Bookworm Transcripts

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ATR USB microphone.

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Yep, this is the one I used last time.

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And since you didn't complain about it, I'm going to use it again.

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Ha!

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That works.

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That works.

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It wasn't too bad.

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I was going through the editing process with that the last time around.

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And it seemed fine.

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I mean, I noticed it's not a mile for sure.

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Like, I noticed that.

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But other than that, I mean, you got to run a little bit to get some of the background

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stuff out of it.

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But I tend to run that anyway.

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It just means it actually does something on this mic as opposed to the aisle.

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So I'm not going to complain about it.

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Nice.

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Sway goes.

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I will say that I, at least on my end, I started sitting down again.

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Sorry about that.

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Slacker.

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Ha!

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Ha!

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Ha!

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Yeah, it has a little bit to do with me not having the correct setup for a standing environment.

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Because if I said something with a P and it boomed a little bit, it would have this ringing

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that would work its way down into the back end of the microphone, which is not good.

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Because the way that it was mounted had a little bit of...

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It was flexible a little bit, so it would have this ringing in the background.

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Not a good thing.

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So, until I have a legit stand-up scenario for a microphone, I'm going to sit down.

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Fair enough.

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It's the way it goes.

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I suppose I got to get show notes up that way.

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I actually know what we're talking about today.

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What are we talking about today?

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I don't know, but I guess I'll get the notes up to figure it out.

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I don't know what we're talking about.

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But Mr. Tlaab is smarter than we are.

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I will give him that.

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For sure.

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This is the first book I read that made me sound like...

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Or made me feel like an idiot.

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It works.

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There's a lot in this book.

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For sure.

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For sure.

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But before we get there, we need to jump in to follow up.

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And you have a lot here.

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I do.

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And I am proud to say that I actually did all of these things.

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So the first one...

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Is this...

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Well, hold on.

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Hold on.

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Is this the first time...

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Because I hit all of one of mine, this might be the first time we know for certain that

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we've hit all of our follow-up.

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100% on the follow-up?

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Is it the first time?

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It might be.

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That's almost scary.

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We're 37 episodes in and we finally hit all of our follow-up from the last round.

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It was bound to happen at some point.

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At some point we were a success.

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These were fairly easy.

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Let's think about my allies.

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Was pretty easy.

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It was a good exercise.

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It's not something I think that I'll go back in reference.

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I think I may have mentioned that in the last episode.

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I don't really see a whole lot of value in going back to this thing all the time.

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But it was definitely good to go through the thought process, the exercise of identifying

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the people who are my allies.

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I think that's going to change over time too.

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You're going to share this list or is this a secret mic list?

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This is a secret list.

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It's going in the bat cave.

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That works.

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Sometimes I feel like we make lists and people always want to know what is on that list.

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I'm like, "I can't share that.

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It causes all kinds of problems if I share that."

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I understand.

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I know you did want to be on the list.

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I will say that you are on the list.

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You made the cut show.

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I win.

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That's all I wanted to know.

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To me, I don't care who else else is on the list, but that one makes me happy.

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Yay.

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Nice.

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Next one for me was develop an idea bank.

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I started doing this.

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I've got a perspective in my OmniFocus, which has a little money bag icon.

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Just called the bank.

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Nice.

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At least it's not the money flying away.

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This is one that's going to stick, I think.

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Let me give you one example of this that I've used even this week.

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Hosting the productivity show, that's one of my areas with Asian efficiency.

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I'm responsible for laying out the roadmap of episodes, topics that we're going to cover.

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That means also that I'm responsible for grooming the backlog for the scrum process that we

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use.

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Every couple of weeks when I groom the backlog, I have to identify some topics and I have to

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create the issues inside of JIRA, which we use to track all of our work at Asian efficiency.

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Every two weeks, I find myself in the situation where I'm like, "What are we going to talk

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about?"

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Occasionally, there's something that lines up with a release or some chronological event.

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Habits make sense at the beginning of the year when everybody's talking about, "I'm

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going to go to the gym and New Year's resolutions and stuff like that."

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For the most part, it's like, "Okay, we've got to create awesome content now for the next

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two weeks."

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I find that I get podcast ideas all the time.

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If I jot them down in drafts with just Idea, Colon, and then the podcast episode, I can

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send those to my Idea Bank.

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It's like, "Oh, yeah, I've got to find some topics."

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I just go there and I pick the two that I like the best, just from reading through it quickly.

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I think that if I figure out other specific use cases like that, it's going to exponentially

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pay off, but already I'm seeing returns from this idea.

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This Idea Bank is one that you're storing inside of JIRA for Asian efficiency.

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Do you have a personal version of that that you're holding onto for your own projects,

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or is this something that you're trying to do primarily for AE?

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That's a great question, and that's where it's going to evolve a little bit.

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The ideas are actually stored inside of my personal OmniFocus, but when I pick them

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and I'm like, "Okay, this is an idea we're going to do now for the next sprint," then

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I create the issue in JIRA and remove that essentially from the Idea Bank.

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I know that I can find other areas where this is going to be applicable, but I haven't put

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it into practice yet.

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What I'm thinking is that with OmniFocus, you can hack your way around using tags.

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I want to do hashtag podcasts to get my podcast ideas or hashtag dojo for dojo module ideas.

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You could use this anywhere.

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You could use it hashtag blog for blog posts, but that part I haven't fully figured out

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yet, but just implementing it for the podcast already, it's been great.

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The only thing I heard in all of this was OmniFocus.

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I thought you were off of OmniFocus.

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What's this all about?

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If you go back to the tape, I think I'm justified in saying that, I said I will be back.

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I'm a little bit annoyed because by the end of November, they were supposed to have released

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the multiple contacts to the tags and the incessant reminders that Todo has.

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In fact, Matt Ryan told me initially, he's like, you probably don't even need to move

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to Todo because this stuff is coming to OmniFocus.

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But I can't case from the OmniGroup just published an updated roadmap and now that's not coming

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until at least Q1 2018.

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Little bit annoyed, but OmniFocus is great and with iOS 11, it is great-er.

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The drag and drop between OmniFocus and Apple Mail is awesome.

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I know you just switched everything to paper, but this is a Joe workflow right here.

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You can go split screen on an iPad and you can drag an email from Apple Mail to OmniFocus

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and it creates a task in your inbox and it's got the link back to the original message.

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It's genius the way that they've implemented this.

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Common sense, it makes so much sense to do it that way.

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Common sense isn't so common, especially when you get really smart developers that are trying

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to push all the technical stuff.

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I just think that the way that they implemented that is awesome and it makes me really excited

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about that platform.

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It's interesting.

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The thing that I hung up on with these types of things is I don't have an iPad.

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The drag and drop thing, I still don't fully understand because I've never played with

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it.

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That's almost sad to say, but it's not something that I'm going to get super thrilled about

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or even use just because I don't use an iPad in that way.

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I have yet to figure out why I should own an iPad, which is a weird way to come at it.

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That's a whole other topic, Mike.

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That is a whole other topic.

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To be honest, I mean-

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I mean, especially with the stuff that you've been doing with the analogs, I think if you

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were to use a 10.5-inch iPad Pro with an Apple Pencil for a week, you'd be hooked.

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You would have to use the right applications, like good notes, for example, but it would

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give you all of the flexibility that you have for the analog stuff.

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Then, as soon as you wanted to turn any piece of it digital, you could do it using something

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like drag and drop.

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You could have another application open and be like, "Oh, I wrote this handwritten note

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over here.

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I'm just going to drag this into this other application.

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It's going to OCR it for me and it's going to store it."

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I can reference it later whenever I want.

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You're not going to have to worry about transferring notebooks full of information every time you

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get to the last page.

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I actually did solve that.

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I'm actually not transferring anymore.

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Okay.

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I shouldn't say that.

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On a weekly basis, I am, but on a long-term list, I'm not.

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I do keep that digital anymore.

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I think I would convert to some iPad stuff if they bring some of the iPad pro features

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to the mini.

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If they took the iPad mini and gave it all the pro features, I would be hooked on that

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because it's so much smaller and I simply want it for doing notes and such with the pencil.

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If they bring that, yeah, I'll be hooked on that.

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But until that point, I still don't see how that's helpful versus, because with the new

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MacBook Pros versus the iPad pro, my stepdad was just here this past weekend and we were

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working through, he's got one of the full-size iPad pro.

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What is it?

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12.9 is the size of that thing.

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It's just a monster, gorgeous screen.

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Love that thing.

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Looking at it, by the time you get a keyboard and everything on it, it's actually thicker

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than my MacBook Pro.

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Okay, do I want an iPad pro that's bigger than my MacBook Pro?

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When personally, the way that I do things, the MacBook Pro has a lot more power for what

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I want to do with it.

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I don't see the point in that because everything I could do with the iPad I already do with

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the MacBook and quicker.

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Well, yeah, I get that.

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You can't compare the 12.9 inch to your 13-inch MacBook Pro because you're right.

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The screen size is exactly the same and you're sitting there looking at, "Well, this is basically

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the same size.

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I can do way more on this."

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What you need to do is you need to use a 10.5 inch, not a mini.

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Believe me, I had the same thought process you did.

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I've had a mini for years.

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I've had multiple revisions of the mini.

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The 10.5 inch is the sweet spot.

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It's incredible.

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It's so light that you probably are thinking, "Well, the mini is going to be more portable.

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I can just grab it and go somewhere."

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The 10.5 inch is so light and it is so portable that I think it would meet all of your requirements

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in that regard.

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Plus, having that larger screen to actually draw on is really, really nice.

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Here's why I want the mini because I don't disagree with you.

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The 10.5 I could see having a lot of valid pros versus the cons.

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I already carry around a book quite a bit.

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Currently, I've developed this habit of carrying around a notebook along with that.

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I've got my normal reading book plus my analog task management stuff that I've been using

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lately.

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I'm already carrying those two around and they're roughly the size of the mini.

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That's why I want that because then it would just be something I carry around all the time

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and it would be thinner than my notebook.

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I could see that, but the 10.5, that's a whole different level that I'm carrying around

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with me all the time.

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That's why I'm interested in that.

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Yeah, I get that.

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I don't know.

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I carry a 10.5 around in a book quite frequently.

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The 10.5 is a little bit bigger, but it's not too bad.

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Are you carrying that around in a backpacker by hand?

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Well, when I am out and about, I'm carrying it in a backpack, but often I will grab just

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my iPad and a book and go somewhere.

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If I know that I'm not trying to achieve maximum productivity during this particular

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session, I'm not on the clock, so to speak, then often I will grab just the iPad Pro with

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I've got a smart keyboard cover, which is actually really thin.

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It's way thinner than a lot of the other keyboard cases.

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I know that there's some complaints about the actual keyboard in that, but in my experience,

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it's not bad at all.

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It's a full-size keyboard, so it feels really good when you're typing.

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Then a book because books come on.

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Bookworm, you have to have a book.

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Life is not moving unless you have a book in your hand.

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Exactly.

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Okay, I'll maybe think through this a little more.

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I've got a lot that I've been collecting on this, trying to nail down what I think about

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it.

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I haven't...

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It's an expensive experiment to just go buy one just to see how it's going to work.

