros significantly outweigh the cons.

00:33:42

The last one I thought of, and you brought up the book example, but he ties it into more than just the things that we've seen already, but it's actually now the things we have seen.

00:33:54

So in 2016, I think some of these things were just coming around, whereas now, I mean, they're full in full force. So he talks about sharing vehicles, sharing land, and about how things like medicine will become flows as opposed to where they're more stocks or fixities before that.

00:34:10

So overall, I think this was a good way to get us to think differently about information and the way we package information and the way we utilize resources, maybe limited resources in the world.

00:34:23

Right, so I agree with you on all that stuff. I think the thing that you missed though when you do just embrace everything is digital and everything's connected and everything is constantly flowing.

00:34:35

You do lose a little bit of being able to put a flag in the ground and identify, like, this is this thing, this is that thing.

00:34:44

When everything connects and it's all the same, it's harder to make sense of that stuff.

00:34:50

When you're talking through that sort of thing in a discussion with somebody, the reason that you're saying I'm on page 35, or I'm in the second edition in this section, is that those boundaries create the ability to align.

00:35:09

And I couldn't help but think of the map is not the territory, yet again, that seems to come up with every single book that we talk about, but I really like that idea of constructing these maps.

00:35:20

And I feel like when everything is connected and there are no clear boundaries, it's harder to decipher what are the bits and pieces that I want to include on this map.

00:35:32

It's easier, it's almost like instead of a map for a territory where we're trying to figure out what are the parameters of the land that we are walking, it's almost like we're lost at sea with all of this stuff and we're tossed back and forth at the ways.

00:35:52

Maybe that's a terrible analogy, but that's kind of the picture that I get, which is fine.

00:35:57

If you want to go swimming, go ahead, jump into the digital ocean.

00:36:01

But when you're trying to figure out, what do I make of this stuff, at some point, more information is detrimental.

00:36:10

So it's easy, it can be helpful to establish those boundaries and be like, no, this is the thing that is useful, this is the thing that is useful.

00:36:17

I'm going to put it on this small workspace in front of me and figure out what I think about this.

00:36:22

Then I'll go dip my toes in the ocean again.

00:36:25

I can't tell you I agree with you, but I can tell you that I appreciate your perspective.

00:36:30

Alright, so the next one we move to chapter four and this is screening.

00:36:37

What's interesting about this one is he uses a phrase of a book that I've read.

00:36:42

He uses, we are now people of the screen, which I completely agree with.

00:36:47

But there is a book that came out not too long ago and it's actually called People of the Screen.

00:36:52

In the context of the book doesn't really matter, but what I think is interesting is I wonder if the person who wrote that book has read this book and that's where they got that phrase from and they used it to make the title.

00:37:03

But what he's saying is basically people of the screen think that technology is a solution for all the problems, that we screen when we read words, when we watch words, when we look at images, that there are benefits to these things, right?

00:37:20

If we can link things together better, if we can tag them together better, that we're able to associate pattern making and figure out how to handle the vast amount of information that flows past us, that the screens enable us to do that.

00:37:37

There's the natural and the obvious of what we have a screen in front of us all the time, either a laptop or a desktop or an iPad or something, and then we move into VR, where now we're potentially going to put that screen and we're going to even make it closer to our eyeballs, or people are doing that.

00:37:53

So he gets the idea that basically this interconnectivity idea with the fact that we have a screen in front of us all the time, and we're trying to link these two together from the way I interpreted those these sections.

00:38:11

Yeah, so this section I couldn't help but think about the conversation that I had on the Focus Podcast with Marianne Wolf, who wrote a couple of books about reading, and one of them was Reader Come Home.

00:38:28

And that book talked about the difference between reading a physical book and reading on a screen and spoiler alert, if you read the same material in a book versus on a Kindle, you process it differently.

00:38:46

Just by looking at the screen, you are thinking, this is more transient, more temporary, it doesn't matter as much.

00:38:54

So, I go into it with that bias, I will say that right up front.

00:39:03

And I think that there, again, there is something to be said about the analog format and the intentional constraints.

00:39:16

So, this is actually one of my favorite chapters from the book because this is where they get into the idea of connecting things between different books, which is exactly what I was trying to do in Obsidian.

00:39:31

It's why I take the crazy mind map notes and then I export that as a mind map but then also as a markdown document, bring those into Obsidian with the idea that I can make connections between these different books.

00:39:46

And I found that with the books that we read for Bookworm, there will be stories and examples that are shared in multiple books and one that comes to mind is the Poulger sisters, there was this guy who did an experiment on his family, like can I make my daughters become chess grandmasters or is that sort of brilliant genetic.

00:40:08

And so, James Clear talks about it in atomic habits but then also I think it was Andrew's Erickson talks about it in peak.

00:40:16

And when I come across processing these notes, I can rip out the piece from atomic habits and link it to the piece from peak and put it in its own Poulger sisters note.

00:40:26

Like that's really cool because now when I go back and look at that, I can see how these things are connected and that's valuable to me.

00:40:35

But then he describes how in the future, there's going to be this universal library where all books and documents are connected and I'm like, no, I don't want that.

00:40:47

Why?

00:40:48

One of the reasons I don't like good reads and even read wise tries to give you like the recommended highlights or a lot of people who read this highlighted this section, like I don't care about that.

00:41:03

I don't care about what everybody else got when they read this because I want to read it at a different level than they got to.

00:41:12

And that's not to say that I'm smarter or better than anybody but I think that if you go into it with like, oh, collective intelligence isn't this great in some ways, yes, but in some ways, no, and you got to be really clear on what is it you're hoping to get.

00:41:32

I'm hoping to get from these things specifically books.

00:41:36

And so as I wrap up my rambling thoughts on this, you know, I do think that yes, there is definitely a trend towards this screening, but I would hope that we can take some of these concepts that he's talking about and still recognize that there is a lot more value that there is a lot of value in the analog

00:41:58

processes that align very much with the things that make us human that he talks about at the end.

00:42:05

Yeah, so this ties back to something in chapter two in the cognifying section where he describes that different AIs will have different like geniuses or they'll, you know, they'll be really specialized in certain ways, but that we add value in thinking about it from like a self conscious standpoint.

00:42:23

And that's exactly what you're getting at. It's like, okay, the library's there and everybody's I've got, I could, I could look at everybody's information or what they've highlighted or what they've linked to.

00:42:33

But really what I want to do is I want to link to how it works in my brain and having this like one like overall idea of past me thought this was important.

00:42:42

Why? Okay, past me is connected. Sorry, future me.

00:42:45

You might think it's important in this way or I want to try to connect it in the following way.

00:42:49

So that's a really interesting point that I hadn't thought about.

00:42:53

What I'll tell you is like my closest experience with this, what he's describing would be, you know, because I read mainly on Kindle, right?