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It's expensive to do that, especially at the level that I would want to purchase said

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iPad, so I don't see myself doing that just on a whim.

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It's likely going to be something that here is the use case that warrants this level of

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purchase, because I'm trying to change my mindset over from having these devices as

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a place that I hang out versus a tool to use.

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If I'm going to purchase an iPad, I want it to be a tool that has a very specific and

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yet highly valuable purpose behind it.

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Fair enough.

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There's our Apple and iPad rant.

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Quite the tangent for an IdeaBink.

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I'll start by OmniFocus.

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You scoundrel.

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Oh, Omni.

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I still love Omni.

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I just am not using it as much as I hate to say that.

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Yeah, actually the thing...

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Okay, so the thing that really bugged me about the new post from Ken Case is that OmniFocus

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too has been around for years, so it is due for a major update.

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They're talking about adding these multiple contexts and adding these recurring reminders.

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The two is that exist in other applications already.

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In the last post, he mentioned that that's going to be released as OmniFocus 3, which

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I know means another major investment in order to use this tool, which I know I'm going

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to buy it.

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I've resigned myself to that fact, but the fact that this stuff has been teased for so

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long and now it feels like, "Oh, we're going to just roll this over into the new version

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and that's going to be a paid upgrade."

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That feels a little bit weird because I haven't heard anything else about new design or anything.

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Those features enough, I don't think justify a major version release, but we'll see how

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that shakes out.

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I just listened to the MacPower users' podcast where they had Ken Case and Dave Tier.

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Oh, yeah.

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Yep, the developer roundtable.

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Yeah, so I listened to that.

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Two of the three were doing subscription models, whereas Ken Case and Team are not.

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Don't you do it on me.

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Don't you do it.

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I can't help but think they'll eventually get to that point, just because they have such

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a long release cycle that they have to lengthen it out a little bit in order to justify the

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cost because if they're releasing a new version every three years on something, they're usually

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pretty major updates when they do that.

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That's a good thing whenever they really push the envelope when they do that, but it also

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means that they have to charge quite a bit for their apps and whenever they do push out

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a new one, it's going to be another paid upgrade.

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You still have to pay to do that.

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I can't help but think that the pace of app development in today's world is so fast that

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you almost have to go subscription just to keep the lights on to keep things moving at

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a quick pace.

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You're going to get me on a soapbox as a developer with all this stuff.

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That's just the way things are going lately.

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Yeah, I'm not excited about that.

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I hope that Omni is able to figure out how to crack that nut.

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Something that I thought was cool, I've mentioned the set app service before.

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I'm pretty sure on Bookworm, but I really like this idea and they just added to do as

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an application in the set app service.

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So yeah, they've got and actually they announced they're over 100 apps now and they curate all

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the apps so they're pretty quality apps and I'm excited to see where that service goes.

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I hope that that model is sustainable for software developers because I think that's

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much more palatable for a consumer than, hey, sign up for this service and this service

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and this service and this service and this service.

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Because then it gets expensive.

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You start tacking all those together.

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Yep.

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Okay.

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Are we done with our bunny trail?

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I think so.

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I think so.

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So the next one, who knew that an idea bank would be for that?

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I kind of did as soon as I said, Omni Focus.

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But it's all your fault.

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The next one here is my outside in analysis, which I did.

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And I'm not going to share all of my problems here on the podcast, but I will say that it's

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a little bit humbling and I've got a lot of stuff to work on.

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But yeah, I think that this was again a really good exercise and I also think that some of

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these things I wouldn't have discovered had we not done bookworm for the last, what is

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it like year and a half, almost two years that we've been doing this?

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It's been, so we just launched it before a max stock two years ago.

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Okay.

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Yeah.

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So a little, a little over a year.

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You're pushing a year and a half.

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But it was, it was kind of cool to see like, even though it was a hard exercise because

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I'm basically putting myself under the microscope and pointing out all my flaws.

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It also showed me the areas or the ways that I've grown, like just being able to notice

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some of these things I knew is like, oh, I wouldn't have, I wouldn't have noticed that

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before I read this book and understood this, this point and got this perspective, if that

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makes sense.

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So bittersweet, I guess, but it's done.

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It's one of those things that you need to do this because I am convinced that, and a

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lot of people say this, self-awareness and understanding how you work and what you, like

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why you do the things you do.

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Those are some of the most important things you ever learn in life.

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If you know how to get yourself to do a lot of high quality and very pointed and focused

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work, that's huge.

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But at the same time, if you know that you struggle to help people through problems and

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you're working in, say, IT, that's an issue and you need to be very aware of that.

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So I feel like this outside in analysis is a very good thing to do.

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I'm a little afraid to do this thing, but I understand the value of it.

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I just don't want to do it.

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Yeah, it's fair.

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So that's the outside in analysis and the last one, play video games.

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I definitely succeeded at this one.

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I am hooked on FIFA.

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Although, it can be a little bit frustrating because whenever you play any sort of video

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game online, which is fun, I mean, you can connect and you get plugged in with somebody

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who's in the same division as you and it's always like a pretty good game.

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And literally it just takes a couple of seconds to set that up.

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That's really cool when you think about it.

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But also it shows me that there are a lot of other people who spend way more time playing

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video games than I do and are way better than me.

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It also locates me as not very good.

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Another humbling experience.

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Yep, exactly.

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I suppose that means you're done and I have to go.

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Yep.

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So the one that was on my list from the last round was project planning methods.

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And what I mean by that is trying to nail down a way to keep track of what project, when

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and where.

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And it's very similar to, you know, from the GTD world of task management, but doing that

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on a project level.

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So it takes you up to the next, what would that be, horizon one versus the runway, whatever

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you want to call it, the 1000 foot level in GTD.

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So trying to manage that level.

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So I know what project to do, what day of the week, where things at in the process.

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And I did nail down and I've had this for a little while.

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It's a way to use the whiteboard in my room because I love my whiteboard.

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And I have it set up such that there are projects that might go forward.

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And I guess I should back up.

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It's primarily for all of my client projects.

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I don't manage like my bookworm projects for each episode.

00:23:37

Like I don't manage that level of work in here and I don't manage like my household

00:23:42

projects on it.

00:23:44

But it does all of my client projects, which is like the one thing that's been stressing

00:23:48

me out lately is what is, where is everything in this flow?

00:23:52

Clients just pull no way.

00:23:55

Never.

00:23:56

That's never going to happen.

00:23:58

So I needed a way to keep track of where all these things are at the process.

00:24:04

I could use something like Trello.

00:24:06

I could do that.

00:24:08

But at the same time, it's helpful for me.

00:24:10

I'm learning the value of the analog system.

00:24:13

So bear with me.

00:24:14

I have this thing set up such that there are four really five categories that things can

00:24:21

be in.

00:24:22

Like the projects that I might be moving forward on, some that I have a commitment on but aren't

00:24:26

scheduled or the first payment's not in on it.

00:24:29

So they're in the queue.

00:24:31

So there's those two.

00:24:33

And then after the work is done, I've got like I'm waiting for a response from them

00:24:37

before I send the final payment or it's pending payment, meaning it's done.

00:24:42

I'm just waiting for that invoice to come in.

00:24:44

So there's those four categories.

00:24:46

And then the big one is in the middle of what week am I actually going to be doing this

00:24:50

work so I can plan out here are the two three clients I'm going to be working on this week,

00:24:55

next week here are the two that I'm working on the following.

00:24:58

Here's four that I'm working on and then you know so on and so forth.

00:25:01

And I usually plan about four, sometimes five weeks out.

00:25:06

So it's helpful for me to know where are these, where are these projects in the queue

00:25:11

and what week am I going to be working on them?

00:25:13

Because if I'm talking to somebody new, say this afternoon, I need to be able to tell

00:25:17

them, yeah, I'm going to start this in two and a half weeks and we'll be done by the

00:25:20

end of that week.

00:25:21

So I need to be able to say that.

00:25:23

So it's a good thing to be able to tell people when their project is going to be done, they

00:25:29

seem to like that.

00:25:30

So that's kind of where I'm at on that.

00:25:32

It's interesting because I've got each project laid out on a post-it note and it's like the

00:25:38

bigger post-it notes so I can literally just pull it off and move it from category to category.

00:25:43

Much like you would with cards on Trello.

00:25:44

I know that I could do this on Trello.

00:25:46

Not going to do it on Trello.

00:25:49

No Trello.

00:25:50

Like I get enough emails about you should use Trello for this.

00:25:54

No, I'm not using Trello for this.

00:25:56

So that's what I'm doing.

00:25:57

And it's been very helpful.

00:25:58

I've been enjoying that process.

00:26:00

Nice.

00:26:01

Yeah, I'm not a huge fan of Trello.

00:26:04

I get the idea behind Trello and it actually is owned by Atlassian now so it integrates real

00:26:10

nicely.

00:26:11

Oh, I didn't know that.

00:26:12

I didn't know whether Atlassian stuff.

00:26:13

But there's just little things about it that bugged me.

00:26:15

Like you're supposed to be able to embed Wistio links which is great because we're going

00:26:21

to use Trello for product development with a bunch of beta testers.

00:26:24

I'm like, oh, I'll just embed the Wistio links.

00:26:27

Turns out you actually can only do that in a comment which makes no sense.

00:26:32

Like I want cards with the videos in them for people to review.

00:26:37

And all I can do is add an attachment with a link and now they've got to go into a new

00:26:41

window and just like dumb.

00:26:44

But the idea behind Trello is really good.

00:26:47

And I think that when you're using it with other people, specifically clients, you know,

00:26:51

the people that you're going to be working with that aren't necessarily part of your

00:26:54

organization, it's a great tool because people seem to pick it up and it seems to make sense

00:27:00

pretty easily.

00:27:03

The one thing that I've found because I have people like to recommend stuff like whenever

00:27:07

you go paper.

00:27:08

So here's the thing you should know.

00:27:10

For the listeners, if you have any kind of an online audience and you mentioned that

00:27:15

you're going to use paper for a given thing like task management, project management,

00:27:22

you know, just taking notes, anytime you do that, you will get tons of people recommending

00:27:28

certain apps that do the same thing digitally and that you can carry with you everywhere.

00:27:32

I'm aware of this.

00:27:34

So here's the backstory.

00:27:37

With client work, especially the type of client work that I do, clients often have their own

00:27:43

systems that they simply want to add me to.

00:27:46

I'm a part of 28 Slack teams right now.

00:27:49

It's intense.

00:27:51

And if I turned on all the notifications on that, it would just sit here and ding all

00:27:54

day long.

00:27:55

Like that's how much I would get with Slack groups.

00:27:58

I'm a part of a lot of to do stuff.

00:28:00

I'm a part of a lot of Trello stuff.

00:28:02

I'm on a lot of Atlassian stuff.

00:28:04

Like I'm on a lot of these tools.

00:28:07

And I think that's part of the reason I ended up on paper because I'm just tired of so many

00:28:11

of these tools.

00:28:12

I can tell you exactly where the pros and cons of each of them are.

00:28:15

And yet I was still using OmniFocus for a long time.

00:28:18

But yeah, if you want to know what all the edge cases are and what people would recommend,

00:28:23

just tell people you're using paper.

00:28:24

They'll give you tons of recommendations.

00:28:28

Paper like the app you mean, right?

00:28:30

Exactly.

00:28:31

That's exactly what I'm talking about.

00:28:33

Whatever.

00:28:34

So with all that out of the way, and we've had our 30 minutes of fun.

00:28:40

Oh, wait a minute, wait a minute.

00:28:42

You know what paper is really good at is being anti-fragile.

00:28:49

Segway of the year right here.

00:28:56

Speaking of which...

00:28:57

Here you go.

00:29:00

Here's our book for the day.

00:29:01

Yeah.

00:29:02

And why you picked this one?

00:29:04

Okay, because I'm not entirely sure why I picked this one.

00:29:07

But the book for today, "Anti-fragile, Things that Gain from Disorder, New York Times best

00:29:13

seller, and written by the same guy that wrote the black swan, Naseem Nicholas Taleb."

00:29:19

I think I got the name right.

00:29:20

I looked it up, but that doesn't mean I got it right.

00:29:23

And this is a book that it was recommended in one of our other books.

00:29:27

And I was really smart when I wrote down this book in my list, and I simply said, "Great

00:29:33

recommendation in the book."

00:29:36

And I must have got distracted or somebody stopped and said something because I never

00:29:40

wrote the book title down as to what book recommended this book.

00:29:45

So I don't actually know where this came from, but I was running through my book list whenever

00:29:51

I was selecting these and saw it on the list and I looked it up.

00:29:55

And then whenever I picked it, I was like, "Okay, well, it's a New York Times best seller.

00:29:59

It's by a guy that's written a number of books at this point, and he seems to be getting

00:30:03

a lot of accolades on it.

00:30:05

It's a fairly big book, but we've been doing a lot of short books lately.

00:30:10

Looking at you, Mike.

00:30:11

Except for big books.

00:30:12

And exactly.

00:30:13

So my thought was, "Well, I'll pick a longer book just because we've been doing some shorter

00:30:17

books."

00:30:18

And then Mike selected, paid to think immediately before this one.

00:30:20

Sorry about that.

00:30:22

Those who were reading along.

00:30:23

And that means that we had two borderline textbooks in a row.

00:30:28

And here's a little pull the curtain behind or pull the curtain away for a bookworm.

00:30:35

Mike and I were trying to record this particular episode a week ago, and we had failed to get

00:30:41

it on the calendar right away.

00:30:42

And Mike texted me saying, "Hey, are we still good to go tomorrow?"

00:30:45

It's like, "Nope.

00:30:46

I am nowhere near done with this book.

00:30:47

Can we push it off a week?"

00:30:49

So if there's an extra week in between releases, that's why I was not done with this one.

00:30:55

So here we go.

00:30:56

Here we are.

00:30:57

Yeah, full disclosure.

00:30:58

I wasn't either.

00:30:59

But this one was a little bit...

00:31:00

Oh, you mean it sound like you were done with it.

00:31:02

You were just waiting on me.

00:31:03

I could have been done with it.

00:31:07

But yeah, this one was hard for me to be motivated to read.

00:31:14

It was really...I'm not sure what the term would be because half the time I feel like

00:31:22

he's showing off how smart he is, half the time I feel like he's dumbing stuff down for

00:31:27

us.

00:31:29

And I never really found the balance where I could relate to the author.

00:31:35

So every time I picked it up to read, I felt one of two negative emotions.

00:31:41

Like, "Why am I reading this?" or "I can't believe..."

00:31:45

Like, "I have no business reading this."

00:31:48

Yeah, yeah.

00:31:49

I get it.

00:31:50

Because this is something that I enjoyed reading it, but I think there are a number of times

00:31:56

we talk about a book that's probably not designed for the bookworm format.

00:32:01

And it's interesting to me that books often come with an expectation on how you will read

00:32:07

it.

00:32:08

And I think that's something that people really talk about because it's just a thing where

00:32:13

here is a book, it's designed to read, say, a chapter per week.

00:32:17

You go do something about it and you come back to it.

00:32:19

Like, that's a method that they have, that they want you to read it.

00:32:23

Every once in a while you run across a book like this that it doesn't have an explicit

00:32:28

way that you should read it, but there's like an implied way that you should read it.

00:32:34

In this case, I felt like it was designed to read four or five, maybe ten pages at a time,

00:32:41

and then sit on it, and then come back to it after you've marinated on it and then read

00:32:47

it a little bit more.

00:32:48

So that this is a book that you read across, say, five or six months instead of a two-week,

00:32:54

or in my case, maybe Mike's case, three-week time frame.

00:32:58

So I think this is a case of you and I likely went through this too fast because we were

00:33:05

doing it for Bookworm.

00:33:07

Maybe that's something we need to pay attention to in the future.

00:33:09

I don't know, but it is interesting that with something like this, there's so much in here.

00:33:14

And it's a lot of cases over my head, and you can tell he's a smart dude for sure, and

00:33:21

I'm interested to know how many people read this and understood the whole thing.

00:33:26

I was interested in that.

00:33:28

Yeah, well, I took it as we just don't have 30 to 60 hours per week to read like he does,

00:33:36

because he mentioned that in here.

00:33:41

But yeah, I agree that this is definitely not a page turner per se.

00:33:47

It's a read a couple pages and then, okay, what did he just say?

00:33:51

Yes, exactly.

00:33:52

He's not figured out.

00:33:53

Exactly.

00:33:54

Yeah.

00:33:55

And to reread a paragraph.

00:33:56

Yeah, that part was kind of frustrating.

00:33:59

I do like the way that it's broken down into the different books.

00:34:02

There's basically seven different books inside of anti-fragile.

00:34:07

And it seems to make sense the way that he broke it down.

00:34:12

Like Bookworm was an introduction to the whole concept of anti-fragile.

00:34:17

Book two talks about how in the modern society, we kind of deny this idea of anti-fragility

00:34:24

or Book three talks about how anti-fragility is actually something that you could use

00:34:31

to make better predictions.

00:34:34

Number four talks about optionality and technology in terms of anti-fragility.

00:34:39

Book five talks about the math stuff.

00:34:41

It's actually called the non-linear and the non-linear.

00:34:44

Lots of math.

00:34:46

Tons of math.

00:34:47

Yeah, which that was a little bit hard to muscle through.

00:34:51

Book six.

00:34:52

A little bit.

00:34:53

Book six was my favorite one.

00:34:57

It's a via negativa.

00:34:59

And that basic idea there is that a lot of positive outcomes come from avoiding negative

00:35:03

scenarios.

00:35:04

And then the last one, Book seven, he wraps it up, which if you think about this, like

00:35:10

makes no sense to end on this note, but he's talking about the ethics of fragility and anti-fragility.

00:35:16

So is this an ethical idea?

00:35:21

Like usually the conclusion, you're kind of bringing it in for a nice landing and he's

00:35:25

tackling the medius topic at the very end of the book.

00:35:28

Yes.

00:35:29

Yes.

00:35:30

I really wanted a conclusion and a wrap up, not a-

00:35:33

Yeah, exactly.

00:35:34

Give me the most difficult thing we're going to talk about and then I'm going to leave

00:35:37

you on it.

00:35:38

Right.

00:35:39

Right.

00:35:40

Which based on just reading this book, I can kind of project that that's totally his

00:35:45

personality, not actually having met him, but just the way that he wrote.

00:35:50

I could see him writing this and being like, yeah, I'm just going to screw the system.

00:35:55

Like I'm going to do it different.

00:35:57

Yes.

00:35:58

Yes.

00:35:59

So before we go too far, I think we need to define anti-fragility just because this

00:36:06

is a word he coined and it's a word that is going, we're probably going to end up using

00:36:11

it a lot.

00:36:12

And unless you understand it, at least to some extent, because it's kind of a really

00:36:18

abstract thing to think about, unless we define it, this whole episode is going to

00:36:23

be really confusing.

00:36:24

So let's start with book one.

00:36:27

And I wrote down here, fragile versus robust versus anti-fragile.

00:36:33

So if you think about something that is fragile, and the easy explanation I've been using on

00:36:40

this whenever I talk to a handful of people about it is simply a glass.

00:36:45

If you drop a glass, you're screwing with its environment, you're screwing with the

00:36:49

climate that it is comfortable in, and it is going to shatter.

00:36:53

If you drop it off of a table, that glass will shatter because it is designed to sit

00:36:58

in a stable place on a flat surface, preferably with liquid inside of it, and not move beyond

00:37:05

that.

00:37:06

Like it's just not designed to be struck in any way.

00:37:11

So that would be fragile.

00:37:13

The robust side of things is when you have an assembly line of sorts that is designed

00:37:22

to have tolerances in it, and whenever things potentially go break, there are fail-safes

00:37:28

or backups such that will account for something that is not in place.

00:37:34

Like it's not fragile because you can account for issues that could arise and overcome those

00:37:40

on the fly.

00:37:41

When the whole assembly line is not going to completely break and stop altogether.

00:37:47

So that would be the robust.

00:37:50

Anti-fragile, you had to help me out here, Mike, because this gets kind of hairy quick.

00:37:56

You have to think of it as the opposite of fragile, where something in the environment

00:38:01

changes and the whole system could come crashing down.

00:38:05

The opposite of that would not be that the climate changes and it simply doesn't come

00:38:10

crashing down.

00:38:11

That would be robust.

00:38:13

As opposed to coming crashing down, it would actually thrive.

00:38:17

So if I throw that glass on the floor, the glass would actually get stronger as a result,

00:38:21

not break.

00:38:22

Like that would be your anti-fragile.

00:38:25

And I think the classic example here, just to put a little teeth into this, I think that

00:38:33

example would be health.

00:38:35

It's probably the easy one is take exercise, for example, or lifting weights.

00:38:40

Say I lift weights and I'm lifting just for easy numbers, say you're lifting 100 pounds

00:38:45

in some form.

00:38:46

If I lift that 100 pounds today, then my body will reactlimate to that 100 pounds and it

00:38:54

will overcompensate for what was lifted.

00:38:58

Meaning that tomorrow whenever I go do it, I can then add, probably not tomorrow, say

00:39:02

two days because you got to recover, 105 pounds.

00:39:05

And then two days later, 110 pounds.

00:39:07

And you can continually go up because your body is overcompensating.

00:39:11

Whenever you stress it, it gets stronger and tends to grow and get better as a result.

00:39:16

Thus, their tagline, things that gain from disorder, meaning a stressor or something that

00:39:22

goes wrong.

00:39:24

Is that a fair justification between all three of those?

00:39:29

Yep.

00:39:30

Yeah, the definitions that I wrote down, fragile is at best unchanged, at worst, broken or damaged

00:39:35

with mishandling.

00:39:37

Robust is at best or worst unchanged with mishandling.

00:39:41

And anti-fragile is at worst unchanged and at best improved with mishandling.

00:39:47

So there is a spectrum there, but basically there's more good than bad that comes from

00:39:53

the volatility with something that is anti-fragile.

00:39:56

And the example that he uses in this is from classic literature.

00:40:00

Actually, I'd never heard of this before, but which, again, made me feel a little bit

00:40:05

stupid when I was reading this.