00:43:01

They'll pop up the underlines where, you know, a lot of people have, you know, I'll tell you, and even tell you, when they underline it, it doesn't bother me.

00:43:10

When they tell me how many other people have underlined it, for some reason that bugs me.

00:43:15

They don't know why. I just have a gut reaction that's like, I don't really care. I don't really care how many people to know that under--

00:43:21

Oh, there's 35,000 idiots who have read this.

00:43:24

I wouldn't go that strong. But to say that like, there's, to see what other people think is interesting puts me into like a self-reflection almost that says,

00:43:35

"Well, wait, why do they think that's interesting? Should I think that's interesting or do I think that's interesting?"

00:43:40

And sometimes yes, sometimes no. But I can see where you're coming from in terms of the benefit and the negative of that, you know?

00:43:48

Well, let me explain my strong reaction there with the 35,000 idiots.

00:43:55

I don't mean that everyone who reads these books on Kindle isn't an idiot.

00:44:00

I do think though that the fact that people are highlighting that is a very low level of, I want to remember this.

00:44:11

And yeah, you can do progressive summarization and take it a million levels down like Tiago Forte talks about.

00:44:16

But I forget which book we read recently where we talked about this specific thing and how highlighting is really not that big a deal.

00:44:25

And like why even do it was kind of my takeaway. There's got to be something a little bit more substantial there.

00:44:33

And I do think going back to the discussion that we've had about reading and the different forms of reading,

00:44:40

like you get out of a book what you put into it. So you should be thinking, not, you know, I got to glean everything I possibly can from every book that I read.

00:44:50

But if we're going to read, then let's make it worthwhile. Let's figure out a way to take these dots that we're collecting and connecting them in new and interesting ways.

00:45:00

And there's a section in page 95. I wanted to read a couple of these quotes that I teased out because this is really at the heart of like what I'm trying to do in Obsidian.

00:45:08

I don't think I've really cracked it yet, but talks about how dense hyper linking among books would make every book a networked event.

00:45:17

Right now, the best we can do in terms of interconnection is to link some text to its source, source's title and a bibliography or a footnote.

00:45:24

Much better would be a link to a specific passage in another passage or work.

00:45:28

But when we can link deeply into documents at the resolution of a sentence and have those links go two ways, then we'll have network books.

00:45:34

So he's describing what you're currently able to do inside of something like Obsidian.

00:45:39

But then he also says on page 98, the link and the tag may be two of the most important inventions in the last 50 years.

00:45:45

And that is, there's a hidden level of profoundness there, I believe, because in the practice of the game cohort, I talk about how there are different ways that you can create links between your notes.

00:45:57

There's the bidirectional linking. Tagging is another one. But you can even use something like a folder structure as a way to group things together.

00:46:05

And these are all tools that we have at our disposal when we sit down at our workbench to sense make, then to figure out what do I actually think about this stuff.

00:46:14

And we should be thinking about how can I use the tools at my disposal to help me make better maps.

00:46:20

See, and there's your question, right? I said, did you get a question out of these chapters? Well, there's your one for this one.

00:46:26

Ah, sure. Okay.

00:46:27

What are the tools within screening that we can utilize here? So good job. Wait a way to work that one back in.

00:46:35

All right, let's move to chapter five, which is accessing. So he talks in this one, kind of a big major thesis of this section is possession is less important than it once was.

00:46:47

And the idea of, can we just get access to the thing? But then there are caveats to the access, right?

00:46:54

Like, so why would we want to access it over owning it? Well, one, because there's less tangible things. We've moved into a digital world.

00:47:02

So he would call this the materialization, right? Then there's the real time on demand. So we actually have the ability to get the thing in more real time than we've ever had in the past.

00:47:12

Then there's the decentralization of it. We don't have to go to one source to get this thing. Then there's the platform synergy, right? Which is, oh, well, there's a platform and they've built other things into the platform and they're actually offering us many, many different value ads or benefits from it.

00:47:26

And then the last one is the cloud, right? And the fact that we've now got all of this interconnected technology and it makes it easier for us to access. So all of these are the trends that were driving us towards access.

00:47:36

And I would say these have not decreased on any level. If anything, the dial has been turned up and we're driving more towards accessing versus owning.

00:47:45

One of the ways he would describe this were basically Uber and ride shares and those type of things have pushed us towards much more accessing cars.

00:47:55

Like, can I just get good access to the car versus do I actually need to own my own car? And I'll say in different contexts, it's actually probably better to access a car, not own a car.

00:48:04

Because then you don't have to deal with all the headache and the hassle that goes with not just the transportation and of it, but maybe the storage or those ends of it.

00:48:13

So, yeah, I think the Uber stuff is probably in a different chapter because the cloud, like you're not getting a cloud car.

00:48:24

But the example that he does use, which I think is really effective here, is the idea of like Spotify. Apple Music wasn't a thing yet.

00:48:34

But the on demand listening to music and then also Netflix, I guess, before that, because he talks about the difference between accessing the Netflix library via the cloud versus getting the DVDs in the mail.

00:48:46

And the library is bigger via DVD, probably not the case anymore.

00:48:50

But people want it instantly. And I feel like that is something that maybe we underestimated if we went back to 2016.

00:49:02

Because I think if you were to go back to when iTunes initially came out and you could buy the single tracks, that was pretty disruptive.

00:49:13

Now we've got digital music as opposed to CDs, but there was still the idea of ownership and this is my thing.

00:49:19

And I think that there were a lot of people who they never would have guessed that we would get to the point where almost all music is not owned, but it is streaming.

00:49:34

I don't remember the last time I bought an album or a song. I do still buy movies as opposed to streaming them, but that's simply because you never know when a movie is going to be available on a streaming service

00:49:48

and they jump back and forth between different platforms all the time. There's websites devoted to, you want to watch this movie and it'll tell you exactly where you can go to find it.

00:49:58

So there's still some boundaries there, like where stuff is. But when it comes to music, I mean, it's pretty much the same catalog at this point, whether you use Spotify or Apple Music or whatever.

00:50:10

And so it's simply then a matter of which one are you going to sign up for, which one eliminates the friction so you can get it even more instantly.

00:50:22

I think if we look back historically, we've under emphasized how much that was going to matter to us as humans.

00:50:28

And you're touching exactly on that real-time on demand, right? So the movie thing, if I want to watch the movie, I want to be able to watch it right now and I don't have to go find it.

00:50:36

So therefore, what do I do? I'll buy that one. Or if there's an album that I can't find on one of those streaming services because the catalog is very similar across them, what am I going to do? I'm going to buy that album.

00:50:45

So it shows both where we're willing to move towards accessing over ownership and then where we'll still hold onto ownership for different reasons.

00:50:53

The one that I think was, that he doesn't mention here because I don't know if the model existed at the time. If it did, it wasn't as rampant as it is now, but subscription services or for software.