00:40:07

Because he's like, "Oh, obviously the example here is the hydra."

00:40:11

And the hydra apparently is a creature, which is like kind of like a snake.

00:40:17

And every time that a head is cut off, two grow in its place.

00:40:21

So normally you would think that you cut the head off of something that's going to die,

00:40:25

but in the hydra's case, what happens is that it actually grows two heads and it becomes

00:40:30

even stronger.

00:40:34

And that is something that I struggled with in this book because there are a lot of examples

00:40:41

that he would, he names in a lot of cases, he would throw things out and the expectation

00:40:45

is that you know that person or you know the story behind it.

00:40:50

And yet most of those I did not know.

00:40:54

And maybe that's just Joe not keeping up with the times or reading enough books.

00:40:59

Who knows?

00:41:00

And that's something that it was just, it was difficult because you end up having to either

00:41:07

look something up or try to wait because in hope that he'll tell the story later about

00:41:13

what he's getting at.

00:41:14

And in some cases he did and in some he didn't.

00:41:17

Lots and lots of stories, which is great.

00:41:19

But at the same time, it almost requires you to have read an extra thousand books just

00:41:24

to be able to read this.

00:41:26

Yeah, you got to read 30 to 60 hours a week, otherwise there's something wrong with you.

00:41:29

Yeah, exactly.

00:41:30

What's wrong with you, Mike?

00:41:33

Yeah, the term for this process of things that surviving gets stronger, I believe he

00:41:41

used was Mithriditization.

00:41:44

Yes.

00:41:45

And the example here is bacteria or cancer cells that survive.

00:41:52

So not to go onto a tangent or open a can of worms, but this is the logical example I

00:41:59

think is how you see all over the place now antibacterial everything and how that can

00:42:07

actually be a bad thing because if it kills 99.99% of bacteria, the 0.01% that survive,

00:42:15

they've now got this immunity and they're stronger, they're more resistant to all of

00:42:20

this stuff.

00:42:21

And if you overdo it, eventually what you end up with is a whole bunch of bacteria that

00:42:27

you can't do anything against.

00:42:30

They're much stronger.

00:42:31

Yes.

00:42:32

For sure.

00:42:33

Yes, exactly.

00:42:34

I know that the classic example I have on that is from agriculture because in ag, people

00:42:41

use Roundup quite a bit.

00:42:42

You know, Roundup is even almost a household term anymore.

00:42:47

And it comes from spraying it on fields in mass.

00:42:51

And the problem with a lot of that is guys don't want to spend the money to use the correct

00:42:58

rates of Roundup on the field, which means that not all the plants get killed whenever

00:43:06

they spray it and the ones that survive end up being almost resistant to it.

00:43:11

And then over time, they eventually do become resistant to it.

00:43:15

And thus we see today a number of super weeds that are now very difficult to kill, if not

00:43:22

impossible to kill.

00:43:24

So it's something that I know it continues to show up in a number of areas.

00:43:30

And when you're familiar with that process, you know, cancer cells is a good example.

00:43:35

If you don't kill them all to begin with, it can sometimes come back strong.

00:43:40

That whole process happens more and more often than what you would originally expect.

00:43:45

And you notice it when it's you're aware of it.

00:43:48

Yeah, totally.

00:43:51

To move on to the next not comfortable example in book two of modernity in the denial of

00:44:00

antifragility, he introduces the idea here of eatrogenics, which is the net harm being,

00:44:08

which is net harm being done by people who have good intentions.

00:44:12

So the example that he uses here is a medical example where doctors will prescribe medication

00:44:21

to treat a symptom that the person is having.

00:44:24

But he's arguing that oftentimes the individual is better off just being left alone so that

00:44:32

their body can solve the problem on their own.

00:44:35

And he says on page 125, if you want to accelerate someone's death, you can see that

00:44:38

they give them a personal doctor.

00:44:43

He brings up, and I thought this was interesting, domain dependence on how something that you

00:44:49

know is true in one arena.

00:44:52

You tend to not translate to another arena.

00:44:55

And the example he used there with doctors, he seemed to like picking on doctors.

00:45:00

And Paul does this.

00:45:01

Yeah, true.

00:45:03

He really likes picking on him.

00:45:04

But he brought up that doctors often recommend exercise.

00:45:11

And the idea there is kind of like what I was talking about earlier, where you stress

00:45:15

your body to a point and then it overcompensates and you get stronger over time when you continually

00:45:19

stress it beyond what you could do.

00:45:23

So you just continually get stronger in that sense.

00:45:25

And yet a doctor will prescribe a medication to prevent your body from overcompensating

00:45:32

because it's helping your body to overcome, say, a cold or the flu or you name it.

00:45:38

It's trying to prevent that exact process that they are promoting with exercise.

00:45:43

So the concept there is domain dependence where doctors in this example understand medicine

00:45:50

and how that can help you overcome certain things.

00:45:53

And yet they will recommend exercise, which does the opposite.

00:45:56

So it's interesting how that can happen.

00:45:59

I don't know that I agree with what you should or shouldn't do in each of those scenarios,

00:46:05

but it's at least something it's interesting to think about and to just be aware of.

00:46:09

Yeah, totally.

00:46:11

The author definitely comes across as a cantankerous old man frequently in this book.

00:46:18

And this is definitely-

00:46:19

We didn't find these books that are like this.

00:46:21

This is definitely one of the areas where that came through.

00:46:24

There was one idea in this section though that I really liked and that's the idea of

00:46:28

the signal versus the noise.

00:46:30

The idea here being that the more often that you check a system or look at data, the more

00:46:37

likely you are to receive noise or things that don't really matter.

00:46:43

And the example he gave was news, but the obvious extension of that is social media,

00:46:50

in my opinion.

00:46:51

Yeah, that's the obvious one for sure.

00:46:55

How many times do you check Twitter in a day, Mike?

00:46:58

That's-

00:46:59

You and I are probably on the very low scale of the number of times we check social media

00:47:04

in a day.

00:47:05

Because I know some folks that are on it all the time and they wonder why their battery

00:47:10

on their phone is dead all the time.

00:47:12

iOS 11 was put aside.

00:47:16

Outside of that, it's still an issue.

00:47:19

So whenever you don't know what could be there, there's so many reasons people do it.

00:47:25

But yes, I'm with you on that one.

00:47:27

Yeah, what's interesting about this is that a lot of the people who are on social media,

00:47:32

myself included, you do it because you want to stay up to date with what's going on in

00:47:38

the world.

00:47:39

That's the millennial version of the evening news, I guess.

00:47:44

But what he's saying is that the more that you check it, the less likely you are to get

00:47:49

the information that you want.

00:47:51

Because the more noise that you get, the harder it is to distill the signal or what's

00:47:55

actually happening.

00:47:56

So if you were to check Twitter once a day, you're much better off in terms of getting

00:48:01

information from there, stuff that you could actually act on, then you are checking it

00:48:06

every hour.

00:48:07

This might come back to the whole email thing too.

00:48:12

You and I both promote scheduling time to go through your email as opposed to checking

00:48:18

it hundreds of times a day.

00:48:20

And there are definitely seasons in my life.

00:48:24

And some of those have been recent where I've needed to check email on a very regular basis

00:48:31

and have hit probably two or three hundred times in a day of checking that.

00:48:35

And there are reasons that you could do that.

00:48:38

If you're working in support, you have to do that.

00:48:41

Like that is required because you're going to need to see when people, like your customers

00:48:47

need help and you want to respond to that as fast as you can.

00:48:50

Like you're going to want the notifications in that scenario.

00:48:53

It's your job to respond to that stuff.

00:48:55

So there are scenarios where that is valid.

00:48:58

In most cases, people don't work in that scenario.

00:49:03

And in those cases, it's easier to schedule a time, even if it's every twenty, thirty minutes,

00:49:08

depending on your work.

00:49:11

For Mike and I, probably more so Mike than me, you can schedule two times a day and go

00:49:17

through that.

00:49:18

For me, I've kind of got four just because I've got enough client stuff that moves quickly

00:49:22

that I need to be able to keep my clients moving because the faster they move, the faster

00:49:28

I get paid.

00:49:29

So it's in my best interest to make sure that they don't stop at all.

00:49:33

This is why I like Australian clients because they work while I'm sleeping.

00:49:36

That's awesome.

00:49:37

Now, there's also, though, I think the principle of anti-fragility can be applied to email

00:49:43

because there are certain situations that you're right, that you need to respond in

00:49:48

a timely manner.

00:49:50

There are definitely other situations that I can think of that are email related where

00:49:55

if you just don't reply, the problem solves itself.

00:49:59

I love these.

00:50:01

Yeah, and that's anti-fragility in action.

00:50:04

So I think that the author would say that if you're able to take an anti-fragility approach

00:50:09

to your email, you're not going to have as much that you're going to need to deal with

00:50:13

when you do check your email.

00:50:16

The trick is figuring out the balance there.

00:50:21

I don't like email.

00:50:24

I don't think that's a secret.

00:50:26

And I know that there are a lot of ways that I've used it, but I know that especially towards

00:50:33

the end of my workday, I have this tendency to want to check email towards the evening

00:50:40

just because there are a lot of my international clients that will send me something mid-afternoon

00:50:47

or early evening.

00:50:48

And if I can get a response out to them like 30, 45 minutes before I go to bed, they can

00:50:55

oftentimes have answers to me before I get up in the morning.

00:51:00

That is borderline addictive sometimes for me because it's something that I know I should

00:51:06

not do because the times that I'm not able to check it at that time, it's uncanny the

00:51:12

number of times that they will have their answers for themselves.

00:51:17

Like, oh, well, I didn't get that response from you.

00:51:19

So I checked with this person and that they got this to me.

00:51:22

So let's do this instead.

00:51:24

And that is amazing for me because it means I don't have to do anything in order to solve

00:51:32

that problem.

00:51:33

And I wish more email did that.

00:51:35

So maybe I need to stop checking it so much even with the client stuff.

00:51:39

That should be your action item.

00:51:41

Not checking email.

00:51:42

To do nothing.

00:51:43

Yeah.

00:51:44

Let email solve it.

00:51:45

Yeah, we both have like a on our action list.

00:51:52

What do I do with this?

00:51:53

Maybe that's my action item.

00:51:54

I'm not checking email less.

00:51:55

All right.

00:51:56

So that's book two, modernity in the denial of anti fragility.

00:52:01

Book three is a predictive view of the world.

00:52:04

There's not a whole lot here that I took notes on, but there was one interesting idea

00:52:10

which was this barbell strategy.

00:52:15

And this is where he introduces a character called Fat Tony.

00:52:18

And Fat Tony seems like the kind of guy that you wouldn't think is real bright, but he's

00:52:26

just totally anti fragile and pushes back against everything.

00:52:31

And that actually turns out really well form.

00:52:35

And this chapter, he introduces a narrative between Fat Tony and another guy named Nero.

00:52:41

And basically Nero is a little bit, if I'm my interpretation, like Nero is a little bit

00:52:48

flabbergasted that Fat Tony is so successful.

00:52:52

And all Fat Tony is doing is he's betting on the things that are anti fragile.

00:53:00

He's identifying the things that are gaining from disorder.

00:53:03

And he's just going that way as opposed to thinking logically about all the different

00:53:09

situations of problems that he faces.

00:53:11

Is that fair to say?

00:53:13

I think that's fair.

00:53:14

I mean, Nero is a book reader.

00:53:18

Fat Tony doesn't read like anything.

00:53:20

So time you translate all that out.

00:53:22

I think you're dead on.

00:53:24

Okay.

00:53:26

And the other principle that he introduces here on page 155, he says that men feel the

00:53:31

good less intensely than the bad.

00:53:33

So what he's saying here is that you want to embrace this barbell strategy to litigate

00:53:42

the risk that you are exposing yourself to.

00:53:45

If you have two opposite strategies and you don't know which one is going to work, you

00:53:51

can do a test essentially and see which one is responding well and then go all in with

00:53:56

that one.

00:53:57

Is that fair?

00:54:00

It's a classic A/B test.

00:54:01

I mean, if you do like an email newsletter, like I recently converted my newsletter stuff

00:54:09

over to ConvertKit just because I've heard a lot of good things about ConvertKit and

00:54:15

based on what I've been seeing with using ConvertKit, it's rather awesome.

00:54:20

So there's my plug for ConvertKit link in the show notes.

00:54:25

So there's something that they do and they do it extremely well with A/B testing, especially

00:54:31

with email newsletter subject lines and it lets you put in two different titles for that

00:54:40

email and you can send them out either in small groups or to the whole thing and then

00:54:44

see which one works better and then you can send the one to the broader group that is

00:54:51

the more successful of the two, if that makes sense.

00:54:53

So that's, to me, that's exactly what's going on here is you can take two different strategies

00:54:57

and if you don't know which one works, test them on a small scale and then whichever one

00:55:03

works better, then blow up with that.

00:55:05

Who's the, what's the app, buffer?

00:55:10

So they do the social media scheduling.

00:55:13

They do this heavily and I know that they've done as many as five or six different titles

00:55:20

for blog posts to see which one will get the best response and they will run with whichever

00:55:27

one gets the most clicks very quickly and they've got it nailed down how to test that

00:55:34

and it's something that they do a lot.

00:55:37

Clear down to testing colors of buttons and placement of buttons to see which ones work

00:55:42

out the best.

00:55:43

So this is not, like even YouTube does this heavily where they're always testing out new

00:55:49

UI elements and changing things around.

00:55:51

If you ever want to see the frustration with that, listen to Cortex with Mike and Gray, like

00:55:55

they talk about this a fair amount where YouTube is just different every single day for different

00:56:01

people.

00:56:02

Like you cannot do a screencast on how to do something on YouTube.

00:56:05

It'll be different before you release it.

00:56:07

Like that's just the way that they do things to try to figure out what is the best way

00:56:11

to get clicks and get people to see the ads.

00:56:13

Like they're always testing this stuff.

00:56:16

That's the exact thing that I think this addresses is find the two or three or ten different

00:56:23

strategies, test them at a small scale, whichever one works the best.

00:56:27

Blow it up.

00:56:28

Yeah, that's an interesting example.

00:56:31

I kind of can't believe I didn't think of that when I read this.

00:56:35

I was thinking of it more in terms of like the, even the job that you would take.

00:56:43

A lot of the companies that are in our space, I would say, tend to start with like a project

00:56:53

basis.

00:56:54

I've heard about a lot of other like startup type companies where they're not just going

00:57:02

out and hiring a whole bunch of developers.

00:57:05

And I know that that's kind of the way things used to be.

00:57:08

But if you're looking for somebody to fill a specific position, you kind of like have

00:57:12

a probationary period or trial period of 90 days or something just to see if this is really

00:57:17

a win.

00:57:19

And I was thinking about specifically my own experience I guess and how I got connected

00:57:24

with Asian efficiency.

00:57:25

But I know other people who have been in the same sort of situation where it's like, well,

00:57:28

I'll do a little bit of work for this company or this site or this person.

00:57:34

And if that works, we'll do a little bit bigger project.

00:57:37

And if you start off as a, let's just say a creative, you know, you're creating something,

00:57:43

whether that be you're writing for different sites, you're creating videos, you're podcasting,

00:57:48

whatever, if you can kind of hedge your bets, essentially doing an A/B test with your career,

00:57:55

then you can mitigate the risk because one of these things is going to work.

00:58:01

And then once you figure out which one is going to work, you just ride that one.

00:58:05

But like you said, yeah, this happens every single day with anybody in the online world

00:58:09

who's creating content because you could put a article out there in the headlines bad

00:58:14

and it just tanks and nobody opens it.

00:58:17

But most likely you're going to do this A/B test, especially with the email subject lines

00:58:22

to get, get opens and you're, you're not going to have nobody look at it because one

00:58:26

of the headlines that you're trying is going to work.

00:58:29

Obviously, it's not guaranteed to work.

00:58:31

You have to have a little bit of skill in writing these things.

00:58:34

But yeah, you are basically eliminating the risk, which is the barbell strategy in action.

00:58:41

And I also like how you brought it into technology because that's actually the whole theme of

00:58:46

number four, optionality, technology and the intelligence of antifragility.

00:58:50

Yeah, exactly.

00:58:53

So this book, there were a couple points in here that I really liked and there was one

00:59:01

specifically that I put in the show notes on page, or in the outline.

00:59:05

Page 220, he says, "History is truly written by losers with time on their hands in a protected

00:59:09

academic position."

00:59:12

So obviously he has very strong opinions about the people who are, I would even argue his

00:59:20

peers.

00:59:21

It seems like he's a pretty smart guy.

00:59:22

He's got the grease.

00:59:24

But he's got a problem with the traditional academic person who is just sitting at their

00:59:29

desk and writing this stuff and not actually getting out into the real world to see how

00:59:34

this stuff actually works.

00:59:36

And again, my brain went to social media and rephrasing this.

00:59:42

You could say social media is truly written by losers with time on their hands.

00:59:45

They don't necessarily even need to have a protected academic position.

00:59:49

But just think about all the negativity that comes from Twitter with the gamer gate stuff

00:59:54

or all of the abuse specifically with women.

00:59:59

These are people who have nothing better to do than tear other people down.

01:00:05

They're internet tough guys who in real life, they don't have this platform.

01:00:09

They're not going to say anything.

01:00:11

But on social media, they feel empowered.

01:00:15

And I think it's important to recognize that when you're going into these worlds, whether

01:00:22

it's an academic world like the author is talking about.

01:00:26

So he sets foot on a college campus because he's going to give a speech.

01:00:31

He's already got a guard up because he knows the type of people that are going to be there.

01:00:37

And I think the same can be said for social media as well.

01:00:42

Now there are certain pockets of social media, certain communities within the internet that

01:00:47

are definitely not in that description.

01:00:52

But I think that there are few and far between if you were to take a look at the whole.

01:00:59

I will never forget that in college, I took a number of economics classes and the professors

01:01:11

that I had in those classes taught a lot about business strategy.

01:01:18

And they spoke a lot about how you should or shouldn't run the finances of said business.

01:01:24

And at one point, I was having a conversation with a classmate and my question was, why

01:01:31

are we learning this from a person who has never run a business?

01:01:37

Why am I being taught all of this information from someone who's never been tried and tested

01:01:46

on running a business?

01:01:47

Because in this case, my professors were ones that had gone to school, went and got their

01:01:52

master's, went and got their PhD in business and then gone right into being a professor.

01:01:55

They'd never worked in the private sector in any way whatsoever.

01:02:01

So I was always a bit confused by that.

01:02:05

And I think in this case, if you read the beginning of the introduction and stuff, what

01:02:10

is it, the prologue on this one, Taleb is he tries to explain things and talk about things

01:02:19

that are real.

01:02:21

He does spell out this whole process at the beginning that he doesn't want to teach or

01:02:25

promote something that he himself is not putting in action or that he himself has not genuinely

01:02:32

learned firsthand.

01:02:33

He wants to spell all that out.

01:02:36

Having been, because he was a professor, is a professor, I forget, he works in academics

01:02:42

in the academic arena.

01:02:45

And he gets to see a lot of the backside of the professorship side of things, a whole

01:02:52

bunch of sides in that phrase, sorry about that.

01:02:55

But the interesting thing to me is he does know the back end of this.

01:02:59

And he knows that there's a lot of stuff being written and shared by people who don't

01:03:05

have, as he would call it, a practitioner level of information.

01:03:10

They're not people who have actually practiced the thing that they're teaching, which is

01:03:14

kind of concerning.

01:03:15

You and I have a very different perspective on school with our kids.

01:03:21

And this is partially why.

01:03:24

I mean, there's a lot of aspects as to why you and I have the views that we do.

01:03:28

And I think this might play into it a little bit where people who are simply academic and

01:03:33

have never practiced the things that they are doing in quote unquote, the real world,

01:03:40

because of that, it's kind of difficult to trust them and to go back to your quote,

01:03:46

history is truly written by losers with time on their hands in a protected academic position.

01:03:50

It's probably a bit harsh.

01:03:52

The author's words, not mine.

01:03:54

Yeah, I mean, that's a direct quote out of the book.

01:03:56

So maybe that'll tell you a little bit about the author's style.

01:04:00

But this is something that I feel like is maybe a bit harsh, but at the same time, there's

01:04:04

a little bit of truth to it because I feel like there's a lot of this out there where

01:04:09

the people that are promoting the science and the research and telling us what is going

01:04:13

on in the world and how the world operates are not people working in that sector.

01:04:19

Like the people that you would want to hear from are the people who are too busy to write

01:04:23

about it.

01:04:25

They're doing too much on a day to day basis to sit down and try to coach the world on

01:04:30

what you should or shouldn't do.

01:04:32

They'll do it on a one on one basis or a mentorship basis, but not necessarily from

01:04:37

a broader research level.

01:04:39

Yeah, absolutely.

01:04:41

And really, like page 248 is kind of the validation for a lot of the points that you

01:04:47

just mentioned, not to go back into the whole, "This is why we homeschool thing."

01:04:52

If you want that discussion, listen to the episode 36.

01:04:57

But on page 248, he says, "What I was given to study in school, I've forgotten.

01:05:02

What I decided to read on my own, I remember."

01:05:05

And I think that that's why we do bookworm and that's the thing that I want to instill

01:05:09

in my kids is the ability to learn what you want to learn.

01:05:13

This is an important thing is to keep learning.

01:05:16

And this is also where he mentions that he reads 30 to 60 hours per week, which I think

01:05:21

is...

01:05:22

I mean, I don't even think if I had nothing to do and I didn't have to worry about money

01:05:28

at all, I still don't think I could read for 30 to 60 hours a week.

01:05:34

That's just...

01:05:35

That's intense.

01:05:36

But if you were able to do that and actually internalize all that information, yeah, more

01:05:42

power to you.

01:05:43

You would definitely change your situation and your mindset very quickly doing that.

01:05:48

And that's important.

01:05:50

On page 235 in this section, he talks about this concept of strategic drift.

01:05:56

And I think that this is where bookworm and other things like this can help.

01:06:02

His reading books in general can help, listening to podcasts can help, listening to audiobooks.