00:51:06

Right. Well, what do we want? We really want access to the pro features of the software. Well, does that mean we buy it and then we have to buy the update and then we have to buy the update where we own technically, maybe non-technically, depends on the software.

00:51:18

But it's like where we own the actual software or are we just okay with accessing the software through a subscription model? And I think we've seen that at least for most things, people are kind of okay with accessing.

00:51:31

I mean, they're maybe not the happiest they've ever been, but they're okay with it because they do it and a lot more businesses are moving to that access model away from that we're going to sell you the software and you'll own it model.

00:51:42

As someone who does screencasting and writing in the Apple community, this is interesting to me because pretty much anytime that I cover a productivity app that is a subscription service, I hear from the old Mac diehards who refuse to subscribe to anything.

00:52:04

They're going to buy this thing once and you know the 99 cent app they paid for 10 years ago better be supported in the future.

00:52:13

And so it's kind of interesting to me that in that arena specifically, you have these people who are early adopters, they like technology, but still there's something that is causing them to resist this whole idea of shared access and not

00:52:32

actually owning the thing. And I feel like, I feel like this is the trend, this is where we're going. And I feel that if you're going to hold that line, you're going to miss out on a lot of cool stuff that is going to become available.

00:52:57

So this is one of those places where I feel like the best path forward is to recognize like this is the market, right, because he talks about the three levels of platforms that can exist in this chapter.

00:53:12

There's the firms, the markets and the market places.

00:53:15

So this is where things are going at a market level and even a marketplace level.

00:53:22

So recognize that as a macro trend.

00:53:26

And then you go ahead and try to pinch your pennies and minimize your expenses and cut the subscriptions wherever you can. Like that's a question you always got to ask yourself is, is it worth it for me to continue to use this application.

00:53:42

One application that I occasionally use still because it's a part of set app, but you know, five, six years ago, I would have said I'm going to pay 50 bucks a year for Ulysses until the end of time because I did all my writing there.

00:53:56

And now, you know, I do a lot of it and I'm saying I don't use Ulysses for stuff like that anymore. It's a great app, but it's just one of those things that my preferences have changed.

00:54:05

And I think that's one that I've had to draw a line, you know, I would do it there and that's okay, but I feel like to just take a stance that I refuse to pay for these subscriptions and I want to own everything.

00:54:19

Like, even in 2016 that was going to be tough when he wrote this, but that ship has sailed.

00:54:25

Yeah, exactly.

00:54:26

You're not going to win that fight in 2024.

00:54:29

Yep, I agree. And I think Kevin Kelly would agree with you completely if you asked him if you asked him that question.

00:54:35

All right, let's move to chapter six. So now we're sharing.

00:54:38

Right. So he gets into kind of the idea of digital socialism here and the sharing economy, which we've, we've heard a good, a good bit about by now.

00:54:48

And then the idea that, you know, we're sharing, we're cooperating, we're collaborating and then there's a collectivism around doing that.

00:54:56

He talks about the fact that, you know, blogs came in and basically, or I guess social media more so than anything, but it's like, they came in and then there was this bottom up content generation.

00:55:06

So something like Reddit, right? Like the people who go to Reddit actually produce all the content, but then he says there needs to be some top down editorial, but not too much.

00:55:15

And he makes this really interesting connection between vitamins and food.

00:55:19

And he's basically like, hey, don't try to eat vitamins as your food because you're going to get sick and you're going to, you know, or they're just going to get flushed out of your system.

00:55:27

He's like, that's editorialing, right? Like, don't try to do too much.

00:55:31

But at the same time, don't do nothing, right? Nothing tends to not work either. And you have to sit somewhere in between that.

00:55:38

I'm not sure if this is exactly where it is, but we start to get into Wikipedia and he uses Wikipedia a lot as an example in this book, but how Wikipedia is made by users generating content and then there's a slight little bit of filtering in there.

00:55:52

There's a slight little bit of editorializing in that from kind of the selected view.

00:55:58

So he also talks in here about how we're going to move from basically underappreciated or forgotten or like not bestsellers to in the sharing economy.

00:56:09

Right. They're going to be able to, we're going to be able to more easily find that niche that we sit in and that we want to know.

00:56:17

And they won't just kind of die like completely like, well, you put them out there and then like nothing.

00:56:21

It's like, we'll be able to actually connect those things.

00:56:24

One of the things that said later in the book, but definitely ties into sharing is the human impulse to share overwhelms the human impulse for privacy.

00:56:34

And I thought that was a really, really like interesting statement because I was like, man, that's actually really true.

00:56:40

And we've seen this proven through behavior that like people just are willing to share and just go crazy online with what they're willing to share.

00:56:49

And then maybe think about the privacy implication down the road or after it bites him in the butt or something like that.

00:56:55

So that's the gist of the sharing chapter.

00:56:59

Well, I think that the willingness to share, like people still do care about privacy, but with the right technology, the right benefits and the right conditions, humans will share almost anything he says in this chapter.

00:57:13

And so that there's all these trade offs that go with it, but we're, we undervalue, I think, some of the privacy stuff because of the immediate benefits that we get from it.

00:57:29

And I actually kind of like the fact that there are companies that are taking a stance to protect privacy.

00:57:35

Obviously, Apple runs a whole ad campaign on this, but even something like Google, which essentially they're providing a service and they're trying to provide better answers to questions that people have.

00:57:48

But all of those questions that you ask, that is providing data, which then drives all of their products.

00:57:57

And if you are getting something for free, you can't figure out why or how they're making money, then you are the product.

00:58:07

Exactly.

00:58:08

So there's alternatives like DuckDuckGo that are built on the idea of privacy.

00:58:14

And everyone can figure out where they're going to draw those lines, but the big thing is not where we draw those lines, I think, but just the fact that we figure out where those lines should be drawn.

00:58:25

And then the other thing in here that was interesting is that this whole idea of sharing this even applies to financing and crowdfunding with things like Kickstarter.

00:58:44

I never really, it's been around in some way, shape or form for long enough that I like the crowdfunding thing.

00:58:55

It never really occurred to me how differently that how different that would have been prior to something like that.

00:59:02

If you wanted to get a project off the ground and you didn't have access to a network of angel investors that you could pitch your thing to how that wasn't even a possibility for you.

00:59:15

And just because you throw it together at Kickstarter doesn't mean that it's going to be successful.

00:59:19

There's a lot of challenges that go along with that.

00:59:22

But I think it's cool that the barrier to entry has been lowered to the point where people can contribute and participate in these different things without having to have all the, well, let's just talk about YouTube for example.

00:59:41

YouTube has been a project of mine lately.

00:59:43

And I have some fancy microphones and some fancy cameras, but it's nothing compared to like a professional television studio.

00:59:50

And that's kind of the point you make is that people on these social sites are basically creating content as free labor.