01:06:07

It can cause you to not necessarily even change your direction, but it can cause you to refocus

01:06:16

on the right thing.

01:06:18

And I've kind of experienced this a little bit myself and it does definitely mess with

01:06:23

the frameworks like the 12-week year plan.

01:06:26

For example, my last 12-week year plan, I did okay if you look at my specific goals for

01:06:34

the 12-week year.

01:06:37

One of them, I nailed and then the other two, I made pretty good progress on.

01:06:41

I didn't fully complete them.

01:06:44

But what I also did in that section, which was completely unplanned, is I started running,

01:06:49

did my first 10k.

01:06:52

I actually took second to my age group for that, that was my first race.

01:06:57

And fitness wasn't even on my radar at the beginning.

01:06:59

I also entered the Toastmasters Humor's speech contest.

01:07:03

And as we're recording this in a week and a half, I go down to Madison to compete at

01:07:10

the district level.

01:07:11

So I've won the club level, the area level and the division level.

01:07:17

And the district level encompasses the entire state of Wisconsin and also the UP.

01:07:21

So this is essentially the finals of the Humor's speech contest, which I even mentioned in my

01:07:26

speech.

01:07:27

I don't really consider myself a funny guy.

01:07:30

It's about productive parenting lessons that I've learned from being a dad.

01:07:34

Because that's the only thing I could think of that was Humor's, is stuff that my kids

01:07:36

have done.

01:07:37

So all sales throw in the game.

01:07:40

Yeah, exactly.

01:07:42

But looking back at the last quarter, if I'm rigidly looking at it as the things that

01:07:48

I said I was going to do at the beginning of the quarter, I guess maybe I was successful.

01:07:53

But when I take into consideration all of the things that have happened and the strategic

01:07:58

drift as I embrace these other goals at the expense of my initially stated goals, I can

01:08:04

look back and say, yeah, that that was a success.

01:08:07

Does that make sense?

01:08:08

It makes sense to me.

01:08:10

Okay.

01:08:11

And I think this is a really important concept because especially for somebody who like me

01:08:15

is a high-fact finder and you've got the plan and you work the plan, you have to be

01:08:19

willing to chuck the plan every once in a while.

01:08:21

Going back to one of my follow-up items, that's one of the things I'm not good at.

01:08:26

Although in certain cases, I'm learning to embrace that mindset.

01:08:32

Yes, I agree.

01:08:34

You want to talk about math?

01:08:37

No.

01:08:39

But book five is about math.

01:08:41

The one thing I will mention here, actually, for the people who are into math, he mentions

01:08:46

at the very beginning something that would probably make a lot of sense to you.

01:08:51

He talks about how there's essentially two curves, two things that are fragile versus

01:08:57

anti-fragile and their curves are either convex, which means that they're positive or concave,

01:09:02

which means they're negative.

01:09:03

Those terms, without looking at the pictures, mean absolutely nothing to me.

01:09:07

I'm not a math person.

01:09:09

If you are a math person, you're like, "Oh, yeah, that makes sense."

01:09:12

The other thing, though, that I'll say about this, is there's this idea that you can't just

01:09:18

add up all these things and have them be equal.

01:09:20

One of the examples that he gave, which makes a lot of sense, if you drive into a wall at

01:09:25

50 miles an hour, that does more damage than driving into a wall at five miles an hour,

01:09:33

10 times.

01:09:35

You have to be careful how you apply this stuff.

01:09:39

If you just go all in right away, if you don't do those A/B tests, if you don't head your

01:09:42

bets, then you could end up being, you could end up on the wrong side of the curve, essentially.

01:09:52

So one of the things that I'm going through this section, I'm with you on the Too Much

01:10:00

Math thing.

01:10:01

I like to think that I'm good at math.

01:10:05

I use calculus and derivatives and such whenever I'm doing a lot of programming, because it

01:10:10

seems like a lot of folks want calculations to run on the back end of a website or a

01:10:16

plugin that I'm working on.

01:10:17

I get that.

01:10:19

So I end up using some fairly sophisticated math to build those programs, because they

01:10:25

just simply run better whenever you can use some of these higher level formulas and such.

01:10:30

So I like to think that I understand math at a pretty decent level, but this kind of got

01:10:36

over me on some of it.

01:10:39

Okay, I think I understand what you're getting at.

01:10:44

I get the idea that you're trying to get across.

01:10:50

I just want this to be done.

01:10:53

Are we done with this section yet?

01:10:54

Like even right now, can we go into the next book section, please?

01:10:58

Yeah, and he does give you permission to do that at the beginning.

01:11:01

To be fair, he says if you're not in a math, you can just skip this one and go straight

01:11:06

to book six.

01:11:07

So maybe we should skip this one and go six now.

01:11:11

Yeah, exactly.

01:11:12

Okay.

01:11:13

So book six is via negativa.

01:11:15

And the idea here is that positive outcomes come from avoiding negative scenarios.

01:11:23

So it's kind of addition by subtraction.

01:11:25

One of the ideas that I really like from this section is on page 315.

01:11:30

He mentions that technology is at its best when it is invisible, which is a really cool

01:11:37

idea.

01:11:38

And if you think about specifically, it's iPhone season.

01:11:42

So as we record this anyways, you think about the iPhone...

01:11:45

You're getting a new one.

01:11:46

You're getting a tan?

01:11:47

You're going to do it?

01:11:48

I think I might.

01:11:49

I'm going to see if I can get it this year.

01:11:54

Probably.

01:11:55

If I have to wait till June, then probably not.

01:11:57

I'm going to get it between the morning.

01:11:59

And if I don't get it till next year, I'll still be happy.

01:12:01

My success is definitely struggling.

01:12:06

But the idea there, obviously, the iPhone is not invisible.

01:12:11

I would say that Apple maybe is trying to take steps to make it invisible with the Apple

01:12:16

Watch, but there's a lot of problems there because in a lot of scenarios, the Apple Watch

01:12:20

just replaces the phone in terms of visibility.

01:12:24

If you don't trim your notifications at all, then really having that with you doesn't mean

01:12:28

that you're paying more attention to the thing that you're supposed to be paying attention

01:12:31

to.

01:12:32

It just means that you're getting your notifications and your interruptions using a different medium,

01:12:37

which is always physically attached to you.

01:12:42

So I don't really like that idea.

01:12:45

And I think it's important to consider what the technologies are doing in our lives.

01:12:50

So the iPhone, as an example, this is something that I think the author would really rail

01:12:58

against based on this quote, "Technology is at its best when it's invisible."

01:13:02

Because you see people walking around with their faces down, looking at their phones.

01:13:05

The iPhone is definitely not invisible.

01:13:09

That being said, it's also a great example of the antifragility of the technology because

01:13:16

he also says in here that the longer a technology lives, the longer it can be expected to live.

01:13:21

It's in essence, it's non-perishable.

01:13:24

And the iPhone now has been around for a while.

01:13:25

A smartphone has been around for a while.

01:13:28

And he's arguing that the longer that something stays around, the less likely it is to just

01:13:33

be replaced by something else.

01:13:36

Which is an interesting idea because you hear about companies that are always looking for

01:13:42

the next new thing.

01:13:43

We talked about it in the last book with Kodak and paid to think.

01:13:47

And the example there, they had the new technology.

01:13:49

They had digital camera technology that they didn't chase.

01:13:54

And I think that reading this, it kind of validates some of their actions where they

01:14:01

drag their feet and then it actually is something that ushers out the old era and ushers in

01:14:07

a new era.

01:14:08

But what the author is saying here is that that's not the default.

01:14:14

As a general rule, you can say this thing has been around for 100 years.

01:14:19

Like the automobile, it's not going to go away anytime soon.

01:14:25

I say this at our church quite a bit because with, you know, I run sound at our church.

01:14:31

And if you've ever been to one of our services, you would see that we have a fairly sophisticated

01:14:38

way of running sound.

01:14:40

Our church is large enough and we have some very generous people such that we have some

01:14:45

really cool equipment that we can do some things with it.

01:14:49

And I tell people that as a sound person, as the IT guy, my goal is to never be noticed.

01:14:57

Like that is my goal.

01:14:59

If no one knows I'm here, that was a successful day.

01:15:02

Like that is just the way it works.

01:15:05

And that has a lot to do with, you know, lights have to be set correctly.

01:15:09

The slides have to run smoothly.

01:15:12

Sound should be clear and never accidentally muted at the wrong time.

01:15:16

Like all of that should be in place such that you never know I'm in that booth.

01:15:23

If everybody turns around and looks at me, that means I did not do my job.

01:15:27

Like something I screwed it up somehow.

01:15:30

Like that is what happened.

01:15:32

And this I think spells that out to a T because with all of the tech, you want it to be in

01:15:39

place such that it runs automatically and it doesn't ever get in your way.

01:15:45

And this is something that I know I've seen some.

01:15:50

And this is partially what led me to going to a paper system.

01:15:54

And I know I haven't really talked about that on bookworm at all.

01:15:59

But that whole system is partially because so much of say, Omni-focused to-doist, to-do

01:16:08

wonder list or to use Hurley's vendor list.

01:16:12

Like if you want to go with to-doist, all that stuff, go for it.

01:16:15

But the thing is with all of these, they all have some form of structure in them.

01:16:20

And no matter what you do, there is always a way that you are supposed to use that tool.

01:16:25

And you have to learn what that way is, like what that method in syntax is and how you

01:16:30

should enter tasks and how you should enter projects and what you can and can't spell

01:16:34

out inside of it.

01:16:35

Like you're always in the back of your mind thinking that through, which tells me that

01:16:39

the tech isn't out of the way.

01:16:42

But the tech isn't just flowing behind the scenes and letting you work the way you should,

01:16:47

which is why I've gone over to paper because I'm locked into zero structure with that.

01:16:52

I can impose my own structure on it and do whatever I want within that.

01:16:56

But I can always break the rules and draw pictures in the middle of a task list.

01:17:00

Like I can do that.

01:17:01

I can't do that in Omni-focused.

01:17:02

I can't do that in any task manager that I know of.

01:17:05

So that level of getting out of the way, I don't think we've gotten to yet, which is

01:17:11

why I've gone in a log.

01:17:13

But I would love to see it get to that point.

01:17:15

I mean, I have all kinds of ideas on how to build one of these things.

01:17:18

That's a huge undertaking.

01:17:19

Don't do it.

01:17:20

So I have ideas on this, but at the same time, we're not there.

01:17:25

I would love to see us get there, but we're not there.

01:17:28

Yeah, definitely.

01:17:29

And the other thing about the technology and the systems that you have in place, the more

01:17:34

pieces that you add to those systems, the more opportunities there are for things to

01:17:39

break.

01:17:40

That makes the point in this chapter that technology is by nature fragile.

01:17:45

And so in many instances, less is more.

01:17:49

And I would say that is true of the system that you have at your church.

01:17:54

Like every piece of technology that you use that's plugged into the system has to have

01:18:00

a specific function.

01:18:01

And if it doesn't have a function, you don't want to be sending sound through this thing.

01:18:04

That's really not adding anything to the mix because that's another piece of equipment

01:18:08

that could go bad.

01:18:10

And now it's something in the chain that you have to identify.

01:18:14

And I think you probably know more about running sound than I do at this point.

01:18:18

So is that fair to say?

01:18:21

Yes.

01:18:22

I mean, the classic example, as a sound person that runs live events, the number one thing

01:18:30

that you're always trying to pay attention to is feedback because you're trying to get

01:18:34

volume, but you don't want feedback, like that is the killer of all live events.

01:18:41

And what I can do because I've run it enough is I can look at a stage setup and I can tell

01:18:46

you the exact instruments that are potentially going to have feedback just by looking at how

01:18:51

things are laid out on stage.

01:18:53

The way the monitors are pointed, the way all the microphones are set up, I can tell you

01:18:56

where my potential problems are.

01:18:58

And when we do a rehearsal, if I hear even a tinge of feedback, I can usually tell you

01:19:04

the exact instrument that is coming from without even looking at the board.

01:19:08

Like I can do that because I know how all of that stuff is set up and there may be 15

01:19:14

microphones on that stage with say seven or eight monitors plus the main speaker system.

01:19:20

Like it can get intense with how much is on that stage and how much volume and stuff is

01:19:26

flowing from place to place.

01:19:27

But it can get really sticky.

01:19:30

But if you do big events, like we've done some things in one of the parks here in town

01:19:36

has an amphitheater that you can set up and you can rent it out and blah, blah, blah.

01:19:41

And I go help set that up and I don't run it, but I at least set it all up.

01:19:45

And we've done that enough that I can tell you when you're setting up the subs or you're

01:19:49

setting up the main speakers, there are very specific ways you want that set up.

01:19:54

Always put it in front of the microphones if you can, like that whole thing.

01:19:58

It can get hairy very quickly and you have to know, you have to know how to set up a

01:20:04

lot of stuff with that clear down to EQs and compressors.

01:20:07

They can change all the feedback things.

01:20:09

But most of what you're doing is mitigating feedback.

01:20:11

That's mostly what you're doing.

01:20:13

Yeah.

01:20:14

And when you get feedback and you've got a hundred different channels that that could

01:20:19

be coming from the more sliders you add to your board, the more likely you are to hit

01:20:23

the wrong one really is exactly the point here.

01:20:26

And also the more that you add, the harder it gets to define the specific thing that

01:20:33

you're doing.

01:20:34

Now that's not a big deal when you're running sound because really what people are looking

01:20:38

for is just that whatever sound happens to be being, being, whatever sound is being made

01:20:45

that it sounds good.

01:20:46

But also, this comes back to the whole idea of selling yourself specifically online.

01:20:55

Like we talked about in the last episode and I'm reminded of a quote by Sean McCabe who

01:20:59

wrote the book Overlap.

01:21:00

He says, "You can be known for something or you can be known for nothing."

01:21:03

And really what he's saying is that you have to identify what you're going to project.

01:21:08

And you may have all of these different skills and do all of these different things, but

01:21:13

you have to distill it down to one thing.

01:21:16

If someone were to ask you, "What do you do?" and you say, "Well, I do this, this, this,

01:21:19

and this," you're going to be filed in that person's mental junk drawer.

01:21:23

But if you say, "I am a wedding photographer," then when they're going to get married, they're

01:21:28

going to think of you as a potential solution to the problem that they're having.

01:21:34

And so that's another idea that he visits in this book, which I thought was really good.

01:21:38

And then the last thing in here, which kind of stood out to me, was this rule that he

01:21:45

has where he only reads books that are older than 10 years.

01:21:51

The theory being here that only good books survive, I'm not sure this is true.

01:21:57

I'm interested to get your thoughts on this.

01:22:00

I enjoy reading books that push the modern envelope a little bit because you always get

01:22:09

to see what's the latest science on things, what are people in today's world thinking

01:22:12

about.

01:22:13

So I kind of disagreed with him on this.

01:22:15

I think there's a lot of value in reading older books.

01:22:19

And I wish, I shouldn't say I wish, I think I may select more older books in the future

01:22:26

for a bookworm just because they've been around for a reason.

01:22:30

And we haven't really gone down that path.

01:22:33

Most of the books we read are five years old or less.

01:22:35

And a lot of cases are one or two years old, which is interesting because there's a lot

01:22:39

of more, a lot more interesting aspects and ideas that pertain to what we're doing today

01:22:48

and how our culture operates in today's world.

01:22:50

So I think there's a lot of value in the more modern books, but at the same time, there

01:22:56

are a lot of old books that have ideas that I think we could benefit from here on bookworm.

01:23:01

So I may select some of those.

01:23:02

It was maybe a thing that I considered, it wasn't really even worth putting an action

01:23:06

item for it.

01:23:07

It was just an interesting idea.

01:23:09

Yeah, I think there's a lot of those things that just really aren't worth putting an action

01:23:13

item for interesting ideas in this book.

01:23:16

Yes.

01:23:17

So the point there he's making is that we're more likely to notice the things that change

01:23:22

than the things that don't.

01:23:24

And we give them artificially more importance, even if they don't necessarily deserve it.

01:23:31

Now you've got a point in here, which also this could be a big topic, but the whole idea

01:23:36

of health and antifragility, because he says in this section that a lot of health conditions

01:23:41

are cured simply by removing something.

01:23:43

Like if you were to remove sugar from your diet, that may clear up a lot of the health

01:23:47

issues that you happen to be experiencing.

01:23:51

I put this on the list because I struggle with migraines.

01:23:54

I don't know if you know this or not, Mike.

01:23:56

I feel like I've told you about this at one point, but I don't know if it's come up on

01:23:59

bookworm or not.

01:24:01

But I shouldn't say on a regular basis, but about once a month, sometimes more frequently,

01:24:08

I'll get migraines that are bad enough that my vision gets blurry and I can't sit down,

01:24:15

you can't stand up, you can't lay down.

01:24:17

Nothing helps on these things.

01:24:21

And it can strike at weird times.

01:24:24

It usually will hit me at about 10, 30 or 11 o'clock in the morning.

01:24:29

And I know that whenever I get up in the morning, I can tell you if I'm going to get one that

01:24:34

day.

01:24:35

Nothing in the morning, 5, 36 o'clock in the morning, I can tell you this is what is going

01:24:41

to happen today.

01:24:42

And I know it's going to happen.

01:24:43

And I usually have to send out emails telling people, "Today's probably not going to get

01:24:48

a lot done on your project.

01:24:49

It's just not going to happen.

01:24:50

It's going to have to wait until tomorrow or the following day."

01:24:53

And I try to tell them, "I've got this whole migraine thing, blah, blah, blah, blah.

01:24:57

It's bad enough I've got a text expander snippet for it."

01:25:00

So it's a thing that I don't enjoy.

01:25:04

However, I bring this up because I have learned a number of triggers that cause these things.

01:25:12

And oddly enough, these things come back to not enough sleep, sugar intake from the following

01:25:20

day, stress levels impact it quite a bit.

01:25:25

And if you compound any of those, you know, sleeping in a different bed, like there's

01:25:29

a lot of little things that add up to it.

01:25:33

It does have a lot to do with health, what I'm eating.

01:25:36

It seems to impact it quite a bit.

01:25:38

So these are things that I've learned that impact it at the same time because I've noticed

01:25:45

that say sugar can impact this, I've cut back on how much sugar I will consume, which

01:25:51

means that whenever people bring, say, desserts over for our small group or we go to an event

01:26:00

and they have cookies or something.

01:26:02

I actually need to avoid those in today's world for me because I know that I have no tolerance

01:26:09

for that level of sugar anymore because I've been cutting it so much.

01:26:13

And that means that if I eat a cookie that someone else made, I'm most likely going to

01:26:18

get a migraine tomorrow.

01:26:20

That is the level of impact that it's going to have.

01:26:24

So it's kind of the opposite of what we've been talking about here where you consume a

01:26:29

thing and you build up your tolerance to it.

01:26:31

It works the other way too because I'm not consuming a thing as regularly.

01:26:37

It then leads me to having potentially bad health effects as a result from that.

01:26:43

So it's something that I've noticed impacts health quite a bit.

01:26:47

And I love talking about the health piece with anti-fragility because I feel like it's

01:26:51

a perfect example of how it works because you tend to overcompensate in both directions

01:27:00

depending on how much you're consuming of a thing or how much you're not consuming of

01:27:03

a thing or how much you're stressing your body or how much you're not.

01:27:05

Those things all impact it and your body tends to acclimate to the environment that you're

01:27:11

putting it in.

01:27:12

I just don't like migraines.

01:27:14

So I have been trying to find ways to prevent these things.

01:27:18

Yeah, that's a really good point because it illustrates something that he mentions earlier.

01:27:23

But the essential idea is that we react to pain more than pleasure.

01:27:31

We want to avoid pain more than we want to experience pleasure.

01:27:34

So telling somebody like you should change your diet because you'll live longer or it's

01:27:40

going to have some desirable effect, that's not going to be as impactful as removing something

01:27:46

in order to stop your head from feeling like it's going to explode.

01:27:52

What exploding equals bad?

01:27:54

Yes, yes.

01:27:55

Should we move on to the last one?

01:27:58

Sure.

01:27:59

All right.

01:28:00

The one that neither one of us really care for either.

01:28:03

There's a book five or seven we don't like them.

01:28:05

We're not going to spend a whole lot of time in this one.

01:28:09

A book seven in the last book here is the ethics of fragility and anti fragility.

01:28:17

So this is a whole can of worms that you could probably launch an entire podcast and just

01:28:24

never get to the bottom of this particular topic.

01:28:28

But the thing that stood out to me in here, which I think is a really valid idea, he said

01:28:33

it a little bit different, is this whole idea of skin in the game.

01:28:36

He mentions the Roman architects had to spend time under the bridges that they built.

01:28:43

And that's a very valid idea.

01:28:44

If you are going to create this thing and there's the potential that it will harm other people,

01:28:52

you should have enough confidence in it to say, look, it's, I'm going to do this and it's

01:28:58

not going to harm me.

01:29:00

The term I think for this nowadays would be dog fooding where you want to listen to people

01:29:07

who are practicing what they are telling you to do.

01:29:11

You don't want people who are saying one thing and doing another.

01:29:17

This is why I struggle to use apps and services where the creators themselves don't use it.

01:29:27

So if I build a thing, I want to make sure that's a thing that I'm using.

01:29:31

If I build a plugin for discourse, I want that plugin installed on my own instance of

01:29:37

discourse, like I want that thing on my system because if it breaks, then I need to have

01:29:47

my system break as well because it creates that urgency and then my customers sense that

01:29:52

as well and then they're better off as a result.

01:29:54

So anytime I create a thing like that, write code in some way that I'm going to be selling,

01:30:01

I want it on my thing.

01:30:03

That's the way I tend to come at it.

01:30:05

Now if I'm building a thing for a client, there's no way I should be running.

01:30:09

I mean, those things are so specific to their environment.

01:30:12

I shouldn't be running those and they just have to let me know.

01:30:15

I mean, that's a little bit of a different scenario, but I do think that if you're selling

01:30:19

something on a regular basis, an app or a service or a website, et cetera, you need

01:30:24

to be using it a lot yourself.