00:59:56

Think about that I guess when you're going through scrolling through your endless feeds and you're going and posting things like this is one of the problems I see with YouTube honestly is like the people who want to get the big audiences and they're making ad revenue and then all of a sudden they get demonetized.

01:00:14

And all the YouTube just yanked my ability to provide for my family away from me.

01:00:21

Well, it's because you were doing it for them.

01:00:24

Like they were your employer in a sense.

01:00:27

I think the better way to do it is to figure out a way where you can borrow attention, but you want to own list.

01:00:33

Right.

01:00:34

So that's kind of the approach I've taken for anybody who cares.

01:00:37

Like all of my YouTube videos are talking about something in Obsidian and then if you want the template, if you want the tips or you want to try this yourself, here's the starter vault and then you go download that.

01:00:50

So I think if you're going to go ahead and share your stuff, but share it in a way where you're actually benefiting from it as much as the platform is.

01:01:01

Yeah, I think it's wise.

01:01:02

I think it's really wise.

01:01:03

All right.

01:01:04

We're ready to move to filtering.

01:01:05

Let's do it.

01:01:06

All right.

01:01:07

So filtering, chapter seven, basically he's saying he ties back into this idea of the library of everything, right?

01:01:14

And that as we get more and more, as we link more and more, as we share more and more, now we have to think about how do we like work through all of that.

01:01:23

Like kind of how do we call this down to something useful?

01:01:26

He describes a couple of different ways to filter gatekeepers, intermediate, curators, brands, government, culture, environment, friends and ourselves.

01:01:33

He describes being in a filter bubble that if we filter in certain ways and we filter too much, right, then we can actually find ourselves in this bubble where we're not getting exposed to the truth or all of the ideas.

01:01:44

We're really just getting exposed to the things that we want to see or the things that we want to.

01:01:50

Maybe we don't even want to, but the things that are going to continually pop up in our feeds.

01:01:55

He throws out this idea that filtering is a type of censoring, which I liked that, right?

01:02:00

It's like, yes, it is, right?

01:02:01

Sometimes that's good.

01:02:02

Sometimes that's bad.

01:02:03

It depends on who's doing it and why they're doing it.

01:02:05

But I liked that he was, he called that out, called out the fact that a filter focuses content, but it also focuses our attention, which I really liked that concept because there are times when I need to filter, not because there's too much content,

01:02:20

but because my brain is so all over the place that that filter really helps me funnel in on what I should be working on at the time and during the moment.

01:02:30

But then he talks about the fact that experiences are coming into play and that experiences use this technology, which the technology is trending towards free.

01:02:40

So how are we going to monetize this or how are we going to make something out of it?

01:02:44

What's less about now the actual technology and/or the content and it's more about the experience that we get through this other thing.

01:02:51

So instead of just reading or watching my video, come to my workshop.

01:02:55

If I'm a musician, it's not just about the music because the music's easy to get for free.

01:02:59

It's about coming to my concert and experiencing the thing I'm doing in my concert and we're very much seeing this.

01:03:04

We're very much seeing with a thing like Spotify where it's less about the album sales and it's much more about the concert and the merch and the experience, the VIP treatment and those type of things that are kind of rising to the top as you will.

01:03:19

So what do you have in terms of filtering, Mike?

01:03:23

Well, I think the first thing I jotted down, we have an abundance of options so we need to apply filters and to deal with super abundance, we have to increase our filtering methods.

01:03:33

That is a fancy, nice way of saying that there's too much information in the world.

01:03:39

So I was kind of thinking about when I first started making stuff for productivity.

01:03:49

FOMO was kind of one of the buzzwords.

01:03:53

The fear of missing out is FOMO still a thing.

01:03:57

Are people really worried about missing out on things?

01:04:02

Or have we gotten to the point where it's so saturated that we know we're missing out on some things and we don't like that, obviously, but it's not something that keeps us awake at night like FOMO used to?

01:04:15

I bet the idea is still around, but really all I see now is marketing.

01:04:19

It's a marketing thing.

01:04:21

Yeah, and I see actually more talk about the opposite of that would be JOMO, the joy of missing out.

01:04:28

It feels like maybe that's just my bias because I do like a focus podcast where life is more than cranking widgets and things like that.

01:04:36

Being intentional and putting up the boundaries and saying no to certain things, that is actually a good thing and increases the amount of overall value that you're able to get from the stuff that you have.

01:04:49

I feel like I see that message a lot more.

01:04:54

But I think the ways that we filter that you describe, like those are interesting.

01:05:00

And I think ultimately, Curator is the one that resonates with me because I think that's what Bookworm is for a lot of people.

01:05:07

Yep.

01:05:08

Is a way to curate books and should I actually read this or do I get the gist of it and that's good enough.

01:05:15

But I think the thing with curating is you really have to trust the source.

01:05:25

You have to know who the curator is.

01:05:29

I get to really believe that they're able to filter effectively.

01:05:34

But when you find someone that can act as that curator for you, I think it's really, really valuable and it also ties back to something from chapter three.

01:05:44

Which we didn't actually discuss, but I jotted down in my mind map that deep down avid audiences and fans want to pay creators, but it requires four conditions.

01:05:54

It talks about how it must be extremely easy to do.

01:05:56

The amount has to be reasonable.

01:05:58

There's a clear benefit to them for paying and it's clear that the money will directly benefit the creator.

01:06:02

And I feel like the curation piece is one of the benefits there.

01:06:07

But I guess spoiler alert, Corey and I are talking about what a way to support the podcast might look like.

01:06:16

Hopefully we'll have some details for you next episode.

01:06:18

But I recognize that the role of the curator is going to become more and more important.

01:06:27

Yeah.

01:06:28

The gatekeepers and intermediaries and friends, culture environment, all that kind of stuff is important too.

01:06:33

But the curator, and just that term curator sounds a little bit too formal.

01:06:41

But I remember last episode we were talking about the advice that I give people and I've heard myself that someone you trust recommends a book to you buy it right away.

01:06:53

Stick it in your library.

01:06:54

It's how I ended up with the lateral thinking about Edward Dibano, even though I've never really read it.

01:06:58

Somebody that I trusted as a curator recommended that to me at some point.

01:07:04

And who are the people that you trust?

01:07:07

Who are the people that if they give you a recommendation, you recognize that this one means something.

01:07:13

Because if I just do a Google search on what are the top 20 productivity books that I should read this year, I guarantee you that like 15 of them, I'm not going to want to read.

01:07:22

I don't care about the subtle art of not giving it.

01:07:30

I see that on a list and right away I'm like, "Okay, well that's not somebody I can trust."

01:07:34

They have been fired from the curator role in my life.

01:07:38

But who are the people that can feel that for you?

01:07:41

Because that's going to be important for discerning what's the useful stuff from the noise.

01:07:46

Where I think this gets really interesting is when AI comes in and can AI be a good enough curator?

01:07:53

Or can there be a different version of AI or a tuned version of AI?

01:07:57

Or a version of AI that I've trained to curate the podcast for me?

01:08:04

Or to curate YouTube videos for me?

01:08:06

Like I want to learn about woodworking.

01:08:08

So is there an AI out there that can go, "You should watch these 10, but it's actually good."

01:08:13

You know what I mean?

01:08:15

I think if we can get there, I'm in.

01:08:18

I'm all for it.

01:08:19

I just don't know if we can get there.

01:08:20

I don't know if I can get confident.

01:08:22

I don't think we can get all the way there.

01:08:24

I think what the algorithms will be able to do is be able to say, "Well, you read this book on this topic.

01:08:29

People who were reading this clicked on this link, whatever, they asked these questions."

01:08:35

So it can be very good at answering the questions that you're asking.

01:08:42

But the thing that I think it's not good at is, "Okay, so that opened up a loop to something that I experienced

01:08:50

or read way over in this other domain."

01:08:53

There's such a far reach from here to there.

01:08:58

Maybe that gets closed in time with the amount of information that's out there.

01:09:03

But those are the connections that actually mean more to me.

01:09:09

It's the stuff that's like, "How in the world does this connect?"

01:09:13

And I feel like the AI is really good, just based on the sheer volume of the information that's getting fit in there,

01:09:19

it can find the next level stuff that's in the same vicinity.

01:09:24

But it has no idea how the study of productivity and the study of the scripture lights me up.

01:09:34

Those two things don't compute not yet.

01:09:39

That's true.

01:09:40

Let's see where this goes.

01:09:43

Let's get into remixing. Chapter 8 is remixing.

01:09:47

He defines remixing the rearrangement and reuse of existing pieces.

01:09:53

This would be something along the lines of a mashup.

01:09:56

You take a bunch of artists and you take their music and you mash them up.

01:10:01

He uses that example a decent amount in this book where the original author wrote the primary story

01:10:08

and then there's a bunch of people mashing it up or doing a remix in terms of a fan fiction.

01:10:13

But he basically says that one of the benefits here would be that anything digital will have the undo

01:10:21

and rewind capability as well as we'll be able to remix that, which is a very interesting thing.

01:10:28

Again, Mike, you will go back to your comment before about the fixed nature of the hard copy book.

01:10:36

You can't really do that unless you cut up the pages and then you do that and then you have one of a kind.

01:10:40

But in the digital world, we can do that all over the place.

01:10:44

He gets into the idea of intellectual property and copyright law and how does that play into this.

01:10:49

One of the really interesting things I thought about this was what is the name of the OpenAI's video tool?

01:10:57

It starts with an S, but I can't remember what the name of it is.

01:11:00

You remember it, Mike?

01:11:01

No, I don't know the video one. I haven't messed around with the video stuff.

01:11:06

But I have used mid-journey for images.

01:11:09

Okay, so you can't, they won't let you actually do anything with the video one yet,

01:11:13

but they released the name of it and they showed examples of it.

01:11:17

All I could think about was, he says in there, there's little need to take new photographs or videos

01:11:22

because almost every image or shot has been taken already.

01:11:26

All we need to do is re-pix them, which I completely disagree with.

01:11:30

But then at the same time, I watch these videos from OpenAI and I think, well, I mean, they got pretty close.

01:11:38

If I can give it the right prompts, it might be able to take existing photography or existing video

01:11:45

and actually make the thing that I want, will it be completely removed the need?

01:11:51

I don't know about that.

01:11:52

That's where it goes a little too far for me.

01:11:54

Yeah, so I think it depends on the video and maybe, you know, it gets to the point where it could actually create

01:12:03

B-roll of me that I could use in my YouTube videos, but it's not doing that any time in the near future.

01:12:12

I do think though that if you have generic images or video, yes, absolutely.

01:12:20

I have thought from the very beginning, the first time I saw mid-journey, I was like, "Getty images is in trouble."

01:12:27

Now, I have a background with the family business and all the writing that I've done online,

01:12:34

like stock photos for a lot of different stuff.

01:12:37

And in recent years, there have been websites that have, like I use pixels most of the time

01:12:43

because it gives you royalty-free images and videos.

01:12:47

And you can use them in freer or commercial products, but with the family business,

01:12:53

we've been doing video products since digital video was a thing.

01:12:57

I remember back in high school, we were shooting digital video for these independent living skills programs

01:13:01

that we were doing and with low functioning populations, the reason we were doing that

01:13:06

is because they could watch the video and those skills were much more transferable

01:13:10

when they saw the video types into this concept of video modeling.

01:13:14

So I've been using giddy images and sources like that for 25 years at this point,

01:13:21

and they are ridiculously expensive.

01:13:25

That is a monopoly. I really hope gets disrupted.

01:13:30

But I think it is because, like you said, you can put in a prompt

01:13:35

and you can get a video or an image of this person doing the thing to include in your blog post

01:13:42

or your video, and you don't have to pay the $30 for a single image.

01:13:51

It's ridiculous.

01:13:53

And the other thing with this, since I'm on my soapbox now,

01:13:59

there are places that will just comb the internet for these images

01:14:05

and file lawsuits against people.

01:14:07

It's like, well, you don't have the rights to use this.

01:14:11

And I've been involved with some of these because we would be working with other companies

01:14:16

that used a stock image for an article that they wrote and published on our website.

01:14:21

And so the years later, companies coming after us like,

01:14:24

"Hey, you don't have rights to use this image?"

01:14:26

Well, we worked with this company.

01:14:28

It doesn't matter.

01:14:29

We're on the hook for the $10,000 they want for this image

01:14:33

just because I don't have a receipt for the image that appeared on our website.

01:14:37

And less than learned, we don't make that mistake again.

01:14:40

But I just think it's incredibly slimy that that sort of industry exists.

01:14:47

So, yes, as soon as we can kill the stock photos, let's do it.

01:14:51

And I think it is happening because I never, like if you were going to search for stock photos,

01:14:57

getting images is the thing that pops up.

01:14:59

And Adobe has their own stock thing that you can subscribe to too.

01:15:03

But I was watching a basketball game with my parents when we were in Florida.

01:15:09

And I saw on TV a commercial for Getty Images.

01:15:14

And I was like, "I have never seen a Getty Images commercial before."

01:15:19

And it was anchored on, like how, it was anchored on a historical perspective

01:15:25

of the most important events in human history have been captured with a photo or a video.

01:15:31

Like who cares?

01:15:32

You're not using those most likely when you're going to get a images and you're licensing those images.

01:15:37

But that's the only leg they have to stand on because the AI generated photo,

01:15:42

well, it may be fake, is going to accomplish the exact same thing when used in this thing that I'm making.