01:30:26

And there are a couple of cases where I feel like I slack on this a little bit and need

01:30:31

to be a little bit better at it, but at the same time, like this is a thing that I'm very

01:30:34

aware of and I wish more people would do it, Mike.

01:30:36

Yeah, and it's not just using the thing.

01:30:38

Like there's different levels of commitment to the tool or the that you're promoting or

01:30:45

even the message that you're sending out.

01:30:50

Reminds me of the chicken and the pig.

01:30:55

The story here is that they're going to start a restaurant.

01:30:58

They're going to serve bacon and eggs.

01:31:01

And the chicken is involved, but the pig is committed.

01:31:04

Like there is very, very real ramifications for the pig, but not so much for the chicken.

01:31:12

And I think that you can tell when somebody is authentic in their message, when they've

01:31:17

lived it out, that resonates and they have that authenticity that the person who's like,

01:31:23

hey, yeah, you should just try this thing.

01:31:25

It may work.

01:31:26

Like that's not what they say, but that's how it comes across.

01:31:29

So you can see that in the message that they're sending out.

01:31:33

So that's a big piece here is that if you're going to promote a thing, if you're going

01:31:39

to have a message, then make sure that you can fully support what you are saying because

01:31:45

you fully believe it.

01:31:47

And then the other big thing here is that just because something is legal does not mean

01:31:51

that it's ethical.

01:31:52

And we intentionally did not get into any of the politics stuff.

01:31:57

Also in this chapter, he talks about how the net gain, so yes, some people are going to

01:32:08

suffer, but if it ends up being a net gain, sometimes that's okay.

01:32:13

My words, not his, I guess, trying to distill what he said.

01:32:17

That's the way I read it though.

01:32:20

And obviously there's a whole lot of, you got to be careful when you're embracing that

01:32:26

idea.

01:32:27

Right.

01:32:28

And he even calls that out.

01:32:30

He knows that this is not a thing that I like, that some people need to suffer for the greater

01:32:38

good of the population.

01:32:40

He doesn't like that.

01:32:41

So thankfully he does call that out.

01:32:44

And I was glad that he did call that out.

01:32:47

But at the same time, like there are cases he brings up, some stories he brings up where

01:32:52

a number of people died.

01:32:55

And that was a good thing.

01:32:56

Like that is what he's saying.

01:32:58

He's like, I don't like that that's a good thing.

01:33:00

But the greater population, this business failed.

01:33:03

That's a good thing for the general entrepreneur base because it means there's a hole for people

01:33:09

to fill.

01:33:10

Like he goes through that, like the broader culture gets better as a result of some of

01:33:16

that, but it's still not a thing that's positive in that moment for those people.

01:33:22

So I was at least grateful he called that out.

01:33:24

Yeah, he may not like saying that message, but I think he does like putting it at the

01:33:29

end of the book and seeing how uncomfortable it makes you.

01:33:32

Yes, I think he's just trying to get you fired up right at the end.

01:33:36

Yeah, I don't think I'd like this guy if I'm at it.

01:33:37

I feel like he would just try to push all my buttons.

01:33:41

And I don't think it would be terribly hard to do given his topic matter.

01:33:44

No, not at all.

01:33:45

Like, oh, you work in railroad here.

01:33:49

Let me tell you how a broken rail line is a good thing.

01:33:52

What?

01:33:53

Yeah.

01:33:54

So you mentioned this earlier, but neither of us have any action items for this book.

01:34:02

So which is weird given how long this thing is.

01:34:05

Yeah, theoretically follow up should be short next time.

01:34:10

But yeah, the way that it's written, this reminded me of shoot, what's the name of the

01:34:17

book, the Ken Robinson book.

01:34:20

I don't think I had any action items for that one either because it was a lot of monologue

01:34:27

about a topic, but nothing really tangible.

01:34:30

Like, okay, go and do this.

01:34:32

Like there's some ideas in here which are going to be important, like the barbell strategy.

01:34:38

And I can see myself putting that into practice at some point, but it's not something that

01:34:44

I'm going to make sure that I embrace every single day.

01:34:47

It's not something that I can make a habit out of and it's going to provide a change.

01:34:52

So it's, and therefore it's not something that I really enjoyed to read.

01:34:58

I don't like to just collect information.

01:35:02

I like it when the information inspires action.

01:35:06

And I really don't think there's a whole lot of action that's coming out of this book.

01:35:11

You're talking about out of our minds, Ken Robinson.

01:35:13

Yes, yes, that's the one.

01:35:15

Yeah.

01:35:16

So I'm with you on that.

01:35:17

Very similar to that where there's a lot of interesting facts and a lot of stories.

01:35:22

And from a content standpoint, I think there's a lot that you can learn in this book.

01:35:28

So if we're going to, you know, no action items, I don't know if that's good or bad.

01:35:33

But you know, from a style standpoint, it's hard to read.

01:35:37

I found it hard to read just because it feels like you need to read 30 to 60 hours for the

01:35:43

books every week for a few years to be able to really comprehend everything that he has

01:35:47

here.

01:35:48

And I don't really see that as a positive because very few people are going to read

01:35:53

at that level.

01:35:54

So it kind of limits the number of people that are going to understand everything in

01:35:59

this.

01:36:00

So you kind of have to just be okay with not understanding every reference he makes, which

01:36:05

I guess is a good thing because it means there's something in there for everybody, I suppose.

01:36:09

So it's hard to read in that sense.

01:36:12

And I felt like there was a, again, there's a lot of good things you can take from it,

01:36:17

but at the same time, I'm probably not going to recommend this to very many people, very

01:36:23

few at all, just because it's tough.

01:36:27

Yeah, it's definitely tough.

01:36:31

And the, if you were to just cherry pick sections of this book, there's a good chance that I

01:36:38

would like the writer's style, but when you take it in totality, the entire thing, I feel

01:36:44

like he's the way that he writes is almost condescending.

01:36:51

Like he thinks he's really funny and you're an idiot if you don't understand his jokes.

01:36:57

I can't think of any specific examples of that, but just like the way that he words

01:37:00

things, he words it in a way where like, I think back to the TED talk that you had sent

01:37:06

me of Ken Robinson, where he's actually a very funny guy.

01:37:12

I feel like if you were to take Mr. Taleb and put him in that arena, he would be laughing

01:37:21

at his own jokes, but no one else would get it.

01:37:24

That's fair.

01:37:25

That's fair.

01:37:26

Yeah.

01:37:27

So I get it.

01:37:28

So I mean, all of this put together, I think from a ratings standpoint, I think I would

01:37:33

put it at maybe 3.5, I think is where I'll put it because there's some interesting stuff

01:37:38

in it, but it's a tough one to get through.

01:37:41

Yeah, I think that's fair.

01:37:42

I was on the fence between a three and a 3.5 because you're right.

01:37:49

Like actually talking through this with you, I realized that I got more out of this than

01:37:53

I first thought.

01:37:55

There are quite a few points in here that I think are going to stick with me like the

01:38:02

barbell strategy and the whole idea of improving something by removing something.

01:38:08

Like those are pretty powerful, powerful ideas, but definitely didn't enjoy this book.

01:38:17

And definitely not something that I would just recommend to somebody like you mentioned.

01:38:21

I totally agree with that.

01:38:22

So I'm going to say 3.0.

01:38:24

Fair enough.

01:38:26

There you go.

01:38:27

So let's put this one on the shelf.

01:38:30

And what are we doing next time, Mike?

01:38:33

Next time we are doing another reader recommendation or listener recommendation, which is mindset

01:38:40

by Carol Dweck.

01:38:42

And this is shorter than both of these books, the last two that we've done.

01:38:47

So a little bit of a break.

01:38:49

But then you've got another long one.

01:38:52

Yes, it's a long one, but this is one that has made the rounds.

01:38:58

It's a listener recommendation.

01:39:00

I'm kind of surprised we haven't gone through it yet.

01:39:03

It's the 40x, the four disciplines of execution.

01:39:07

And I feel like this is right up our wheelhouse.

01:39:11

And yet we've not done it.

01:39:12

A listener recommended it.

01:39:13

So here we are.

01:39:15

All right.

01:39:16

I've actually started reading this book, could not finish it.

01:39:20

So spoiler alert.

01:39:25

That's good to know.

01:39:26

I've actually already read it and synthesized it to a point because we did it for the pro

01:39:33

side of the guild, the productivity guild.

01:39:35

So we did it for that.

01:39:36

And I wanted to talk through it with you because we talked through books and I feel like I

01:39:40

synthesized them better when you and I talk about it.

01:39:42

True.

01:39:43

So you're going to make me muscle through this one.

01:39:44

I'm a force it.

01:39:46

All right.

01:39:48

Gap books.

01:39:49

I've got Perennial Seller by Ryan Holiday, which I know that you've read.

01:39:54

It's just read this one.

01:39:55

Yeah.

01:39:56

I love Ryan Holiday.

01:39:57

We covered the obstacles the way on Bookworm and it was really good.

01:40:01

So I make just to dive into this one.

01:40:03

And you've got a book that I actually picked for a gap book at one point.

01:40:07

We may need to turn this into an episode.

01:40:09

Well, I did Perennial Seller for a gap book at one point too.

01:40:12

So we're like trading gap books.

01:40:14

That's true.

01:40:15

Mine is Make Your Bed by William McRavin.

01:40:16

So I think maybe we should just do fillers and just do both of those.

01:40:25

Make Your Bed is a really cool book for the Bookworm format.

01:40:31

It's short, but it's got a lot of stories that have a lot of good points that we could

01:40:38

definitely unpack and turn into a two-hour podcast.

01:40:41

There you go.

01:40:43

Although the book probably only takes you about two hours to read.

01:40:48

Good to know.

01:40:49

I haven't officially started it yet.

01:40:51

That's this evening.

01:40:52

So good to know.

01:40:54

If you want to recommend a book, you can do that by going to bookworm.fm/list.

01:41:02

And you will see a list of all of the books that we've covered, the ones that are planned,

01:41:08

and the ones that are recommended.

01:41:09

And on the sidebar, you will see there is a link to recommend a book.

01:41:14

So if you want to make us go through another textbook, you can go there and recommend it.

01:41:19

But we won't please promise that we will go through it.

01:41:23

And if you want to interact with us in any way, there are a couple ways you can do that.

01:41:30

The first and the most exciting one is to leave an iTunes review, link in the show notes,

01:41:37

click the link.

01:41:38

You can leave us a review there.

01:41:39

That helps out a ton because it helps other people find us.

01:41:42

And it's been fun to watch the Bookworm listenership grow lately.

01:41:46

It seems like it's starting to gain some traction, which is exciting.

01:41:50

So we ask that you would leave us a review on iTunes.

01:41:53

And if you want to leave comments on that review, go for it.

01:41:56

If you have other comments that you want to share, there will be a link in the show notes

01:42:00

to the Guild where we tend to do comments on the podcast.

01:42:04

So if you have questions, you're looking for a link that I failed to get into the show

01:42:07

notes, you can always post it there as well.

01:42:10

All right.

01:42:11

So if you're following along, the next book is Mindset by Carol Dweck.

01:42:16

And we will talk to you next time.