01:15:47

Plus, I don't have to worry about the lawsuit.

01:15:49

And I think we're going to reach a tipping point here if we aren't already there,

01:15:53

but people are just going to like the AI image better.

01:15:55

Like they're going to like the AI generated image better than what we're seeing.

01:15:59

Alright, so the last one here, because I think we got to roll a little bit.

01:16:02

So in 30 years, the most important culture works and the most powerful mediums will be those that have been remixed the most.

01:16:08

Again, I'm not sure, I'm not going to say he's wrong, but I'm not sure I agree.

01:16:13

Like I'm not sure that I believe that will be the case.

01:16:16

But I'm intrigued to see, like this is where my question comes in on this chapter,

01:16:20

like, huh, I wonder if that's really going to happen. Like I wonder if the remixing side of this is really where we're going to make,

01:16:26

you know, the most important culture works and the most powerful mediums.

01:16:30

Yeah, the one other thing that I wanted to call out don't really have a whole lot to say about it,

01:16:33

but he introduced the concept of rewindability, you know, being able to go back.

01:16:37

And I immediately thought of I think it's rewind.ai, that thing that you can just record everything that you ever do on your computer,

01:16:43

and then you can go back and search it.

01:16:45

It's like, huh.

01:16:46

Yeah, that's so that's a thing and it even almost uses the same term.

01:16:51

There were a couple different times in here, just as a complete side note,

01:16:55

where he mentioned technologies that don't exist anymore.

01:16:58

Like it's like, oh, this thing was happening in 2015, 2016.

01:17:02

And it's really, really interesting and it ties into this concept that I went and Googled it.

01:17:05

And I was like, yeah, that's not a thing anymore. They shut that down.

01:17:08

Like they shut that service down.

01:17:10

Okay, so let's go into interacting.

01:17:12

Basically, you know, he makes the bold statement of the future of technology

01:17:18

relies in the discovery of new interactions.

01:17:21

And in the coming 30 years, anything that is not intensely interactive will be considered broken.

01:17:27

I tend to, you know, to put the cart before the horse on purpose, I tend to agree with him here.

01:17:31

I think we are going into a more interactive society.

01:17:35

I think COVID and Zoom and, you know, that pushed that on a little bit.

01:17:41

I think the continued advancement in VR and AR, I think that's a really big side of this that's going to keep going here.

01:17:52

This is another one of those chapters where, you know, if you could have called it out, you would just say,

01:17:56

this is the VR AR chapter, right?

01:17:58

Like he calls it interacting, but it's really the VR AR chapter because he goes into, you know,

01:18:03

what's happening with face scanners and eye scanners and the more senses, more intimacy, more immersion

01:18:10

in terms of the future of interactions.

01:18:12

One of the statements he calls out that I really, really liked, computers have been on a steady march toward us, right?

01:18:21

Like moving more towards wearables.

01:18:23

And then he talks about the fact that, you know, under the skin or, you know, brain interaction,

01:18:28

you know, tying directly into the spine, like neural links trying to do.

01:18:31

I just, I thought this was a really, really good chapter and I agree with the overall premise of the fact

01:18:36

that I think we're going to become more interactive than less interactive and that's where our technology is taking us.

01:18:42

Yeah, I don't have a whole lot to contribute here because I have no VR or AR experience,

01:18:49

but it did occur to me reading this, that this was kind of the playbook for what makes the Apple Vision Pro so great.

01:18:56

A lot of things that he's talking about, the gaze tracking, which you mentioned and engaging your whole body

01:19:04

and everything that happening in the virtual world, that has to, that has to, well, the more immersive it is,

01:19:11

so you're combining it with the real world.

01:19:14

That is the thing that makes it successful and I feel like that's the thing, I don't have experience with it, you do.

01:19:20

But that's the thing that makes the Vision Pro stand out compared to the Oculus Quest and stuff like that,

01:19:27

is it feels more like reality and I think it's pretty brilliant what they're doing with that specific device

01:19:35

and going further out and disconnecting from Apple specifically, you can kind of see that's the blueprint for all of these sorts of devices going forward.

01:19:43

Yeah, I think if he was going to write this chapter again, I would probably title it if I was his editor.

01:19:49

I'd be like, maybe we should think about title in this chapter, immersion or immersion, what would it be?

01:19:54

Yeah, true. I don't know what the word would be there, but do you know what I mean?

01:19:58

Because when you put that VR headset on, it takes you a little minute to adjust, but then you really just want to start grabbing things

01:20:05

and touching things and when you're immersed in the Panorama 3D or the 3D video, it's such a different experience than you get in relationship to technology.

01:20:18

You get it obviously with other people in real life, but it's such a different experience that you get in relation to technology

01:20:23

that it's actually, you know, if they can do it and do it well, you could see how a Ready Player 1 scenario could actually become true.

01:20:33

And this was one of the best day in the life that I think he did.

01:20:38

Chapter 9's Day in the Life, I thought was the one that engaged me the most and I kind of resonated with the most as we read.

01:20:46

Agreed.

01:20:47

All right, let's move to tracking. Now, my notes on tracking are huge and partially because in the section where he says things that track us,

01:20:58

he lists like 20 or 25 different things that track us, which was kind of frightening and revealing all at the same time.

01:21:06

But the goal here is he starts off with the quantified self and he starts off with how we're essentially tracking our own things on purpose

01:21:13

to try to learn about ourselves or to try to answer questions. And he ties back into concepts called like life stream where you're basically trying to record everything in like a diary format of everything that happens in a stream.

01:21:25

Then life logging, which basically we're trying to record every data point that we can about our life and how and why we would want to do that.

01:21:34

Then he goes into the idea of, well, the problem then becomes making sense of that data because we get this idea. We have too much data. And how do we actually do things with the data.

01:21:45

Then he goes into the look at all the things that are already tracking you. And I won't read this whole list because there's just too many, but like drone surveillance, postal mail, utilities, your wallets and your bank accounts, the IRS, fitness trackers, you know, reading trackers.

01:22:00

So there's all these different things. And then he goes into the fact that basically he's like, hey, in 50 years, tracking is just going to be a thing. We're not even going to think about it anymore.

01:22:11

It's just we're going to know that we're always being tracked. We're going to know that everything is always tracking us. And essentially, we're just going to go, okay, here we are, like, and we're just going to do it.

01:22:21

We're not even going to think about it anymore, which I think is a very interesting take on it.

01:22:28

I think that's accurate. I think that everything is going to be tracking us. And the thing that he called out is like the big brother is not the fact that all the stuff is tracking us but aggregating all those data streams together.

01:22:43

That's the thing that feels a little bit creepy. But even that is becoming more normalized. You go search for something on Amazon and then you go to a completely different website and you see ads for the thing that you search for.

01:22:59

That's going to become even more normal. But I really like the quantified self idea. So the whole thing that stood out to me from this section, you know, I read the chapter tracking and I kind of thought, oh boy, we're going to get into the next section.

01:23:12

We're going to get into how evil all this stuff is and all that. But it's pretty balanced in the approach. And so there can be a good and a bad application of this.

01:23:23

And I think we should figure out where we want to draw the boundaries. You know, I'm not going to put on the tin foil had anytime soon.

01:23:30

But I'm also not going to offer all of this data whenever anything asks for it either. And I'm going to be thinking about what are the data points that I can use to measure my progress in specific directions that I consider to be worthwhile pursuits.

01:23:49

And I would say Kelly is very much on the side of being pro data and pro even pro tracking. But he says with caveats right we need transparency we need regulation we need accuracy.

01:24:01

And then do people really understand that like the more personalization they want which comes from all this data, the more they're giving up in terms of their privacy or the more transparent that they're going to have to be through that process.

01:24:15

And I think that he calls out the fact that it's like, yes, anonymity can be valuable in very, very rare circumstances but most of the time it's used in bad ways right it's used to get out of something or to try to do something bad and not, and not get caught for it.

01:24:29

So, that's our, that's our tracking session now we're going to go to questioning.

01:24:34

So questioning is what is possible in theory, and what we don't think is possible right then ends up happening in practice and he gives quite a few different examples of this.

01:24:45

So Wikipedia, YouTube, eBay, Uber, right, he gives all these different examples of how we never thought that was possible so we'll use eBay because I think it's a really good one.

01:24:53

So you're going to tell me that we're going to broker this transaction from states and/or countries away from each other and we're going to do it in a way that is safe and relatively fair or sorry relatively safe relatively fair, right, and actually people walk away more often than not pleased with the thing.

01:25:09

He goes, and then you're going to tell me we're going to do it for cars, right, like we're going to actually sell cars that way which is one of eBay's I guess prime drivers in 2016 was was their automobile sales.

01:25:19

And I think that's a really interesting premise to this.

01:25:23

I don't like, and I don't know what your take is on this mic, but I don't like that he calls this chapter questioning.

01:25:28

I think questioning doesn't make sense.

01:25:30

Like in the end he ties it back in and he basically then says, you know, what are humans good for?

01:25:35

Humans are good for asking good questions and that that's what we're going to do well in the future is we are going to be the ones who ask really, really good questions and the better, sorry guys, more productive, the better we are, the better questions we ask.

01:25:48

But man, there was a lot in the middle there that I was just like, I'm not sure how he's tying this into questioning and I'm interested in your take on this.

01:25:56

Well, if I had to guess, you know, he mentions that the impossible things that are happening now are due to a new level of organization that didn't exist before.

01:26:03

And so I think that's the connector is that when we're asking these questions, we're kind of asking how could this impossible thing potentially be possible.

01:26:13

And that's what leads us to do these things that we never thought we would be able to do.

01:26:19

I think the key here, this is one of my favorite chapters, to be honest, because of the paradox of science that he describes here.

01:26:28

This is kind of the key and why like the dystopian future where the AIs take over everything I don't think is ever going to happen.

01:26:34

He says the paradox of science is that every answer breeds at least two new questions and computers are really good at giving answers, but humans are really good at asking questions and questioning is more powerful than answering.

01:26:47

I think that that is 100% true and there's a whole bookworm length discussion as to why that is so.

01:26:55

But leaving that aside, I feel like that's the thing that we should be leaning towards.

01:27:03

I guess here's another question I could ask.

01:27:05

How can I ask better questions?

01:27:08

Not how can I get better answers, but how can I ask better questions?

01:27:12

When you ask the right questions, the answers usually become clear.

01:27:15

It's why I like personal Socrates by Mark Champagne so much as it gives you so many great questions that you can use.

01:27:21

I think that's really this chapter in a nutshell is just continue to ask questions and the answers will reveal themselves.

01:27:28

He states exactly what you called out right there is at the end of the day, a world of super smart ubiquitous answers encourages a quest for the perfect question.

01:27:38

That's what you're asking.

01:27:39

You're saying, "How can I get to that perfect question or ask better questions to get to that perfect question?"

01:27:45

I like the idea of that's what we're going to be.

01:27:51

If I think about the future and I say, "Okay, in the future, humans are really good for asking these questions and then we get really good at asking these questions."

01:27:58

I don't have a problem with that.

01:27:59

The other thing with this though is that you can't just grab the most convenient answer either.

01:28:07

Because he talks about it here, like, "When everything's connected, facts will have anti-facts."

01:28:11

You'll be able to find a fact that supports your belief, but then there will also be other facts that support the exact opposite beliefs.

01:28:19

That's why you have to keep asking the questions because you've got to get more data around this thing and you've got to decide what sense do I make of this myself.

01:28:27

This reminded me of the liminal thinking by Dave Gray concept where he mentions that the Internet is a grocery store for facts.

01:28:35

You can find whatever fact you want.

01:28:37

People will do that and they'll grab that and they'll build all their beliefs and judgments on that.

01:28:41

That's the caveat with this. You've got to be careful.

01:28:44

Good, good. Let's move on to 12. This is our 12th and last chapter.

01:28:49

It's called "Beginning."

01:28:51

Really, it's a shorter chapter.

01:28:55

He starts out by describing this planetary layer is the way he describes it.

01:29:00

He calls it the "holos."

01:29:02

I include the collective intelligence of all humans combined with the collective behavior of all machines plus the intelligence of nature plus whatever behavior emerges from the whole.

01:29:15

He then says, "How do we engage with this? We are the people who write the code.

01:29:21

We are the people who interact with this holos, this thing that is existing and living and flowing and interacting with us."

01:29:29

Then he describes it almost as the phrase "superorganism," the term "superorganism."

01:29:36

It's more of a "How do these chapter titles, these verbs, turn into a living thing," if you will, like an organism like living thing that does all of this stuff.

01:29:49

He then says, "Hey, we've already started. All of these 12 that I'm talking about have already begun.

01:29:55

This is really the beginning of it all.

01:29:58

What we're going to see is that in the next 30 years, we're going to continue to push the way we've been pushing."

01:30:06

He calls out the way we've been pushing for the last 30 to doing all of these 12.

01:30:11

Really, we're just at the beginning of it all.

01:30:14

It's how he wraps up the whole book.

01:30:17

I don't really have anything else to add to this. The sharing is excessive now. It's just the beginning is his idea.

01:30:24

Is there anything else that stood out? This was an interesting book for me where I had the actual chapters, but then there were a couple things that I just called out on the side.

01:30:35

I thought this was interesting about this book. I thought this was interesting about this book.

01:30:39

Did you have anything there? I only have a couple ones that I want to talk about.

01:30:43

No, just some general stuff when we get to the style and rating, but for the most part, I don't have anything that I jotted down as important or relevant for this book exists inside one of these chapters.

01:30:59

The one I thought that was interesting, he calls it out, is attention is our last scarcity?

01:31:04

That's going to be the thing that is going to drive a lot of this thing.

01:31:08

Do we have enough attention to do the things that we want to do and how do we have enough attention to do the things that we want to do?

01:31:15

We already talked about it a little bit, the fact that he was so far advanced that I expected him to be, having written this book in 2016, I thought that was really good.

01:31:26

The last one is this idea of technium. I've never heard the phrase of technium before, but he calls it the modern system of culture and technology.

01:31:34

It's accelerating creation of new impossibilities by continually evolving these social organizations.

01:31:41

I thought these were three additional interesting points. At this point, we can roll into style and rating.

01:31:50

This is my book that means I go first.

01:31:52

Styl and rating.

01:31:55

Actually, before styling rating is action items, if you have any, but I don't know that you have any.

01:32:00

I didn't play around with the technologies, but that's not really an action item.

01:32:04

No, I didn't have any for this one. That's kind of why I skipped right over it, because I didn't even think about it.

01:32:08

Yeah, I figured. Go ahead then.

01:32:11

So now we're rolling into style and rating. I'm mixed on this one.

01:32:15

So, style, here's the way I'll do it. My rating is a four.

01:32:21

I feel confident on that based on the book, the way it was structured, the way the content that was in the book, the fact that it is so meaningful in 2024, and it was written in 2015, 2016, 2014, whatever, tenish years ago.

01:32:38

So, but from a style standpoint, there was something about this book. I actually texted Mike earlier in the week and was like, man, this book is a slog, and I can't figure out why.

01:32:47

Like, I don't know what's happening. It wasn't that what was being said wasn't interesting. It wasn't that he like talked in circles or anything like that.

01:32:54

There was something about this book that I actually had a harder time working through.

01:32:59

And if I wouldn't have had such a hard time working through, I would have rated it a five. This book would be a five for me.

01:33:05

There's something about it, and I can't put my finger on what it actually was, that knocks this book down a notch and puts it into a four for me.

01:33:12

All right. Well, I think you're actually spot on with the rating. When I got through the second chapter, I was like, this is going to be a five star book.

01:33:22

But there were some sections where it maybe it didn't age quite as well, or maybe I just wasn't interested in those specific aspects of things as much.

01:33:32

But there were parts of it that felt long. And you're like, okay, let's get on to the next one.

01:33:39

I do feel like he really knows what he's talking about. And this is probably the best book like this that I have read.

01:33:47

I know this kind of came on the radar because you wanted to read something about AI, and I felt kind of bad when we ended up picking something from 2016.

01:33:55

But I feel like we probably got more out of the AI section in this book than a lot of the other ones that would be right now.

01:34:02

I agree completely. Yes. So there's some really good stuff in here. And I feel like if you're interested in technology trends or where things are going, this provides some great context.

01:34:15

It is pretty long. It's about 300 pages. And it probably doesn't need to be quite that long.

01:34:21

But I don't fault him in the approach that he took. I feel like when he wrote this in 2016, that was the right move.

01:34:28

And it's evidenced by how well this holds up almost 10 years later.

01:34:33

I don't think I would wait. If you're listening to this five, 10 years in the future, maybe things have changed significantly since then.

01:34:40

And it's not worth reading. But as we record this in early 2024, I think that this is still a worthwhile read for people who are interested in this.

01:34:48

And Kevin Kelly's style is pretty approachable, pretty entertaining.

01:34:53

I mean, it's not like going to have your role on the floor laughing or anything like that.

01:34:57

And there are certain sections that get a little bit long. But for the most part, I feel like it's a pretty engaging read.

01:35:03

So.

01:35:04

Good. So what's your ratings of four?

01:35:06

My reading is also a four.

01:35:08

All right. Awesome. All right. So Mike, can you tell us about what book is next because it is your book?

01:35:13

Next, we are reading a book that as we record, this is not available yet. And that is "Slow Productivity" by Kael Newport.

01:35:19

But it will be available March 5th. So pre-order it right now.

01:35:23

Or as you're listening to this as it's live, go ahead and order it because it's available.

01:35:28

But yeah, I'm really a big Kael Newport fan. I've liked a lot of the books that he's written.

01:35:35

I have been listening to his podcast recently. And I feel like this is kind of his thing.

01:35:44

This feels like it could be the culmination of everything that he's written about.

01:35:49

There are some people you can just tell, like, this was the book they were born to write.

01:35:54

Feels like this might be it for Kael. I like the whole idea of "Slow Productivity" and "Focus and Intentionality."

01:36:02

So yeah, I have very high expectations for, but we're going to go through it together.

01:36:09

Awesome. Well, since you've given us a couple extra days, I decided to pick a long book for the next book, my next book.

01:36:17

And that is "Mastery" by Robert Greene. So the bookworm podcast, Mike and Joe, covered a different book by Robert Greene.

01:36:25

Mike, do you remember which one it was? I think it was the 48 Laws of Power.

01:36:29

So they've already covered one of Robert Greene's books, but I want to cover "Mastery."

01:36:33

So "Mastery" is a long book. It's listed on Amazon as 350 pages.

01:36:38

So you can get a head start on that one if you're reading along with us.

01:36:41

And then when "Slow Productivity" comes out, you can take a look at that.

01:36:45

All right, Mike. So we did it. Let's go ahead and put the inevitable on the shelf.

01:36:51

And the last thing I have is a really kind of interesting thing that kind of is random.

01:36:58

I was listening to the audiobook as I was reading this book, and the stats were different.

01:37:03

[laughter]

01:37:05

Interesting. Well, it wouldn't surprise me if the digital version he's updated.

01:37:09

Yeah. It was crazy. Like the stats were, but they were like very, very off.

01:37:14

And it was maybe like 1% of the book, half a percent of the book. I don't know what it was.

01:37:19

But I thought that was really, really kind of crazy. So, all right, we'll put the inevitable on the shelf.

01:37:23

Mike, is there anything else that you have to think about as we leave?

01:37:28

Just a couple of gap books, I guess, because I mentioned Amazon vacation,

01:37:32

I would have someone I came back. So one that I'll call out is "The Art of Focus" by Dan Co.

01:37:38

This one is not as great as I had hoped it would be, but it's still an entertaining read

01:37:44

and very much in my wheelhouse. You got any gap books?

01:37:50

I do. So I'm going to start reading "Every Good Endeavor" by Tim Keller,

01:37:55

and it's part of a grant that I'm working on. So I need to work through that book

01:37:59

and figure out what I can glean from that book for the grant.

01:38:02

Cool. All right. Well, thanks everyone for listening.

01:38:06

If you are reading along with us, pick up Slow Productivity by Cal Newport,

01:38:10

and we'll talk to you in a couple of weeks.